14 DAY TRIAL // A certain Acer mobile computer has turned up for sale, one that bears the name of TravelMate B113 and is not actually as appealing as some would make it out to be.
The Acer TravelMate B113 is, in a sense, a sort of cheaper alternative to the Aspire V5, which we spotted during Computex 2012 and covered here.
The numbers seemed good on paper (or a monitor, as the case may be), but suspicions arose when the price comes into view.
Aspire V5 was introduced with a tag of $629.99 / 500 Euro, or $449.99 / 357 Euro if a Sandy Bridge CPU is used instead of Ivy Bridge. Not overmuch for what is essentially an ultrabook, but the tag does make the price of the TravelMate B113 too high by comparison.
TravelMate B113 costs 420 Euro ($513, if exchange rates are in any way relevant), which is a bit much for an 11.6-inch system (V5 comes in 14 and 15.6 inches).
That isn't the only curious thing either. As we said back in June, the B113 is too small and thick to be an ultrabook and one size too large to be a netbook.
To its credit, it does have a decent dual-core Pentium 976 CPU (1.3 GHz) or a Core i3-2377 (1.5 GHz), but the battery life is rather short (all the hardware runs Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional on a 4,400mAh battery for 5 hours tops).
Not only that but, all things considered, 420 Euro for what is essentially an oversized netbook might not fly with some people.
The rest of the hardware is as follows: 4 GB of RAM (random access memory), a 500 GB hard disk drive, USB 3.0 (one port), USB 2.0 (two ports), a 5-in-1 card reader, wireless-N, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, Ethernet and a VGA port (no optical drive).
Finally, the screen has a native resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels (HD) and the whole thing weighs 1.38 pounds (0.62 kilograms).