Claimed by its makers to be unique, the Series 6210 notebook can be used as a large personal DVD player as well as normal notebook. But it's a bit of a curate's egg; as a DVD player it's great, but as a notebook it falls a bit short of the mark, performance-wise, and it also gets very hot - you wouldn't want it on your lap for too long. However, its saving graces are its big screen and its price.

One of the best parts of this notebook is its bright, sharp, 15.4-inch screen, which has a native resolution of 1,280 by 800 pixels. And despite its size, the Series 6210 weighs just 4kg (including the power adapter). Because it has a wide body to accommodate the large screen, the keyboard is a good size and the 19.5mm keys make it easier to use than many notebook keyboards.

Feature-wise you get four USB 2.0 ports, LAN and modem ports, S-Video out as well as VGA and audio. It is also wireless enabled with an 802.11g unit that can be switched off to prolong battery life. Unfortunately there is no FireWire connection which would aid things such as video transfers, nor is there any flash memory card reader.

In its DVD player guise, the Series 6210 plays CDs or DVDs through a quick-load player without the need to be booted into Windows. It really is a quick-load player, too; just 20 seconds after pressing the 'on' button on the front of the unit, the disk is playing.

Along with the on/off button there are buttons for stop, eject, pause, advance and rewind and the player accepts MP3 discs as well as audio CDs and DVDs. If you can't be bothered to press the buttons yourself the Series 6210 comes with a tiny remote control which is handily stored in the PC Card slot.

When used as a notebook, however, it's not helped by the choice of chipset and processor. AMD's XP-M 2400+ may run at 1.8GHz but it's no match for Intel's 1.8GHz Pentium M, especially as it's setup to achieve maximum battery life by clocking down to 400MHz (in the case of our review unit, even when it was plugged into the mains). But the biggest problem comes with the graphics subsystem.

By using an SIS M741 integrated chipset you lose 32MB of the 512MB system memory to drive the graphics, which may be fine if you are going to use it in notebook mode purely for office work or Web surfing. But this is one notebook you are not going to be playing any of the current hot games on. Although the chipset is supposed to be DirectX 8.1 compliant, the system under test wouldn't load passed the first test (DX7) in 3DMark 03 which accounts for its woeful score of just 80.

Verdict
If you don't need a powerful notebook but rather just want the basics and the ability to play movies on the move then the Series 6210 is a good choice. It's not for gamers or serious business users, though.

Company: Averatec

Tags: dvd universal serial bus advanced micro devices directx dvd player compact disc ieee 1394 interface intel core i7