Hi-Grade UltiNote AS8300

Hi-Grade's new UltiNote is actually manufactured by Asus. The company is better known for motherboards, but is a well-known player in the OEM notebook market. The key selling point of this latest machine is its weight, which has been pared down to an impressive 2.4kg.

I say impressive because the UltiNote isn't a cut-down subnotebook with a tricky keyboard and an SVGA screen. Rather it's a slightly reduced footprint portable with a particularly slim body, and it's this that accounts for the low carrying weight. When designs like this work they can offer the best of both worlds, combining reasonable screen and keyboard ergonomics with portability without sacrificing much on the ease-of-use front. The Hi-Grade's case is 32mm thick, only 20mm of which is accounted for by the main body of the machine. This is barely enough to accommodate a multifunction drive bay, but the fact that there's one means there's no functional difference between this and many full-weight notebooks.

The bay can hold either the floppy drive or the 24-speed CD-ROM, but other available options include a DVD-ROM drive or a second 2.5in hard disk. The floppy module can be run externally from what is the expansion bus you use for connecting the port-bar and port-dock options, and I was pleased to find the necessary cable included in the box. The port-bar (£60) is a fairly standard replicator with serial, parallel, VGA and twin USB ports plus separate PS/2 sockets for the mouse and keyboard. The port-dock is an external drive bay housing the floppy disk and a CD/DVD-ROM drive (£155) or second hard disk. It can even use the CD-ROM for standalone music playback.

The notebook's only apparent concession to size is its single Type II PC Card slot. Still, there's a socket in the back for an optional internal V.90 modem or a 10/100Mbits/sec Ethernet adaptor, and the slot itself supports Zoomed video, so you shouldn't miss the second slot too much.

Slimmer notebooks can feel flimsy, but the UltiNote is solidly constructed with no real flex in the body and plenty of pressure resistance in the lid. Everything fits neatly together, and nothing rattles or looks likely to fall off. There were other indications of thoughtful design too, such as the double catches securing the battery pack in place, and the extra-wide slot in the head of the screw holding the hard disk compartment panel shut, allowing the use of a coin rather than a screwdriver to remove the drive.

Since the notebook itself hasn't been dramatically reduced in size, neither has the keyboard. This alone wouldn't guarantee usability, but fortunately the layout is also fairly sensible. The spacebar, backspace and Enter keys are all big enough to avoid problems, and the action is firm and lively.

The small case size allows for a 13.3in TFT screen running at a resolution of 1,024 x 768. The results are comfortable and won't have you pressing your nose up against the panel in order to read it.

Several versions are available, ranging from a Celeron/400 to the Pentium II/400 model by way of the Pentium II/366 reviewed here, and Hi-Grade promises the release of a Pentium III/450 soon. Memory is divided between the 32Mb hard-wired onto the motherboard and whatever's in the single SODIMM socket. The more powerful machines come with 96Mb as standard, but it's worth remembering that an upgrade will necessitate replacing the 64Mb module.

Performance is on a level with big-brand Pentium II/366 notebooks like HP's OmniBook 900 and slightly better than Toshiba's PortÚgÚ 7020CT or IBM's ThinkPad 570 (see ultra-portables Labs, issue 58, p116). The UltiNote has a well-balanced configuration and runs fast enough to be taken seriously as a business portable.