Competent companion

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If you have a big cabin with a big table with an even bigger padded chair at your place of work, you must definitely be the boss! But size does not matter when it comes to personal gadgets, like PMPs (personal music player or multi media player) or cell-phones/PDAs. There, on the contrary, the smaller the better! This is also true for laptops. What is the point of having a 17” laptop that weighs more than 3kg and juts out 4” on either side of your lap? Not only is it cumbersome to work on while travelling (air or road), but it also disturbs co-travellers.

As a big truism goes: good things come in small packages and Indian IT giant HCL seems to have taken it to heart. It recently launched the MiLeap series of sleek, ultra portable, fully functional laptops with seven-inch display screens. At a price point starting from Rs 13,990 and available with both flash-based and disk-based storage versions, with Linux operating system, they offer a full mobile Internet computing experience.

The MiLeap-S that I got for review is a new hard disk (HDD) based model that comes preinstalled with Microsoft Windows XP, starter edition. Weighing just 1.44 kg, the feather-light laptop is designed to resemble a personal organiser (diary) in both shape and size. The appealing top plastic cover is user-changeable, has a well-padded hand grip and a magnetic buckle like any other organiser. To add a dash of glamour, it comes in three attractive colours (rich black, pink and cool blue) to choose from.

As you lift the top panel open, a rather small (800 X 480 resolution) LCD, TFT display panel encrusted in matt-grey bezel with pearl white trimming greets you. The broad duo colour bezel makes the LCD look still smaller, but as you power it on, the bright and sharp colours compensate for the size. Though there is enough space to use a bigger display panel (up to 10 inches), the company has probably provided a smaller screen to keep costs in check.