Of the various notebook series Acer has offered, the TravelMate is designated as a lightweight business and professional computer built to withstand day-to-day activities.

The TravelMate name was previously used by Texas Instruments, which sold its mobile computing division to Acer in 1997.

The TravelMate mainly competes against business computers such as Dell's Latitude, HP's EliteBook and ProBook, Lenovo's ThinkPad and Toshiba's Portégé.

The classic models may have a pointing stick option, a docking port, fingerprint reader, and other high-end business features.

Others utilities manage passwords, file encryption, memory optimization, and network connections.

Many models organize these together into an interface called 'Empowering Technology'—with the aim of allowing safer, more comfortable, and practical use of the notebook.

This laptop has been a popular choice for making a "Hackintosh" computer, as it had nearly identical hardware to the 2006 clamshell polycarbonate MacBook.

[8] The TimelineX are ranges of laptops focused on ultra-long battery life on the order of 8 hours.