For the money, Lenovo has crammed an awful lot of very cool bells and whistles into this ultraportable: a DVD writer, a 1.3 megapixel camera built into the forgivingly flexible 12.1inch screen, and the piece de resistance, a fingerprint scanner. It's also got a 2GHz Intel Core Duo T7300. Despite numerous attempts to crash it by running dozens of apps at once, we didn't dent the processor's power. But then, Second Life was down due to that internet outage in Palo Alto when we tried it. It's got a full complement of I/O . . . you get your "ve-in-one memory card reader, firewire, PCMCIA and three USB 2.0 ports. Battery life is pretty average at 1.8hrs for the standard three-cell lithium-ion battery, pushed out further with the supersized coppertop. At 1.8kg it's light enough . . . though if you were to choose the bigger battery pack it would up the heft to near 2kg, which would probably disqualify it as an ultraportable. Still, we're not complaining . . . about that at least.

We did find that our review unit had some annoying, random sticky keys . . . type 'n' and get 'nnn' . . . that no amount of tweaking could fix. A survey of other reviews didn't reveal this as a common problem, however. Another poor design choice was to bury the 'Home' and 'End' keys as 'function' add-ons. Any other complaints had to do with Vista, so we can't blame Lenovo for that. The fingerprint scanner alone is worth a test drive, and it's hard to find better value.

Recommended.

Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Si 1520

Coming in at just over 1,000, this ultraportable has enough power to keep the Microsoft Office Suite flying along. While it's certainly not the most powerful laptop on the market, the 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo T2300 processor, 1Gb of memory and 120Gb hard drive mean that it is very competitive in its class and the 12-inch screen gives a very crisp image when using the Aero user interface on Windows Vista. At a light enough 1.7 kilogrammes, this laptop is easy on the back. As well as the standard USB, firewire, modem and memory card reader slots, the laptop has S-Video and DVI outputs, which are rarely seen in a laptop of this type. The laptop also contains a multi-format DVD burner. This laptop is perfect as a mobile office, and with the ability to connect wirelessly to bluetooth devices and 802.11a, b and g networks, the device is very comfortable for use on a train, in an airport or in your local Starbucks. Only one thing let me down with this and that was the heat output. When the laptop is not in power-saving mode, the heat the fans throw out can make it feel very uncomfortable if you have to leave the device on your lap for longer than about 20 minutes.

It has a sleek look, enough power to run all modern of"ce applications and is very good value for money.

Price: 1,123.98 including VAT from Dabs. ie; 1,100 in Dunnes

HP Compaq 2710p Tablet PC

Small, sleek, light but powerful, if you have the budget, the about-to-be-released 2710p ultraportable is something to be considered. With prices starting at a rumoured 1,500 for a 1.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of DDR2 memory and 60GB hard disk, the power to value ratio might not be the best but the flexibility of the laptop, which can also act as a tablet PC, means it is a step above standard laptops and weighs just 1.7KG. The laptop is certainly futureproof when it comes to wireless, with support to every available wireless technology on the market and some not yet released. Battery life is five hours, though that's running a few office programmes and surfing the net and goes down depending on what wireless connection you use. Reminiscent of the transformers, the laptop has different modes and shapes depending on the situation, meaning it can strip down to a very lightweight and portable wireless laptop if you want to move about the building or you can attach an additional layer below the laptop and double the battery life. Additionally this is how you add DVD drives and other modules. We'd recommend this laptop as a well-powered mobile office and efficient tool, as well as something to show off to other people with the nice silver design and tablet PC capabilities.