• Largest display among all-in-ones
• Fast dual-core CPU makes up for lack of quad-core (mostly)
• Finally has an SD card slot
• Wireless mouse and keyboard
• Mini DisplayPort input ripe with possibility

• Most Windows all-in-ones in the price range have Blu-ray
• Touch-sensitive mouse gestures not as responsive as we'd like
• Apple's expensive customer service policy

If we could, we'd take points away from this iMac simply because by giving it a 27-inch display Apple threatens our livelihood. You don't need our input to simply walk past the 27-inch iMac on a store shelf and recognise that it's the largest all-in-one currently available, and that it has a reasonable price tag relative to its size advantage. Look deeper into this AU$2199 iMac and you'll find a desktop that's equal parts compelling and polarising.

Some new features, like the SD Card slot, the now-standard wireless mouse and keyboard, and the LED backlight, have obvious appeal. The glossy screen coating, the limited (for now) bidirectional functionality of the Mini DisplayPort, and the absence of both a Blu-ray drive and a quad-core processor all provide openings for criticism. For us, however, and we expect for many others, the screen trumps most of our concerns.

With this most recent update to the iMac, Apple brings the design of its all-in-ones in line with that of its MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. The aluminium and polycarbon body of the old iMac has been replaced with aluminium and edge-to-edge glass over the screen. From an aesthetic standpoint, the new iMac is as strong as ever, and maintains Apple's lead over other computer manufacturers. Provided you have the room for it, you should feel no shame putting the new iMac in a prominent location in any home or business.

The new screen size makes the iMac the largest ever in Apple's all-in-one line, but only by an extra 76mm in its width. The new iMac measures 520mm high by 648mm wide by 203mm deep. The old 24-inch iMac is only 566mm wide, but otherwise has the same dimensions. The extra inches in the screen have a more significant impact than the changes in chassis size.

In addition to going to a 27-inch LCD, Apple has also boosted the resolution of the display to 2560x1440 pixels — up from 1920x1200 pixels in the old model — which amounts to roughly 62 per cent more screen real estate. Where the old model couldn't quite accommodate two full-size Safari windows, the new iMac can fit two side by side with room to spare.

Along with bringing the MacBook Pro's chassis materials to the new iMac, Apple also incorporated some of the same tricks it uses in its laptops to make the display appear so vibrant. An LED backlight amps up the brightness to such an extent that the display in the old iMac seems washed out in comparison. A glossy coating on the display increases the apparent contrast, while the IPS-based screen helps with viewing angles.

The glossy coating on the screen is one of the flashpoints of criticism for the new iMac. Those opposed cite more intense reflectivity and increased glare from environmental light sources. As the iMac is generally a stationary device, you can't necessarily move it to a different spot to avoid glare, as you might with a glossy-screened laptop. Unfortunately, Apple offers no way to opt out of the glossy coating on either its laptops or the new iMacs; from a customer service standpoint, however, providing a screen-coating option would certainly add an extra layer of complexity for less savvy buyers.

For now, Apple has taken a stand on glossy screens, gambling that shoppers either prefer it, won't care or will suffer through and accept it. The folks at MacMatte and elsewhere are actively working against that decision. Your buying decision should hinge on your own preference, of course, and a trip to a retail outlet that carries iMacs will answer any questions you might have in short order.

We place a high value on our multitasking test, as it reflects how many people tend to work, but on single applications, the 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo chip helps push the iMac comfortably past its Windows-based competition. If you anticipate running particularly demanding multitasking workloads, you may want to consider going for the quad-core Core i5 or i7 iMac. Otherwise, the majority of you should feel confident that the iMac is the fastest all-in-one on the market, and you would be hard pressed to find a mainstream workload (or combination of workloads), that would bog this system down.

The screen and the core features out of the way, we can shift our focus to some of the secondary updates to the iMac. The SD Card slot is one of the most long-asked-for features in Apple's entire Mac line-up, and its absence thus far has seemed particularly silly given that you can find multi-format media card readers in even the cheapest of PCs. Anyone with a digital camera or other SD Card-equipped portable device will obviously benefit from the addition of the slot to the iMac. Popping a card in brings up a screen that shows you the card contents. OS X will then chide you if you don't hit the drive eject command before removing the card.

More interesting than the SD Card slot is that the Mini DisplayPort on the back of the iMac is now bidirectional. Right now you can find a cable with two Mini DisplayPort connectors, which lets you use the new iMac as a second display with another Mini DisplayPort-equipped Mac. You can hot-swap the cable between different systems without having to shut down, and the display management software is the most intuitive and most flexible we've seen. You can switch between extended and mirrored modes, and an icon-based orientation system lets you switch the extended orientation from side to side, up and down, or virtually any other configuration, as long as the two screens border each other. This capability also extends the useful life of the iMac, addressing a long-standing criticism of all-in-ones. Even if you someday demand a faster computer, you can always use the iMac as a secondary display.

Unfortunately, the dual-Mini DisplayPort cable from Belkin won't let you input video from other devices. For that you'll have to wait until January. Details on what Belkin's cooking up are scant, so we can't offer much information about the forthcoming adapter other than that it's on the way and it does more than connect two Macs. But given that you can output the iMac over HDMI, DVI and other formats with the Mini DisplayPort adapter cable, we'd expect that any updated input adapter would include those formats as well. Our hope is that, similar to all-in-ones from a variety of PC vendors, the new cable from Belkin will allow you to input video to the iMac from game consoles, cable boxes, Blu-ray players, HD camcorders, and other such devices currently bound to your television. The appeal of such capability should be obvious, but we'll unfortunately have to wait until the adapter hits before we can test it out.

The wireless mouse and keyboard are the last major additions to the new iMac. Mostly, we're glad to see Apple switch to all wireless-input devices, as the wired versions always seemed to disrupt the clean aesthetic Apple seemed to be going for with the system itself. Not everyone likes wireless devices, because of responsiveness concerns and intense battery demands, but for the responsiveness in general usage we experienced no difficulty.

We'll refer you to our review of the touch-sensitive Magic Mouse for our full opinion of Apple's unique new input device. For now we'll say that we like the design of the Magic Mouse, and we found the basic functions worked well enough. Clicking and scrolling all worked as expected, and we even appreciated the acceleration detection that speeds up scrolling down longer pages. The multi-finger gestures were no replacement for dedicated forward and back buttons, let alone lateral scrolling like you find on Logitech and Microsoft mice. We can't feel too disappointed in the Magic Mouse as a bundled mouse with the iMac, however, since it has the basics down. We just find it interesting that for all its attention to design and usability in other products, Apple has never really conquered the lowly mouse.

The last point we'll make regarding the iMac's features has to do with the lack of a Blu-ray drive. Apple CEO Steve Jobs made his feeling about Blu-ray well known a while back by calling it a "bag of hurt", but various tech bloggers still speculated that Apple might finally introduce Blu-ray in this round of iMac updates, especially considering the hardware cost has dropped substantially in recent months. The iMac's giant screen has better-than-1080p resolution, and the iMac's audio output is decent enough that it would certainly do justice to the format.

Mitigating factors include Belkin's forthcoming adapter, if it allows for HDMI input via the iMac's Mini DisplayPort. Of course, in that event, you still incur the added expense of the adapter and a separate Blu-ray player itself. We also understand that you can download HD movies at 720p from iTunes, and we acknowledge that Blu-ray as a format hasn't demonstrated the same rapid adoption that came with the switch to DVD, thus minimising the level of consumer interest. We don't believe that Blu-ray is a must-have for all computers, and we can think of several features we'd rather have instead. That said, leaving Blu-ray off the new iMac gives Windows-based all-in-ones a selling point. Apple's customers miss out, and would be right to feel disappointed.

Finally, we hate to end a positive review on a negative note, but we continue to find the extra AU$268 for AppleCare a questionable deal. You get a yearlong warranty with the iMac, which matches the industry standard, and you can also haul your Mac down to one of Apple's Genius Bars or an authorised Apple service provider. But in order to be eligible for phone support after your first 90 days of iMac ownership, you need to pay the extra AU$268 for AppleCare. Yes, that gets you a three-year warranty as well, but long-term phone support should be free.

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Upside

The Adamo XPS looks impressive with its aluminium body and extremely thin form (Dell touts it as the thinnest laptop ever at close to 10mm). The monitor has a larger footprint than the keyboard, the latter nestling within the bevel of the monitor while closed, a major difference to all other notebooks in the market.

The difference is most obvious when the laptop is open. Once the keyboard is folded out, it stands at a 20-degree angle, allowing for better cooling of the internals as well as a more ergonomic typing experience. Opening the laptop itself is a novel experience, with a swipe of a finger across the top lip of the body unlocking the capacitive hinge. It also features a 13.4-inch screen with a 1366x728 resolution and a full-sized keyboard akin to those found on Apple's MacBook Pros.

The XPS is run by a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo ULV processor, a respectable 4GB worth of RAM, a 128GB SSD hard drive and comes pre-installed with Windows 7, so it looks up to scratch performance-wise. It also comes with two USB ports (on opposite sides, which is a good thing) and DisplayPort for outputting to a separate monitor. Network access is provided by 802.11n or Ethernet through a supplied dongle.

Downside

While on paper the Adamo XPS looks good, there's still a question over its practicality. The elevated monitor and keyboard seem impractical for anything but a flat surface, and if the advantages to cooling are to be believed, using it on your lap could probably lead to overheating. Similarly, not everyone likes elevated keyboards and reaching over the trackpad to type may not suit smaller hands.

The AU$2500 price point seems a bit on the pricey end, with the high-spec MacBook Air coming in cheaper and the mid-spec Toshiba R600 coming in at roughly the same price.

Outlook

The Dell Adamo XPS's form is inherently different from that of other laptops to necessitate its thinness — which will either make or break the system. We're wary of whether the notebook's design will remain practical whilst on the go — first glance says no, but we'll find out in the coming months.

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IT professionals in medium-sized business face a unique set of challenges. They are often alone or in a very small team and don't have the luxury of saying "That's someone else's department"; they have to do everything IT related. Installing printer drivers, troubleshooting Exchange and making sure all computers have the latest patches are all in a day's work.

Naturally, they look for tools to automate and simplify their IT tasks, but packages such as CA Unicenter, IBM Tivoli and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)/Configuration Manager (SCCM) are enterprise level applications requiring specific hardware and high levels of expertise and maintenance. At the other end of the scale are low cost solutions that automate one particular task — software/hardware inventory with Spiceworks for example. The ideal solution is something which covers everything the big ones do, but packaged for an IT generalist audience. That product is Microsoft System Center Essentials (SCE), currently in beta testing for its third reincarnation: the 2010 version.

SCE is designed for organisations with up to 50 servers and 500 client computers, and combines hardware and software inventory, monitoring, software deployment, patch management and (new in 2010) virtualisation management, as well as comprehensive reporting. All of these capabilities are incorporated into a single console with an intuitive interface.

"One pane of glass" to monitor ALL servers, network devices and client computers.
(Credit: Paul Schnackenburg)

Installation is very easy, with detailed wizards holding your hand all the way; be aware the server needs to have at least 4GB of RAM.

Different parts of SCE can be spread across several servers.
(Credit: Paul Schnackenburg)

Monitoring

At the core of SCE's monitoring capabilities are Management Packs (MP), a set of rules and scripts for a particular product that captures the "knowledge" of how that application should behave and what to do when it doesn't. Every Microsoft server product has a corresponding MP, created by the product team responsible for the program itself. Many third-party MPs are also available: for hardware from Dell and HP, networking devices from Cisco, applications like BlackBerry and other operating systems like Linux. These MPs are created for SCE's larger sibling — Operations Manager — but work fine in SCE. A new feature in 2010 is that the "chattiness", ie, the number of alerts, is automatically turned down by about 50 per cent when an MP is installed in SCE compared to SCOM.

If you've never experienced monitoring at this level, it's the definitive early warning system. Without monitoring, usually the first you hear of a problem is when users call with complaints. With monitoring, you'll have alerts long before then, which means you can often fix minor problems before they turn into service outages. By capturing "best practises" in MPs, deep product knowledge is presented in an easy-to-understand fashion, which can change your IT support from reactive to proactive.

Wake up! Something's wrong with one of your servers.
(Credit: Paul Schnackenburg)

SCE 2007 installed about 70 MPs under the assumption that this would cover the vast majority of installed OSes, services and applications in most mid-sized business, with the option to install further MPs manually. SCE 2010 takes a different approach, only installing a handful of core MPs then looking at its inventory of your particular environment and only plugging in the MPs required for those applications and platforms. If you later add another server or application, SCE will prompt you to install the necessary MP.

Detailed hardware and software inventory is only one of the many features of SCE 2010. (Credit: Paul Schnackenburg)

If you add new client computers or servers to your environment, SCE can detect these, install the agent and automatically make them managed. New in SCE 2010 is the ability to create dynamic groups where new computers are automatically put in the right group based on particular characteristics, make and model for instance. The SCE console can be installed on several client workstations for remote access; for times when you're out of the office SCE can email/IM or send you an SMS with relevant alerts.

Not in the office? No problem — SCE lets you know about problems no matter where you are. (Credit: Paul Schnackenburg)

To avoid a planned server outage generating unnecessary alerts, use the new Maintenance Mode feature, which temporarily halts warnings related to the object.

Software deployment

It's a critical task when there are hundreds of client computers in your environment and making sure users have the right software to do their jobs. The traditional approach of manually starting the installation on each machine doesn't scale well beyond more than a few PCs, so a centralised solution is necessary. SCE 2007 can create packages based on MSI installation files that you then assign to the relevant client computers. Many set-up programs only come in an "exe" variant — fortunately, SCE 2010 supports creating packages from these. There's a bit more manual work, as you have to define which OS and architectures are supported, but this feature considerably broadens SCE's ability to deploy all needed software.

Patch management is built on top of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), the free patch management product from Microsoft, but SCE 2010 adds a few bells and whistles. Rather than downloading the whole catalogue of available updates, SCE 2010 looks at what's in use in your environment and only gets what's necessary. Another issue with WSUS is that the size of the database grows over time; SCE 2010 adds a nifty wizard to schedule "clean ups" of old or superseded updates. SCE not only updates Microsoft's products; there are several third-party catalogues available, and you can also define your own.

For server applications, the addition of an "Authoring" tab provides an interesting feature: Distributed Applications monitoring. End users (and your boss) don't care about SQL Servers or Exchange Servers; they care about being able to do their job. Using this new tool set, you can model all the servers and applications that make up a particular service into one object for management and monitoring.

End-to-end service monitoring lets you know when there's a problem with any part of your applications. (Credit: Paul Schnackenburg)

Going virtual

The big Kahuna in SCE is undoubtedly the addition of virtualisation support. Essentially a scaled down and integrated version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), this adds host management, Intelligent Placement and Physical to Virtual conversion (P2V). Both Windows Server 2003 with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 with Hyper-V are supported hosts. If you point to a server as a virtualisation host and it doesn't have the corresponding platform installed, it'll automatically be added for you.

Once you have one or more host servers going, the next step is taking existing physical servers and converting them to virtual machines. SCE helps by identifying good candidates for converting to the virtual world. A simple wizard gathers information about the candidate server, installs a small agent and proceeds with the process. Afterwards, you can simply turn off the physical machine and start up the VM; users should notice no difference. The wizard is robust and a delight to work with, making a complex task easy.

Once you have VMs, the next question becomes which server to house them on. Intelligent Placement takes into account performance data from both hosts and the VM to recommend the best host to place the VM on.

Missing from the SCE implementation of SCVMM is management of VMWare's VirtualCenter/VSphere, so if you need that, the full SCVMM will need to be added.

Once you have some or all of your servers running as VMs, SCE 2010 doesn't differentiate how you manage the physical and virtual world — it's all the same.

Performance and Resource Optimisation (PRO) is a feature that lights up in SCVMM when SCOM is also installed in the environment. It allows for policy-based control of VMs: if a website is receiving higher than usual traffic, an additional web server VM can automatically be started, for example. PRO is not in the current beta of SCE 2010, but it looks like it'll be in the Release Candidate, which puts the concept of a "dynamic datacentre" in reach of medium businesses.

Conclusion

SCE 2010 is a key cornerstone for comprehensive IT management in a medium business. If you're in this category and are spending more time fighting fires than adding business value through IT, it's time to look at this very comprehensive and easy-to-use solution.

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• Excellent build quality
• Good keypad
• Improved camera
• Very responsive
• Good battery life
• 3.5mm audio port

• Optical navi-pad can be annoying at times
• S60 platform feels dated in light of the competition

The Nokia E71 was one of our favourite business smartphones thanks to its attractive design and full range of useful features. More than a year on, is its successor, the E72, just as compelling a smartphone? Let's look at the differences between the two to find out.

Design

Given how well-received the form factor of the E71 was, there wasn't a need to change things much in its successor. The E72 has a similar solid metallic feel and is almost the same size and weight at 114x59.5x10.1mm and 128g. On the front, you get the same landscape-oriented QVGA display, below which lie shortcut buttons and a QWERTY keypad. The shortcut keys surrounding the directional pad are laid out differently, but the ability to access your calendar, contacts and mail in one button press remains intact.

The directional pad is significantly different to the E71. While it shares the same square design with a large selector in the middle, this centre button now doubles as an optical navigational pad. So, aside from pressing one of the four direction buttons, it is possible to move cursors by stroking your finger over the selector. This can be annoying as we found ourselves moving the cursor accidentally at times. The application in which it is useful is the browser as it gives better mouse cursor control — clicking on small links can sometimes be a very precise affair. Those who don't like the optical pad can turn it off completely, rendering the directional pad identical to the E71's.

The E72's QWERTY keypad layout doesn't differ much from the E71's. It has a shorter spacebar, making way for two extra keys on the bottom row — a shortcut to select symbols and a dedicated exclamation mark key. As indicated by a diagram on the spacebar, it now doubles as a shortcut to turn the camera light on for use as a torch; pressing and holding the key will activate that useful feature. Though the shape of the keys remains the same, we found the tactile feedback different. Less force is required to depress a button, and consequently, the "springiness" of the keys is reduced. This takes some getting used to if you are switching from an E71 and we can't conclude if it's better or worse — just different.

One of the best changes is the inclusion of a 3.5mm audio port on the top of the device. The E71 had a 2.5mm version which required an adapter if you were using your own pair of headphones. Other connectors remain the same with a dedicated connector for charging and a micro-USB port on the left. One thing it lacks, which is present on the E71, is infrared, but we reckon it's not too big a loss to most users.

Features

When it comes to connectivity features, the E72 doesn't differ much from the original. You get the full works including HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS for navigation. There are some slight improvements such as a faster 10.2Mbps HSDPA maximum speed and HSUPA for high-speed uploads. Do note that these are highly dependent on the operators' 3.5G network quality, so users may not really feel the impact.

Since the launch of the E71, Nokia has been making improvements in the Symbian S60 third edition software. The E72 has convenient features such as transition animations, Ovi Store for downloading third-party applications and built-in support for Microsoft Exchange synchronisation. It's important to point out that these features can be activated on the E71, too, by downloading the appropriate updates from Nokia. What makes the experience different is that the E72 is much more responsive thanks to a faster processor. More on that in the Performance section later.

Another improved feature is the inclusion of a 5-megapixel camera, up from the 3.2 megapixels in the E71. In our tests, we found the photo quality much improved with excellent macro shots as one of its highlights, perfect for archiving name cards. Also, you don't have to press the "2" key to activate autofocus, a cumbersome and unintuitive implementation on the E71. Now, simply touching the optical pad will let you focus on your subject, while depressing it will snap the shot.

Performance

The performance of the E72 is where it really shines compared with the E71. Now, the E71 is no slouch and, in fact, was one of the most responsive S60 devices when it was launched. But this Nokia comes with a 600MHz processor that blows the E71 out of the water when it comes to speed. There was no lag felt throughout the menu system and even long contacts and message lists loaded very quickly. This was felt most in the web browser as you can now scroll around full web pages before they are fully loaded. There may be software improvements in play here, but we're pretty sure the faster chip has a part in that, too.

The improved speed didn't affect the battery life much. With the same 1500mAh battery, we got about 2.5 days of use on a single charge. This included phone calls, messaging and occasional use of HSDPA for emails and Twitter updates. Most users will be able to get by on more than a day without recharging.

We had no issues with reception and call quality, and the speakerphone was sufficiently loud for use in quiet situations.

One thing we've brought up time and again over the past year is how the S60 platform feels dated compared with the competition such as the iPhone OS and Google Android. This reduces the value proposition of the E72 slightly, especially when you consider the availability and quality of third-party apps.

Conclusion

As you would have probably gathered by now, the E72 is a very competent business smartphone. Nokia stuck with what worked in the E71 and made a few improvements in the process.

The big question is whether current E71 users should upgrade to the E72. There's no quick answer to that, but if the camera quality and responsiveness of your current smartphone irk you, the E72 would be a good replacement. Otherwise, stick with your E71 because the major features such as a good keypad, push email and decent battery life remain the same.

Via CNET Asia

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• Solid build quality
• Excellent screen
• New multi-touch trackpad
• High performance
• Affordable

• No backlit keyboard
• No HDMI or FireWire

Design

With the new MacBook in your hands it's difficult to tell at first glance what the differences are over the last version. But look a little closer and you'll realise: "hey, the trackpad's a little bigger, and it's got that unibody thingy". Like the MacBook Pro, the new Macbook features a unibody construction — only this time it's polycarbonate and not aluminium. Apple also cheats a little by including a detachable rubberised base, but this serves its own purpose by ensuring the MacBook doesn't slide away while typing.

The trackpad is a muti-touch glass sandwich and feels good to the touch. The pad is hinged in such a way that any point on its surface can act as a mouse click.

Features

The notebook features a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB RAM, a 250GB hard drive, and the Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphic chipset. The MacBook features a 13.3-inch screen which is LED-backlit for better colours and power consumption, and comes in a 1280x800 resolution.

As a unibody the MacBook features a built-in battery, which Apple claims is good for seven hours of life. The new body means it's now a little lighter at 2.1kg. Other additions include a non-slip bottom and a 90-degree MagSafe power cable that should make it harder to knock out. To borrow from the D-Generation it now comes in a huge range of white.

On the left-hand side you have the power adapter, a LAN port, a mini DisplayPort, two USB ports, a combination headphone/microphone input compatible with the newer iPod headphones, and a Kensington slot. On the right-hand side you simply have the slot-loading 8x SuperDrive. If you don't want to try using the combination in/out headphone thingy there is also an on-board microphone next to the integrated iSight camera.

Networking includes a built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking adapter, the aforementioned gigabit Ethernet and Bluetooth.

Performance

In use, the new Apple MacBook is a lot like the old one — no surprises there. Of course, having multi-touch does speed up productivity somewhat, and the new 13.3-inch screen is simply exquisite. The panel is bright, detailed and clear, but it can be reflective due to the glossy, "high-contrast" coating.

The laptop proved itself to be quite capable as a gaming machine, and while this isn't that useful under OS X it really comes into its own once you fire Boot Camp up. Despite the cries of "Dear God! What abomination have you unleashed?!", we loaded and benchmarked a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate onto the machine. Running the venerable 3DMark05 we were able to extract a very usable 2119 marks — most modern games will run on this system without a hitch.

Despite being a new operating system, Windows 7 behaved on the Mac quite well due to the bundled Windows drivers on the OS X disc. Only occasionally did the trackpad have a brain-fart and misinterpret left-clicks as right-clicks. Again, not an issue if you use a mouse.

The keyboard is the "pebble" style we've seen from the company previously, and the action is as good as you'd expect with decent tactile feedback. There's no backlighting, though, so if you often type in the dark it may be better to try its bigger brother, the MacBook Pro.

While we didn't get anywhere near the claimed seven hours, we did manage to get a very decent four hours and 50 seconds using our video playback test. At almost five hours it can outplay most netbooks — which is an excellent result for a "budget" laptop. This is because unlike light internet browsing and word processing, movie files tax both the processor and the video adapter which makes it a "worst-case scenario" of battery life.

Sound quality via the on-board speaker is very good, and while lacking in any bass whatsoever it has a detailed sound that highlights vocals well.

Conclusion

If you have an Apple MacBook already there is no compelling reason to upgrade to this one. While multi-touch is a nice addition, serious productivity hounds will be using a dedicated mouse anyway. But, if you're looking to buy a new laptop and like the flexibility of a dual-boot system then this MacBook and a copy of Windows could very well be the ticket.

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• Slimmer design
• Lighter chassis

• Ugly, protruding battery pack
• No ExpressCard slot

Lenovo's IdeaPad S10 netbook was one of the most popular budget mini-notebooks for good reasons: its business-friendly tools, ExpressCard slot and reasonable price all made it a great option for consumers or corporate users.

When we last visited the S10 in May, the addition of a six-cell battery fixed our gripe about the short battery life of the previous version. Now, another revision is available that effectively replaces the S10 — the S10-2. This new model has some physical changes — most good, a couple bad — but keeps the same general components at a reduced price. It's a better deal than previous models, but you'll have to live without one key feature.

As far as the main body goes, the S10-2 is thin: so thin, in fact, that we'd be hard-pressed to want anything thinner. However, while the netbook closes up into a neat package, the six-cell battery protrudes out the back and hangs off the rear hinge like a laptop riser that can't be put away. Maybe it's the netbook's new thinness, but the dangling battery seems more intrusive here. We'd love to see that battery folded into the chassis, somehow, in future versions — it's just plain unsightly and also gets in the way of packing the netbook flat into sleeves or cases. It does, however, make for a nice stand on a desk.

With a matte-black interior and keyboard, a glossy 10.2-inch screen, and a smudge-collecting glossy black exterior with a black-on-black polka-dot pattern, the design feels a bit lost between business and consumer. It also looks a little more like an Acer or Asus than a "pro model" netbook, if we can use such a term.

The keyboard is comfortably responsive and has good travel, but the feel is still shrunken-down from a full-size keyboard experience. The multi-touch Synaptics trackpad is adequate and has average buttons beneath it, but getting finger-scrolling to work is a frustrating exercise. While the keyboard has been improved with full-size shift keys and a larger, wider set of tapered keys, it still doesn't approach the comfort of a ThinkPad keyboard, or even the HP Mini 110's fuller-size keys.

A quick-start button above the keyboard launches a Splashtop Linux-based instant-on OS if pressed when the power's off. The functionally limited web browser, music player, photo viewer, Flash-based game player and Skype/chat options are decent, but still take time to boot up (although less than booting XP). We'd prefer to put XP in standby and just resume when needed. When not running Splashtop, the QS button can be customised as a hot key to launch apps within Windows XP.

The 10.2-inch widescreen display has a 1024x600-pixel native resolution, which is standard for 10-inch netbooks. The new glossy screen looks stylish, but attracts light much more than the S10's. Video, including 720p clips, look clean and bright, though. Stereo speakers are positioned on the bottom of the S10-2, projecting sound but sounding muffled because of their positioning. They'll suffice for basic listening, but we recommend headphones.

One thing that made the S10 a standout was the inclusion of an ExpressCard/34 slot. It's sadly omitted from the S10-2's connection options. Maybe space had to be made to account for the thinner size, but taking away extra connectivity is never a good thing. Three USB 2.0 ports are your only options for connectivity without it. This means it'll be harder to connect a 3G modem, for instance. The rest of the S10-2 port options are netbook standard, though nothing to write home about. We hope in the future Lenovo turns things around by adding connectivity instead of taking it away.

The Lenovo S10-2's performance was average on our benchmark tests, mainly because it has the same N270 Atom that nearly all netbooks do. Some processors, such as the AMD Neo, perform faster, but the S10-2 doesn't under-perform for its category. For email, chatting, office documents and basic media playback, the S10-2 works perfectly well. Facial-recognition security software and OneKey data backup add some business-friendly applications to the package.

Compared to the IdeaPad S10's six-cell battery, which lasted four hours and one minute on our video playback test, the S10-2 gets four hours and 17 minutes on the same number of cells. While that's good battery life (actual battery life will be even longer with basic netbook use), laptops like the Asus Eee PC 1005HA outperform it by a considerable margin.

System configurations:

Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 128MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Western Digital 5400rpm

Asus Eee PC 1005HA
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 224MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Hitachi 5400rpm

Acer Aspire One AOD250
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 224MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Seagate 5400rpm

HP Mini 110
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 128MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Seagate 5400rpm

Toshiba Mini NB205
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz; 128MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Toshiba 5400rpm

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• Decent battery life
• MP3 player
• Good camera
• Music recognition
• Good call quality

• Average browser
• No standard headphone jack

Design

Its slim, slider design complemented with a metallic silver shell and a black rim around the display make the Samsung S6700T an elegant looking phone. At 106x50x13mm and weighing just 105 grams, it sits comfortably in the palm of the hand and is light enough to carry in your pocket.

At the back of the phone sheltered by the slide is the camera lens, flashbulb and self-portrait mirror. A multifunction jack (USB, headphones and charger port all-in-one) is located on the right edge of the phone above the camera/application switch key. Volume controls can be found on the opposite side.

The flat numeric keypad under the slide is surprisingly simple to use, as the keys are decently sized and not too close to each other.

The 2.4-inch QVGA display is quite luminous and comes with three pre-installed themes, with an option to make your own from images, colours and patterns. Even the dialling display can be modified if you find the default one boring. The homepage is bare by default apart from the date, time and shortcuts (the shortcuts screen can be tailored to accommodate your own preferences). As a whole, the interface is very clean and intuitive, making it easy to navigate and discover features.

Features

Along with the standard phone features including messaging (SMS, MMS, email), voice and video calling, the Samsung S6700T also comes with decent multimedia features and is compatible with Telstra's Next G network.

The 3-megapixel (MP) camera with flash and auto-focus comes with a number of options for capturing photos. You can have fun with various shooting modes like Smile shot, Continuous, Panorama, Mosaic and Frame, along with effects including black and white, sepia and watercolour. Conveniently, there's an image editor for basic touch-ups such as cropping. The camera acts as a camcorder too, recording video in MPEG4 format.

The music player (supporting MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR, EMA) lets you set up playlists and synchronise your phone with Windows Media Player. The phone has 120MB of internal memory, which may not be enough to stack up all your favourite tunes, but it can be expanded up to 8GB with a microSD card. If you have a song stuck in your head, but don't know who the artist is, Samsung has included a cool music recognition feature that identifies the artist and title for you.

You probably won't find the WAP browser dazzling, but it's functional and does an OK job for simple browsing. Anything more complex, like instant messaging is pretty cumbersome. We found the "copy URL to" and "Send URL" options pretty handy. Social media junkies can upload content directly to sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and MySpace via apps on the phone.

Other features worth noting are an RSS reader, multi-purpose converter, voice recorder, FM radio, Mobile TV and conference calling.

Performance

Over an intensive period of listening to the FM radio for around 10 hours, using the camera and browsing the web, the battery lasted around a day and a half, while minimal use of the phone (calls, SMS and occasional browsing) led to a battery life of nearly a week without recharging.

Watching Foxtel on Mobile TV was a delight; impeccable audio and good image quality delivered an engaging experience overall. This goes for call quality as well. We found both video and voice calling very clear, even when in noisy places and on the speakerphone.

We could browse the internet at fairly fast speeds; however, occasionally we came across warnings that the page was too large to render properly.

We were quite impressed with the camera on this phone. For a 3MP phone camera the image quality was excellent. We took photos both in natural light and indoors and they came out very sharp, clear and with enough detail. At 15fps video quality isn't worthy of praise, but satisfactory for a mobile phone.

The performance of Java applications is solid, as revealed by JBenchmark tests 1 and 2.

Overall

The Samsung S6700T should be an appealing choice for anyone wanting an inexpensive phone with a decent number of features and a good camera. Employing a minimalist design approach, Samsung has created an aesthetically pleasing and simple to use handset inside and out. The multimedia attributes shouldn't fail to keep you entertained and the call quality is nothing short of outstanding.

On the downside, the lack of a standard headphone jack might be a minus for some and the browser is not fantastic, but it serves its purpose.

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• Decent battery life

• No expandability through docks, odd for a business product
• Not a great screen

HP's ProBooks are non-extravagant business-orientated machines with additional diagnostic tools built in for the benefit of system administrators. This 4310s model is a perfectly serviceable machine for almost all everyday tasks; however, it will struggle to run 3D games or do any heavy-duty media creation work.

The machine runs a Core 2 Duo T6570, which contains two CPU cores running at 2.1GHz each. Complementing this is 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, wireless N networking, gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, VGA and HDMI outputs, ExpressCard 34 and audio ports, SD card reader and a modem of questionable utility.

This laptop is not hugely expandable. There is no FireWire connector, no port replicator or docking port and no PCMCIA slot. All this is fine, provided you're the kind of user who won't miss the extra external connectivity.

The upshot of its modest configuration is good battery life. Even with the screen brightness at maximum, it took over three and a half hours to drain the battery from full while decoding MPEG-2 video. We repeated the test in HD using the vastly more computationally intensive VC-1 codec, and saw the battery life drop to a very respectable hour and 50 minutes.

The 1366x768 display has reasonable horizontal visibility, but the image washed out faster than you'd expect when you tilt the monitor off-axis. This isn't so much a problem with text, but images and video will appear washed out and inverted when you look at the screen from steep angles. Despite the LCD having quite a bit of flex, the notebook's construction is solid.

At the top right of the keyboard are a series of touch-sensitive hotkeys for volume controls, wireless and a HP launcher. We found the volume up and down buttons unresponsive, and occasionally the wireless would turn itself off without us touching it.

On the software side, a subtly HP branded copy of the 32-bit version of Windows XP Professional comes preloaded. Many of the recent patches to keep it stable, however, do not. XP Service Pack 3 had not been installed. IT managers will like the diagnostic tools built into the hardware that are accessible by interrupting the boot sequence.

A 60-day trial of Microsoft Office is included, as is a 60-day trial of Mcafee Total Protection Service. It's an antivirus suite with extra programs that notify you of phishing attacks in Internet Explorer. This continued to function when we upgraded Internet Explorer from version 6 to 8; however, the software added itself as a space hogging toolbar. It functions with minimal extra effort under Firefox, but does not work at all under Google's Chrome browser.

There are HP branded software helpers scattered throughout the operating system, many of which are unnecessary. After installing our benchmarking applications and several Adobe products to test real-world usage, we found the machine could not finish its restart cycle, although this problem disappeared after several Windows updates. During our battery life tests, we hit a blue screen.

If you find that the price is right and you are only planning on doing menial tasks, you could do a lot worse than the HP ProBook.

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• Very nice touchscreen
• Good plain text quality

• Ink tanks very difficult to insert and remove
• No fax
• Frustrating Smart Solution set-up

Design and features

The Lexmark Prestige Pro805 is a behemoth of a multifunction printer when you first take it out of the box: measuring 25x46.5x39.2cm and weighing 9.27kg it's certainly a large addition to any workspace. Along with the rest of the oddly-titled range (including such gems as the Impact, Prevail and Intuition — find us a printer that's intuitive and we'll eat our hat), the Pro805 is a wireless-enabled device that prints, scans and can even check the weather forecast for you. At AU$499, this printer does cost a pretty penny, so you'll want to make sure it's fully tailored to your needs before you fork out a wad of cash.

It's therefore evident that the Pro805 has a myriad of calling cards, but the most intriguing ace up its sleeve is the 4.3-inch web-enabled touchscreen that takes the place of the traditional colour TFT panel at the front of the device. With a sleek piano black finish, it certainly adds a touch of refinement to an otherwise conventional Lexmark printer design. With the Smart Solutions interface, you can download applications to install on the printer (such as RSS feeds, and one-touch printing for commonly used documents providing a computer is connected to the printer at the time). There's also an application that lets you view the closest retail location from which to purchase ink.

Connectivity is taken care of thanks to 802.11b/g/n or the standard Ethernet port at the back of the device. At the front alongside the touchscreen are standard PictBridge connections (though only for SD, Memory Stick, xD and MMC cards). At the back is the Ethernet port and USB cable connector if you don't feel like freeing yourself from cords. A novel addition for business people is the scanner's ability to read business cards and import contact details into a communications program of choice (such as Microsoft Outlook). There's automatic duplexing as well. The included cartridges are XL (high yield) consisting of three colours — magenta, cyan and yellow — and black. Paper consumables are loaded from the front of the device.

Performance

Taking the Pro805 out of the box is no easy task, as the printer is hidden beneath a layer of styrofoam, cords and instruction booklets (thank goodness that Lexmark chose to include physical copies of the documentation this time around, unlike some of its earlier printers). Included in the box is the printer itself, four cartridges, instruction manuals and networking guides, an installation CD and service guideline CD, USB cable and a protective/polishing cloth (presumably to wipe away those smudgy fingerprints from the touchscreen's surface). Installing the software and printer drivers took at least half an hour, with the printer needing to update its firmware not once, but twice during the set-up process.

The set-up process is the first time that you will encounter the touchscreen interface, and it certainly makes a good first impression. It's nice and responsive, and intuitive to use. It even gives a nice visual indication (complete with little animated bubbles!) to tell you the current ink tank levels.

This is where our admiration for the printer begins to wane. In our experience, there's always an aspect of a printer that proves frustrating, and for the Pro805 it wins the tearing hair award for having the most fiddly ink tanks. The tanks wouldn't snap into position on the printhead without a lot of jostling, abrasions and the odd expletive or two. An honorary mention has to go to paper jams as well — the Pro805 fed several sheets at once through the printer, making the paper get stuck as it passed through the device. There's no easy way to remove the paper either, so you'd better hope for some small hands to jam underneath the print tray to retrieve your treasured, crumpled sheet.

As for the Ethernet and wireless set-up, well, the less said the better. The printer intermittently connected to our network of choice, and then dropped out (regardless of the connection method) which was incredibly frustrating. Linking the device to the Smart Solutions website was also difficult with the printer constantly timing out when connecting to the site — and this wasn't an internet issue either as the printer kept verifying that it was connected to the internet. After the Smart Solution website required a printer firmware update (again) to allow the site to communicate with the printer, we thought at least this time it would be straightforward. Not so.

One of the elements that we tested was syncing the printer with the Smart Solutions website in order to download applications for the touchscreen. A week of struggling with the syncing process was met with many errors until finally after resetting the printer to its factory defaults, the printer finally synced and installed the applications we chose from the Smart Solutions website. Cue more hair loss here.

This printer isn't particularly fast — with our standard test document sent via the USB connection it took one minute, 13 seconds for the first page to emerge from the printer, with lengthy delays of 10 seconds or more between pages thereafter.

Fortunately, text quality with standard 12-point font was fairly good, though at larger sizes there was a small amount of smudging and banding across the text. Lexmark claims that the Pro805 can spit out a 10x15cm print in 24 seconds — we measured exactly double that time for a photo quality print on Lexmark's photo paper. The quality of the print was reasonable, but nowhere near lab quality with visible droplets and over-saturated colours.

Cost and consumables

One of Lexmark's perennial claims is how cheap it is to run one of their printers — 1¢ per page (black). You can find the nearest place to buy cartridges using one of the apps on the Smart Solutions interface. The Pro805 uses individual colour cartridges and one black cartridge, a shift away from the combined colour cartridges of old.

Service and support

Lexmark provides a three-year on-site exchange warranty. The Lexmark website also includes a number of downloads including driver updates for new operating systems. Support is via email or via a 1300 number which we had to call during the Smart Solutions debacle — fortunately, we can verify that the staff on hand are very nice to deal with and very patient. Pity there isn't an app for "Find the nearest wig shop".

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• XFS and Ext3 supported
• Supports ZFS for easy snapshots
• Dual DOM should keep hours of operation high
• Updated interface
• Expandability

• Loud
• Not configured to DHCP out of the box

Design and features

Thecus has carved quite the name for itself amongst network storage enthusiasts; however, of late it's faced stiff competition from the likes of QNAP and Synology, which offered similar performance and features, but with a much nicer looking chassis and interface. To this end, Thecus has released a new look firmware for its NAS, which is now rather AJAX heavy just like its competitors. The result is the inevitable increase in lagginess of the interface, but as a trade off the ease of use is significantly higher.

A five-bay NAS, the N5500 straddles the prosumer to SMB category. This in particular is highlighted by the presence of two Disk On Module (DOM) units, one containing the operating system, the second a mirror of the first, adding some redundancy for more demanding environments. There's still the power supply as a single point of failure, or potentially even the motherboard, but doing anything about that would likely drive costs up substantially.

Of course the usual iSCSI support is there too, and through USB it can act as a DAS too, offering a fairly large degree of flexibility. You can even choose the file system, a welcome addition, either going with EXT3, XFS or ZFS, although the latter would have to be run in user space to avoid licence issues, meaning performance wouldn't be too great. Not to mention it's there as a file system only — RAID-Z is not offered on the N5500, leaving the user with the choice of RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 or JBOD (and whether or not to encrypt those volumes). If you run out of space, you can stack multiple N5500s together using iSCSI to make it appear as a single storage unit to the outside world.

The dual-gigabit Ethernet ports support 802.3ad link aggregation, although as usual with Thecus we had fun navigating through it's not-so-intuitive LCD screen to manually set an IP to begin with — for some reason Thecus chooses to ship with DHCP disabled, a practice we wish it'd reverse. In setting the IP, we also noticed that the access door to the drive bays was a little flimsy and difficult to open via its magnetic-push latch.

Inside is an Intel Celeron 440, clocked at 1.86GHz and a 1GB DDR2-667 SODIMM, although there's a place for a second should you wish to upgrade. Expandability is decent too, with five USB ports and an eSATA port, should you need to attach additional storage to the unit temporarily. An RS232 port is supplied for UPS management, and if you're so inclined you can share a printer off one of the USB ports. All this seems to come at the cost of noise though, with the N5500 packing some relatively noisy fans to push the heat out.

Typically with NAS devices it seems those with the most features wins, and so the N5500 is stacked to the gills. On the server front, it can be an NTP server and a DHCP server, and also packs FTP, iTunes and UPnP media servers. For networking protocols it covers CIFS/SMB, NFS, AFP and Bonjour, and you can mount ISOs if you so desire. The usual email notification and wake on LAN is present, as is scheduled power on/off and disk spin downs for power management.

Active directory is supported, as is local user and group control. Thecus offers its unfortunately named Nsync for backups, although you're free to use whatever backup solution you like, so long as the NAS understands the protocol you're using.

Finally, the Thecus supports modules to expand capability — Thecus by default offers download manager, IPcam, web server and mySQL modules, although the community has long been developing its own modules for Thecus' range. While there doesn't seem to be any dedicated N5500 modules yet, no doubt some of the pre-existing ones will simply work off the bat.

Bugs and performance

Thecus' beta firmware (3.00.07) clearly isn't fully baked yet — which, given its beta status, is to be fully expected. In our testing, logging in as users other than anonymous caused the FTP server to hang when receiving passwords, and eventually claim the password was incorrect. We also found that you could not change the machine's workgroup without turning on ADS.

Thankfully, performance was fine. Copying across a 2GB file saw a maximum of 85MB/s read speeds from the NAS, while write speeds peaked out at 63MB/s. We would have preferred that the unit wasn't so noisy though — trapped in a server room it's fine, but given the Thecus effectively straddles from home user to small business, a quieter operation would have been a plus.

Thecus' N5500 is, like all of Thecus' lines, best suited to the professional user who doesn't mind tweaking the unit to get the most out of it. We believe QNAP and Synology currently have the edge in terms of ease of use, design and quietness, but the N5500 is not too far behind for those who know what they're doing.

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• Cheap

• Wireless receiver isn't built-in for keyboard/mouse
• Can't be used as an extra monitor
• iMac offers better value proposition

Design and features

While we're not sure whether we like the idea of all-in-ones as business machines yet, the Vostro 320 certainly gives its best stab at it. Black is the order of the day, although the monitor stand is curiously red. Curious, because mostly this will be hidden from sight — it's like a designer somewhere decided to subtly get their revenge over all the black business machines.

The front panel is devoid of anything functional, save the screen and embedded webcam — everything else has been moved to the side. Unfortunately, this means you can't see the status lights at all without moving your head to the side. It's certainly not a deal breaker, but if the point of status lights is to have a quick glance to make sure everything's behaving as it should, putting them out of view isn't necessarily the smartest thing to do.

The screen itself is a basic 19-inch, TN-based, 1440x900 model, and unlike the recent spate of Windows 7 machines it doesn't even mention the word touch. While the aforementioned stand only offers limited tilt adjustability, the Vostro can easily be mounted to an adjustment arm for further manoeuvrability.

Being a business machine, the Vostro is subject to the usual anachronistic mess of ports, from the six USB ports, one FireWire and SD/MMC/MS card reader, to the ancient parallel port, serial port and PS/2 ports on the rear. A headphone and microphone jack is also included on the right-hand side of the unit, and while there are speakers included, they're bad enough to only be satisfactory for system sounds.

Dell has included a wireless keyboard (which has a jog dial for volume control, and multimedia/web/mail/computer/calculator dedicated buttons); however, it requires a wireless dongle — the receiver isn't built into the unit. While our review unit included a corded mouse, retail samples should include a wireless mouse hooked into the same receiver as a keyboard — but an internal receiver would have been a better option so we could reclaim the extra USB port.

Internally our review sample sported an Intel Core 2 Duo E7400, 2GB RAM and a 160GB hard drive, all tied up by the X4500MHD chipset for graphics. This is a bit different from what's available at retail — with either the option of a Core 2 Duo E5300 or E7500 for AU$799 or AU$999 respectively. It currently sells with Vista with no XP downgrade rights (although Windows 7 should be available as an option soon with downgrade rights to XP), and unlike the rest of Dell's lines, there's no configurability at all as far as specs are concerned, although you can of course increase your warranty.

Performance

As a business machine, the Vostro isn't required to be too grunty, but the 1047 score in 3DMark06 isn't too bad (at least it'll run Aero just fine), and the 5892 in PCMark05 makes it fine for production work — and the viewing angles are acceptable too.

The Vostro 320 does have its shortcomings, yet for a sub AU$1000 machine we find we can't complain too much. Still, Apple is the king in this arena and we'd be sorely be tempted to spend the extra AU$600 on the iMac 21.5-inch. For your cash you get a significant upgrade, with a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard drive and GeForce 9400M graphics — although non-Mac friendly businesses may not have that option.

While a few tweaks such as an in-built wireless receiver for keyboard/mouse and a video input so it could double as a monitor for your laptop would be nice, if you're looking for a cheap all-in-one PC, it's hard to ignore the Vostro 320 as an option.

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• Apple iMac 24-inch (2009)

• Looks and feels upmarket for the price
• Multi-touch touchpad in entry-level machine

• Low battery life
• No Bluetooth

Design and features

For an affordable laptop at AU$1199, the K50AB looks quite good. The silken coating on the exterior contains a faint half-tone pattern, making what seems at first an ordinary black more of a deep champagne colour, depending on which way the light shines on it.

The 15.6-inch, 1366x768 glossy screen has the requisite 1.3-megapixel webcam up the top. Moving further down, the speakers are provided by Altec Lansing — this in itself doesn't mean much, but the bundled SRS Premium sound app included does do a good job at making the sound better. The multi-touch Elantech pad has lightly concave dimples, which doesn't interfere with use unlike the UX30's. The keyboard features a slightly squished numpad, and the optical drive has been moved to the left instead of being on the usual right. The usual complement of ports is present — four USB, gigabit Ethernet, microphone and headphone jacks, SD/MMC/MS card reader and VGA out. The nearly ubiquitous wireless N is here too; however, Bluetooth has been cut from this budget model.

Internally it plays host to AMD's hardware — an Athlon X2 QL-65 2.1GHz CPU drives the laptop, while a Radeon 3200 and Radeon HD 4570 pull graphics duties. The user is able to switch between the integrated 3200 to save battery, and the discrete 4570 for extra graphics power by right-clicking on the desktop and running ATI's PowerXpress application — although we wouldn't mind a hardware switch for this too. A 320GB hard drive and 4GB RAM round out the specs for the K50AB, while Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit is the OS of choice.

Performance

Two graphics cards means testing twice — and with the Radeon HD 4570 enabled, the K50AB scored 2929 in 3DMark06 and 3820 in PCMark. Battery lasted a concerning one hour, 36 minutes and 19 seconds in our test, where we turn off all power-saving features, set screen brightness and volume to maximum and play back an XviD file.

Switching to the Radeon 3200 should have presented less performance, but greater battery life — however, only one of these was true. 3DMark06 and PCMark05 pulled in 1485 and 3678 respectively, though the battery test only went for one hour, 37 minutes and 34 seconds — indicating something is wrong either at the hardware or driver level when switching GPUs. Regardless, this is the second K50AB we've had from Asus that exhibited the same issue, so we can only assume the problem is endemic to the series at this point in time.

The K50AB is a typical mid-range laptop that looks good, but the in-built GPU-switching feature doesn't save on battery at all. We'd suggest looking elsewhere for your mid-range needs.

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• Sharp design
• Great battery life
• MS Exchange email support
• Good camera

• Gesture games are rubbish
• No 3.5mm headphone socket
• Keypad design makes texting difficult

Design

Subtlety isn't something we encounter too often when reviewing mobile phones, but if anyone is to deliver a subtle elegance in its design aesthetic, it's Sony Ericsson. The Yari isn't a high-end phone, its RRP of AU$549 places it somewhere in the middle of the road, and from a distance it looks like another boring handset. Up close though, you discover something quite beautiful in its black and white composition, its asymmetrical curving white trim and oddly shaped camera key — the gentle ridges that define the keys on the T9 keypad.

While we find this handset beautiful to behold, we don't find it fantastic to use. The aforementioned keypad design is cool to look at, but it's essentially a flat plastic surface with raised peaks, and while this is nice to slide your fingers across, it makes it difficult to type on quickly and accurately. The same can be said for the navigation panel under the phone's screen. Again it looks great, with careful, subtle design, but the buttons aren't easy to use without care.

Good game?

If you've heard anything about the Yari it's no doubt about the phone's gaming prowess, Sony Ericsson's first gesture-controlled gaming phone. For most gamers the following statements are probably completely redundant, but we'll say them anyway: these games suck like a Dyson cyclonic vacuum cleaner. Of the 10 games pre-installed, five of them are controlled by a player's gestures recorded by a front-facing camera, similar to the EyeToy on the Playstation. There's Baseball, Boxing, Bowling, Tennis and Fitness, with only Bowling responding well to gestures and none of them coming even close to being fun.

On the flipside, the games controlled by either the number pad or an in-built accelerometer are mostly fine for killing time. There's LocoRoco, a motion puzzler controlled by tilting the phone, Bubble Town, which is like Bubble Bobble with a story tacked on, and the self-explanatory FIFA 10 and Guitar Rock Tour.

Media and the web

The Yari comes with all the hardware you'll need to connect to the web, including HSDPA data transfers, but no Wi-Fi. The web browser is OK for short sessions of Google searches, but the combination of the browser and smallish screen make reading your favourite desktop websites a feat of patience and sharp eyesight. Yari also has GPS on-board and a range of location-based services installed, including Google Maps and a navigation app called WisePilot.

Sony Ericsson's excellent media browser is present here too, giving the same excellent user experience we've seen recently in the W995 amongst others, with album art display and access to a range of good equaliser presets. On the back of the phone, alongside the 5-megapixel camera and flash, are external speakers which are surprisingly loud and clear. Less impressive is Sony Ericsson's lack of a 3.5mm headphone socket or adapter to plug in standard headphones.

One area of the phone that definitely meets our expectations is the camera. We're not often fans of Sony Ericsson cameras, especially in this price range, but the Yari is one of the exceptions. The photos we've taken so far have been colourful and with decent focus, perfect for capturing those impromptu moments with family, friends or clowns, etc.

Performance

We have no complaints about the way Yari processes common tasks. Throughout our tests the Yari remained stable and lag-free, executing applications quickly even when others remain open in the background. Data transfers were slower than you'll get with a high-powered smartphone, but as we said earlier, this isn't a great phone for web browsing on the whole. Call quality is alright, but not spectacular. The earpiece speaker on our review unit tended to be a little muffled, making it hard to hear when outside near traffic.

Sony Ericsson gets two big thumbs up for battery life, though. While using the Yari we charged the phone on either the third or fourth day, making it twice as battery efficient as the large display touchscreens available.

Overall

The Yari looks great but doesn't have stellar features or applications. The phone is fine and the battery is good, but this can be said for most phones we review. The web browser, games and navigation are mediocre features with limited purpose, and the music player would have been great if Sony Ericsson got past its insistence on using a proprietary port for connecting headphones.

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• Individual ink tanks
• Smart Solutions give flexibility
• Touch panel works intuitively

• Expensive
• Doesn't live up to speed claims
• Ink tanks tricky to fit

Design

There's not been a whole lot of innovation in the multifunction printer (MFP) space in recent years, and that's for one very simple reason. By the time you combine a scanner tray, printhead mechanism and paper mechanism together, you're limited to only a few basic shapes on offer. The S605 looks, for the most part, like any other black multifunction printer, until you look down at the control panel and realise that most of the buttons are missing. There's an indent for the power button next to a glossy black resistive touchscreen panel. Power up the S605 and it springs to life with large and simple buttons for common scanning and copying tasks, as well as a button labelled "Smart Solutions". More on that shortly.

Features

Looking at print speeds, the S605 isn't that much to get excited about. Lexmark rates it with a black print speed of up to 33 pages per minute (ppm) in draft black and 30ppm in colour. The scanner has 48-bit depth, but do note that it's a fax-free model, if faxing is important to you. Media card support extends to SD, MMC, xD and Memory Stick, with a PictBridge slot just below that. The S605 is 802.11n compatible.

One interesting new feature — at least for a Lexmark printer — is the inclusion of discrete ink tanks. There's an argument for cost savings here with three colour tanks and one larger black tank.

The hero feature of this product is the LCD touchscreen, which adapts its on-screen display to be relevant to the task at hand. This makes it a genuinely intuitive printer to use in pretty much any case or scenario, as it'll guide you through each process in turn.

The LCD also enables what Lexmark calls "Smart Solutions". These are web delivered miniature apps with a general printing bent to them, downloaded from Lexmark's dedicated web portal. Lexmark's hype for the S605 mentions "creating" your own Smart Solutions, but that's arguably a little deceptive. At least when we checked, all you could do was register your S605 and download Lexmark's existing Smart Solutions.

Performance

Installation of the S605 was surprisingly easy for a couple of key reasons. Firstly, Lexmark has finally cleaned up its installation procedures. Whereas in the past you'd have enough time in-between starting the installation and actually printing to start a small land war in Asia, the S605's software installation was speedy. Physical installation was mostly problem free, especially as the LCD panel in the S605 doubles up as a display monitor showing you what the next series of actions should be. Our only problem here was fitting the ink tanks, as it took us a little while to work out the correct way to get them to properly click into place.

Getting Smart Solutions onto the S605 does involve registering it with Lexmark, and the cynical part of our brains wonders if having a printer that talks back to its vendor won't result in it chucking a hissy fit if non-Lexmark cartridges are used within it. That having been said, there's a wide variety of Smart Solutions on offer. These range from the rather obvious — advanced copying presets, file printing and so on — to rather more obscure, like getting RSS feeds of MSNBC or Apple Hot News headlines to pop up on the printer. It's also worth noting that some Smart Solutions are Windows only, which is odd when you consider that it's software that's delivered to the printer, not to an operating system per se.

Print speeds on the S605 didn't entirely live up to expectations, with a draft page taking 15 seconds to emerge from the printer, and an average print speed in draft of 13ppm, well under the claimed 33. Photo printing a 10x15cm borderless print took 55 seconds. The S605's photo output was largely unremarkable, with most photos coming out a little drab and flat.

Conclusion

At AU$399, the S605 isn't an entry-level MFP, and it doesn't carry the kind of print or photo speeds we'd expect from a premium unit. On the other hand, the LCD panel works beautifully, and the flexibility of Smart Solutions do give it an edge over a more locked down multifunction device.

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• 16:9, full HD resolution

• HDMI overscans
• Glossy screen
• Overpriced

LCD monitors are slowly being released in the same widescreen ratios as widescreen TVs, which is great for the most part. This 21.5-inch HP 2159m monitor is an example of this trend, and even has a native resolution of 1920x1080; the same used by full HD televisions.

In practice, the wider aspect ratio means certain kinds of work become a little easier (for instance, working on two side-by-side documents) and the high resolution means that you can get more things on your screen at any given time if you don't mind squeezing a lot onto what isn't an overly huge monitor.

During our testing, we found that the panel could reproduce all the colours and shades of our DisplayMate tests. Out of the box the monitor pulls to the red quite a bit by default, and a little under its other presets. This wasn't as noticeable when the custom preset was set to its maximums, but by this point the display had become overly bright.

The panel is highly glossy, and you will be able to see your reflection (and the reflection of everything else around you) in dark areas of the image when in a lit room. This screen won't be at your eye line without the aid of phone books or encyclopedia volumes, as the stand does not extend vertically. On the flip side the stand does tilt quite far, the viewing angle is very good and the screen doesn't distort fine details such as text.

The only real technical frills are the ability to turn off the power LED, which you may not realise was distracting until you disable it.

While most of these limitations come down to taste and budget, there is a major technical flaw that should concern users who intend to connect their computer to this monitor through an HDMI cable. The HDMI input overscans by default, and cannot be overridden.

This would mean that the image from any computer plugged in via HDMI will be zoomed in and slightly cropped. You won't see the title bar of your program or the leftmost file menu, and you'll certainly lose the program bar at the bottom of the screen.

Overscan is a relic from the era of CRT monitors. Since not all CRTs could be relied upon to display a correctly aligned image, the film and TV industries kept the important parts of their images within safety margins so that no important information would be cut off by CRTs in various states of misalignment. This is why subtitles have never been placed at the far bottom of an image.

None of this is a concern in the world of digital pixel mapping, where pixels can be reliably mapped to precise, repeatable coordinates. When overscan is mimicked in digital hardware, the crispness of the image is entirely lost and fine details such as text are mangled horribly. This wouldn't be as big a problem if this were an LCD TV, but for a monitor it would be crippling if there weren't VGA and DVI inputs available that didn't overscan.

We do know of a workaround for this: you can use an HDMI to DVI adapter or cable to connect HDMI equipment through the DVI input of the monitor (which will leave you with one less usable input); however, none are included in the box.

If you were willing to work around this issue, we'd almost recommend this monitor, if it wasn't for one other major problem. The sticker price is simply too expensive. At AU$500, it's AU$200 more than comparable monitors, and AU$100 less than 3D capable monitors.

If you can find it for AU$300, it's worth a look. But until then, we can't recommend it.

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BlackBerry manufacturer RIM has finally announced a successor to its wildly popular BlackBerry Bold 9000, increasing the product number to 9700, but trimming the fat across all of the handset's physical dimensions. The 9700 is like the old Bold after a week at a Boot Camp for fat kids, now 5mm shorter across its width and length and 19 grams lighter.

But these are the only areas where the numbers have gone down, across all other specifications we see the numbers travelling in the opposite direction. The old Bold shipped with a 480x320-pixel display, 1GB of storage and a 2-megapixel camera, the 9700 ships with a 480x360-pixel display, a 2GB microSD card and a 3.15-megapixel camera.

The other big change is the shift from a jogball for navigation to an optical touchpad, like the one we saw on the 8520, which should, if nothing else, assist with web browsing, though we're keen to see if it also improves our high score on Brick Breaker.

For all these enhancements RIM still thinks it can squeeze better battery life out of the new model too, with six hours talk time (up an hour on the iPhone 3GS) and about 17 days standby time. It's certainly not in the same league as the four or five days we used to get on old BlackBerrys, but its not too shabby all the same.

The Bold 9700 should hit stores in the UK in November, though there's no word yet about when we might see the 9700 down under.

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• 50Mbps UTM throughput
• Gigabit ports for main WAN/LAN connections
• 3G wireless connectivity
• Load balancing and failover
• Comprehensive gateway security services

• Additional Ethernet ports are 10/100Mbps only

King of the small business security market, SonicWall recently added six new models to its popular TZ range of UTM (Unified Threat Management) appliances, delivering a mix of enhanced functionality and improved performance. Designed to serve the one-man-band upwards, the new range is topped out by the TZ 210 which, as we discovered, neatly bridges the gap between SME and enterprise products — and at a price that the competition will find hard to match.

The USB ports at the front of the TZ 210 can be used to add a 3G wireless dongle or an analog modem. At the back, the TZ 210 has two gigabit Ethernet and five Fast Ethernet interfaces. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

Available with or without an integrated Wireless-N (802.11n) access point, the TZ 210 has two gigabit Ethernet interfaces at the back, labelled WAN and LAN, for internet and local network attachment, respectively. Alongside are five other network ports which can be used for a variety of purposes including additional LAN/WAN connectivity with built-in load balancing and failover support, although these are all 10/100Mbps only, rather than gigabit enabled. At the front, you also get two USB ports for a 3G wireless dongle and/or to connect to an analog modem to further boost WAN bandwidth and protect against service failures.

In terms of performance, the firewall in the TZ 210 can inspect traffic at up to 100Mbps. With the UTM services applied this halves to 50Mbps, but that's still an impressive figure for a device in this price bracket. Indeed it's good enough to protect the WAN links of even quite large organisations and more than adequate where the appliance is used to secure connections to distributed branch offices.

Wizards help with initial deployment of the TZ 210. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

Installation on our (more modest) test network took just a few minutes, following the instructions in the comprehensive getting-started guide, which includes lots of useful examples showing how to cope with different network deployments. Most of the initial work is done by set-up wizards, which certainly helped us — especially with the VPN configuration. However, these can't do everything so, once the basic set-up is complete, it's down to the usual web-based interface for more detailed configuration or, on large networks, SonicWall's GMS (Global Management System) software.

Website browsing can be managed via a categorised list. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

We used a browser for our tests and found the interface very easy to navigate. On the downside, a degree of technical knowledge is assumed and some of the options took a while to work out. However, that's par for the course on this type of appliance, and it took us just under an hour to get the key firewall and antivirus services up and running and to use the content filtering service to stop users browsing sites we wanted to block. We also found it easy to zone our network and apply different policies to each — and even scan and filter traffic passing between zones.

Different services and policies can be applied to each network zone. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

There was no option to inspect SSL-encrypted traffic for threats, but you can scan compressed files and enforce local antivirus protection on network PCs. Plus there's a useful guest services option for wireless users, to allow visitors, for example, to connect to the internet but not snoop around the corporate LAN. You can even use the TZ 210 to manage security on other wireless access points, although only where SonicWall hardware is employed.

Comprehensive gateway antivirus protection is a key feature of the TZ 210. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

One other point to note is that most of the services have to be licensed before they can be used. Go for the bare appliance and you get the usual free trials. However, we'd recommend the Total Secure package, which includes licences for the gateway antivirus, spyware, content filtering and intrusion prevention services. This adds to the price of the TZ 210, but is cheaper than buying the licences separately. Plus you're immediately good to go with a full year of updates and support, after which there are several ways of extending your protection — one of the cheapest being a three-year Comprehensive Gateway Security Suite licence.

The ability to enforce and update McAfee-based client antivirus protection is an optional feature. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

Depending on your network, other costs may also be incurred. Spam filtering, for example, isn't included in the Total Secure package. Likewise, if you want the TZ 210 to enforce and update McAfee antivirus protection on local PCs you'll need yet another licence. Additional VPN licences may also be required, as just two IPSec and two SSL VPN licences are included as standard.

Conclusion

The TZ 210 is an impressive UTM appliance, delivering enterprise-class security and throughput to match similar products from competitors like Cisco and Juniper. Moreover, we found it relatively easy to manage and much more affordable.

Via ZDNet UK

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• Lightweight
• Internal DVD burner

• Build quality
• 802.11n is optional
• Poor quality WLED screen

Design

Metallic red isn't a colour you'd normally associate with a business notebook, but Dell has decided that a little splash of colour is needed in a business notebook market full of grey and black notebooks.

The 12.1-inch glossy WLED screen runs at a maximum resolution of 1280x800. Even more annoying than the fingerprint-attracting glossy screen was the screen bleeding that made itself known along the bottom of the screen. This becomes even more evident when viewing anything with a dark background.

The keyboard is light and tactile when typing, while the touch pad is responsive to touch. The touch pad settings can also be easily customised to suit your taste. A row of media shortcut keys (all with blue backlights), along with the power button and status indicators, are located above the keyboard.

Another disappointment is with the screen's hinge, which refuses to stay up once it's past the 130-degree angle. This mainly poses a problem for those that like working during their commute to work on public transport.

Features

Internally, our review unit had an Intel Core 2 Duo T6570 running at 2.1GHz with an 800MHz FSB with 2GB of RAM, which manages to run the pre-installed Windows Vista Business without many issues. However, anything more strenuous than the word processing or PowerPoint may be asking too much for this notebook.

It must also be noted that the retail versions of the Vostro 1220 will have a slightly faster processor, available as either a Core 2 Duo T6670 at 2.2GHz with an 800MHz FSB or a P8600 at 2.4GHz with 1066MHz FSB.

Although the internal 8x DVD burner is a welcome addition in a notebook this size, it comes at a cost. The shell casing above the DVD burner isn't particularly strong and could easily break if you're not careful while lugging the Vostro around with you.

In an odd move, despite the widespread availability of wireless LANs, the Vostro does not feature 802.11n wireless LAN connectivity as standard and is instead an optional extra, falling back on a b/g adapter as the default. Other connectivity options include three USB ports, a gigabit Ethernet port, VGA connector, Bluetooth 2.1 support (although this is optional on the base models), 34mm ExpressCard slot and three-in-one card reader.

In what should be a more widespread practice, Dell has decided against the usual trialware on the notebook, giving you free reign to decide the kind of software you'd like to install on the 250GB hard drive. Sure, you could just uninstall the software yourself, but it's nice to know that Dell has saved you precious minutes.

Performance

As to be expected from the on-board Intel X4500MHD graphics the Vostro managed a lowly score of 825 in 3DMark, but managed to protect its portable business notebook image better in PCMark05 by snagging a score of 3847.

The four-cell battery of the Vostro lasted for a respectable three hours, 25 minutes and 33 seconds on high performance settings with brightness and volume at maximum. While this puts it a few hours behind the best netbook offerings, it does have the advantage of a larger screen and significantly more processor power.

Vostro 1220 had a lot of potential, but has been letdown by its below average build quality — something that should be a high priority, especially for an ultraportable notebook.

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• Comfortable keyboard
• ExpressCard slot
• Optional HSDPA connectivity
• Good battery life
• Draft-N Wi-Fi radio
• Bundled docking station converts netbook into a nettop.

• Included docking station increases price but does not add new ports like HDMI

On the surface, the Booktop seems to be just another Atom-based 10-inch mini-laptop from a minor player. But while Gigabyte is better known for manufacturing mainboards than laptops, we were impressed that the M1022M managed to stand out from the crowd during our testing. In fact, it could be the first mini-laptop that can be configured as a nettop as well. The bundled docking station and excellent battery life make the AU$699 price tag expensive but not unreasonable. However, we feel the docking station should have been an optional accessory so that the M1022M can be offered at a lower price, since not everyone wants to use a netbook to replace a desktop.

Design

It may not be as hardy as a ThinkPad, but the Booktop is not some cheap OEM rip-off, either. The tapered chassis has an attractive hinge design and although colour options are not available, the simple black-and-white theme is understated yet attractive. It has a solid build quality and tight hinges so we expect this machine to be durable enough for the road.

But what really impressed us was how Gigabyte managed to fit in a six-cell battery without having it protrude from the back or bottom. This helps the M1022M maintain a slim profile and reasonable heft. We like the 92 per cent keyboard which is comfortable to use, though touch typing may not be feasible for those with fat digits. Our only complaint is that the trackpad buttons are located at the sides, which may take some getting used to.

The Booktop maintains a sleek profile despite a generous six-cell battery. (Credit: Gigabyte)

The fact that all three USB ports are positioned on the right may look unusual at first, but it makes sense when the unit is docked as it allows these slots to remain available. The docking station puts the netbook in an upright position to minimise its footprint and makes the unit resemble a nettop. Despite the accessory not having a heavy base, we never felt that the netbook was in a precarious position when in use. The dock includes VGA and Ethernet passthrough ports as well as three USB slots so you can keep the Booktop connected to an external display and peripherals.

Features

The Gigabyte M1022M is one of the few low-cost mini-laptops to sport an ExpressCard/34 slot. Surprisingly, it does this without compromising on the number of USB ports or reducing the size of the battery. The company did not skimp on hardware components, either, and the Booktop is decked out with Draft-N Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Ethernet connectivity. The netbook can also be wired for HSDPA connectivity as an optional extra.

Though the 10.1-inch glossy display is not HD-ready, its 1024x600-pixel resolution is decent enough for internet surfing and emails. Which is all a netbook is really good for as its Atom processor and integrated GMA 950 graphics engine are not powerful enough for HD videos or most current gaming titles. The audio output through the stereo speakers is, like most netbooks, adequate at best, so plug in a pair of earphones if you are picky about sound quality.

As a nettop, the Gigabyte M1022M is comparable to first-generation low-cost PCs since current models sport dual-core Atom chipsets. Though the docking has a VGA output, Ethernet port and three USB slots, it does not expand the feature set by offering connectors such as HDMI or eSATA (which are becoming common among nettops). The docking station has a power button that turns on the netbook, as well as a battery key that shows the remaining power by lighting up the six LED lights at the front of the M1022M. This feature also works by clicking on the right trackpad button on the machine.

The bundled docking station puts the netbook in a space-saving upright position. (Credit: Gigabyte)

Gigabyte's proprietary Smart Manager software provides a user-friendly interface to change power profiles. In addition, it can control screen brightness and audio volume, enable the webcam and wireless radios. The latter is especially useful since the Gigabyte M1022M does not have a dedicated switch to turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Performance and battery life

The Booktop runs off a 1.66GHz Atom processor, 1GB RAM and 160GB HDD. The single-core chip, along with its integrated Intel GMA graphics card, is best confined to internet duties and simple productivity tools such as word processing. Standard-definition videos are still playable, though HD videos (even those streamed from the net) do not perform well on this mini-laptop.

Battery life is where the Gigabyte netbook differentiates itself. Granted the Asus Eee PC series still takes the crown for exceptional uptime, but the six-cell 7800mAh battery in the M1022M holds its own. We looped a video clip at half-screen brightness on this netbook with the wireless radios turned off and it shut down only after an impressive five hours and two minutes. There is no extended battery option, though this netbook's uptime should be adequate for all but the most demanding traveller.

Via CNET Asia.

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• Record-breaking battery life
• Strong performance for an ultraportable
• Comfortable full-size keyboard
• Widescreen display with a sharp resolution
• WWAN and GPS options

• Nine-cell battery adds significant weight
• Lacks an optical drive
• Includes pointing stick but no touch pad

We were a little surprised when Lenovo announced an X series laptop with a 12.1-inch wide-aspect display; after all, the similarly sized ThinkPad X300 had won over many hearts and minds when it was introduced earlier this year. But the new ThinkPad X200 does nicely round out Lenovo's ThinkPad family. It's slightly smaller and — with a starting price of AU$2999 — significantly less expensive than the 13.3-inch ThinkPad X300. More importantly, with the nine-cell battery it features the longest battery life we've seen to date.

What the ThinkPad X200 doesn't offer — a built-in optical drive, a touch pad — will surely be a clear deal-breaker for some users. And you'll have to carry some extra weight to get a full day's worth of battery life. However, the Lenovo ThinkPad X200 makes sense for frequent travellers who want an ultraportable laptop that's both long-lived and powerful enough for a full day's work in a variety of applications.

Even from across the room, there's no mistaking the X200's heritage: its rectangular black case (wrapped around a magnesium chassis) is all ThinkPad. By virtue of its wide-aspect display, it features a slightly larger footprint than its predecessor, the ThinkPad X61s. In fact, the X200 now looks like a miniature version of the 13.3-inch X300. Though the X200's weight starts at 1.39kg, our ThinkPad X200 review unit tipped the scales at 1.68kg with its nine-cell battery. We think the extra weight is worth it (read on for the results of our battery benchmarks) but acknowledge that some road warriors might prefer the sub-kilogram weight of the Toshiba Portege R500.

The 12.1-inch widescreen display features a sharp 1280x800 native resolution that's more common on 14.1-inch or even 15.4-inch displays. The resulting text and icons are probably about as small as you can go for comfortable everyday use. Given the ThinkPad's business focus, we appreciate the matte screen finish, which avoids reflections in brightly lit office environments.

Another advantage to going wide with the ThinkPad X200: plenty of room for the keyboard. Whereas Lenovo's previous ultraportable, the standard-aspect ThinkPad X61s, had (of necessity) a slightly compact keyboard, the ThinkPad X200's wider case can accommodate the same keyboard used on Lenovo's 14- and 15-inch ThinkPads. (You can see close-up photos of both keyboards in this blog post.) The difference in size is noticeable; on the X200 we never felt like we were typing on an ultraportable machine.

Navigation, however, is still a bit limited. With its last few ThinkPad models, Lenovo has tried to accommodate both fans of the red TrackPoint pointing stick and those who prefer a touch pad by including both options. The ThinkPad X200, however, features only the TrackPoint and three mouse buttons (the centre acts as a scroll button); touch-pad fans, of which there are many, will feel left out.

Above the keyboard are basic volume controls as well as the very helpful blue ThinkVantage button, which launches a suite of system maintenance, power management, connectivity, and other utilities. All the other classic ThinkPad touches are here, including the nifty keyboard light tucked beneath the lip of the lid and a fingerprint reader below the keyboard for quickly logging in to Windows and a company network.

As with the ThinkPad X61s, the ThinkPad X200's slender case does not have room for a built-in optical drive. This may be a deal-breaker for some, but we like having the option of paring down our system to the bare essentials for travel; users who rely on optical media would be better off purchasing Lenovo's UltraBase dock, which includes a DVD burner, or opting for the ThinkPad X300, which incorporates both an optical drive and a larger screen.

Otherwise, the ThinkPad X200 offers the basic ports and connections a business traveller will need, plus one more USB port than average and the option for built-in WWAN and GPS. There's also a 1.3-megapixel webcam above the display.

Our ThinkPad X200 review unit contained a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor and integrated Intel GMA X4500 HD graphics. The CPU gives the ThinkPad X200 an advantage over the low-voltage, lower-speed processors that power other ultraportables. On CNET Labs' benchmarks, the ThinkPad X200 outperformed the Toshiba Portege R500 and the Apple MacBook Air, and it showed notable gains over the ThinkPad X300. The ThinkPad X200 also easily outpaced a number of netbooks, including the admittedly less expensive MSI Wind U100, making it a far better choice for travellers whose work extends beyond web surfing and keeping up with email.

The ThinkPad's nine-cell battery lasted an astonishing six hours, 23 minutes on our video playback drain test. It even bested smaller systems, such as the Asus Eee PC 901 and the Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium. Anecdotally, we got about six hours of battery life from the ThinkPad X200 while simultaneously working on documents, surfing the web, and wirelessly streaming music.

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