Evesham Lightbook review

The Lightbook is impressively light, but the compromises mean this won't suit everyone.

Many ultra-portable laptops tip the scales at around 2kg, but Evesham's Lightbook weighs in at a slender 1.25kg, making it one of the lightest ultra-portables we've seen. This is especially impressive since the DVD writer is built into the case.

No matter how light it is, a laptop still has to feel sturdy. Unfortunately, it's ugly grey case looks and feels cheap, flexing easily in several places. You'll need to invest in a padded laptop bag and avoid dropping it if you want it to stay in one piece.

The flimsy build also affects the Lightbook's ergonomics. Although the keyboard doesn't feel cramped and the keys have plenty of tactile feedback, it flexes when typed on. This isn't a problem for occasional typing, but for serious work it quickly proves annoying. Some keys, such as the cursor keys, are also too small for comfort. Just below the cursor keys is a fingerprint reader, which is useful not only for securing your data should your Lightbook be stolen or lost, but also as a handy substitute for numerous easily forgotten passwords.

Screen siren

The LightBook's matte screen has a comparatively low resolution of 1024 x 768 and the Windows Desktop can rapidly begin to feel cramped if you use a lot of programs at once, or want to work on large spreadsheets and images. Image quality wasn't stellar either, with uneven backlighting and visible grain in some of our test images. It also suffered from subtle shifts in colour accuracy at different angles - black text at one angle could suddenly become dark purple at another, for example. At this price, and even on a laptop this small, we'd have expected a widescreen display with a resolution of 1280 x 800 and far better image quality.

If you have a large collection of MP3s, photos and videos, the 60GB hard disk will quickly prove restrictive. It's more than enough space for office documents though, and as it's located under an easy to reach panel, you can replace it with a larger model. Alternatively, you could add an external hard disk to one of its three USB ports.

Single-minded

Like other ultra-portable laptops we've seen, the Lightbook uses a single core processor - the Intel Core Solo U1400 - instead of the more powerful dual-core processors we're now used to seeing in even quite modestly-priced laptops. The half pint processor isn't, however, the laptop's biggest issue and its performance in our benchmarks was hobbled by its frugal 512MB of memory.

It struggled with tasks like video encoding and didn't cope at all well with activities that benefit from lots of memory, such as image editing. An overall score of 48% in our benchmarks shows that its got enough poke to handle word processing, web browsing and the like, but you'll have to be patient if you ask any more of it. Unsurprisingly, the Lightbook isn't suited for playing the latest 3D games and it couldn't even run our Call of Duty 2 test.

The Lightbook is no powerhouse, but it is incredibly light and thanks to its single-core processor, blessed with impressively lengthy battery life - 4 hours and 13 minutes. This might not be the longest lasting laptop we've ever seen, but it's enough for almost all short-haul European flights.

Its great battery life and slender frame are very appealing if you often work on the move, but even with a sturdy laptop bag, we're not entirely sure that it'll survive life on the road for very long.