Sixty-eight minutes was all the time this NEC Versa S3300 had for battery power - not nearly enough to run the 110-minute Bourne Ultimatum movie DVD.

With the low battery life and the plain look and feel, my initial opinion of the S3300 was not too good.

Fortunately, deeper investigations revealed a compact notebook with credible computing power, good multimedia accessories and highly portable features.

For road warriors, travelling with this 2-kg notebook should be easy. If you go off-road, the notebook's durable magnesium alloy chassis should handle the average knocks and bumps.

NEC has configured this machine with fairly high-end parts like an Intel Centrino Core Duo 2.2GHz processor coupled with 2GB DDR SDRAM. Hard disk options vary from 80GB to 250GB. As expected, there is a DVD-R/RW for playing DVD movies and burning DVD disks.

There is more good news. Notebooks usually come with weak two-speaker systems. This one has four high definition speakers that complement the bright and widescreen 13.3-inch LCD.

If only there had been a more powerful graphics subsystem instead of the Mobile 965 Express chipset, the multimedia department would have had more bite. For the record, the S3300 scored a low 557 points on the 3DMark 06 bench test. With this, you could probably get away with playing real-time strategy games like Blitzkrieg II, but not first-person shooters like Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl.

The must-have features like three USB ports, a three-in-one memory card reader and FireWire are all there. As are wireless Internet surfing with Wi-Fi, and cable-free data transmission with Bluetooth.

Bundled software programs include easy-to-use Easy Media Creator, Power Cinema 5.0 and Magic Director. They allow you to burn CDs and DVDs, organise multimedia files and create movies, respectively.

FINAL SAY: Powerful computing power, but battery life can be better.

NEC Versa S3300
$2,399
Get it from authorised NEC dealers