Asus U2E

• Pros Small and solid. Rammed with connectors
• Cons Leather-clad look an acquired taste. Slightly slow processor

Asus has transformed itself from a boring motherboard manufacturer into the world's favourite laptop-builder faster than you can say "Eee PC". A new 8in version of its Linux maestro is in the pipeline, but to keep us busy until then the Chinese company has launched another alluring ultraportable – the U2E.

While clearly inspired by the Eee PC's outrageously slight frame, the U2E is a very different beast. It's available in two 11in versions: a black leather hard-drive number (reviewed here), and a more expensive brown leather version with 32GB of solid-state memory. But the big difference is that, rather than Linux, these chaps pack Windows Vista Business.

Mean screen
The U2E is impressively small. It boasts the same build quality that had us happily using the Eee PC as a doorstop, but open it up and the U2E's glorious 11.1in WXGA screen leaves a strong impression on your retinas.

Thanks to the aspirational Vaio-like styling, so does the machine's design. The whole thing's lined with leather – inside and out – with supposedly 'hand polished' steel trimming the edges. With the machine's slogan etched into the metal and the battery LEDs glowing an attractive white, product placement in the next Bond movie wouldn't be out of place.

Under the leathery skin
The 1.06GHz Core 2 Duo U7500 processor is a little slow compared to the guts of the new top-spec Toshiba Porteges and Sony's latest Vaios, but with 2GB of RAM – pretty much standard on this new wave of Vista laptops – it copes well with the bloated demands of Microsoft's money-spinning new OS.

Movies play perfectly and look sensational on the 1366x768 native screen, making it ideal if you're stuck in the airport departure lounge. Plus the panel's one of the more efficient LED-backlit jobs, helping the U2E last for around three hours on one charge – or even longer if you plump for the optional 32GB solid-state drive.

Novelty extras
The 'for business' angle means you get special features to boast about at marketing conferences, such as fingerprint recognition – nice to have but rarely used. The face-recognition system of the U2E's integrated webcam also rapidly becomes annoying once the novelty of showing it to people has worn off.

Asus' software offers a password-remembering system for filling in forms and personal data on the internet. Which, again, could be quite handy, but it's the sort of thing you're likely to switch off after a few hours of annoying prompting.

Super-connected
Despite the U2E's tiny size it comes with an unbelievable array of connectors. Micro-DVI and VGA mean you can cable any old monitor up to it, and there are a MacBook Air-humbling three USB sockets, built-in DVD burner, Ethernet connection, card reader and Express Card slot – all in a case not much bigger than the Eee's.

Asus also chucks a wireless Bluetooth mouse and spare battery in the box, which is generosity beyond belief.

The U2E's an extremely well made and decent performer with a style of its own and every feature you'll ever need. It's also remarkably solid, so you'll have no qualms about chucking it in your man-bag with your keys, wallet and Swiss Army knife. We like it a lot.

Asus EeePC 900

A few months later, we followed up with our full evaluation of the Eee PC 701 4G. By the time early Eee PCs were ready for the retail market, Asus had morphed the machine from a competitor of the OLPC XO to a UMPC for the masses. In the move, pricing increased from initial reports, but that didn't stop the Eee PC from being wildly popular. The Eee PC was still priced low enough to allow budget conscious consumers to own a UMPC, and to allow power users to pick one up as somewhat of an accessory for their main PC or full-sized notebooks. Fan sites and numerous Eee PC mods would eventually hit the web too; Asus really did strike a chord and consumers (and competitors) listened.

Due to the success of the originals, Asus of course followed up with numerous accessories and multi-colored Eee PCs in the months after the initial release. The follow-up units were essentially identical to the originals though, save for the different colored enclosures. The first really major change to the Eee PC line-up would be the Eee PC 900, which was just introduced about two weeks ago.

Although the new Eee PC 900 and Eee PC 700 series machines have similar hardware foundations, Asus has tweaked the 900 in a number of meaningful ways. Below are the official specifications, but they don't tell the whole story...

Asus Eee PC 900 Features and Specifications

The specifications above hint at some of the more significant differences between the Eee PC 900 and Eee PC 700. First, the 900 series is outfitted with a larger, higher resolution 8.9" screen. Solid state storage capacity has been increased as well, as has the amount of factory installed RAM. A 900MHz Intel mobile Celeron CPU and 910 chipset still lie at the heart of the machine, and audio and LAN connectivity options are also similar. Asus did more than just attach a larger screen and add more storage though, as we'll show you on the pages ahead.

Asus ships the Eee PC 900 in an unassuming box adorned with the likeness of the system. Inside, we found a detailed User's Manual, a Quick Start Guide, a warranty card, and a couple of DVDs - one with the Linux recovery image and the other a Support CD that contains a number of useful tools for reconfiguring or restoring the Eee PC, including a utility to create a bootable thumb drive with the factory OS image. In addition to the aforementioned items, Asus also included a 36W power adapter and a simple, padded pouch. If you're familiar with the Eee PC 700 series, you'll notice the newer 900 series machine includes a more traditional power adapter with a cord and not a wall brick like the 700 series.

Rock Pegasus 210

• Pros Ultra light and beautifully designed. A go-anywhere notebook
• Cons Slow processor. Awkward keyboard

It’s difficult to find a computer manufacturer who isn’t shifting a slim and light laptop for under a grand these days, but the kings of the genre remain Sony’s Vaio TX series, the Asus Eee PC and, of course, the MacBook Air.

Is there room for another contender? Rock thinks so. Its new Pegasus 210 is a bold attempt to shake things up in the ultra-portable market, which it plans to do with a potent mix of stylish looks and a very attractive price tag.

Bombproof build
First impressions are good. No other super-slim laptop boasts this kind of build quality for this kind of price. It’s made with the bare minimum of plastic and a discrete gunmetal grey magnesium alloy for the casing.

Like the MacBook Air the Pegasus 210 eschews an optical drive to achieve its improbable thinness – it measures just 30mm at its thickest point. Unlike the Air, though, it boasts three USB ports, an optional 3G modem, 80GB hard drive and even a fingerprint reader and smartcard slot to big up its business credentials. None of this gets in the way of this instantly covetable computer weighing just over a kilo.

Special screen
The 1280x800 resolution makes the 12.1in screen very easy on the eyes, and an X-Glass coating for helps give it higher contrast ratios than the French president to wife equation.

The three quarter size keyboard is a little on the fiddly side, though, and quite why the hash key is almost as large and easier to hit than the return button is a mystery we’ll never solve. Still, this is a quirk you can dismiss considering the Pegasus 210 has all the allure and battery life of a Vaio TX but at half the price.

The processor problem
There is, though, one more problem that is slightly harder to overlook. Despite the fact that dual core processors can be found co-ordinating LED lights in kids’ shoes, the Pegasus only has an Intel A110 at its heart. For all its cool looks and sleek lines, it’s barely more powerful than an Asus Eee PC.

That’s not to say it’s useless – for email, web and low-def video playback you’ll never notice the difference between this and its peers. You might even get in some photo editing before the slowdown becomes noticeable, as long as you don’t try and do more than one thing at once. But if you’re planning on heavy daily usage we’d recommend upgrading to the more expensive Sony TX or MacBook Air.

HTC Shift

• Pros Incredibly solid build. Touchscreen system actually works. Very usable slide-out QWERTY keyboard
• Cons Processor and 1GB of RAM struggle to run Vista at full whack. Keyboard is small and a struggle to type on at speed. No voice call functions

The HTC Shift wants to be everything. You can power it up in full, manly Vista Business mode, or just hit the switch and use its 7in screen like the world's biggest text messaging tool and calendar thanks to Windows Mobile.

But it also has something unusual for a UMPC: a SIM card slot. This means easy access to HSDPA, 3G, GPRS, EDGE or whatever acronym your provider lets you use.

Dearer than an Eee
As ever when reviewing something that's small and a computer, we first have to mention the Asus EeePC 701, which is a quarter of the price of an HTC Shift. Now, the Shift is engineered like a brick and feels very satisfying in the hand, but is it worth nearly £900?

It is if you need Vista. The Shift runs nu-Windows pretty well. Not at desktop levels of speed, but well enough to manage most tasks.

The Shift’s 7in display is all one big touchscreen, so you can give it a good poke in iPhone fashion. It works well enough, but prodding away at tiny boxes and options with a stylus can be a bit of a pain.

What is nice, though, is the tilting screen. This is no basic mobile slider – extend the QWERTY keyboard and it's possible to bend the screen upwards so it takes on a proper ultraportable laptop feel. Hinge technology has really moved on.

Play it like a PSP
One of the reasons the Shift works as a tablet PC is its innovative and superb thumb-based control system. The touchpad is located on the right-hand side of the machine, so you move the mouse cursor with your thumb. Don't laugh, it works.

Then, over on the left, another two buttons are your left-click and right-click, which let you hold the machine like it's a big PSP or Nintendo DS. It's an awesome system that does away with the need for a stylus, and its responsive on-screen keyboard makes the cramped physical QWERTY feel a bit redundant, too.

Talkin’ bout the resolution
If your eyes are going, there's a resolution switch button on the case. This flips between the native 800x480 resolution and a boosted 1024x600 version. The latter makes web pages fit better, but also makes them harder to read and prod your way around.

The Shift's other magic feature is its dual operating systems. Press a button and the HTC SnapVUE kicks in. This alternate, power-saving SMS and organiser feature is basically a rejigging of Windows Mobile 6 and lets you use the simple text messaging, weather reporting, calendar functions and MS Exchange push email to gain days of extra battery life.

When running Vista at full whack with Wi-Fi on and the brightness around medium, the Shift manages about two and a half hours of battery life. That’s pretty much the standard lifespan for something this small – it only weighs 800g, remember.

Sluggish processing
Problems? Obviously the old line graph of power versus price is a problem here. The Shift's 800MHz processor and 1GB of RAM combo means you see the old rotating Vista 'Please wait for me to open this app' icon pretty much every time you boot something up.

Compared to the lighting speed of the Eee PC's Linux build, you're left twiddling your thumbs for an awfully long time when waiting for Vista to open up its numerous menus. It's not unusable, but we can't help wondering how utterly kick arse the Shift would've been had it had XP instead of the lumpen Vista Business.

Still, if you absolutely must have a fully featured version of Vista on the go because you’re literally doing business every second of the day and you want a tablet PC that finally - finally! - works like PC makers have been promising for over a decade, the HTC Shift is a very decent machine.

HP Mini-note 2133

PREVIEW

Since the EeePC made its debut, the market’s been flooded with small, cheap portable laptops. Unfortunately, they’ve all too often been underpowered and had the build quality of a sponge cake.

Not so the HP Mini-Note. Encased in Apple-like aluminium, it’s a classy-yet-sturdy beast that’ll survive a journey across town in your record bag with your keys.

The big squeeze
Open the Mini-Note and you’ll find a keyboard that’s 92% of full size. That’s close enough for us – we might give touch-typing a miss, but it’s far more welcoming to our sausage fingers than the usual cramped UMPC numbers.

Size-wise it’s similar to the EeePC, with the same 8.9in screen. And it’s one tough nut – a scratch-resistant coating makes it hardier (if more prone to glare) than Asus’s baby and an internal magnesium alloy structure provides additional protection to all the Mini-Note’s sensitive bits.

But the killer feature for us is the 120GB hard-drive. Sure, it’s not going to be as resilient as the Asus EeePC’s solid-state storage, but if you’re using it for travel you’ll welcome the extra space for your music, photos and Lost bonanzas.

Weight watcher
There is a downside to all that armour though – the HP Mini-Note is heavier than the EeePC, weighing in at 1.27kg. Still, at only 33mm thin it’s certainly no porker and the touchpad looks a better size than many of the postage stamps offered on UMPCs.

Connectivity is also decent. Wi-Fi, Ethernet and optional Bluetooth sit alongside two USB ports and an SD card slot, so you won’t be ruining its portability with too many peripherals.

Our only worry is that the Mini-note doesn’t have the latest Intel Atom processor, going instead for a Via C7 chip that could struggle with the more demanding applications. An Atom version is rumoured to be in the pipeline, but it’s a shame the Mini-note didn’t have this from the beginning.

For a more up close and personal look at the HP Mini-Note, keep an eye on our ‘watch and listen’ page where we'll be posting a hands-on very soon, followed by a full review.

Asus EeePC 701

One of the biggest news stories out of this year’s Computex wasn't of a new chipset, GPU, or graphics card, but rather of the announcement of the ASUS Eee PC, a small, slim, and light portable computer that is priced at $199. Introduced by Jonney Shih, Chariman and CEO of ASUS at Intel’s keynote address the first day of the show, the Eee PC has already made headlines world wide.

The Eee PC’s main competition is the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project that originally aimed to bring to market a laptop priced at $100 for children in developing countries. However, the OLPC project has seen numerous delays and even a price increase to the $170 range.

Not only have we had the chance to actually use the ASUS Eee PC, we can also confirm some important new specifications of the notebook. The Eee PC is running a version of Intel’s 910 mobile chipset, it uses a 900MHz Intel Dothan based Pentium M CPU, it has 512MB of DDR2 memory, full 802.11g wireless capability, and a flash-based hard drive. There will be at least two different models of the Eee PC, with the $199 version using a 4GB flash hard drive and the $299 version using a 8GB drive.

Although 4GB of storage is extremely small when you consider that the industry is shipping 750GB hard drives on the desktop and 200GB+ hard drives on the notebook front already, the 4GB flash drive keeps costs very low, and cheap external storage can very easily be added to the Eee PC.

Another important thing to note is that although the ASUS Eee PC will directly compete with the OLPC project, the Eee PC wasn’t designed solely to bring personal computing to children in third world countries. ASUS plans to use the Eee PC to give people of all ages and from all corners of the globe access to their very own computer. The Eee PC will be a great first computer for people that have never been able to afford their own before, but will also appeal to experienced computer users that just can’t afford spending $2,000 on a UMPC that probably isn't much more powerful than the Eee PC.

One of the first things that you notice when picking up the ASUS Eee PC 701 is the fact that it is so light. The Eee PC weighs in at only .89 kilograms, which translates to just around 2 pounds. The keyboard on the Eee PC is slightly crammed and smaller than most notebook keyboards due to the Eee PC’s smaller form factor. It very closely resembles the size of the keyboard used in the Dell Inspiron 710, which makes it ideal for emails, web surfing, or short papers, but could become a nuisance when writing for extended periods of time and for those that are used to full-sized notebook and desktop keyboards.

On the Eee PC’s left side panel, the notebook has two USB 2.0 ports, an audio and microphone port, a 10/100 Ethernet port, and a 56K phone modem port. To show just how thin the Eee PC is, I used a NT$10 coin, which is similar in size to a United States half dollar coin. As you can see, the Eee PC is very thin.

The right side panel of the Eee PC 701 has two more USB 2.0 ports, a VGA output, and even a flash card reader. The notebook uses a 4 cell battery that gives it just around 3 hours of battery life when it is on the move. As you may have noticed, there are no optical drives included with the Eee PC, and there is no room to add any to the notebook itself, so any DVD burners will have to be installed externally through one of the Eee PC 701’s four USB 2.0 ports.

Heat wise, the Eee PC 701 felt a bit warm to the touch, likely due to its non-stop use throughout the day on the show floor at Computex. It was however very quiet and the lack of spinning hard and optical drives made for a near silent experience.

Zyrex Anoa

I believe Ubud is Zyrex’ answer to Asus’ EEE. This tiny, cute, lightweight (it’s only 0.94 kg) laptop is no toy though. Unlike EEE that has inconveniently small secondary storage, Ubud is shipped with 30 GB harddisk making it good enough for working grown-ups. It uses VIA C7-M,ULV 1.2Ghz, 1 GB RAM, and it has all the other funky stuffs like 1.3 MP camera, it’s bluetooth ready, has 802.11 b/g - USB interface, 1x RJ 45 port for 10/100 Mbps Ethernet LAN, and hmm did I miss something? Oh yea … card reader too.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, some stuffs do get sacrificed for the sake of portability no optical drive is given, the 7″ display is way to small for people with impaired visions, and it uses rather oddly positioned micro pad. More about the micro pad, this is how it works: you have to use one of your right hand’s finger to move the mouse cursor around, and then you need two fingers of your left hand to do left click and right click. Hmm … practice makes perfect, otherwise just use a mouse.

Overall, I give this laptop a 7 out of 10. I love how this laptop slips into my handbags easily ^^, I bet this will be a hit among the girls. Another plus: Zyrex is a 100% Indonesian Product! Unfortunately, I need more powerful machine for my work, so I have to forget about forking my money on this. Price wise, it’s veryyyy affordable too. I’m guessing it is tagged at around Rp. 6 million, I don’t know its exact recommended retail price because President University students and staffs got a much much better price . More information is available here.