The recent trend for thin, light, sexy ultraportables seems to be all the justification many manufacturers need. While the sector is already crowded with impressive products such as
Toshiba’s Portégé R500,
Sony’s VGN-TZ36GN and
Lenovo’s ThinkPad X300 , NEC has now decided to join the fray.
The NEC Versa S9100 certainly has the figure for it: its dimensions are compact and it tips the scales at 1.26kg. Only Toshiba’s waif-like R500 manages to sneak closer to the 1kg mark.
The figures don’t quite tell the whole story, however. We first encountered the S9100 in a meeting at a local Starbucks, and just picking it up was almost enough to make us choke on our frappé. Like Lenovo’s ThinkPad X300, the Versa S9100 is a little more sensibly sized than many ultraportables, but it feels impossibly light. It wasn’t until we pressed the on button and Vista Business fired into life that we believed its chassis concealed the working innards of a laptop.
It looks nowhere near as striking as some of its rivals, though. In black from top to toe, it doesn’t draw attention to itself like the white Sony VGN-TZ36GN. There’s also no getting away from the fact that it’s easier to equate a solid, weighty object with quality, and the NEC’s light weight means that, initially at least, it does feel a touch cheap.
What the NEC lacks in looks, however, it makes up for with surprising sturdiness. Grab the S9100’s lid with both hands and, although it exhibits a fair amount of flex, apart from a very slight rippling on the display it remained unperturbed by the abuse.
And no matter how hard we prodded the display’s glossy rear, there was no show-through on the display. Apart from a little give in the lid’s centre, it offers impressive levels of protection.
The 12.1in glossy LED-backlit display isn’t the most impressive we’ve seen, however, and for this price we’d expect a little more. The native resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels is partnered with ample brightness, but there’s a little backlight leakage. Colours weren’t great either, with skin tones taking on a greenish hue, a trait that’s exacerbated if you dim the backlight.
The keyboard has sensibly sized keys with a reasonably positive action, but there are some aggravations. The half-height Enter key often left us hitting the Backslash key by mistake, and the decision to move the Insert and Delete keys to the bottom edge isn’t logical.
The Versa S9100’s battery life gave us some reasons to be cheerful, however. Sitting idle it managed over six hours, and heavy usage saw that dwindle to just short of two-and-a-half hours. That’s not bad, but with the Sony VGN-TZ31MN lasting over eight hours when idle and nearly four hours under heavy use, it’s not going to make any headlines.
Performance is as modest as you’d expect given that this laptop contains a low-voltage Intel Core 2 Duo U7600 processor. With two cores running at just 1.2GHz, stamina, not speed, is the order of the day, as a score of 0.59 in our benchmarks testifies.
The NEC Versa S9100 is a curious blend of the brilliant and the barmy. Its finer attributes are well worth shouting about: it’s light, compact, blessed with good stamina and, to cap it all, is impressively resilient too.
But where it falls down, it falls down hard. The S9100 just doesn’t look like a $2990 laptop, and when you could buy a Sony VGN-TZ36GN for the same sort of money, it’s not a difficult choice to make. The Sony has better battery life, a noticeably superior 1366 x 768 display and offers integrated 3G as an option. With integrated 3G, the NEC Versa S9100 could be a real contender.
As it stands, though, it’s simply an interesting and more robust alternative.