Hi-Grade Notino A1300-850a

With the Notino A1300 series, Hi-Grade seems determined to prove that it's not just Sony, Apple or Packard Bell that produce the sort of flashy notebooks that look good on the pages of glossy Sunday supplements.

With its flowing silver curves, translucent blue front panel and matching keyboard, the Notino A1300 has a certain understated cool.

But while the Notino will look good in a home or smart office environment, it's unlikely to be shown off much away from the desktop. At 316 x 250 x 40mm, and weighing 3kg, the Notino is a bit too bulky and heavy to carry around. Still, size always has an upside: inside the case you'll find a built-in Toshiba DVDRom drive, a 3.5in floppy drive, a good-sized screen and keyboard, and enough ports to render a separate docking station unnecessary.

The ports are mostly situated at the back, and include two USB sockets, a 10/100BaseT Ethernet adapter, VGA and S-Video video outputs, a 56K modem and a serial and parallel port. On the left side of the case you'll find audio inputs and outputs, plus two stacked Type II PC card slots while, on the right, there's a single PS/2 port.

The touch pad is accurate and usable, while the two odd-shaped silver buttons surrounding the usual left and right buttons act as a substitute to the scroll-wheel. We have no complaints about the keyboard, either. The layout is sensible, the keys don't feel cramped, and the light action and shallow key travel feel good.

Although its front panel includes extra CD control buttons for audio playback, the Hi-Grade isn't likely to replace your hi-fi. The built-in stereo speakers are fairly average for notebook units, which means they're not a lot of good. The volume is there, and the sound isn't pitifully thin, but the overall result still lacks any real body. Luckily, the visual output doesn't deserve such a crushing verdict, as the 13.3in, 1024 x 768 TFT screen is bright, well lit and perfectly clear.

The screen comes in handy for DVD playback, but this isn't the best machine for that purpose. Even though the combination of the eight-speed Toshiba drive and the Asus software DVD player dished out smooth motion in the default software playback mode, the picture suffered from some distracting pixel creeping in dark areas of the background. We hoped that switching on hardware assistance would help, but this made the video playback erratic and choppy, with clear decompression artefacts.

It's curious, as the Notino's specification wouldn't lead us to expect any problems. Admittedly, the graphics subsystem - integrated graphics built into the SiS 630 motherboard chipset - hardly inspires confidence.

Even in the notebook world, a discrete graphics chipset with its own memory beats integrated graphics sharing system Ram, and the SiS chipset isn't a top performer anyway. However, this usually only has a dramatic effect when you're trying to play 3D games.

The Notino's processor shouldn't be at fault, either. Intel's latest mobile Celeron runs at 850Mhz with a 100Mhz front-side bus, meaning that the only thing that separates it from the current mobile Pentium III 850 is the cache size: 128Kb instead of the P III's 256Kb. Back that up with 128Mb of PC100 SDRam and a 20Gb Hitachi hard disk, and you won't find many desktop applications, outside graphics and gaming, that the Notino won't run.

While the Notino doesn't shine as a portable PC entertainer, it's still got plenty in its favour. Battery life, for example, is surprisingly good, with the lithium-ion cell lasting for just over two hours in our rundown tests. But the Notino's best feature has to be its price. For £1056 inc VAT, it delivers a lot of class for quite a small outlay.

CONTACT: Hi-Grade
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www.higrade.com