Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Mini UI 3520 review

Every month now we're seeing one of the big names in laptops make its entry into the netbook market.

Since the debut of the Asus Eee PC last year, sales of these low cost, low power devices have soared, so it's no wonder the world's major electronics companies want a slice of the pie. The latest to come up with its own take on the netbook is Fujitsu Siemens, with the Amilo UI 3520.

Our initial impression was that the Amilo was rather garish and clunky. While most netbooks adhere to a single colour policy - from the childlike white of the Eee PC to the stylish deep blue of the Samsung NC10 - the Amilo sets itself apart with its drastic two tone monochrome design. It's not really a look that works, making the Amilo seem far too angular and 80s retro for our liking. If you fancy a change, there's a choice of several coloured covers that clasp onto the lid - a nice idea, but we found they just clashed with the base colour scheme.

Practical considerations are handled more conventionally. Two USB ports, a VGA monitor output, headphone and microphone jacks and an ExpressCard/34 slot are par for the course, along with the 4-in-1 memory card reader. The trackpad features buttons to the left and right, rather than below, and it's an odd design that'll take getting used to. The buttons and pad themselves, though, are comfortable, responsive and easy to use.

The keyboard impressed us less. The keys are slightly shorter than those on the average netbook, and the row of function buttons are about half the size of regular keys. More important keys have been subjected to resizing, too: the Return key is single height, a very irritating trend in recent keyboards, and several of the punctuation keys have shrunk. Even by the end of the testing period, we never got used to these compromises, and they were particularly galling given the two inches of wasted space sitting above the keyboard.

The screen isn't the best we've seen, either. While all current netbooks show a degree of graininess on their small displays, the Amilo is one of the worst. The effect is especially noticeable with plain, uniform areas of colour - like the white background to a Word document, for instance - and was bad enough in testing that we kept thinking the screen had been smudged by careless fingers. Colour reproduction wasn't particularly accurate, either, with images appearing much too pale and lifeless for our taste.

Exactly alike

Inside, the Amilo is basically the same netbook we've been seeing for months. Intel's 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor is accompanied by 1GB of RAM, a 60GB hard disk, 802.11b/g WiFi and a basic 10/100 network jack; there's no support for the faster Draft-n wireless or Gigabit Ethernet.

This familiar specification gave predictable performance. In our 2D (general) benchmarks, the Amilo scored an unspectacular 42%. That's enough to handle basic applications in the supplied Windows XP Home, such as word processing and web browsing, but try anything more ambitious and the single core Atom processor will struggle.

Battery life was decent, but not spectacular. In our light use test, the Amilo lasted four hours and 13 minutes - a lot better than the LG (opposite), but not up to the likes of the Asus 901 or Samsung NC10, which both go for more than seven hours.

The Amilo is attractively cheap, but it falls down in too many areas to make it worth recommending. The poor keyboard and screen, mediocre design and average specification add up to a less than satisfying experience. We expected more from Fujitsu Siemens, and maybe they'll deliver it next time. For now, try a Samsung NC10.