Review: Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Mini UI3520

NETBOOKS are ten a penny these days, so to stand out they really need to be good or have a unique selling point (USP).

Sony took an interesting approach with their P Series by making them shockingly expensive - you can get a powerful desktop PC for less than the £800-odd quid the Sony will cost you.

Dell and others seem to be leading the charge toward equipping their mini marvels with built-in 3G broadband.

So what is the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Mini's USP? Hmmm, tough one that.

The coloured, clip-on covers? No, they don't really do it - the burgundy clip-on on my review unit fell off at the slightest provocation.

The slightly retro, glossy white and black styling? Nice, but hardly unique.

The Silent Mode, which allows you to throttle down the ubiquitous Intel Atom N270 processor and thereby reduce fan noise? Actually, I ran it at full pelt and didn't even notice any fan noise, so that's a 'no' too.

The truth is, the Amilo Mini doesn't have a USP - it's yet another Atom-based netbook and, as such, it shares the strengths and weaknesses of most of its brethren.

The keyboard is horribly cramped and responds to your presses with a hideous clackety-click. You need to be extremely accurate to hit the Space bar and Enter key, and while the touchpad is OK, the left and right mouse-click buttons take a lot of getting used to.

The 8.9inch, 1024x600 resolution, non-glare display is plenty bright enough, but colours aren't as rich as on the Dell Inspiron Mini.

But where the Amilo Mini does very well is in the speed stakes: It benefits from having 1GB of RAM, so the pre-installed Windows XP Home and programs run surprisingly quickly for a machine with only a 1.6GHz processor.

Specs-wise the Amilo Mini is good - a 60GB HDD (£279.99 inc VAT - the 80GB version is £289.99 inc VAT); 4-in-1 card reader, USBx2, 1.3megapixel webcam, VGA display slot, PC Express card slot, Bluetooth, Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics, wireless and ethernet networking.

The sound from the Mini's two small speakers, sited just above the keyboard, is not brilliant but is passable for occasional use.

The Atheros wireless detected and connected to my home broadband network without any difficulties and wired networking is equally trouble-free.

And that's about it really: The Amilo Mini is solidly built, with a decent screen, a ghastly keyboard and all the usual netbook bells and whistles.

There's no Linux OS option with the Amilo Mini but, mischievous red devil that I am, I tried it with Ubuntu 8.10 running off a USB pendrive.

Performance was exceptionally fast but unfortunately, so was the Synaptics touchpad which bordered on the unusable without a fair degree of tweaking.

Ubuntu also had problems with the Atheros wi-fi chipset - I had to go hunting on the Ubuntu forums for a solution and only after considerable fiddling did I manage to get the Mini temporarily connected wirelessly.

Disappointingly, I had similar problems with my Huawei 3G mobile broadband dongle (using the 3 network) in the Mini's other USB slot - this normally works fine with Ubuntu-based distros but Network Manager failed to detect it as usual.

Wired ethernet (see picture right) worked fine, however, as did the Mini's sound and screen resolution; so, not bad but still some work to be done if you plan on wiping XP and replacing it with a Linux distribution.

So, to conclude, if you don't plan on writing any long reports on it, it could do you a turn and at these prices represents a reasonable, if unspectacular, investment.

Visit www.fujitsu-siemens.co.uk/, or to buy the Amilo Mini go to www.fujitsu-siemens-shop.co.uk/