Nokia Booklet 3G

26. Jan, 2010 1 Comment

Yes you did read the title correctly, Nokia have dipped their toe into the netbook market and brought us the Nokia Booklet 3G. So does the mobile phone company cut the mustard in the computer world or should they stick to what they’re good at? We’ve sent our agents in to bring us a full report.

The Good

The new Nokia Booklet 3G certainly makes a good first impression, it has a certain Macbook-esque look about it with an aluminium chassis that also doubles up as a heat sink enabling Nokia to do away with a fan and vents. The fact that they have used aluminium does mean the netbook weighs a bit more than most (1.2Kgs) but this is far from a bad thing, it feels much studier and better built than a lot of the recent netbooks on the market. The outer lid has glossy plastic which isn’t interchangeable unfortunately but does come in 3 different colours, black, silver and blue, of course the glossy finish tends to attract fingerprint marks so you’ll be glad to hear that Nokia even include a little cloth to keep the Booklet 3G spick and span.

Lifting the lid reveals a 10.1 inch LED backlit display, which in fact is very easy on eye, it runs at 1280 x 720 which provides a good amount of screen real estate for a netbook. Just above the screen is a built in 1.3MP camera and beneath is a chichlet style keyboard, the keys are very comfortable to work with, if ever-so slightly smaller than the norm but we didn’t find this to be a problem with our chubby digits. The mouse trackpad we were very impressed with, it is only a basic touchpad and doesn’t support all the fancy pinching and twisting gestures, but still was very easy to use and a good size.

There are plenty of connection options on the Booklet 3G, consisting of three USB sockets, headphone jack, HDMI output and a SD card reader all found on each side. Nokia have also decided to integrate a GPS chip which we thought was a nice touch and not often found in other netbooks/laptops, while it doesn’t work brilliantly inside a thick walled building it does work nearer to a window or while strolling outside, it accurately tracked our location and we could plot destinations with ease. It also of course offers connectivity via Wi-Fi and even bluetooth, but the Nokia Booklet 3G really comes into it’s own with it’s built-in 3G.

The Booklet 3G has a SIM card slot on the side which allows you to connect to the 3G network in those times where a Wi-Fi hotspot isn’t available. Installation is a breeze and as soon as you insert your sim card, Windows 7 picks it up and has you connected via 3G in no time at all. You can currently use a SIM card from any network as the Booklet 3G isn’t locked into one or the other, but this may change if they start to offer a subsidised model in exchange for a mobile broadband contract.

Battery life on Nokia’s offering is truly excellent, lasting a good 7/8 hours under load, under normal use you could easily expect it to last a good 12 hours+ between charges which should be more than ample for those on the go.

The core of the netbook is an Intel Atom Z530 running at 1.6GHz combined with 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a 120GB hard drive

The Bad

Even though the low power Intel Atom CPU provides the system with excellent battery life, it does suffer a bit in the performance stakes, if you try and have too many applications open at once it will start to struggle. That being said the same is true for most netbooks using the Intel Atom chip, but in the price range in which this one lies a little more would have been nice.

Nokia have bundled in Windows 7 as well, but only the starter edition unfotunately, while it does the basics very well you won’t find any of the bells and whistles to be found in the more advanced editions.

Conclusion

For it’s price tag the Nokia Booklet 3G certainly looks the part, just let down slightly by it’s ability to multi-task. If it’s style and looks you are after then this is your baby, but if you want more performance bang for your buck then keep shopping around.