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If you’re on a tight budget and want an ultra-portable you can carry everywhere with you, Medion’s Akoya E3211 looks an attractive proposition. For just £500, you get a 13.3in widescreen laptop that weighs just 1.8kg. Unfortunately, the budget nature of this laptop shines through. For starters, opening the lid reveals an uninspiring silver-and-black design that makes the Akoya look cheap. Inside, things aren’t that much better. The 1.3GHz Intel Pentium SU2700 processor is one of the slowest models you can buy, and meant that this laptop was very slow in our benchmarks, scoring 21 overall, despite its 4GB of RAM. At this speed, the Akoya’s fine for basic office tasks, but editing large image files or videos will be more of a struggle. Games are also out of the question. The onboard Intel GMA4500M graphics chip managed only 4.4fps in our Call of Duty 4 test. The keyboard’s not very good, either. The keys are a decent size, but they’re very spongy and make typing at speed inaccurate. We found the tiny cursor keys hard to use, while the touchpad’s sunken buttons are difficult to hit accurately. Viewing angles aren’t brilliant on the 13.3in 1,366×768 screen, but it’s fine for one person. The screen is bright and colours look fine. Thankfully, there’s a DVD drive built in – which many budget ultra-portables don’t have – so you can watch movies on the go. One thing we expect from an ultra-portable is fantastic battery life. At nearly four-and-a-half hours, the Akoya can be used for a fair time away from a power socket, but we’ve seen budget ultra-portables, such as Acer’s Aspire Timeline 5810GT, last longer. It’s not all bad news, though. The 320GB hard disk is generous for the price, and gives you plenty of space for all of your documents.
The Akoya 3211 is a compact laptop with good battery life, but the single-core processor holds back performance and the keyboard is uncomfortable. Samsung’s Q320 costs a little more, but has far better performance and similar battery life. It’s a much better choice.
