Nokia Booklet 3G

The idea of paying £660 for an Intel Atom-powered netbook with a 10.1” screen may seem absurd, particularly when excellent models cost half as much, but that’s just how much Nokia wants for its Booklet 3G.

On the face of it, that price tag suggests that Nokia has made a fundamental miscalculation in judging what people want from a netbook, but dig a little deeper and you can see a little more justification for the Booklet 3G’s high price.

For a start, the Booklet 3G looks like no other netbook we’ve ever seen. Sure, it’s the same size and shape as other Intel Atom-powered portables, but the aluminium ‘unibody’ case makes it look more like something Apple would come up with if it wasn’t so obsessed with thinking different. The sleek silver effect is a spoiled somewhat by a shiny plastic panel that covers the lid, but at just 19.9mm thick, this is one slim and sturdy netbook.

Lift the lid and the aluminium extends to the screen edges and keyboard surround, too. The screen itself is capped with a sheet of glass and there’s a wide black bezel on all four sides, but the overall effect is rather stylish. The screen is hinged so that it can fold open to almost 180 degrees, but viewing angles aren’t really wide enough for viewing at anything other than face-on.

You’ll need to sit fairly close to the Booklet 3G to use it, too, since the screen’s unusually high 1280 x 720 resolution makes the Windows 7 Desktop rather small when crammed into a 10.1” diagonal. We’re almost tempted to say “too small”, but we found it quite refreshing to be able to use a netbook just like any other laptop and not have to worry about tall dialog boxes and wide web pages fitting on screen properly.

We’re less thrilled with the Booklet 3G’s picture quality, though. The screen is crisp, but not terribly bright and the glass overlay seems to carry a fine grain that creates a subtle optical distortion. It’s not enough to spoil the image, but it’s not something we’ve seen before on any netbook — and not something we’d expect to see on one costing this much.

Netbook manufacturers have long since figured out how to squeeze a near full-size keyboard into a 10.1” chassis, but the Booklet 3G has a layout that’s a good few millimetres smaller than we’d like. The chiclet keys are also more compact than usual too, although their wide spacing still makes them comfortable to type on. We don’t like the condensed cursor key arrangement tucked in at the bottom right of the keyboard, but that’s our only real quibble.

Although the sums don’t really add up when you look at how much 3G and GPS chipsets cost to buy in bulk, we suspect the addition of these two features are the main reasons for the Booklet 3G’s high price. The problem is that neither are really essential on a netbook — a USB 3G modem costs around £10 with a PAYG contract and GPS isn’t that much use on a device this size.

The SIM slot sits next to an SD Card slot behind a flap on the right of the netbook but while the Booklet 3G is unlocked for use with any mobile operator, we’ve yet to see subsidised models available in the UK.

Nokia hasn’t done anything fancy with the rest of the specification and the Booklet 3G uses an Intel Atom Z530 processor, 1Gb of DDR2 RAM and a 120Gb hard drive. The processor runs at 1.6GHz and turned in the lowest score of any netbook we’ve tested with PCMark05 — 1044. This doesn’t necessarily mean much, but the Booklet 3G also felt incredibly sluggish in use, with software installations taking an age and running more than a couple of applications at once practically brought Windows 7 to its knees. Again, we’ve never seen Windows 7 run on an Atom processor so poorly and again, it’s not something we’d expect at this sort of price.

Sadly, poor performance also hinders the graphics and the Intel GMA500 chipset isn’t up to running HD video. This chipset is now supported by Flash 10.1 beta, so HD YouTube playback should be possible, but this won’t affect QuickTime, where even 480p clips were jerky.

Battery life is more impressive, however, and the Booklet 3G ran for just over seven hours in BatteryEater Pro’s Classic test and 10 hours in the Reader test. The large battery fits flush to the case and the netbook only weighs 1.25kg, but as impressive as this is, it just doesn’t justify the £660 price tag.