Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange Laptops

AVADirect IFL90 - Features and Specifications

The Compal IFL90 is a typical midrange notebook, with one specific feature that caused us to request this model for review. That feature is the LCD, which can be either a 1280x800 model or an upgraded 1680x1050 display. Tons of 15.4" notebooks ship with 1280x800 LCDs, but there aren't nearly as many with 1680x1050 displays so we were interested to see how this one compares to other laptops. We'll cut through the suspense by saying that if you want a higher resolution notebook display, the 1080P option on the Acer 6920G ends up being a better overall solution right now. Still, the 1680x1050 display is a lot better than most of the 1280x800 LCDs we've tested - and not just in terms of having a higher resolution.

Compal offers two different battery sizes for the IFL90/HL90. We received the higher capacity 9-cell battery, which should provide 35% to 50% more battery life than the 6-cell option. (There are two different 6-cell batteries, which is why it's not necessarily a 50% improvement.) Increased battery life is certainly nice to have, but the high-capacity battery has a similar problem to the battery on the Gateway P-series notebooks: it extends an extra inch beyond the back of the laptop. Since we are not dealing with a mammoth 17" chassis, we didn't find this to be as much of a problem as on the Gateway notebook, but it does make for a somewhat less desirable form factor.

As mentioned already, the IFL90 that we are testing is no longer stocked by AVADirect, since it was replaced by the HL90. Looking at options on the HL90, you have a choice of two LCD resolutions, 16 CPUs, 33 different RAM configurations, 52 different hard drives/SSDs, two optical drives (DVDR or Blu-ray recorder), 16 different operating systems (including no operating system), and various other items like networking, Bluetooth, and accessories. This can definitely be overwhelming for uninformed users, but for technophiles this is about as good as shopping for parts at Newegg. One option we wish they would offer is a BD-ROM/DVDR in place of the Blu-ray recorder, as we don't see ourselves recording Blu-ray movies and you should be able to save about $250 while maintaining Blu-ray playback capability (not that Blu-ray support is likely to be any better than on the other laptops we've tested).

The system we received for review initially retailed for around $1500; now an upgraded HL90 system with a P8600, 4GB of memory, and Vista Home Premium 64-bit will run about $1400. According to our testing and information from Compal, we also expect the HL90 with a Core 2 Duo P-series processor should provide 25 to 30% more battery life. Ain't progress grand?