Medion RIM1000 Ultra Mobile PC

The latest attempt to try to breathe some life into the ultra mobile PC (UMPC) concept comes from Medion, and this is the first one we've seen with consumers in its sights rather than business people.

The RIM1000 is essentially a slate-style tablet with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard underneath. We've seen this form factor before, in both mobile phones and Sony's more business-focused UX series, but there are some new touches - the 6.5in wide-aspect screen, for example, and the welcome neatness of the sliding mechanism's design.

The keyboard is a bit of a departure too. It's separated into two parts in an attempt to stop it feeling cramped, making the keys easier to reach with your thumbs. It's just about possible to type in the normal way with your fingers; just be prepared to put in some practice, partly because the spacebar is only on one side. The keys themselves are a reasonable size, with sloped edges to define them more clearly and a definite clicking action.

One of the biggest issues with UMPCs is navigating Windows, an operating system that's always been designed with a mouse in mind. The RIM1000 is the first UMPC chassis we've seen that tries to solve the problem with a touchpad (at the bottom-right corner). Using one thumb on that and the other on the left- and right-click buttons, it's surprisingly effective, if not always precise.

That said, you can get away with using your fingers most of the time or, failing that, the stylus. But while the surface of the touchscreen may resist fingerprints well, using the stylus feels like scraping your fingernails down a sticky blackboard.

The screen runs at a native resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, but many applications are unable to scale down effectively to such a level. You can scale up to 1,024 x 600 or 1,024 x 768, but you pay dearly in clarity and the incorrect aspect ratio.

Running Vista Home Premium, you get all the tablet PC goodness it confers, such as accurate handwriting recognition and touch-friendly desktop icons. You also benefit from the new Origami Experience, a touch-optimised program launcher that builds on Windows XP's Touch Pack for UMPC. We're glad to say it clears up most of our original complaints about UMPCs - transitions between the interface and external programs are smoother and you rarely get dumped back into Windows.

But the experience is less joyful elsewhere. While most modern PCs spoil us for performance, using the Medion for a while reminded us of the bad old days. VIA's C7-M processor may be a marvel of power efficiency, but with an operating speed of 1GHz, a slow hard disk and just 768MB of RAM, the RIM1000 is very slow. And by that we mean it struggles with the Start menu.

Our benchmarks took several days to run (scoring a grand total of 0.12) and even a normal boot takes well over two minutes. As if that wasn't bad enough, VIA's UniChrome Pro II graphics are incapable of handling such niceties as Aero Glass or live preview features - something just about every other modern integrated graphics chip can muster.

We wouldn't mind all this if there were some other benefit, but the C7-M's low-power credentials don't translate into anything stellar: the whole unit becomes uncomfortably hot even when left idling, and our light-use battery saw a duration of just 2hrs 15mins. There isn't much salvation to be found in the rest of the hardware either: while Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are welcome, there's no GPRS, GPS or TV tuner.

We also have concerns about the button layout: we appreciate the numerous shortcut buttons, but with the D-SUB output and one of the two USB ports on the bottom of the unit, you can't use them with the RIM1000 on its mini-stand. Medion no doubt hopes people will invest in the optional docking station.