Netbooks have had all the limelight for too long. They're great if you like restricted low-resolution screens, low-powered processing and a small amount of storage and memory – but hardware that inspires words such as 'fine' and 'adequate' is hardly exciting.
Raise your sights a little, however, and devastatingly powerful laptops with desktop levels of power leap into view.
It's not even the case that you are forced to choose between the brick-shaped laptop on the left and the block-shaped laptop on the right.
Designs that boast razor-thin edges and weights that push the 1kg mark are now becoming the norm.
Characteristics
This low weight is partly due to new lithium-ion batteries that are lighter and can be made into almost any shape, compared to old technologies.
Many of these laptops also omit an optical drive, taking advantage of the additional weight savings and reduced chassis thickness gained by dropping these rarely used devices.
If the lack of one worries you, keep an eye out for laptops that come with bundled external options.
Another slimming technology is displays that take advantage of LED backlights. Not only lighter and thinner than the older cathode-lit displays, they also consume far less power.
As you'll see, Intel still rules the roost with mobile technology. While AMD offers perfectly capable processors, it's the sheer efficiency of Intel's Centrino architecture that AMD finds hard to match.
Its ultra-low power processors tend to deliver the best battery life but, of course, this costs you more, and AMD systems are usually the best value options.
To help choose between the systems, we test for high definition media handling capabilities, 3D gaming speed and overall battery life.
All the systems are more than capable of day-to-day productivity tasks, so it's more a case of whether you want good battery life, high-definition handling or decent gaming features that can really sway your buying decision.
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marktwic
November 14th 2009
1. I've been a bit frustrated so far by the reviews of these new CULV machines. The choice in this article seems to be fairly random and not at all the ones that look like the best options in the category.
I would like to see comparisons of machines with at least a SU7300 CULV chip such as the Dell 13z (600 quid), the Asus U30a (great reviews but the machine with this most powerful chip doesn't seem to be available right now in the UK), the HP ProBook 5310m (suddenly jumps from 470 pounds to around 800 pounds for a decent processor leaving it in the ballpark of the Asus UX30 - another machine that doesn't actually seem to be available, it also seems to me Asus is especially poorly served on the internet in the UK) the Lenovo IdeaPad U350 (550 quid).
It's pretty hard to make up my mind at the moment.
Another point is that some of these are without DVD drive. I'd only really need it for installing software (and actually quite like the idea of not having to cart one around), will any cheap external DVD drive do, or is there something special about the mostly expensive drives that are usually offered by the manufacturers?
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