HP Compaq nc6220

We had our first look at HP's newest mainstream business notebook in our introduction to Sonoma. The pre-production sample showed bags of potential, but its early build status meant full benchmarking and conclusions were impossible.

Now that we've had our hands on a retail unit, there's good news and bad. The good news is that performance is as strong as we'd hoped. The 1.73GHz Pentium M 740 processor skipped through our benchmarks, reaching 1.85. Previous battery tests suggested a light-use stamina of less than three hours, but happily that's stretched significantly to four hours, 54 minutes, with a heavy workload lasting one hour, 39 minutes.

Uneven backlighting was the bugbear of the early sample, and alas this hasn't improved much. But the firm keyboard is nicely laid out and comfortable to type on, and the overall build quality is up to regular travel. IBM's ThinkPad keyboards still have the upper hand, though.

While it's a shame to see the screen hasn't improved, the rest of the notebook lives up to its promise: it's a great performer backed up by a three-year warranty.

But there's one more piece of good news: the price has dropped substantially since the launch, making it great value for money. The specific model is PU982ET.