Labs

This month, Acer's 6292 has set the standard for small notebooks, squeezing great battery life and performance into a well-built chassis. Costing £70 less, Toshiba's U300 has its work cut out, but it makes a good start in two key areas.

First, the keyboard is more spacious. Touch-typing is easy and sensible layout choices have been made, with full-sized Enter and backspace keys, and space around the smaller cursor keys. The one area that's cramped - the left Shift key - isn't of much consequence, although not everyone will like the U300's bouncy baseplate. Second, the screen,

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although the same resolution at 1,280 x 800, is an inch bigger at 13.3in. It's also more vivid than the Acer's, although its glossy finish makes it more reflective.

This is where the good news ends, however. Build quality isn't as good as the Acer's, and we weren't too keen on its styling, either. Although the glossy lid looks nice, with the lid open the silver keyboard surround looks plasticky.

Internal components are equally disappointing, with just a 1.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo partnered with 1GB of RAM and - in the context of the opposition - a meagre 120GB hard disk. It should be enough to keep Vista running happily most of the time, but compared to the Acer - which squeezes in 2GB of RAM, a 2GHz processor and 160GB of storage - it looks a little mean.

As a result, benchmark scores were down on the Acer and Samsung at 0.75.Battery life can't match those two rivals, either, but at 3hrs 50mins it's hardly a disaster. The 1.3-megapixel webcam, 802.11abg Wi-Fi module and Bluetooth round off the specification.

Despite the disappointments, the U300 isn't a poor laptop. The main problem for it is that the Acer 6292 betters it in almost every department.