The 8.9in screen is surround by a large bezel, for example, and there's easily sufficient additional space for a 10in display instead. The keyboard spans the majority of the width of the machine, but at only 80mm deep it occupies less than half the available space. This results in cramped keys and makes mistypes with letters on the lines above and below much more likely. You'll need fairly small fingers and a good bit of practice to get anywhere near full typing speed.

One less USB port than usual

The touchpad is also pretty small - 50 x 30mm - although as it's quite responsive it's still reasonable to use. Unfortunately, Fujitsu Siemens has taken the concept of left and right buttons a little too literally and placed them either side of the touchpad, rather than below. On a small machine like the Acer Aspire One, that's a compromise that makes sense, but here there's room to put them in the proper place.

There's definitely room to place the touchpad buttons correctly

A design feature also means that the bottom corner of each button has been cut off at a 45-degree angle, making them even more difficult to use. Thankfully you can tap on the touchpad for a left click, but for right click you'll find yourself hitting the bottom edge of the laptop before remembering there's no key there.

The display runs to a netbook-standard resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels and reflecto-phobes will be happy to know it's a non-glossy display so you don't need to worry about seeing lights behind you reflected back on screen. The trade off for this is less intense colours, though.

ExpressCard 34 slot, anyone?

There's no prize for guessing that it packs a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor and 1GB of DDR 2 Ram. Fujitsu Siemens has stuck with traditional spinning disks rather than a solid-state drive for storage, which means higher capacities, but it's more susceptible to damage if you bash it around too much. The review model came with a 60GB drive, but £10 more gets you an 80GB unit. There's also a 120GB model in the pipeline, but pricing has yet to be decided for that.