“This happy lappy is one of a range that goes by the name of Joybook. Made by a Taiwanese company called BenQ, Joybooks are almost unknown in the UK for reasons I ca’t fathom, other than, possibly, that both the company and product name are a bit eccentric for British tastes.
Joybooks are, however, extremely popular in Europe, especially Germany, where this model in particular is rated by several magazines as the best or near-best laptop on the market. It’s also exceptionally good value. All of which might be recommendation enough but, for me, the joy of the Joybook extends much further. I’ve just come back from a working trip to Australia where this one enjoyed a fair old pounding in tricky conditions, and I have to say I’m now quite in love with it.
Sizewise, the Joybook 5000 fits more into the “desktop/laptop” category than the “super-slim notebook.” Now, big portable PCs do’t normally do it for me, but the Joybook is wonderfully smooth and rounded and feels physically the nearest to an Apple PowerBook of any PC laptop I’ve played with. It has truly sexy curved lines and is made from a delightfully smooth material that feels like an alloy, even if it’s plastic.
Saying that a laptop looks and feels nice may seem a small point, but why should’t this be a consideration when many of us spend our entire life looking at and touching the things? There’s more to the Joybook, though. Functionally, it has a superb keyboard and the only comfortably useable trackpad mouse I have ever tried. It is also blessed with top-flight battery life – five to six hours – for a big machine. And a brilliantly bright and vivid screen.
As for performance, there’s something unusually perky and sharp about the Joybook. It’s quick, super-user-friendly, nicely behaved and spookily silent like no other laptop I’ve used, except, again, the PowerBooks. The specifications of the Joybook series vary, but I’d recommend the best of the mid-range 5000 models, with its Pentium 1.6GHz, Intel Centrino wireless, 512Mb of RAM, 60Gb hard drive, DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive and 3-in-1 Memory Stick/SD/MMC card reader.
Funnily enough, while I was considering all this, Sony sent me its latest and greatest Vaio notebook, the snappily named PCGZX1SP, priced at almost double the Joybook.
I have to say, impressive as it is, I hated it in comparison. After a fortnight of BenQ Joy, the Sony felt unbalanced and awkward. The trackpad in particular was horrible, faced with some rough material that makes it hard for the fingers to slide aroud. And when you do get the cursor stuttering into action, you fingers scraping the trackpad sound like a small, annoying creature scrabbling about.
Oh, and I also found the Sony rather unintuitive. It’s common for review models to come without instructions- when you use a different laptop every week, they tend to work in much the same way. The Joybook was easy as pie, but this Vaio came with the screen adjusted to took dark, and try as I might, I could find no way to increase the brightness.
Bad Sony. Good BenQ.
BenQ Joybook 5000, from around ขG985 to ขG1,280 from www.dabs.com. See www.benq.com