Belinea b.book 5 review

Belinea are best known for producing displays, but they're now moving into portable computers, and the b.book range is aimed at business users. We wanted to see if it offered the balance of quality and value often seen in Belinea monitors.

The processor is a Core 2 Duo running at 1.8GHz, which may not be top-of-the-range but should be perfectly adequate for office-type tasks. It's one of Intel's dedicated mobile processors, which means it's designed for greater efficiency and battery life. That's the theory, anyway: in our light use test, the Belinea ran out of battery after not quite two and a half hours - distinctly average.

The power drain is caused by the other components that Belinea have packed into the austere case, which turned out to be a standard chassis that we've seen before. The nVidia Geforce 8400M GS is a mobile graphics card that comes with 256MB of dedicated memory and can easily cope with everyday display tasks such as playing back high definition video, but it's not ready for the latest 3D games. In our demanding Call of Duty 2 benchmark, the Belinea managed 31% - better than nothing, but you'd have to turn the detail levels right down to attempt modern games at all.

A meagre 1GB of RAM is less than would be ideal, and along with the middling processor this led the Belinea to a score of 126% in our general (2D) benchmark - competent rather than fast.

The 160GB hard disk is generous enough to cope with plenty of documents and spreadsheets with room to spare for some music and media files. You also get a good range of ports and sockets: with four USB ports, a DVI-I output, SPDIF, FireWire, S-Video and Ethernet, you'll rarely be stumped to connect your b.book to peripherals. A built-in memory card reader accepts many common formats, and not only is WiFi built in but it supports all versions of the 802.11 standard up to the latest 'n', so you can take full advantage of a fast router or wireless hotspots.

Tracks of my tears

The trackpad is incorporated into the plastic case, rather than being a separate piece of hardware slotted in, as in many laptops. We found it poor: the lightest of touches set the skittish cursor cavorting across the screen, double-clicking often triggered when we didn't mean it to, and the built-in scroll bars were hyper-sensitive, coming into play far too often and disrupting our work. Of course, you can always plug in a mouse.

Oddly, given its pedigree, the 15.4 inch display was also lacking in quality. The screen looked vapid and washed out, with colours appearing pale and lifeless. The brightest of whites came with a faint blue hue, and solid colours appeared lighter near the corners of the screen. While this won't be a huge issue for word processing and suchlike, users with image editing ambitions would be well advised to look elsewhere; the b.book just doesn't provide the necessary accuracy and clarity.

Our review machine came pre-loaded with Windows Vista Business, but Belinea says Windows XP will be the standard operating system on this model, reflecting the tendency of corporate users to resist moving to Vista, with an optional Vista upgrade available.

With its underwhelming specification, washed-out screen and hyper-sensitive trackpad, the Belinea just doesn't look impressive next to its current laptop rivals. It's not without virtue: undemanding users will find its performance adequate, and the proper graphics card and large hard disk are welcome. The price may also start to look more competitive once dealers start to discount it. As it stands, this isn't a great buy.