It may be a whitebox laptop, and we only just pulled it out of the box, but as far as first impressions go, we have high hopes for the Pioneer 825.

The keyboard doesn't flex, the trackpad buttons have an well weighted give to them and the chassis is simple and clean. So much so that there weren't any Windows or Core2 Duo stickers under our palms on our review unit.

A single power button and single power save button lie above and to the right of the keyboard. That's it -- there are no hardware wireless switches, you'll find those on a transposed function key. The powersave button dims the non-reflective screen to save battery power.

While we're on the subject of battery power, the battery extends out the back of the laptop implying a very long battery life. Coupled with the low current draw of the Core2 Duo T5600, we're looking forward to seeing how it copes in the labs tests.

There's a 100GB hard drive, Intel 945 graphics (sadly there's no DVI out) and 1GB of RAM under the hood. Other than that it's quite generic. But we've seen in the past that that can often mean very good.

We await the benchmarking...