It might look dull and grey on the outside but its smooth, rounded chassis and interior textured trackpad surround (and classy speaker grille) absolve some sins. NEC’s Versa S3300 isn’t flashy, but it looks sturdy and would fit into both home and office environments.

The keyboard is comfortable, with good response – the same can be said for the trackpad. The glossy screen gets very bright but colours are slightly muted which detracts from the otherwise crisp and clear appearance.

The 13.3in frame and 2kg weight mean it’s nicely portable and the battery forms a prop that lifts the laptop slightly: angling the keyboard for comfortable typing and allowing airflow underneath. During light use, the battery lasted an impressive 5hrs 16mins but a more modest 1hr 35mins when running our intensive tests.

When we ran our performance benchmarks, the Versa scored a pretty ordinary 0.61 – fine for regular day-to-day usage but you wouldn’t want to be regularly encoding with it. Also note that the integrated Intel graphics aren’t powerful enough to run games. So, ultimately, power-wise, it’s more of a workhorse than a stallion.

Although it’s not designed as a multimedia notebook, the S3300 also includes four ‘high-definition’ speakers, positioned in three locations around the chassis. It’s not that common to see so many speakers in a laptop this size, but the resultant sound quality was still tinny and weak when playing music.

Back in August, we said it was unlikely there’d be many Santa Rosa laptops released without draft-n (web ID: 95294), but this is one of the few – NEC opted to use a slightly-cheaper Atheros b/g adapter – but few people will be bothered as it only really affects media streaming and not web browsing. Gigabit Ethernet is included along with an SD/MMC/MS media card reader, ExpressCard/54 slot and DVD writer which supports all formats. It’s a good complement but, for a business-friendly notebook, a fingerprint reader and TPM module are noticeably absent.

The warranty is only one year but is sweetened by being onsite. If you want a bit more pizzazz Dell’s XPS M1330 (web ID: 95288) is a smarter, better-specified option but it costs $1000 more.

While the S3300 is unspectacular, for $1500 it’s fantastic value and sports most of the important features that count. if you’re after a sturdy notebook that’s worth taking on the road and you don’t need to run anything too demanding, this Versa is a great deal.