ZDNet Australia reviews four of the most powerful notebooks on the market today.

Every single technology user is aspirational. We'd all like to have faster, brighter, better systems that don't crash, respond to our every command and have all the bells and whistles. Sometimes, though, the aspirational and real world paths converge, and we can justify expensive technology purchases. This was the essential rationale behind this feature; We wanted to test the best and brightest notebooks on the market today.

We went out to vendors and proclaimed "Send us your best. Your biggest, meatiest, most powerful, sexy, enthralling and innovative notebooks. Damn the minimum specifications. Damn the expense. Damn the torpedoes, even". You get the idea. The mix of notebooks we got back all have their own unique aspirational points.

A number of vendors declined to submit notebooks for review. Dell and Sony are in the process of relaunching their product lines, and thus didn't have suitable products at this time, while HP and Apple were unable to supply us with testing samples in time for our review.

Power notebooks are at a crucial juncture. Notebook sales are about the only positive thing in PC sales at the moment, and the essential split between a desktop replacement notebook and a mobile workstation has been the size and weight argument; most systems have had similar internal componentry. Intel's Centrino platform, due out mid-March, changes that equation, though.

Centrino's based around the processor that used to be called Banias, built from the ground up as a mobile processor. Banias is now called the Pentium-M, and Intel, for some reason, thinks users won't be confused by the naming similarity between the Pentium-M and Pentium 4-M. For the record, the Pentium-M is the new Banias chip and the 4-M is the older, desktop-processor-derived chip in current high-end notebooks today.

Power trip: Four high-end notebooks tested Introduction 1. Acer Travelmate 426LC 2. Fujitsu Lifebook E7010 3. IBM Thinkpad T30 4. Toshiba Satellite 5200 Benchmark results Specifications

Chip speeds on Pentium-M are lower than the existing crop of P4-M chips, with the payoff being in claimed battery life. Quite where a power notebook, most commonly used as a desktop replacement, fits into the Centrino picture isn't quite clear yet. Certainly, the initial Centrino-based notebooks will carry similar prices to high-end power notebooks, but at much lower chip speeds. As time goes on, it's expected that Pentium-M (and/or its successor, currently codenamed "Dothan") chips will power the majority of PC notebooks out there, including the heavy duty models.

Acer Travelmate 426LC

Acer's entry into our dream notebook review has a couple of things that make it noteworthy. For a start, it's the cheapest unit, by quite a long margin; AU$3,999 will net you a basic Travelmate 426LC, more than a thousand dollars cheaper than the next contender, the IBM Thinkpad T30.

Some of this relative budget status comes from the internal hardware used. The Travelmate 426LC is the only system in our roundup to use a desktop Pentium processor -- a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4, making it, in MHz terms at least, the fastest system in our roundup. The plus of having a desktop processor -- cheaper overall price -- does bring with it some drawbacks, however. For a start, desktop processors use more power than their notebook cousins, and this was amply demonstrated in the Travelmate 426LC's comparatively dismal battery life scores, where it consistently came last. This was most marked in the reader tests, where it piked out half an hour before its competition.

Physically the most striking thing about the Travelmate 426LC is the keyboard, which is arranged in a smile-like pattern, with the external keys most noticeably splayed outwards and upwards. Presumably this is for ergonomic reasons, but if you're used to more conventional keyboards, it will take some getting used to. Mouse control is via a fairly standard touchpad with some highly unusual buttons underneath it. We were somewhat irked by the mouse buttons underneath, which are quite large but quite unresponsive to go with it. Acer's forgone a rocker switch in favour of an unusual rocker circle. Again, it's an oddity that you'd have to get used to.

The Travelmate 420's 15" screen was quite acceptable and visible from quite a wide angle. Like most Acer notebooks, a feature of the Travelmate 426LC is an integrated secure digital slot. In the case of this notebook, it sits above the single PCMCIA slot. Like IBM, Acer's rather keen on corporate customers, and positions the SD slot as part of a complete security package.

Power trip: Four high-end notebooks tested Introduction 1. Acer Travelmate 426LC 2. Fujitsu Lifebook E7010 3. IBM Thinkpad T30 4. Toshiba Satellite 5200 Benchmark results Specifications

Its mix of desktop and notebook parts gave the Travelmate 426LC an interesting spread in our benchmarking tests. Shipping with only 256MB of memory saw it fall behind the technically slower systems that came with 512MB in our performance tests, although it did beat out the IBM Thinkpad T30 in performance terms. The larger price paid, though, was in battery life in all of our tests, as noted above.

Ultimately the Travelmate 426LC isn't a bad notebook by any stretch of the imagination, but it is rather overshadowed by some of the powerhouses offered to us by other companies. At its current price, too, we were rather surprised to find that the notebooks in our budget notebooks coverage nipped at its heels in overall performance terms.

Acer Travelmate 426LC
Company: Acer Computer Australia
Price: AU$3,999
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 366 567

Fujitsu Lifebook E7010

While everyone else in this roundup submitted notebooks that fit best into the category of desktop replacements, Fujitsu's entry, the Lifebook E7010, takes a slightly different road. It's a touch too heavy to be an ultra portable, but at 2.4kg, it's definitely on the right track to being a luggable notebook, and is the lightest of the notebooks we've looked at here.

The Lifebook certainly isn't a slouch when it comes to specifications. Only the Toshiba 5200 gave it a serious run for its money, stacked as it is with a 2.2GHz P4-M, 256MB of memory and a 60GB hard drive. With an eye to the security-conscious, the four application buttons on the top of the keyboard can also be used as a system-lock.

Mouse control is via a standard glidepad, with two very small mouse buttons and a rockable switch in between. Of the four notebooks on offer, we liked the Fujitsu's mouse replacement the least; the buttons were difficult to use and just too small. Still, as with most of these notebooks, an add-on mouse certainly wouldn't be a money worry.

The keyboard has good travel characteristics and is generally easy to use, although it does have unusually small and thin cursor controls. It does manage to avoid one of our pet peeves by including the Windows key in the normal position, so the amount of mis-keying when seeking keyboard shortcuts should be minimised.

Being light in weight also translates into being thin, especially in the screen. It's a relatively small 14" screen with excellent visual characteristics; it can be seen from almost every angle, and is bright enough for almost any situation.

Power trip: Four high-end notebooks tested Introduction 1. Acer Travelmate 426LC 2. Fujitsu Lifebook E7010 3. IBM Thinkpad T30 4. Toshiba Satellite 5200 Benchmark results Specifications

From a benchmark results viewpoint, the Lifebook E7010 ran pretty much exactly as we expected. It ran second to the Toshiba Satellite 5200 in performance terms, and swapped places with the IBM notebook in each of our battery tests, still beating out the Acer Travelmate 426LC

Ultimately the Fujitsu Lifebook E7010 is a nice notebook that doesn't quite stack up to its competition, especially given its rather high asking price of AU$6,999. It's not a bad specification, or bad results, or even terrible to use - it's just that you can do better for the money.

Fujitsu Lifebook E7010
Company: Fujitsu
Price: AU$6999
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: (02) 9776 4555

IBM Thinkpad T30

IBM's Thinkpad T30 impressed us with its basic physical styling and ease of use, but sadly let itself down in when it came time to perform.

At 2.6Kgs, it was the second lightest notebook in our roundup, but this was hardly surprising. Where most notebooks in this category go the full 'desktop replacement' route, the Thinkpad T30 is surprisingly small and easy to carry. From a purely visual point of view, it looks almost like every other Thinkpad we've ever seen; same black colour, same double latches on the screen, intermittent use of red highlights on key buttons. It would seem that IBM is wavering in its otherwise rock-solid attachment to the Trackpoint, instead opting for what it calls the UltraNav multi-pointing system. That's a fancy marketing name for sticking a Trackpoint and touchpad onto the notebook, an arrangement that usually sees us inadvertently hitting the touchpad while typing. This was less of a problem on the T30 than on other systems, possibly due to the overall smaller size leading to a more tightly packed keyboard.

Like most other Thinkpads the most design thought has gone into the chassis, which is rock-solid. If, as its size would suggest, you were going to take this notebook on the road, it would survive quite a large quantity of abuse before giving up the ghost.

From a specifications viewpoint, the T30 gets beaten by pretty much every other notebook in our roundup; a 2GHz Pentium 4-M processor runs the whole shebang along with a 16MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 and 256MB of memory. For its stated purpose -- essentially corporate usage -- that's probably more than enough. Anyone with a serious business need for more grunt would probably be looking at a larger screened notebook, for a start; this is much more of a travelling notebook.

Power trip: Four high-end notebooks tested Introduction 1. Acer Travelmate 426LC 2. Fujitsu Lifebook E7010 3. IBM Thinkpad T30 4. Toshiba Satellite 5200 Benchmark results Specifications

As could be expected from its lower specifications, the IBM Thinkpad T30 didn't set the world on fire in our benchmarks. It bottomed out our performance benchmarks but managed better results in our battery tests where it played swapping games with the Fujitsu Lifebook; losing to it in performance battery but bettering it in reader battery tests. Again, that fits well with this notebook's small travelling size; how many people do serious 3D calculation on the road?

IBM Thinkpad T30
Company: IBM Australia
Price: AU$5099
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 13 24 26

Toshiba Satellite 5200

Toshiba clearly took us seriously when we said we wanted dream machines. The Satellite 5200 comes with one piece of kit that both raises the RRP and the pulses of most techies simultaneously -- an integrated DVD Burner. The burner in question is of the -R variety, with the option to also record to DVD-RAM and do the usual CD-RW relating writing as well.

We've always liked the keyboards on Toshiba notebooks; they generally have excellent travel and responsiveness, even without the Windows key in the correct place. The Satellite 5200 also integrates Toshiba's cPad technology, which places an LCD under the touchpad. cPad can be used for a variety of functions; it's essentially a software programmable LCD. Our only complaint with the pad was that we tended to brush it when typing, which sent our onscreen cursor into a frenzy of movement. It's not an insurmountable problem, though, especially given that most machines of this size tend to end up with mice tethered to them.

The 5200 topped out the specifications race for those systems with a mobile processor; it ran equal to the Fujitsu Lifebook in processor (2.2GHz P4-M), memory (512MB) and hard drive capacity (60GB). It pulled ahead with a 15" screen and a very tasty 64MB nVidia GeForce 4 460 Go graphics solution. With that kind of grunt, we were expecting great things from the 5200 in performance terms, but were exceptionally nervous on the battery front. It's not as though running that much gear on that large a screen wasn't going to come without a price to pay, after all.

As we expected, the 5200 topped out our MobileMark 2002 performance rankings. What we didn't expect was that it would top out our performance and reader battery rankings as well, nudging just short of two hours in performance mode, and well clear of that figure in reader testing.

The Satellite 5200 is a solid bit of consumer technology with all the bells and whistles you could possibly want at this point in time. It's not cheap, but then it's more than adequately compensated for with a comprehensive bundle of extras.

Toshiba Satellite 5200
Company: 
Price: AU$6499
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1800 021 100

Benchmark Results

Specifications