If you’ve read the first part of our Nokia Booklet 3G review, then you’ll know how impressed we are with the overall build quality and design of this mini-laptop. This time around, we thought it only right to check out the performance and battery life. Find out how well the Nokia Booklet 3G performs after the jump...
The Nokia Booklet 3G is powered by the Intel Atom Z530, which has a clock speed of 1.6GHz and a Front Side Bus of 533MHz. This is a curious choice for Nokia, considering most of machines in this form factor uses an Intel Atom N270. However, the benefit becomes clear as soon as you turn the Nokia Booklet 3G on – near silence.
The Nokia Booklet 3G is a fan-less design, so you need the lesser heat generated by the Z530 chip to make the most of the design and to keep the Booklet 3G cool to the touch. We found this to be the case even after uses the mini-laptop for long periods of time.
The near silent running of the Nokia Booklet 3G is a great design achievement but it does mean that Windows 7 Home Premium loads a little slower than we’d have liked. What’s more, while we found we could easily switch between opened windows, loading more than two programs at any one time soon starts to create drag.
Check out our Nokia Booklet 3G unboxing
It’s worth bearing in mind that laptops like the Nokia Booklet 3G aren’t intended to be anything more than you email, word processor and movie watching machine on the move and this tiny device more than lives up to those tasks.
The single thing we’ve been most amazed with on the Nokia Booklet 3G is the battery life. The 16-cell unit is small and compact and doesn’t impact of weight to any degree – the 1.3kg weight of the Nokia Booklet 3G is highly impressive. Nokia claims you’ll be able to get 12 hours from this mini-laptop and we came close, running the Nokia Booklet 3G for over 11 hours carrying out a mixture of tasks, from writing this review to watching a couple of movies on the train.
A word or warning though, run the screen at full brightness and you will find this dropping down to around seven hours, which is still more than you’ll find with most laptops of this size.
The question most people will ask is whether the Nokia Booklet 3G offers good value for money and we have to admit that’s a tough one – if you’re looking for a cheap machine then there are better bargains to be had. However, the Nokia Booklet 3G never set out to compete with these models and the build quality and sheer functionality of this model makes it worth every penny.
The Nokia Booklet 3G is a pleasure to use, especially out and about, and is a great first step into a whole new market for Nokia. There are small niggles, such as real lack of processing power and the lack of a self-upgrade path is a little frustrating but if you remember what the Nokia Booklet 3G is intended to be – your secondary machine and not your sole laptop, then you’ll find yourself easily bowled over by what’s on offer.