ViewSonic ViewBook Pro

While the screen isn't perfect, it remains worthy of praise. With a 13.3in diagonal, it's the right size for a resolution of 1,280 x 800 (although, as ever, we'd like a higher resolution still), and it's also bright.

Our criticisms mainly focus on its colour reproduction: it has a cold feel, giving whites a slight blue cast, and because the viewing angle is narrow you have to be in the perfect position to see colours as they're meant to be seen.

But the trackpad is the main item on our hitlist: we had to press hard to get the cursor to move at all, and found the pad to be sluggish, imprecise and inconsistent in operation.

Even doubling the sensitivity settings failed to help,
and to make matters worse, the accompanying pair of buttons were far too stiff to be comfortable. The result is a trackpad that's among the worst we've had the displeasure to use.

Also bear in mind that this machine isn't built for speed. There's nothing inherently wrong with the low voltage 1.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U7300 processor - a score of 0.64 in our application benchmarks means it's significantly faster than a netbook. But that speed boost means it's still far better suited to light duties, and makes the ViewBook Pro feel more like a second machine than a main PC.

This leaves us in a quandary. There are many things we like about this laptop: its pleasing design, the inclusion of a DVD writer, its solid battery life, and its light weight. But then you have a truly dreadful trackpad, and a price that pushes it some distance away from the netbooks that ViewSonic surely has in its sights.

If you need a second machine to take on your travels and it must include an optical drive, then the ViewBook won't disappoint. But we're still more tempted by the 2.18kg Samsung Q320, which has substantially more grunt when you need it.

Author: Mike Jennings