Review: Elonex ONEt notebook computer

There’s a lot of interest in mini-notebooks at the moment, with lots of manufacturers trying to get in on the act.

Elonex's innovative One notebook has been around for a while, although it's been hard to get hold of. The One is aimed at students, but the company has now released the OneT, which is designed much more like a conventional notebook.

The OneT has a clamshell design and brightly coloured case – black, white, pink and green are available. Around the sides are sockets for USB connections, microphone and headphones as well as an SD memory card slot. This slot is important because the computer comes with just 128MB of main memory and a 1GB solid-state disk, with only 702MB of that available for documents. Plugging in more storage on SD card will probably be essential, then.

The widescreen 7in display has a resolution of 800x480 pixels, which is of course much smaller than that found on larger notebooks (a standard notebook might have a resolution of twice what the OneT has) but is just about big enough for displaying word processor documents and web pages.

The keyboard, although small, is usable even for those with large fingers, and the key layout is traditional. The touchpad is fine, too, though the two mouse-click buttons make audible clicks, which might attract attention if you're working in a library, for instance.

The OneT runs on an Ingenic processor. The chip runs at a speed of 400MHz, which is extremely slow by today's standards (up to one-tenth the speed of the fastest home computers) and you’d think that would mean everything would crawl. That might be true using Windows – it would be hard to get Windows XP, let alone Vista, to run on this computer.

But Elonex hasn't used Windows – instead, like many mini-notebooks, the OneT uses a version of Linux. It’s tailored for the OneT with a special graphic menu that neatly divides up the various pre-installed programs. Rather than using the free Openoffice software, Elonex has instead gone with Xip Suite, which features an Office-2003-compatible word processor and spreadsheet.

These work well and can handle day-to-day tasks, as long as it doesn't get too complex. As with the original One it's possible, even if you're not a fast typist, to type too fast for the processor to handle, so there's an obvious lag between key presses and characters appearing on the screen.

Firefox is included for web browsing and there's a custom-made email program. You can make the connection to the internet using a wired network connection or through a wireless network.

The third area of obvious application for a notebook of this size is as a media player. The built in speakers are no worse than in most notebooks, but plugging in a good headset gives decent results. There's media playing software installed, along with a photo viewer.

It can be used to view Flash video online, but using an old version of Flash, which means it's not up to playing videos from the BBC iPlayer, for example. Elonex is promising an update soon to correct this, though. Overall, the OneT is a much better choice than the One, both for students and anybody who wants basic office and internet functionality on the move. If you work in education, it's available for a discount price of £130, too.

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