SPLASHED with colours inspired by autumn leaves, the NEC S5500 laptop seems to signal that NEC may be shedding its boring, black-business outfit for a more appealing, personalised look.

But strip the classy colours away from this laptop, and what's left is just an ordinary ultra-portable notebook.

The 1.9kg notebook is made of tough magnesium alloy, giving it a higher chance of surviving the wear and tear of executive travel. Taking up the space of a sheet of A4 paper, this notebook has a travel-friendly, 12.1-inch WXGA display, a webcam and a built-in DVD burner.

On battery the S5500 lasted some 176 minutes before it shut down. This means, assuming that you have the battery fully charged, you can enjoy the two-hour-plus epic movie Saving Private Ryan on DVD.

NEC offers several processor-RAM-hard disk combinations but the test machine came with an Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz processor with 2GB DDR2 SDRAM and 250GB hard disk.

Specifications in the multimedia department also leave much to be desired. The S5500 has only an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100, tHe notebook scored a low 556 points on the 3DMark 06 benchtest.

This is way below the 2,860 points registered by a similarly- sized notebook, the LG P300.

With these specifications, I would recommend using this notebook for everyday tasks like text editing and Web surfing. However, its one saving grace is its high definition multimedia interface. With this you can deliver HD images from the notebook to a larger screen HDTV.

Expect all the standard must-have connectivity features for a notebook. For example, there are three USB ports for external devices, wired and wireless networking options as well as a three-in-one memory card reader for copying or exporting data.

FINAL SAY

Beauty may be priceless but in this case, it exacts too much moolah.