Looking quite a lot like what I imagined the son of Apple's Titanium and Powerbook lines of notebooks would turn out, the AStone notebook features both the Titanium's solid matte silver magnesium-alloy body with the Powerbook's white limned styling. From the very outset this makes the AStone one visually appealing notebook.
It's a solid unit (it just feels strong, and was able to cope with us twisting the screen), and has unobtrusive lights and buttons which gives the whole unit a sleek, modern look and feel.

And there's plenty to like under the skin of this Centrino notebook, with a 1.6GHz Pentium-M processor, 512MB of DDR SDRAM and a 40GB hard drive making up its base specifications. Furthermore, it also comes with a DVD/CD-RW Combo drive, lots of expansion ports and excellent battery life. Its 14.1in TFT screen is a little dark even with brightness at maximum, but that's about the only problem we found with this impressive notebook.

In our test suite, the AStone M3700's SYSmark2001 score means it's no slouch with day-to-day office tasks, and even its 3Dmark2001 SE score of 1,907 is not bad for a notebook with integrated graphics (Intel 855GM). Its greatest achievement was in BatteryMark, where it scored exactly four hours of battery life -- outstanding for a notebook of this size and power.

And then there's the price. For such a fully-featured notebook normally you'd be looking around the $3,000 mark, but Achieva has set this one at just under $2,500, which in our eyes makes it excellent value.

The AStone M3700 is a solid, competently configured and nicely priced notebook. Go get one.