Product Reviews

BenQ's latest notebook is here to bring us joy. It sees the 5000U as a digital hub more than a notebook, and this is backed up by lots of hardware. Quite apart from the three USB 2 ports, there's a four-pin FireWire port and a three-in-one memory card reader, which accepts Memory Stick, SD and MMC media. Add a relatively capacious 40GB hard disk and a fast combo drive and you have a well-specified notebook for the price. There's a decent selection of software to help you along too, with Ulead Photo Explorer 7 SE Platinum and CyberLink PowerDirector Pro 2.55 on hand.

BenQ also uses styling to differentiate the Joybook from the homogeneous notebook crowd. Note the wavy design, which immediately marks this out as a consumer-oriented machine, although it's slightly odd to see Windows XP Professional rather than XP Home.

802.11b WLAN is built in as

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standard, and the 5000U's Centrino branding means there's a 1.4GHz Pentium-M processor, which flies along under general use. With 256MB of RAM, the Joybook scored a healthy 1.18 in our 2D benchmarks. If you do intend to do some processor-intensive work, though, the 5000U will occasionally keep you waiting: it took almost ten minutes to convert our 45-second AVI to MPEG format, compared to six-and-a-half minutes from the Toshiba opposite.

Sadly, the Joybook makes do with Intel's own graphics - only capable of 1,917 in 3DMark2001 SE. At least you can easily take the Joybook with you on journeys. It weighs a mere 2.4kg and lasted for a stunning six hours, 20 minutes in our light-use tests. That said, the Joybook's glossy finish could easily get scuffed if you continually thrust it in and out of bags.

The highly flexible lid is another concern, as a direct hit could cause some damage to the screen. The 14.1in TFT screen is incredibly bright if you set the levels to full and it has good viewing angles and realistic-looking colours.

The keyboard is another sound choice, thanks to the large keys and sensible positioning. Add a responsive touchpad and four shortcut buttons above the keyboard, plus hardware volume controls, and BenQ's attention to detail becomes clear.

If you're more concerned by budget than image, and you want WLAN, 2D speed and a fair sprinkling of features, the 5000U is a clear winner at this price.