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With its external power adapter, Evesham’s Lightbook only weighs about 1.7kg, making it the lightest model in the group. It’s neatly designed, with a slimline, metallic grey casing that measures 3.5cm thick when folded shut.
The screen panel is a little flimsy and tends to flex easily, but Evesham includes a padded carrying case with the Lightbook to provide protection when you’re travelling.
We were pleased to see that the Lightbook has a memory card slot and a Firewire port, so you can easily transfer photos or video clips onto it. There’s also a fingerprint reader to prevent unauthorised users from accessing your data.
If portability is your priority, the Lightbook is the obvious choice. However its lightweight design brings drawbacks. Most of its rivals are based on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, but the Lightbook uses an older Core Solo processor running at a mere 1.2GHz.
Unsurprisingly it emerges as the poorest all-round performer in our suite of benchmark tests. To be fair, though, the Lightbook will be adequate for surfing the web, sending emails and running ordinary business software when you’re on the road.
It’s odd that the Lightboook’s battery life isn’t longer, especially as the Core Solo CPU is supposed to be a power miser. It’s beaten by most of its rivals in our productivity and DVD playback tests.
Even so, almost three hours for productivity software and well over two hours for playing DVDs are still respectable results.
Our main criticism regards price. At almost £1,000 the Lightbook is one of the most expensive laptops in the group, and although its lightweight design has obvious appeal, some people might prefer to pay a little less for a model that provides greater performance and battery life.
This article is part of a group test of lightweight laptops.
See also Fujitsu-Siemens
HP Compaq
Mesh Pegasus
Packard Bell
Samsung NP
Sony Vaio
Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downloads above.
All Notebooks & Tablets PCs
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