Product Reviews

Thought ultra portables were overpriced, overhyped and over here? Well think again. As our group test demonstrates this month (see Labs, p92), the world's biggest manufacturers are now producing stunning products for competitive prices. The Voyager Si 1.2 Pro arrived just too late to enter the Labs, but we were interested in how well a British vendor - although Taiwanese Asus built this chassis - could cope next to Dell, IBM and HP.

One advantage the multinationals have is designing their own notebooks, while British vendors rely on third parties like Asus. In the past, this has led to machines that can best be described as functional, and at worst ugly. Although the Voyager can't match Sharp's Muramasa or Toshiba's PortÚgÚ 2000 (see Labs, p92) for style, it's still very attractive. As with the PortÚgÚ, the silver chassis is contrasted with an all-black keyboard, which will appeal to professional and home users alike.

We can't complain about build quality either, with a metal alloy lid protecting the screen and a solid palmrest shielding the hard disk beneath. But we can complain about the weight. It tipped our scales at 2kg and felt every gram. This isn't the sleekest of machines either, its thickness of 26mm and width of 296mm combining to rival Toshiba's PortÚgÚ 4000 (see Labs, p92), which includes a DVD-ROM.

So how does Asus justify the extra weight? It's partially the metal alloy lid, partially the sheer volume generated by the extra width, but sadly it's not due to a massive battery. This is a 2,900mA unit, compared to the 3,600mA battery in Dell's Latitude C400 (see Labs, p92), so it was no surprise when it fared averagely in our intensive rundown test, lasting for 79 minutes. In the less intensive test, it kept going for two and a half hours - expect something closer to this in real-world use.

The extra width has some benefits, most obviously the larger keyboard - we couldn't find any major faults with positioning, although some users won't like the half-height Enter key. The keystroke

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isn't the comfiest, but only those used to the excellent IBM ThinkPad keyboards will notice. Our only gripe concerns the left- and right-click keys, which feel cheap.

In general, we like the TFT; this also gains from the added width, with a 13.3in diagonal. There's a slight tinge that makes white backgrounds look off-white, but it's bright and evenly lit, while its contrast and viewing angles are perfectly adequate. It also proved to be a very good performer in our DVD playback test, with smooth and well-focused playback.

Asus has done a solid job in building the chassis, and evesham.com backs it up with a great specification. The 1.2GHz Pentium III-M is still close to being the fastest mobile chip we've seen. Combined with 384Mb of RAM, the Voyager scored 3.57 in our benchmarks. That's not a huge distance away from the 3.87 managed by the Toshiba Satellite 5100-501 (see p120) with its 1.7GHz Pentium 4-M.

The Voyager's 3D performance was far less impressive: Intel's 830M graphics controller only provided enough acceleration for 919 3DMarks in 3DMark2001, while Quake III ran at 24.2 frames per second at the screen's native resolution of 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour. We prefer ATi's Radeon Mobility 7500 or, even better, Nvidia's GeForce4 440 Go.

At 40Gb, the hard disk is beyond rebuke. With a non-powered FireWire port and all that horsepower on tap, the Voyager is perfect for video editing. Evesham.com doesn't include video-editing software as standard, though, so you'll have to make do with Microsoft's Movie Maker as bundled with Windows XP Home. The only other software of note is Roxio CD Creator 5 and CyberLink PowerDVD 3.

These accompany the external DVD/CD-RW combo drive that comes in this £1,599 package - you can save £120 by opting for DVD only. We advise sticking with the CD-RW, especially as there's no floppy drive as standard - a USB drive costs £39. You can also buy the port replicator for £69. This provides ports for parallel, PS/2, VGA, two USB and a LAN passthrough for easy connection to the office. On the unit itself, there are a generous three USB ports, infrared, headphone and microphone jacks, proprietary connectors for hooking up Asus external drives, plus a VGA out. The only disappointment is the lack of 802.11b.

So how does the Voyager compare to the multinationals' efforts? Well, it certainly holds its head up, thanks to the strong specification and good build quality. But it falls down on weight and battery life, and as these are two of the most crucial areas for ultra portables we can't recommend it over the Dell Latitude C400.