TINY MediaBook 360S E01445 review

Verdict:

Even though it is £40 more expensive than its nearest rival, the Tiny is a well-specified notebook and its 80GB hard disk is excellent. It's reasonably fast, but its dim screen and poor touch pad make it hard to recommend.

Review Date: 17 May 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The Tiny notebook is just over our price limit, but it has a good specification. However, it is let down by a dim screen and inaccurate touch pad.

FEATURES

At £539, the Tiny MediaBook 360S is the most expensive notebook in the group. It has 512MB of memory and a large 80GB hard disk, though, which is worth the extra £40. It is also equipped with a slot-loading DVD writer. This writes only DVD-R and DVD-RW discs and is much slower than the drive in the Fujitsu-Siemens system. Wireless networking is included as standard.

The MediaBook is large and heavy at 3.6kg. However, it has six USB2.0 ports around its base plus D-sub and S-video outputs. The keyboard is comfortable for typing, although it flexes in use. The touch pad has large buttons but is inaccurate, and the movement of the pointer bears little relation to that of your finger.

The Tiny's display is also disappointing. It is dim even at full brightness and has poor viewing angles. Contrast is good, though, producing deep blacks and bright whites. The MediaBook's 120-minute battery life is one of the worst on test.

PERFORMANCE

Despite having the same Mobile AMD Sempron 2600+ processor as the Evesham notebook, the Tiny lags behind it in the PCMark04 benchmark and Shopper video encoding test, scoring 2,326 and 67 respectively. Its 512MB of memory helped it score 57 in the image manipulation test, but its score of 67 overall means it doesn't do as well as the Watford notebook.

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