The Asus Eee PC appears to have opened the floodgates, with similar low-cost 1kg notebooks arriving on the scene.
Belinea’s S.book 1 is the first notebook we’ve seen to rival the Asus’ tiny computer on size, but at £200 more expensive it needs to justify the extra cost.
Like the Eee PC, the S.book has a 7in 800x480 screen, full Qwerty keyboard, trackpad, speakers, 2200mAh battery, a couple of USB ports and Wifi. But that’s where the similarities end.
The most obvious difference is the Bluetooth phone. This slots into a recess to the right of the screen, which gives it an odd look.
The phone pairs easily with Skype but is fiddly to use and, despite its numeric keypad, it can’t be used to actually navigate within Skype.
The keyboard is better than the Eee PC’s because, although it’s no bigger, the bottom row of keys (including the spacebar) is raised so your thumbs don’t continually hit the chassis edge.
That said, it is difficult to use the keyboard for extended periods of time. Unsurprisingly, the minute 19mm wide trackpad, with left and right clicks either side of it, is particularly infuriating to use, so a USB mouse is essential.
The screen is touch-sensitive and, thanks to a stylus which slides into the case, allows for easy navigation.
The S.book comes with Windows XP Professional installed as standard rather than Linux. It also houses an 80GB hard disk, which is an essential inclusion if you’re not using a slim Linux installation.
These extra features mean it weighs 1kg, slightly more than the Eee PC’s 0 .92kg, and if you include the bulky power adapter that weight increases to 1.39kg – more than the Eee PC’s 1.10kg.
Via components are at the heart of the S.book, comprising a C7-M 1.2GHz processor, 1GB DDR2 Ram (running at a meagre 266MHz) and Via Unichrome Pro II graphics. The Unichrome graphics prevented the S.book from running any of our gaming benchmarks.
The scores were poor across the board in the PCmark05 tests, trailing the all-Intel Eee PC by 10 to 30 per cent in the CPU, memory and graphics sections. Hard disk performance was similar, however. It’s capable of playing MPEG4 video and is fine for internet browsing and Microsoft Office tasks.
Via components are low voltage so we hoped for long battery life, but our reader benchmark was worse than the Eee PC. Via’s low-voltage posturing didn’t translate into a cool notebook either, with the S.book becoming warm to touch during use. After a full day’s testing it crashed, indicating prolonged stability could be a problem.
The hottest part of the laptop is on the bottom side, which doesn’t make it particularly suitable to be used on your lap. There’s no built-in webcam, but the notebook’s two speakers sound good considering their small size. The S.book’s Wifi reception is poorer than many other notebooks we’ve tested.
The wireless connection became inconsistent when two walls were put in its path to a router – two other Centrino notebooks we had to hand didn’t have the reception problems at this distance. There are many flaws with the S.book but, in its favour, it is light. The stumbling block is the price – it does little to justify costing £200 more than the Eee PC.
If you can handle carrying something weighing one or two kilos more, you may as well go for a proper, 15.4in notebook, while those after a truly miniature PC would be better off with the Asus alternative.
