Hewlett Packard OmniBook 500

Ultra-portable notebooks are the creme de la creme of the computer world: neat and powerful, they are the preserve of the wealthy professional.

Some companies are attempting to drag down the prices to broaden the appeal of these wondrous machines, but HP has stuck to form and produced the OmniBook 500, with lavish features and a hefty price tag.

The innovations in this nifty notebook are mainly confined to its expansion slice. This acts as a docking station designed to stay rooted to the desktop, and onto which you can attach the OmniBook to give it more functionality, such as floppy disk and CD drives. These can be removed and swapped for yet more devices - DVD-ROM, CD-RW and long-life battery - which slot in smoothly.

The machine is driven by a 600Mhz Pentium III processor, backed up by 128Mb of memory and a 10Gb hard disk drive. The screen is a 12.1in model with a resolution of 1024x768, and it gives a bright and clear display - as you'd expect of a computer at this price level. Without the expansion slice attached, the OmniBook's upgrade options are limited to a solitary Type II PC Card slot and two USB ports.

The OmniBook 500 is one of the most attractive little computers on sale, with a soft-blue theme set off supremely by a smattering of bright-blue LED indicator lights. Flip it open and it's just as pretty, with a rubberised wrist-rest underlining a nice, big keyboard. In the middle of this is a trackpoint nipple controller.

Oscar Wilde once said that nothing succeeds like excess and this is certainly true of the OmniBook, but it comes at a price. It's about as desirable as notebook computers can be.

Contact
Hewlett Packard 0870 547 4747, www.hp.com/uk

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!