Rock Pegasus 210 - TechRadar UK

The ultra-portable  market was always considered a premium market, exclusive to business people and the gadget conscious who are willing, or able, to fork out a £1,000 for models like the Dell 12-inch Latitude and Sony TX3.

Boastingly parading their laptops like its the latest Gucci handbag. The Rock Pegasus 210 is made in that same mould, coming in at around £940 and packing a host of cutting edge features, all crammed into its 12-inch chassis.

To be fair you're never going to regret buying the Pegasus 210 from a looks and build point of view. It's sturdy yet tiny frame is a magnesium-alloy and helps the entire lot weigh in at just 1.4Kg, and it feels solid enough to take commuter bumps, bashes and the odd drop without flinching, helped thanks to the integrated hard disk shock protection.

While Rock also claims it to be splash, vibration and compression resistant.

Average screen

The 12-inch widescreen 1280x800 screen is a mixed bag with mediocre viewing angles, it does make up for this with a crystal clear head-on image and a thin but sturdy construction - there's no fragile MacBook Air feel to this screen. The same solid feel and build go for the keyboard and touchpad.

Inside Rock has opted for the lesser known A110 processor. This is an low-voltage single-core mobile processor based on the Pentium-M architecture. At 800MHz with just a 512KB L2 cache and 400MHz bus it seems somewhat ponderous in use but is a match for the equivalent Eee 900's Celeron. While its suitable for standard office tasks don't expect HD playback or any feats of major number crunching.

What it does offer is just a 3 watt power draw, which falls to 0.45 watts in Deeper Sleep mode. Coupled with the Intel i945 chipset the entire laptop never draws more than 18 watts and more commonly 14 watts. Running Vista on its Power Save mode with a heavy load we measured 5 hour 15 minute run time, with normal office loads we can see this easily extending to the claimed 6 hour mark.

Great connectivity

For connectivity the Pegasus 210 rules, offering Gigabit LAN, WLAN 802.11a/g/n, Bluetooth and an optional integrated 7Mbps 3G/GPRS integrated modem for full-speed internet access wherever you go. Clearly putting it a class above  other models, if nothing else for the 3G support.

It's impressive so far but the Rock does let it slide on a couple of understandable points. Just 1GB of DDR2 isn't what we'd expect at this price but it'll help increase battery life. The same goes for the slower, but battery friendly 4,200RPM 80GB hard drive and while the lack of an optical drive may seem cheap it does help make this laptop that bit lighter.

As for 3D it has nothing more than the integrated Intel 950 chipset, which while capable of accelerated 3D isn't going to be of much help with actually powering anything recent, but coupled with the lack of processor power you were never going to be doing that anyway.

On an ultra-portable level the Pegasus scores well on a few vital points: size, ruggedness, battery life and comms. The integration of optional 3G is a winner in itself. The battery life is also excellent though the Sony TX3 does still outclass it on this and size, but it is more expensive.

What is interesting is how the market has divided itself into these high-end all singing models and at the low-end the ASUS Eee style models. While the Pegasus 210 does offer definite advantages for the extra £600, not all will feel they are worth the cost.