NEC’s UltraLite long on battery life, but short on performance

By Matthew Fordahl

Associated Press

Weighing in at about 3 pounds and promising a long battery life, the compact NEC Versa UltraLite should be a dream machine for anyone who needs to travel with a portable computer.

For the most part, it is.

The power supply easily lasts long enough for a transcontinental flight and, once at the destination, its bulk is hardly noticeable in a briefcase.

Still, the UltraLite, powered by a Transmeta Corp. processor, is no speed demon. And at a list price of $2,499, the UltraLite is not an especially affordable portable.

The brain of the machine — a 600-megahertz Crusoe — saves power by throttling its speed up or down depending on the power demands of programs. The chip also shifts some of the innerworking typically handled by hardware to software.

The result is a trade-off between battery life and performance.

During normal use — running a word processor, for instance — the shifting is not noticeable, beyond a small utility that graphically displays the current speed of the processor.

But the laptop does feel somewhat underpowered, mostly when several programs are running simultaneously. I noticed it while listening to MP3 files, surfing the Internet and transferring files to and from my home network. The music paused but resumed once the machine caught its breath.

To be fair, other bottlenecks beyond the processor could be to blame, including the hard drive or even the network connection. It’s also unlikely a business traveler would be doing so much at once.

Beyond the processor, the laptop has a few other quirks. As is the case with most ultraportables, the keyboard is way too small. The small "enter" and right-side "shift" keys are easily missed.

The touchpad also is oddly positioned to the left. I accidentally hit it often while aiming for the undersize "space" bar.

The standard unit was equipped with 128 megabytes of memory and a 20 gigabyte hard disk. The 10.4-inch active-matrix XGA screen was crisp, but not enough for daylight. NEC has introduced another model — called the Versa Daylite — with a screen designed to work in bright sun.

Any quibbles can easily be overlooked by the fact that the NEC’s batteries last up to six hours before requiring a recharge. The machine has two batteries — one in the base and another behind the display.

In a test, I ran the CD player that plugs in via a Universal Serial Bus port and several programs, including Access and Word in the Microsoft Office suite. During that time, the screen, which is typically the biggest consumer of power in a laptop, was never allowed to shut off.

The UltraLite ran about four hours before low-battery warnings started to pop up. It shut off a few minutes later.

A similar test on a Gateway Solo 3400 powered by a 600 MHz Intel Pentium III mobile processor ended in just 90 minutes after all the juice was depleted. That unit, however, has just a single battery.

The Gateway unit also did not seem as prone to pauses and stuttering during periods of high workloads.

Still, both machines would be far easier to use if wireless networking capabilities were built in.