Advent's MacBook Air-style Altro preview

 

Gallery

Posted on 26 Aug 2009 at 16:48

Advent has made a MacBook Air-style laptop for the stunningly low price of just £600.

The Altro is one of the first ultra portable laptops we've seen to come with one of Intel's new ultra low voltage processors, the Celeron M ULV 723. It's essentially a variant of Intel's Core 2 Solo SU3300 processor that has only 1MB of L2 cache. This will limit performance, but its power saving design should help prolong battery life.

The Altro bears an uncanny resemblance to Apple's MacBook Air. It's very slender and weighs just 1.6kg, although this is at least partially due to the lack of a built-in optical drive. Unlike the Air, the battery is designed to be user replaceable. Unfortunately we were unimpressed with the cheap, creaky plastic build and wobbly hinge. The underside can become alarmingly warm to the touch when running demanding applications.

Annoyingly, the lone USB port, the headphone socket and the HDMI connector are located on the back instead of on the sides where they would be easier to reach. If you need to attach more USB devices, a port replicator with two extra USB ports as well as an Ethernet connector and VGA monitor socket is included in the box. Bizarrely but quite cleverly, it connects to the port for the power supply and has a pass through connector for attaching the power supply.

The keyboard has large and responsive keys that are comfortable to type on, although it looks quite ungainly. Most of the keys have rounded corners and are spaced apart, while the Function keys have a more standard boxy appearance and are more tightly spaced. The large touchpad feels accurate and has a pleasingly smooth texture.

Unusually, the Altro has an integrated orientation sensor, but Advent has yet to tell us what its purpose is and turning the laptop on its side had no effect. There's also an ambient light sensor so the glossy 13.3in widescreen display can automatically adjust its brightness depending on how your surroundings are.

There's 3GB of RAM, which should be enough for running several programs simultaneously. The 120GB hard disk is a bit small, since 160GB hard disks are now standard on cheaper netbooks. Vista Home Premium is pre-installed, but the Altro is eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 7.

The Altro is available now for £600 inc VAT. We'll bring you our final verdict, along with full Windows and battery benchmark results soon.

Author: Alan Lu