I have a confession to make: I hadn't tried a netbook. As a tech journalist, I realise that this is a bad thing to admit, but I haven't seen the point in them. Why bother with a keyboard that's too small with rubbish specs? With that in mind, when I was offered the chance to try one, I thought I probably should.

My weapon of choice (although it was dumped on me rather than me seeking it out) was the Advent 4213. It comes with a 160GB HDD, HSDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity, the Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor and a 10.2in screen, all for around £300.

And there was my first problem. Why on earth would you pay over £300 for a netbook that does all the things that a full-sized laptop can do? For £400 the specs start to get pretty good on a 15in screened model, so why cramp yourself down?

But, try it I said I would, so I did indeed. My only other experience of using a netbook was an idle five minutes in PC World on an Asus EEE 701 a while back and simply going 'oh'. It might be cheap but it would clearly take a while to do anything on it.

So this Advent 4213 was not only my first experience of using a netbook, but also using HSDPA on my own SIM card, so that worried me too. Surely I was going to destroy my data limit and leave me with a bill the size of Denmark's GDP?

The first impressions on booting it up were that a smaller screen makes for a better looking display when the resolution is squished down. While this may be a 'well, duh' moment for the netbook fan club out there, I hadn't really thought about it, and given that a great portion of my time is spent watching the sub-five inch screen of an Archos 504 on the way to work, it was fine.

The trackpad was a bit haphazard at times, and difficult to easily reach, but then again you got used to this fairly easily. The stand-out buttons on the trackpad, which contained the LED notifications, were a bit bizarre to get your head round, as I was worried I would interfere with the Wi-Fi or something. But I didn't, so a huge sigh of relief was breathed. Huge.

Life without wires

And then, it suddenly started to all make sense the first time I uploaded an article while on the train to Waterloo. A train ride that usually takes less than 20 minutes, and instead of watching another episode of Ally McBea... I mean, 24 or something else manly, I was able to do some work. That might not appeal to some as it's nice to switch off once in a while, but for a tech journo, it's good to be able to react when important things hit.

I've tried to do the same with full size laptops and a dongle, but the whole process was a palaver. The simplicity of the connection manager on the 4213 was a real boon, and when I needed to use it for a Wi-Fi-less existence on a weekend away, it didn't even eat that much data. A hard session surfing (although no video) took around 500MB, far less than I was expecting and well within the 1GB limit I have with my network.

I know this won't be of much use to those that use 3G internet regularly, but it is a real boon when you have netbook as a second PC.

But typing is something I think I will always struggle with on this PC. I've seen the likes of the Samsung NC10 with a larger keyboard, and that seems to make sense. But I don't think I could stand more than half an hour of tapping on this machine. As a touch-typer, I'm fairly accurate in knocking out the old words, but on this every third letter was a mistake.

For a unit that you can pick up and carry around happily with one hand, I guess it's to be expected. But with the space left either side of the keyboard on the device, I can't understand why Advent didn't go one step further and extend it out. One to question the designers on methinks.

Memories, memories

I've heard rumours of people upgrading the memory on this netbook, and for the life of me I can't understand why. I was using it as I would any other laptop, and I have to say that it ran very well with minimal lag. I installed my usual range of programmes on it, including a fair amount of freeware, and navigating around them was speedy and satisfying.