Conclusion and awards

Regardless of their relatively low PCmark05 scores, all of these ultraportable notebooks are excellent for office, email and internet tasks. When reviewing them, we paid close attention to the physical designs as well as areas such as battery life and usability.

As well as our regular synthetic and battery life benchmarks, we played back the same music track on each notebook to judge speaker quality. We also played a WMV high-definition clip to test video playback, a test which every processor passed without a problem. Running the same video across all notebooks revealed the inadequacies of some screens, most notably the Toshiba Portégé R500, which produced a dim image and had poor viewing angles.

The R500 has a transflective screen, which is a type used rarely on modern notebooks. Transflective screens combine reflective and transmissive technologies ­ the transmissive part being the traditional backlit model, while reflective technology means pixels can be illuminated from the front. This means sunlight can actually aid visibility. It’s a neat touch and one that means the Portégé R500 is the best ultraportable notebook for use in bright lighting.

The chassis is made from plastic that we feel is a bit too thin, especially as it separated slightly every time we picked it up from the right-hand side. Whether it will suffer any real damage when dropped is up for debate, but we’d recommend housing it in a carry case during transit. Notebook components can get crushed under their own momentum, and with such a lightweight design the flexible plastic may absorb some of the impact.

The R500 is a glamorous notebook, but we had too many doubts about its build quality to recommend it. We had no such doubts about the Panasonic Toughbook CF-W7, however, and it picked up our Recommended award.

Panasonic does a lot of things its own way, such as building its own ultra-light, pop-up DVD writer and small-but-accurate circular trackpad. What’s more, its elegant business designs always stand up to our rough handling.

We couldn’t award the CF-W7 full marks in all categories since, while the performance rating was bolstered by battery life, it was dragged down by PCmark05. With a solid-state hard disk and an extra gigabyte of Ram, this would be an excellent machine. But, as it stands, we struggle to see how Panasonic could make the CF-W7 much better. The company could fit a faster processor, but this would be at the detriment of battery life, while faster components and a bigger battery would make it heavier.

	Our Editor’s Choice award goes to Lenovo’s Thinkpad X61. The battery inconveniently sticks out by 25mm, but it’s a big capacity model and there’s a fast processing line-up inside the X61, so there’s obviously a slightly different set of trade-offs compared to the Toughbook. The keyboard is definitely the best on test though, which will help you get more work done when you’re on the move.

Like Panasonic, Lenovo has stuck with a 4:3 aspect ratio screen. A 12.1in, 4:3 display gives 29 square cm, or roughly 6.8 per cent, more viewing area than a 12.1in widescreen (16:10) display. Of course, you’ll usually get a higher resolution on the competing widescreen display, so that might be the better option if you appreciate the denser pixel arrangement.

Widescreens are great on larger displays, where you can realistically sit two documents side by side, but on smaller notebooks they only really offer better film playback. Samsung’s Q45 fits a 12in widescreen and represents superb value for money.

Its Core 2 Duo T7500 was the fastest out of everything we’d tested and the mix of a matt and glossy black finish looks superb.

There’s a straight trade-off between cost and reducing the weight of a notebook, and the Q45 can’t match the lightest models in this group test. Although we’d rather take the Panasonic Toughbook or Lenovo X61 home with us on a daily basis, we see the Samsung Q45 as a more realistic option in terms of price. It's got a poor keyboard layout, but picks up a well deserved Recommended award nevertheless.

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This article is part of a group test, see also:
1 Introduction
2 The great weight conundrum
3 Acer Travelmate 6292 review
4 Advent 8112 review
5 Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook P7230 review
6 Hi-Grade Notino D2200 review
7 HP Compaq 2710p review
8 HP Pavilion TX-1260ea review
9 Lenovo Thinkpad X61 review
10 MSI PR200-064UK review
11 Panasonic Toughbook CF-W7 review
12 Samsung Q45-A007 review
13 Toshiba Portégé R500-10U review
14 Performance graphs, page 1 of 2
15 Performance graphs, page 2 of 2
16 Replacement battery costs
17 Conclusion and awards

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