We often get a first look at products before they hit the shelves, but this is a first – right now, the “Zoostorm Netbook” doesn’t even have an official name. What we do know is that companies like Argos are already showing an interest, and from the couple of days we spent with the Zoostorm we suspect they’ll sell quite a few.

The bad news is that you’ll have to wait to buy one: PC Nextday, the company behind the Zoostorm brand, won’t be putting them on sale until the second week of January. Unlike the Fizzbook, Zoostorm’s first and ongoing foray into netbooks, which was based on Intel’s Classmate PC and aimed squarely at children, this is a unique design that it’s created in partnership with a third-party manufacturer.

And more importantly, it aims to set new benchmarks for what you can expect for the price.

In particular, it will be the first netbook in the UK that offers draft-n wireless for under £275 – the Zoostorm will probably go on sale for £219 inc VAT. Right now, the cheapest draft-n netbook we can find is the Medion Akoya, a 10in offering based on the PC Pro award-winning MSI Wind, but that costs a significant £60 more.

Aside from its cutting-edge wireless chip, the Zoostorm harks back to what netbooks were originally intended to be. Cheap and cheerful, while offering all the features most people need. In this case, that includes Windows XP Home. It uses the netbook-omnipresent 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, with 1GB of RAM for company in our sample – though it’s possible this may drop to 512MB.

Its 8.9in screen is again typical fare for a netbook. It isn’t of the very highest quality, with the tell-tale sign of slight graininess, but it’s both bright and well saturated. Photos will never impress a photographer, but when browsing the web or tapping away at a document it’s absolutely fine.

We’re less enthralled by the keyboard. Inevitably cramped, Zoostorm exacerbates things by not using the full width of the chassis, and it also makes several compromises to usability. The apostrophe has been relegated to the bottom row next to the cursor keys, while the right Shift bar has been sacrificed altogether. In combination with the inevitably small keys, this rules out speedy typing for all but the nimblest touch typists.

The small touchpad is another mixed blessing. Until I trained myself not to, my fingers were brushing against it while typing, sending the cursor all over the page in the process. It’s designed to integrate in with the chassis, which keeps things looking neat, but it’s small.

The design itself is pretty good. Apple won’t be losing any sleep, but the Zoostorm’s all-white design inside looks surprisingly upmarket, while the black lid has a sheen of gloss. It doesn’t look cheap and nor, when it comes to build quality, does it feel it.

This makes it a strong contender to be slung into a bag, and considering it weighs just 995g on our scales (many netbooks that claim they’re under 1kg are actually a few grams more) that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Battery life isn’t exceptional – it lasted for 3hrs 20mins in our light-use tests – but because its power demands are low Zoostorm can get away with a small, all-in-one power supply. And that makes it exceptionally easy to squeeze into a bag.

So, there are plenty of promising signs here. The only cloud on the horizon is that the likes of Dell, HP and – if the rumours are to believed – even Sony are targeting their big corporate and marketing guns at the netbook market.

What could make things very interesting, though, is that the signs are that international vendors like Dell are keen to keep prices towards and beyond the £300 mark. Which leaves quite a lot of space for the likes of PC Nextday to operate in.