Product Reviews

HP Omnibook 800CS  [PC Pro]
COMPANY:	PRICE: £2,555  (£3,002 inc VAT)
RATING:	ISSUE: 26  DATE: Oct 96

The OmniBook 800CS is one more step towards the meeting of PC and PDA - a portable, powerful PC with the speed and storage to get the job done.

Previously, the best portable buy was Digital's HiNote Ultra II (reviewed issue 22, p130). At 1.8kg in weight and a wafer-thin 28mm high, it was almost inconceivable that it was based around a Pentium/100 processor. The HiNote's problem was a low battery life and slow speed. HP has stormed into the subnotebook market with a machine that's very fast and long lasting - nearly three hours without power management, so expect four or five hours when conserving power.

The OmniBook doesn't have any of the futuristic design flourishes of the HiNote or the Compaq Armada (reviewed issue 24, p147). Instead it's just small, light and easy to handle. At 1.7kg it's a shade lighter than the HiNote and smaller than a sheet of A4 paper, but thicker than two stacked issues of PC Pro. It feels sturdier than the HiNote, but not quite as rugged as the Armada. The screen feels hard-wearing and the keyboard connector hinge is sturdy. This is a notebook I wouldn't mind lugging around for work.

It also has an unusual layout; the keyboard is positioned near the front of the machine, so there's no palmrest - not good for intensive touch-typists. There are no 'feet' to give you a better typing angle either. However, the lack of ergonomic niceties is almost entirely balanced out by an excellent keyboard. It's firm with just the right amount of give, with almost all the keys in the right place. The cursor keys are a bit small though, and there's only one key. But I can safely say this is one of the best notebook keyboards I've typed on.

The OmniBook has a rather novel mouse replacement. By pressing a button, a small,

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rectangular 'mouse-on-a-stick' pops out, which moves over a limited area but substitutes for a trackball or trackpad very well. Most of the time this works well, but occasionally you'll find yourself unable to move the pointer to the edge of the screen. This is easily adjusted by picking up the mouse and repositioning it on your desk.

Some of the peripheral frills have had to go in the OmniBook to reduce the weight. The most obvious is the floppy drive, which comes supplied as an external unit, complete with cable. This isn't quite as elegant as the HiNote's 'wedge' floppy drive, which provides a typing angle while you work, but it gets the job done. Apart from the lack of floppy drive, the OmniBook has everything else you'd need to get connected. On the left-hand side there's a Type II PC Card slot, and an insert is easily removed to let you put in another Type II card, or one Type III. Next to this are the mic, line in and headphone jacks. Moving around the back of the OmniBook, one long flap covers a selection of ports: port replicator, parallel, serial, VGA and floppy. There's also an IrDA port that supports the fast 4Mbits/sec standard. Next to all of the ports is the AC in port; this needs a separate adaptor, but the combined weight of that and the notebook is only 2.11kg.

Software setup was good with a full set of HP user tools pre-installed. The function keys are fully programmable to launch different applications, much like the Armada's built in hotkeys. However, given the basic nature of the software, it's a shame that there's no Office suite pre-installed, and it's not available as an option from HP. To get the full multimedia experience or beef up the OmniBook for desktop work, you can buy an external quad-speed CD-ROM drive or port replicator, each £316.

The OmniBook is an extremely well thought-out and constructed notebook, with just about everything a mobile traveller could want in a small, lightweight package. But the icing on the cake is the performance. True to the previous records set by HP notebooks, the OmniBook clocks in faster than the P120-based Armada and only a shade behind the P133 notebooks of Toshiba and Dell. With speed, light weight and good construction, you'd expect to pay the Earth - but amazingly all this is available for just over £2,500. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

By Stephen Reid