Packard Bell EasyNote RS65 review

The RS65 comes in a smart clamshell case reminiscent of Sony's Vaio laptops.

It has a glossy metallic brown lid and a brushed-chrome hinge assembly, which incorporates the power button. Opening it up reveals a brushed-metal keyboard surround. Above this is a panel with touch-sensitive controls. These allow you to adjust the volume and disable wireless networking or the touch pad.

Despite its sturdy appearance, the lid flexes under pressure. However, the rest of the chassis feels well-built. The keyboard flexes as you strike the keys, although it's not bad enough to affect your typing. The keys are flat, which gives you less feedback about where on the key your finger has hit. Touch-typists may find that this results in more errors.

Like the same company's BG45, this Packard Bell has a circular touch pad. It's responsive and smooth to the touch, but the shape simply doesn't match that of the display, which makes reaching the corners of the screen more difficult than it should be. The buttons are a bit shallow and lack sufficient travel to indicate that you've clicked them.

The display is bright and the backlighting impressively even. Colours are vibrant, but blacks looked a little washed out. The vertical viewing angle is very tight, too, so you'll need to adjust the screen precisely to get an even image, and its glossy finish can cause annoying reflections. Correctly angled and under subdued lighting it's an impressive display, but its limitations make it ill-suited for use out and about.

The RS65 has a large 320GB hard disk, giving you plenty of storage for media files. There's also an HDMI output, so you can enjoy them on an HD TV. As a Centrino 2 laptop, the RS65 includes Draft-N wireless networking. It doesn't, however, include a modem, and has only three USB ports. The optical drive uses a slot-loading mechanism, which is far more stylish than the fiddly pop-out tray still found on most laptops.

Our application benchmark, PCMark Vantage, showed this laptop to be quick enough for almost any task you'd want to undertake on its small display. Despite its dedicated Radeon HD 3470 graphics chip, the RS65 isn't up to playing modern 3D games. At 2.4kg, it's heavy for its size, and with less than three hours of battery life it's not really suitable for day-to-day mobile work.

The RS65's design is attravailable, but it causes too many practical problems. The round touch pad is a case of style over substance, as are the keyboard's flat keys. The specification is reasonable, but for £50 less, the Samsung Q210 is lighter, has nearly four hours of battery life and better performance, making it a far better choice.