Vye mini-v S37 ultra-portable tablet PC

Small, lightweight laptops are nothing new but it took the Asus Eee PC to bring the price down to a point where they were within the reach of most users. The Vye mini-v S37 has almost the same dimensions, but is a much more capable computer – and it runs Windows Vista. The catch is that this isn’t a low-cost laptop to play with in your spare time, but at £650, it’s still far cheaper than most ultra-portables.

The S37 weighs just 1.2kg and is roughly the size of a large paperback book, so it could easily fit inside a large coat pocket or handbag. It feels sturdily made too. Unfortunately it lacks a built-in optical drive although an external DVD writer, which costs about £50, can be plugged into one of the two USB ports. The S37 is very quiet when in use, but its underside can become very warm. It feels cooler when the built-in fan is turned on by pressing a key on the keyboard.

The large battery protrudes an extra 6cm from the back of the S37. Fortunately this extra bulk is not without benefit – the laptop lasted for nearly five hours in our light usage battery test. The battery took just over two hours to recharge, which is in line with what we would expect.

One reason for the S37’s lengthy battery life is its power-efficient 600MHz Intel A110 processor. Coupled with the included 1GB of RAM, the S37 is fast enough for web browsing, word processing and DivX videos, but it’s definitely not suited for more demanding tasks, such as image or video editing, though.

Unsurprisingly, the small keyboard is too cramped for touch typing, so you’ll have to resort to using just a couple of fingers with a thumb on the space bar. The keys themselves aren’t spongy and feel responsive, but the tiny keyboard is still better suited to writing short emails than long essays.

The small touch pad and buttons are also tricky to use, but no more so than on the Eee PC – and it’s miles better than the Packard Bell EasyNote XS’ ridiculous touchpad. But since the S37 also has a touch sensitive screen, we’d have preferred no touch pad at all and a larger, more comfortable keyboard instead.

Windows Vista can be controlled using the stylus and the touch-sensitive screen, although this isn’t as responsive as using the touchpad. Vista’s built-in handwriting recognition software is surprisingly accurate, though.

The 7in screen has a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels and although this is higher than that on both the Eee PC and EasyNote XS (just 800 x 480), it’s still just as frustrating to use. The bottom half of windows are often not visible without resizing the window and long text documents are a chore to read, requiring constant scrolling.

Since this is a tablet PC, the screen can be rotated through 180 degrees and folded flat onto the keyboard. While you can use the short stylus to control Vista with the S37 in tablet mode, buttons on the screen bezel make it an option. There’s a small joystick for moving the mouse pointer, a four-way pad for selecting icons, along with mouse buttons and a scroll button in lieu of a mouse wheel. The screen can also be rotated in 90 degree increments with the press of a dedicated button, so you can hold the S37 in any way you chose – and the wide battery makes for a convenient handgrip, too.

Unfortunately the image quality of the display is disappointing. Since it’s touch-sensitive rather than electromagnetic, it has an ever-so-slightly opaque layer that gives images a slightly grainy appearance. The semi-gloss coating is also highly reflective and suffers from distracting glare under certain lighting conditions (fluorescent office lights, for example).

The 120Gb hard disk dwarfs the Eee PC’s 4Gb SSD, but it’s nowhere near as robust and you’ll need to treat the S37 a little more carefully than you would the no-moving-parts Asus. The integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics chip really isn’t up to 3D gaming, though it can cope with Vista’s Aero interface.

Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi are built-in, but there’s no CardBus or ExpressCard slot – anyone looking for 3G connectivity will have to plug an external modem into one of the two USB ports. You probably won’t need an external memory card reader though, since slots for SD, Memory Stick and CompactFlash are built-in.

The S37 benefits from more storage space, a higher resolution screen, better battery life, the latest version of Windows and a touch-sensitive screen, but they come at a price -- the Asus Eee PC is £400 or so cheaper.

If you have a limited budget and want a compact ultra-portable that can run the same set of applications as your desktop PC, then the Vye S37 is a tempting proposition. But while its large hard disk and screen dwarf the Eee PC’s, Asus’ cheaper take is still better value for money.