Medion Akoya S5610 review

Medion's Akoya S5610 reminded us of a Sony Vaio, with its tubular screen hinge featuring a round power button on one side and the mains input at the other. The design is smart, but the case flexes under pressure.

The keyboard feels sturdy, but keys lack feedback, so typists with a light touch will be frustrated. The function key is where the Ctrl key normally resides, which will annoy those who regularly use both a desktop PC and a laptop. Medion has used the full width of the case by including a number pad, although this uses three columns instead of the standard four, leading to a non-standard layout. For example, the half-size zero key is placed next to a double-sized Enter key. If you normally use your thumb in this position, you'll often hit both keys. The touch pad is smooth, large and accurate, but it doesn't have a scrolling area.

The bright screen has good contrast, produces convincing colours and has consistent backlighting. On battery power, brightness is reduced to 50 per cent by default, but the Akoya has an Eco button that reduces power consumption further by dimming the screen to its minimum and reducing processor speed. Even at this setting the screen was usable, unlike the Zoostorm's.

The Akoya has a generous 320GB hard disk and 3GB of RAM, plus a full set of ports including HDMI, S/PDIF and eSATA. There's also Bluetooth, a webcam and a fingerprint reader. It's a Centrino 2 laptop, so it has Draft-N wireless and supports processors with a 1,066MHz frontside bus (FSB), compared to the older 800MHz limit. However, the advantage is offset by the choice of a 2GHz Core 2 Duo P7350. This has half the cache of the 2.5GHz T9300 processor installed in most 15.4in laptops reviewed in last month's Labs, which is why our benchmarks showed the Akoya to be slower.

Another disappointment is battery life. Since the P7350 uses only 25W compared to 35W for the T9300, the Akoya's two-and-a-half hours in our light-use test is poor. Using the Eco button increased life to three hours, but this is average compared to similarly priced laptops.

Despite the Radeon HD 3450 graphics processor, the Akoya managed only 5.7fps in Call of Duty 4, so don't expect to play the latest games on it. The S5610's great screen and comfortable keyboard make it ideal for work, while the support for the latest WiFi standard and ports such as eSATA and HDMI help to make it future-proof. The average performance can be forgiven if you consider the price, and the design will make people think you paid more.