When mobility is more important than grunt, the Fujitsu LifeBook Q2010 is ideal. But it doesn't come cheap.

It weighs only 1.1kg with its standard battery and is less than 2cm thick with the lid down. A 1.2GHz Intel Core Solo U1400 CPU keeps temperatures down and minimises battery usage.

The magnesium-alloy chassis felt sturdy and the 12.1in (1280x800) screen displayed acceptable brightness and contrast from all angles. It exhibited little distortion when the lid was flexed, indicating good strength despite being only 7mm thick.

Worst case scenario tests - playing movie files off the hard drive with sound - on the two supplied batteries yielded good results. The three-cell Li-Ion (weight 1kg) lasted 40 minutes while the larger six-cell battery (weight 1.2kg) lasted 208 minutes, an impressive score considering its light weight. The keyboard was easy to use and four programmable buttons aid Windows navigation.

It scored 63 in our WorldBench 5 test, which is good for a low power system. Results showed that the Intel graphics chipset will only perform well with low-end 3-D graphics. However, this unit will perform nicely with business tools such as e-mail, spreadsheets and presentations. It has a fingerprint scanner and hardware level encryption to protect your files from theft.

On its own the LifeBook Q2010 has 2x USB 2.0 ports, a PC Card (type II) slot, an SD media card reader, a LAN/VGA port, FireWire, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi a/b/g. When you're not on the road it resides in a docking station, which has a Super Multi DVD-RW drive, four more USB 2.0 ports, a VGA out and LAN port.