Conclusive Thoughts

The original DOT netbook was a decent first entry by Packard Bell into an aggressive market, there is a lot of competition in this segment, about every computer vendor and/or brand has a netbook variant or netbook targeted hardware;

With the DOT M/A Packard Bell is offering a quite performing portable PC, offloading video encoding to the GPU is all that is lacking, hopefully this can be resolved with a software update. We hooked up the DOT M/A to a Plasma screen and played back some HD content (x264 720p), while the image looks crisp, there were too many frame drops. Playing games like Live For Speed was possible on the big screen though.



With 2Gb memory you can run more than your average netbook friendly applications, 250HDD ensures enough storage for time to come, a nice HD Ready resolution and comfortable keyboard make this netbook a joy to take along on your daily commute, to friends and family or on holiday.

Packard Bell added upgrade possibilities which is a nice extra, you can now swap out the HDD with an SSD if you fancy snappier load times and overall usage.

Packard Bell.com is mainly a European brand, you won’t find their products in the USA. There are some resellers in Argentina, Columbia, Chile and Russia, but those outside Europe are out of luck… at first sight. Since Acer bought Packard Bell and Gateway, they have been offering similar products on both camps. So if you live in US/Canada check out the Gateway LT3100 series netbooks, priced at $380. The EU counterpart Packard Bell DOT M/A is available for €399.

At this price point there is some competition with other feature laden products from Asus, MSI, Dell, HP and even their own mother-company Acer. With the DOT M/A Europeans get another choice and the product certainly comes prepared to win you over. Whether or not it will succeed depends on your needs. What makes this netbook quite unique is the extra GPU power, so if that is important for you the Dot M/A should be on your shortlist!

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We like to thank Tim from Packard Bell and Corneel from NewsEnginePR for allowing us to test the latest DOT M/A Netbook.