Labs

Pull the o.book 1 from its packaging and the first thing that strikes you is the unusual design. Its lid is finished in creamy off-white and an orange stripe stretches from edge to edge. It isn't the prettiest; reactions among the PC Pro team ranged from perplexed shrugs to vocally expressed disgust.

Its looks might leave us cold, but it's not short on practicalities. Twin catches keep the lid firmly closed when in transit, and the build quality is far higher than we expected. Despite its lowly £255 price, the lid easily resisted our most heavy-handed abuse, and the base was similarly resilient.

The black keyboard and trackpad clash horribly with the interior's

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off-white finish, but functionally they're on the money. The keyboard is spacious and comfy to use, and the trackpad buttons respond with a light, positive click.

Turning our attention to the Belinea's display didn't leave us disappointed, either. Like most of the laptops here, it uses a standard resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels and is amply bright across its 15.4 inches. Compared with the very best, it does lack a little contrast and suffers from a slightly blueish cast, but it still offers impressive quality for the money.

Despite the disappointing inclusion of Windows Vista Home Basic, the 120GB hard disk still has plenty of room for storage, and the DVD writer burns to all types of media, DVD-RAM included.

The low price means there are some inevitable compromises. Performance suffers due to the Intel Celeron M 530 processor, which, with its one core running at 1.73GHz and just 1GB of memory for company, scored 0.58 in our benchmarks. The VIA graphics chipset didn't fare any better, barely managing 3fps in our low Crysis benchmark.

For the everyday tasks expected of a budget laptop, the Belinea is perfectly able and well built. But it's up against some tough competition, and the truly dreadful design can't be forgiven.