BenQ’s S61 Joybook is the cheapest of our three ultraportables this month, but few people would guess from looking at it. It’s just as well built as HP’s and Asus’ offerings, it arguably looks just as good with its metallic plastic livery, and it’s not that much bigger either.
Despite a thick bezel, the LCD is 12.1in and sports a resolution of 1280 x 800. It’s bright, clear and crisp and offers very good viewing angles. It has the most comfortable keyboard of the lot too, with a nice smooth action that’s very well weighted. We have no complaints with the trackpad either.
Whereas the nc2400 is for business and the S6 is for those-who-like-luxury BenQ calls the S61 a multimedia notebook – unusual for something this small. But there’s substance behind this claim. It’s packed with features, including 802.11a/b/g WiFi, BlueTooth 2 and Gigabit Ethernet. There are three USB 2 ports and a media card reader that supports SD/MMC and Memory Sticks. A wireless switch is included and our only gripe is that the DVD writer is not dual-layer.
It also has an integral digital TV tuner. While we’d normally write this off as a gimmick, its integration with the surprisingly-good QMedia interface (a Windows Media Center clone) worked very well, albeit only when we were outside. Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) support is limited though – you can’t use IceTV’s IceGuide. On the audio front, the speakers are adequate if a little quiet and tinny.
We’re still struggling to find an obvious weak spot, and the performance isn’t it. With its 1.83GHz dual-core T2400 processor, 512MB of RAM and generously-proportioned 80GB hard disk it raced to a score of 0.99 in our benchmarks – the fastest ultraportable we’ve seen. There are few 2D applications that it can’t handle.
With such power we didn’t expect to battery life to be up to much, and at first glance it wasn’t. The standard battery lasted just 45 minutes in our intensive test and only two hours and two minutes under light use. But BenQ also includes a high-capacity battery. This lasted a more-respectable one hour 52 minutes under intensive use and four hours 17 minutes under light use. It’s still some way behind the 10 hours of Lenovo and Sony, but it’s almost a grand cheaper too.
At 1.7kg with the small battery and 1.85kg with the extended battery it’s still a genuine ultraportable despite being the heaviest of this crop. It’s lighter too than the MSI Megabook S262 we saw last month (September 2006, page 38). That remains some $500 cheaper, but the Joybook offers more quality and better ergonomics. It’s still not cheap at two-and-a-half grand but the two-year onsite warranty helps soften the blow and, for the quality on offer, it’s a good buy.
