Packard Bell Easynote XS20-006 review

Today's typical laptop offers a big screen and heavy-duty processing power to handle the same tasks as a desktop PC.

But if you just want something to carry around for email, word processing, and maybe music or movies, portability is worth more than power. The Bell Easynote XS certainly gives you that. Never mind handbag-sized, this PC is almost small enough to fit in a coat pocket. But there's a price to pay for making things so tiny.

One look at the Easynote tells us Packard Bell have been taking lessons from the revolutionary Asus Eee PC, which we reviewed last month (search for 147954). Measuring just 230x171mm - hardly bigger than a paperback novel - the XS weighs less than a kilo. And like the Eee PC, it has a tiny widescreen display measuring just seven inches diagonally.

On the other hand, the Eee PC costs around £200, while the Packard Bell is £500. Why such a big difference? For starters, you get a proper hard disk instead of the Eee's 4GB of flash memory (2.5GB of which is eaten up by the operating system). The Easynote's 40GB hard disk still isn't big, especially since around 8GB is used for essential recovery files, but given the machine's size it's acceptable. And with the extra space and budget, the Packard Bell can run Windows, rather than the Linux operating system used in the Eee. Disappointingly, though, you don't get Windows Vista: to suit its limited resources, the Easynote comes with Windows XP Home Edition.

The XS also has a processor chip with a clock speed of 1.2GHz, faster than the Eee's 900MHz Intel Celeron-M. But the chip is a Via C7-M, which offers low power consumption but is very slow for a Windows PC. This was borne out by its score of just 27% in our 2D (general) performance tests - the lowest we remember seeing - and the way it felt in use. The delay after double-clicking to open a program was often so long we thought nothing was happening, and even word processing was punctuated by lengthy pauses. Not only is it impossible to run 3D games on the XS, but even modest entertainment titles might not be playable. This machine finds Windows a struggle, and it shows.

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Despite the low-power chip, the amount of heat generated meant we weren't comfortable with the Easynote on our knees for long, and its battery life of three hours and 20 minutes in light use was good rather than gobsmacking. Along with performance, comfort was in short supply. Although the 7 inch display is bright and sharp, its 800x480 resolution means some websites aren't fully visible without scrolling across. In everyday Windows use, the buttons on some dialog boxes disappear off screen. A worse problem, though, is the keyboard. It's inevitable that it had to be squeezed, but its keys are so tiny that adult fingers will constantly hit the wrong character, or two at once.

We had equal trouble with the trackpad, which is roughly the size of a postage stamp, making it tricky to click or drag accurately. The fact that its buttons are placed separately at the top left of the keyboard makes things even more fiddly.

On the other hand, we were surprised by the performance of the XS as an entertainment system. It managed over two-and-a-half hours of smooth movie playback before the battery ran out. The catch is that you'll have to copy video onto the PC to enjoy such pleasures - it has no DVD drive.

The Packard Bell does have a few luxuries: a webcam, built-in Bluetooth, DVI-I monitor output and a multi-format card reader, for instance. It's also supposed to come with 802.11b/g WiFi, although this was missing from our test sample.