PC Nextday Zoostorm 84-4601 review

The Zoostorm 84-4601 is the least expensive of the new crop of Centrino 2 laptops we've seen.

Its colour scheme divided opinion in our office, with its black case sandwiching a white keyboard panel. Above the keyboard, a thin metal band incorporates the power button and three short-cut buttons for browser, email and silent mode. The latter turns off an internal fan, but the low level of noise in normal mode makes this button virtually redundant.

Below the keyboard is a stylish but flawed touch pad. The pad, scrolling area and buttons are all integrated on one piece of shiny plastic. Unfortunately, this has more friction than pads with a matt finish, so your fingertip doesn't glide smoothly over it. The buttons are covered by a single piece of plastic, so you can't detect which button your finger is on without looking.

Apart from a bit of flex in the screen, the case feels sturdy. It's let down by the keyboard, though, which flexes visibly under heavy typing. The whole keyboard seems to be warped slightly, rising in the middle above the level of the case. The keys have little feedback and they make an annoying clicking sound, especially the space bar. Our review model had a US layout, but we are assured that production models will have a UK keyboard.

The screen is dim, even at the highest brightness setting, and we noticed uneven lighting at the bottom edges. Colours were washed out and blacks were faded, despite the glossy finish. This is disappointing on a modern laptop.

The Zoostorm is fairly well specified for the price, including Draft-N WiFi, eSATA, S/PDIF and HDMI. However, the 2.26GHz P8400 processor is hobbled by having 3MB of L2 cache as opposed to the 6MB found in previous Core 2 Duo models. The 2GB of RAM is sufficient to run multiple Windows applications, but the integrated graphics managed only 5fps in Call of Duty 4, so this isn't a gaming laptop.

Like the Core 2 Duo P7350 in the Medion Akoya, the P8400 processor uses less power - 25W rather than the 35W of older Core 2 Duos. This didn't help the Zoostorm's battery life; it lasted a mediocre two-and-a-half hours.

The Zoostorm 84-4601 is the cheapest Centrino 2 laptop we've seen, but not the best value. We'd expect a faster processor and a larger hard disk at this price, and the poor keyboard, touch pad and dull display are disappointing. The Medion Akoya S5610 has similar performance, better ergonomics and more features.