It is rare to see a genuine innovation where notebooks are concerned, but Asus/Hi-Grade has come up with something totally different. The Notino T9400 is an ultra-portable notebook with a removable MP3 player built into it.

The MP3 player is tiny - slightly smaller than a playing card and less than 3cm deep. It's light, too. It has a small screen on the front edge, which tells you which track is playing, how long is left and so on. Four buttons control its operation, and it's very easy to work out how to skip tracks, fast forward and rewind through your music, and adjust the volume.

The player has 64Mb of memory, which is enough for a CD's worth of decent quality music. It also doubles as a voice recorder. Simply press the record button and you can digitally record your voice for up to four hours.

The player docks into the front of the notebook. Once there, it recharges its batteries from the notebook's power cells. You can then copy the music you have downloaded or transferred from CD onto the player ready for listening at your leisure.

The software is basic, but easy to use - simply click on the files you want to transfer, press a button, and wait. All in all, it's a very nifty little device that'll keep you entertained for ages.

None of which would matter if the notebook itself was rubbish, but this is not the case. There are no floppy or DVD drives inside the notebook itself, which helps to reduce size and weight. At a shade under 3cm though, it still isn't as slim as the competitors but that's hardly surprising, considering it can't be thinner than the MP3 player which slots in the front. It's fairly lightweight, tipping the scales at 2.2kg.

The DVD drive is inside an AI-Box - a case that can also take CD-ROM, CD-RW or hard disk drives. It's easy to replace the DVD drive - simply push a button to slide the drive out. The cable from the box to the back of the notebook is quite short, so you'll have to keep it nearby when connected.

A USB floppy drive is also supplied, so swapping small files between PCs is simple, although having a floppy drive to plug into the AI box would have cut down on clutter.

One thing that is usually cut on a notebook of this size is the number of ports, but this Notino has them in abundance. There are two USB ports for a start and a mini FireWire port too. The latter is primarily used for editing video from certain types of camcorder. This is a possibility on this Notino, although there's no specific software supplied to help you out and editing video requires huge amounts of hard disk space.

Both modem and network ports are built into the notebook, so you'll be able to get on the internet and share files no matter where you are. There's even an infrared port.

The usual slots are in place and a PS/2 mouse port if the touchpad proves too tricky. There is also a parallel port connection and the obligatory external monitor connector.

The keyboard is comfortable to use, with keys that are sensibly laid out and feel reassuringly responsive. Past Asus/Hi-Grade notebooks have been criticised for their springy, insubstantial keyboards, but there are no such problems here.

The screen is also a gem. The 14.1in display has a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels that means you get a decent amount of room to fit all your applications onto the Desktop, and the displayed image is clear and bright.

The Notino's got plenty of oomph, too. A 1GHz mobile Pentium III supplies the juice for the T9400 and although 128Mb of memory is only average, it should be enough, unless you go in for lots of image editing.

The 30Gb hard drive is a fair size for a notebook of this class and battery life is good for such a small machine. It should manage just over two hours between recharging.

Buyers get the choice of having Windows Millennium or XP Home Edition installed, but our recommendation for stability would be the latter. Copies of Microsoft's Works Suite 2001 and Norton AntiVirus are thrown in for good measure.

The icing on the cake is the price. £1,497 would be good for this notebook even if it didn't have an MP3 player. The fact that it does is a huge bonus.

Contact
Hi-Grade: 0800 074 0403 www.higrade.comALSO CONSIDER

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Computeractive, Issue 95.