Broadband Computer Co Alex review

The laptop bundled with the service costs £400 and is a Clevo M760T. This plain-looking 15.4in model is familiar to us, as many other manufacturers use this chassis for their own-brand models. It's a little underpowered by today's standards with a 1.66GHz Celeron T1600 dual-core processor and only 1GB of RAM. After installing Windows on the laptop to run our benchmarks, an overall score of 41 shows that this is a pretty slow machine; however, for Alex and its basic set of applications it's more than powerful enough. Battery life at two hours 59 minutes is a little disappointing, and means that this laptop isn't suitable to regular use on the go.

The screen size means there's room for a decent keyboard and each key's full-sized, making it comfortable to type on. We found that feedback was excellent, so typing long documents was no problem. A large responsive touchpad makes mouse movements easy.

The widescreen display has a resolution of 1,280x800, which is plenty for the applications that Alex provides, particularly as application windows can't be resized or moved around the screen. Display quality is pretty good and we found that the screen was evenly lit and produced bright, vibrant colours. Viewing angles were good, too, so you don't have to position the laptop carefully to get the best picture.

Alex is the first computer we've seen to really make things simple, but it's almost too simplistic in many ways, while the supplied laptop is expensive for its specification. If you're buying a computer for a novice and don't mind helping them out, you can get a better-specified Windows PC for less and set it up to boot straight into a browser. From here you can use free Google applications (such as GoogleDocs, Gmail and Picasa), thus avoiding having to pay any monthly charges, better still this easy-to-use PC won't expire if you stop paying the monthly fee, like the Alex does.

However, if you don't want your life to be about technical support and you know someone who has very light computing needs, Alex is a decent choice that could save you a lot of hassle.