Fujitsu Siemens AMILO Mini Ui 3520 netbook review

Overall though, the keyboard is serviceable, which couldn't really be said for the trackpad. For some reason, Fujitsu Siemens has decided to place the mouse buttons to the sides, rather than on top of the trackpad, as is conventional. This meant that to select we had to cross over our thumb and forefinger, which felt quite unnatural and we never got used to it.

In terms of specifications, the Amilo is adequately equipped, with the netbook standard issue Intel Atom N270 processor and Windows XP Home operating system. It felt perfectly responsive even with 1GB of RAM, and as only one memory slot is occupied, its easy to slot in another if you feel it needs a little boost.

Fujitsu Siemens has decided to make use of a conventional hard disk rather than any of these new fangled solid state drives, though the 60GB of capacity is less than 64GB SSD drives - cost effectiveness is naturally the name of the game here.

There are two USB ports on the machine, with one on each side, which helps with connectivity. Wi-Fi (b/g only) and Bluetooth are built-in, and can quickly and easily be turned on and off via the keyboard. On the left you'll find an analogue VGA output, so if you just want something small to run your presentations out to for a projector, this will work fine. On the right there's an Ethernet port, but it's not Gigabit ready. At the front is a SD card slot reader along with headphone and microphone sockets.

As such it pretty much ticks all the boxes for basic functionality. However, there’s nothing else here that stands out from the competition, such as integrated 3G.

In terms of raw performance, the scores from our in-house benchmarks, which run a series of productivity apps, returned 0.37 compared to our reference desktop PC. This might not sound fast, but is perfectly adequate for running basic office applications.

Battery life is perhaps more of a pressing concern and here the Amilo did pretty well, lasting four hours and thirteen minutes under our light-use tests. However, you can get greater staying power from machines such as the Asus Eee PC 901, which lasts around eight hours.

Overall, the Amilo just comes across as a fairly run-of-the-mill netbook, which is problematic when there are now so many to choose from. Specifications and performance it’s average, but ergonomically, it’s far from the best.

It's not a bad machine taken in isolation, but for an individual to purchase we'd look elsewhere, and unless you're getting a fantastic deal from Fujitsu Siemens, we suggest companies do too.