Acer TravelMate P4 P414-51
A great-value business laptop that has quality where you need it, and is well suited to life on the road
SCORE
PRICE £619 (£743 inc VAT) from box.co.uk
If we were forced to summarise the Acer TravelMate P4 P414-51 in one word, it would be “solid”. This isn’t a laptop that will bring an admiring glance from passers-by, nor one that will ever sit at the top of the performance charts, but if you’re after a business laptop for an aggressive price then it deserves to be at the top of your shortlist.
In part that’s due to the solidity of the laptop. Other machines at this price often feel thrown together, but the TravelMate P4 exudes reassuring sturdiness. That’s despite the fact only the lid is made from metal, with the rest of the chassis fashioned from rigid plastic, and its d dark k bl blue l livery gives it a professiona professional look. Windows 10 Pro comes as part of the package – we were offered an upgrade to Windows 11 Pro within a week of use – and our only criticism is that Acer doesn’t upgrade its warranty to two years as standard.
There are some handy security features built in, too, with support for Windows Hello via the IR webcam and the fingerprint reader embedded into the power button. The former works seamlessly, but with the power button awkwardly placed on the right edge of the chassis, this proved more of a faff in practice. Acer also provides a Smart Card reader on the front edge, with a microSD card reader on the right, but it’s the left-hand side that holds most of the physical ports: two USB-A, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI and a solitary USB-C port. The latter supports Thunderbolt 4, with both Type-A connectors supporting USB 3.2 Gen 2 for fast 10Gbits/sec transfer speeds.
Acer supplies a 65W DC power brick, but you can charge this laptop via the USB-C port as well. A 55Wh battery isn’t the largest, but you can still expect around nine hours of life from a charge – yet another solid result. This means you should get away with taking the TravelMate into town without bunging the charger into your bag, and with a 1.4kg weight and compact footprint this laptop l lives up to its name. .
It’s also a solid performer, with our unit – identified by its part number NX.VPCEK.001 X.VPCEK.001 – powered by a
Core i5-1135G7. Other laptop manufacturers squeeze more out of this chip than Acer, as is shown by the graphs on p92, where it’s soundly beaten by the Asus ExpertBook and Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 in most tests. But for general office tasks we doubt you’d notice any difference between the machines. You can also add to the 8GB of RAM (as well as replace the SSD and, more trickily, the battery) by removing the dozen crosshead screws that secure the base; we recommend an electric screwdriver, as three of those 12 were devils to remove. remove
Aside from this, the laptop is a pleasure to use. With the fan rarel rarely brought to bear, it’s a largely silent machine and, so long as you don don’t bash it, the keyboard is i similarly quiet. There isn’t much travel or feel to the keys, but Acer covers the basics by including a (very bright) backlight and, for the most part, a sensible layout. The Enter key is huge, even if it’s annoying to have the Pg Up and Pg Dn immediately above the cursor keys. Acer would have been wise to include a larger trackpad to more easily accommodate gestures, but it works fine.
Considering this laptop’s price, we can’t complain about the screen, either. It covers 56% of the sRGB gamut and a mere 41% of DCI-P3, but whites are clean, it hit a satisfactory peak brightness of 306cd/m2 and its 1,558:1 contrast ratio is exceptional. It’s best not to linger on its colour accuracy scores – an average Delta E of 4.73 is poor – but this isn’t a laptop that will be used by videographers grading their work. Or at least, we hope not.
The speakers are clear if not exactly rich; good enough for watching the occasional film, speech radio and video calls. Acer annoyingly provides a mediocre 720p webcam, but the biggest hurdle to our calls was the low volume of f the microphone. Also note that we had to switch off the audio enhancements nts in the speakers’ properties to play video recordings (and stream Netflix). ix).
It’s these niggles, es, and the average screen, that stop the he TravelMate P4 from earning five stars. However, we’d still recommend commend this Core i5 version for business buyers on a budget. It isn’t the he perfect system, but it is superb perb value.