The Elonex Web-book
While the Carphone Warehouse-branded and Elonex-built Web-book is sure to be a contender for those looking to buy a mid-market ‘netbook’ there is little here that truly sets the device apart from the competition.
With the vast array of mini-laptop devices available today the ‘netbook’ classification has gone from being a niche to becoming a genre all of its own. While there are both cheap and relatively expensive machines within that genre the majority sit somewhere in the middle and offer little difference in the way of features.
The Web-book is no different and with its half a gigabyte of RAM and 1.6GHz processor everything appears to be standard-issue. The 80GB hard drive, on the other hand, is more substantial than many rival models on the market but it is hardly unmatched.
The machine’s small battery offers less than three hours of usage, which seems somewhat counter-productive for a device built for portability. Despite this the machine’s overall weight is 1.3kg, relatively high for a small netbook with a small battery.
In its favour the Web-book is fast to start-up and more than able to handle the regular functions most people look for in a laptop of this size. Its 10.2 inch screen is one of the larger used in a netbook and is far more comfortable than the more minute on offer out there. Likewise the keyboard’s reasonable size makes it easy to use after a few minutes of practice, although there are one or two unusual key placements that take a bit more getting used to than they should.
Priced under the €400-mark it is far from the cheapest machine out there but it is competitive when considered against laptops with similar features.
All of that being said there is a distinct feeling when using this laptop that it is already a victim to the fast-moving pace of the netbook market. Already there are lighter, cheaper and perhaps even more powerful variants out there that are in line to attract the Christmas buyer and unless the Web-book comes down in price or adds functionality to make itself more competitive it may be out of the game.
One or two features that could have helped give it the edge are missing, notably Bluetooth functionality. What is odd about this is the fact that a function key exists on the Web-book to activate Bluetooth, implying that it will be a feature added at a later date.
Overall the Web-book is good but not great. To some degree it is a victim of its own design flaws, particularly in the area of battery power and weight. In other ways it is simply a victim of the fast-moving market which has made it far less competitive now than it may have been when it was first designed.
Elonex are doing some pretty interesting things in the netbook space at the moment, including the Elonex One which sells for just €127 (or £99 in the company’s native Britain). Therefore it is unlikely that the company will have a hard time coming up with something to put its Web-book offering back on the cutting edge.
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