Superior build quality is one of the most desirable features to have in a notebook, and this Notino is one of the best examples in this month's roundup.
The plastic casing is hard and well-finished, the joints on the screen are sturdy, and the interface is a pleasure to use. The touchpad is particularly responsive, and the keyboard has decent full-sized keys. It also features a classy slot-loading CD drive – far superior to the flimsy trays on some other notebooks.
It also offers a good mix of ports, with VGA out, S-Video out as well as USB, FireWire and serial inputs. It lacks any form of PS/2, which can make plugging in an external keyboard a pain, but this is a minor trade-off to make.
The 4400's only significant weakness is performance. Its Achilles heel is a lacklustre processor – it gets by adequately on a 1.5GHz Mobile Celeron, but it's seriously outclassed in comparison to some of the other notebooks reviewed here. The SiS650 graphics chip is also not a powerhouse in 3D, but is still capable.
Despite this shortcoming, it still managed to perform well in our traditional office and multimedia creation benchmarks, and outscored more than half of the competition.
For a budget business notebook, the 4400 delivers a good mix of quality and features.
Its slightly inferior performance is a little annoying, but if you intend to use your notebook for business applications, it's more than powerful enough.