Product Reviews

There's little reason to spend over a grand on a laptop these days. With the likes of Dell's Inspiron 1525 providing an impressive package for less than £500, laptop manufacturers are having to try harder and harder to justify breaking the £1,000 barrier.

The recent trend of thin, light, sexy ultraportables seems to be all the justification most manufacturers need, and although the sector is already crowded with impressive products such as Toshiba's Portégé R500, Sony's VGN-TZ31MN and Lenovo's ThinkPad X300, NEC has now decided to join the premium featherweight fray.

The NEC Versa S9100 certainly has the figure for it: its dimensions are compact, if not as impressively svelte as Sony's VGN-TZ31MN, but it tips the scales at 1.26kg compared with the Sony's porkier 1.48kg. Only Toshiba's waif-like R500 manages to sneak closer to the 1kg mark than this.

The figures don't quite tell the whole story however. We first encountered the S9100 in a meeting in a local Starbucks, and just picking it up was almost enough to make us choke on our frappé. Like Lenovo's Thinkpad X300, the Versa S9100 is a little more sensibly sized than many ultraportables, but its 1.26kg weight feels impossibly light. It wasn't until we pressed the On button and Vista Business fired into life that we believed its chassis actually concealed the working innards of a laptop.

That chassis isn't anywhere near as striking as some of its rivals, though. Finished in black from top to toe, it certainly doesn't draw attention to itself like the striking white Sony VGN-TZ31MN. There's also little getting away from the fact that it's easier to equate a solid, weighty object with quality, and the NEC's light weight means that, initially at least, it does feel a touch cheap. Other ultraportables such as Toshiba's Portege R500 or Sony's VGN-TZ31MN also suffer from plasticky build quality, but both of those make up for any physical defects by virtue of attractive design.

What the NEC lacks in looks, however, it makes up for with surprising sturdiness. Curiously, the UK press release makes no mention of the Versa S9100's Toughbook-rivalling aspirations, but a quick Google hunt reveals quite a few websites and blogs touting the S9100's crush resistance. While the lid of your average Panasonic Toughbook can, it's claimed, withstand 100kgs per square foot, NEC's barely-there laptop can take 300kg. As the only one in the country though, we weren't too confident about hopping aboard with our Size 14 shoes and, more crucially,

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our 16-and-a-half-stone 'physique'.

It's not too difficult to believe, however. Grab the S9100's lid between two hands and though it exhibits a fair amount of flex, apart from a very slight rippling on the display, it remained relatively unperturbed by the abuse. And no matter how hard we prodded the display's glossy rear, there was no sign of show-through on the display at all. Apart from a little give in the lid's centre, it certainly seems to offer impressive levels of protection.

Disappointingly, it doesn't match the Toughbook's spill-proof keyboard or drop resistance, however. Accidentally stand or sit on it and you might just be ok, but tip your coffee over the S9100, or knock it from a desk, and you'll be staring at a hefty repair bill.

The 12.1 inches of glossy LED-backlit display this toughness is protecting isn't the most impressive we've seen, however, and for this price we'd expect a little more. The native resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels is partnered with ample brightness, but there is a little backlight leakage at the top and bottom. Colours weren't a forte either, with skintones taking on a slightly greenish hue; a trait which is exacerbated if you choose to dim the backlight.

Tilt the Versa's lid back on its hinges and there's more cause for complaint: a US-layout keyboard. Apparently this will be the only keyboard layout available, and while it is something we could get used to, eventually, it's still a strange choice. We wouldn't choose to drive a left-hand drive car in the UK, so why buy a laptop with a US keyboard?

The keyboard is largely inoffensive otherwise, thanks to sensibly sized keys with a reasonably positive action, but there are further aggravations. The half-height Enter key often left us frequently hitting the Backslash key by mistake and the decision to move the Insert and Delete keys to the bottom edge isn't the most logical.

The Versa S9100 did give us some reasons to be cheerful, however. Sitting idle, it managed to last over six hours, and heavy usage saw that dwindle to just short of two and half hours. That's not bad by any stretch, but with the Sony VGN-TZ31MN lasting over eight hours and nearly four hours respectively, it's not going to make any headlines.

Performance is as modest as you'd expect given that this laptop has a low-voltage Intel Core 2 Duo U7600 powering things. With two cores running at just 1.2GHz, stamina, not speed, is the U7600's forte, as a score of 0.59 in our benchmarks testifies.

The NEC Versa S9100 is a curious blend of the brilliant and the barmy. Its finer attributes are well worth shouting about; it's light, compact, blessed with good stamina and, to top it all off, impressively resilient too.

But where it falls down, it falls down hard. The S9100 just doesn't look like a £1,100 laptop, and when you could have one of Sony's VGN-TZ31MN laptops for the same sort of money, it's not a difficult choice to make.

The Sony has better battery life, offers integrated 3G as an option and has a noticeably superior 1,366 x 768 display. With a better keyboard and integrated 3G, the NEC Versa S9100 could be a real contender. As it stands though, it's simply an interesting, and more robustly built alternative.