Umax ActionBook S 246T

There's nothing like giving your product a silver finish to make people want to buy it; a fact not lost on Umax with its latest sub-notebook. The 'S' in the S 246T's model name stands for Soyo, its original manufacturer best known for its motherboards. There's no great shame in re-badging a notebook made by someone else, as most of the big companies do, although they'd rather you didn't know about it.

The unit certainly deserves its sub-notebook label: at just 263 x 202 x 27mm and weighing in at 1.4kg it's about as small as a decently specified notebook gets. Specification itself is certainly adequate for this class of machine. Inside, there's a 466Mhz mobile Celeron processor allied to 64Mb of SDRAM, and a 6Gb Fujitsu hard drive. Despite its size, the standard ports are built into the unit, rather than being relegated to a port replicator as with the likes of Sony's 505 range.

At the right-hand side there are single PS/2 and USB connectors plus parallel and serial ports, and a fast IrDA transceiver. At the rear there's just a D-SUB connector, and at the left a single Type I/II PC Card connector and external IDE connector. Unused ports are protected by press-on rubber covers that, while they may get lost, at least won't be prone to snapping off the way plastic covers tend to.

The external IDE is needed because there are no internal device bays, so floppy and CDRom drives need to be external. The supplied floppy drive connects to the parallel port, while the IDE connector can be used for a CDRom, DVDRom or LS-120 drive. Annoyingly, only a floppy drive is supplied as standard, so you'll need to shell out a further £99 plus VAT for a CDRom drive if you actually want to use the S 246T as anything other than a paperweight. As some recompense for the lack of a CDRom drive, the Umax does have an integrated 56K modem with a flip-up connector mounted at the top left of the keyboard.

If you're a resolution junkie, the S 246T's TFT screen will appeal. Traditionally, notebooks of this size have 800 x 600 resolution screens, but the 10.4in TFT display on this unit has a native resolution of 1024 x 768. It's not quite as good as most standard sized TFTs, as the viewing angle is a little restricted, but it's great to have such a high resolution in so small a device.

A constant problem with sub-notebooks is that with the electronics so densely packed, they get hot. The S 246T certainly suffers from this and gets uncomfortably warm on your lap after a few minutes. The need to dissipate the heat also leads to the system fan being constantly switched on, and there's no option in the BIOS setup to switch between silence and performance modes, as with some other notebooks.

In use, the S 246T's keyboard provides acceptably responsive typing. The tops of the main letter keys are fairly large to help with accuracy, at the expense of the lesser-used keys. The touchpad is responsive, but being necessarily close to the keyboard, it makes accidental clicking from the heel of the hand a problem.

The S 246T's build quality is adequate, and its small physical size means that case flexing isn't as much of a problem here as with some larger machines. It's not going to cause the designers of Sony's 505 too many sleepless nights though, despite the silvery sheen.

Graphics are handled by an unremarkable Chips and Tech 69000 PCIset, with just 2Mb onboard. Fine for most uses, but it only allows 16bit colour at 1024 x 768 or 8bit (256 colours) at 1280 x 1024 when using the external VGA output.

The lithium-ion battery is the bar type, mounted at the rear between the display hinges. Battery life, as usual with devices of this type, is estimated at between one and two hours.

Despite its shortcomings, the S 246T adds up to a fairly attractive package if you're on the lookout for an ultra-portable email and word processing machine. Don't forget, however, that you'll need to add £99 plus VAT to the basic price to be able to install any software on the thing: Windows 98SE is all that's supplied pre-installed. Performance won't set the world alight either, but for the kind of uses this machine is aimed at, there's more than enough power.

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