Product Reviews

Rock keeps costs down by re-branding imported notebooks from the Far East, but design can suffer. In several areas, it's none too well thought out.

Portability

At 28mm deep, the Pegasus is slim enough at 28mm to compare favourably with the Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook and Sony Vaio, and at just 1.8kg won't weigh your briefcase down either. However, unless you're really hard up, we can't recommend it due to its dismal battery life: a mere 1 hr 9 mins in our test, a good way short of the Sony.

Worse, we weren't happy with its build quality. Although the screen is well protected,

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the hard disk is alarmingly vulnerable. A small amount of pressure under the left palm rest produces a grinding noise as the disk's moving parts touch its casing.

Ergonomics

The Pegasus' greatest asset is its 11.3in PolySilicon TFT screen, and unlike the Pico's larger screen, it has a high resolution of 1,024x768. Images are pleasingly crisp, too. Keys on the keyboard, if a little bouncy, are large and have plenty of travel, but suffer from an extremely poor layout. The touchpad is reliable and accurate.

Performance

It seems the quality screen ate up a lot of the budget, as the processor is one of the slowest here, a Celeron 433. For anything other than games, though, this should suffice, especially as it's backed by a healthy 128Mb of RAM.

The graphics aren't up to 3D gaming, but at least you get one of the largest disks on test: 12Gb.

Overall

At first glance, the compact, light Rock seems a good deal at £1,149. But battery life simply isn't good enough for an ultra-portable, and the keyboard layout is frustrating.

Also, the lack of protection given to the hard disk means we can't possibly recommend it.