Soyo PW-9801 review

In theory, notebooks are the way forward.

A good one should offer all the power of a desktop, and leave you unfettered to travel and work in tandem. Theory is one thing, however, and practice often another. Take, for example, this month's Dell Inspiron 3700 500GT. It's an excellent notebook with a brilliant screen, a lovely keyboard and bags of horsepower. It's also got good battery life - a feature you should always look out for in a prospective travelling companion. On the downside, it's hardly light, tipping the scales at 2.95kg. You wouldn't have to be Geoff Capes to lift it, but you'd certainly have to be pretty resilient to carry it around for a day. And just imagine wearing stilettos and trotting about with the Dell over your shoulder. I can't (and probably shouldn't).

If weight is a concern, Soyo reckons it has the answer, with its PW-9801. It's a lithe, silver little number which looks every ounce the waif when sat next to the sumo Dell. If you like your buzzwords, the Soyo is a subnotebook, with plan dimensions closer to a piece of A5 paper than the more usual A4.

Opened up, the Soyo certainly looks small. Its screen has a measured diagonal of 10.4in. This certainly makes for great space savings - but at a price. I tried running the screen at its top resolution of 1024x768, and found my eyes needed rest and recuperation after only a short period of time. Text and graphics are just too small. At 800x600, the Soyo is happier.

Next comes the keyboard. Let me be honest: I chose not to write this review on the Soyo because of it. I realise Soyo has to play off space saving against ergonomics, but for my money it's got the balance wrong. This keyboard is simply too small. The space bar is tiny and important keys, such as Delete, have been shrunk and moved. Typing on the Soyo is neither intuitive nor comfortable.

The Soyo's touchpad is more successful. The rectangle of grey plastic works well, being both smooth and precise in use. Its buttons are also a pleasure to use, despite looks that suggest otherwise. In short, an excellent pad-and-button combination.

The Soyo has other ways of saving weight and sweat beyond its shrunken keyboard. Unlike most current notebooks, it doesn't have its floppy and CD-ROM drives built into its body. If you want to use them you've got to pull them out of the carry bag and plug them in, before reading and writing to your heart's content. This has the advantage that you can leave either drive at home when you know you won't be needing them.

As I've already said, battery life is a prime concern when you're buying a notebook. There's little point in leaving Paddington, starting to write your report and finding the battery gives up before the drinks trolley comes tottering down the aisle. Once more, Soyo has been at pains to save both space and weight, fitting a battery which, granted, is both small and light. But again, they've overdone it: it's so small, it only lasted 1hr 13mins in our test. The notebook also becomes uncomfortably hot when you're working with it wired into the mains.

The notebook's performance isn't much to write home about, either. It scored only 675 in our benchmark tests, which is not an especially impressive figure. This can be attributed to the Soyo having only 32Mb of RAM and what, according to our benchmarks, appears to be a slow hard disk. Its processor, a Pentium II 333 is certainly a good workhorse chip, but Soyo has chosen a Chips and Technologies 69000 PCI graphics chipset, which hamstrings the CPU. It's no good fitting a fast processor if its efforts cannot be piped onto the screen quick enough.