Nokia Booklet 3G Review – Impressive First Netbook from Nokia

Pros

The Nokia Booklet 3G offers flawless 3G connection has got great battery life and superb design.

Cons

The Nokia Booklet 3G’s CPU is annoyingly slow and it leads to frustratingly sluggish performance.

Introduction

Mobile mogul Nokia seems to be taking stride into the Netbook forte and enters the pool with its freshly proclaimed Nokia Booklet 3G laptop. The Nokia Booklet 3G offers a premium-feeling system for the lowest price possible, given that you agree AT&T’s two-year mobile data contract.

In terms of looks the Nokia Booklet 3G clearly is one of he most high class looking netbook we’ve seen in long time. The Nokia Booklet 3G feels well-built and rock-solid while held in hand, but devoid of being too weighty. One another decent feature here was the smooth connection of AT&T’s mobile broadband service, which connects by design and the entire process here is superbly transparent, especially in comparison to the manual log-ins and software setup necessary for any other mobile broadband laptops. Though, there is a downside for Booklet 3G as well and that comes in form of its slower Intel Atom Z530 CPU, which pulls the performance down enough and makes it a frustrating.

The Nokia Booklet 3G comes for $299 with AT&T’s two year contract, but the built quality and design of the Netbook puts it way ahead of  any other $299 netbook you can get in the market. But at the same time keep in mind that you will have to pay estimated monthly fees of around $60 for data. Though, if you don’t want to get into contract then the Nokia Booklet 3G will cost you $599, which according to us is both overpriced and pointless.

Design

The design of Nokia Booklet 3G clearly is one of the best netbook designs we’ve seen and makes it an immensely upscale-looking Netbook. The netbook is well built and gives a solid feel when in hand and at the same time it doesn’t feels too heavy. The display screen’s hinge for  Nokia Booklet 3G is agreeably firm, while the keyboard here is a tad thicker and at the same time doesn’t have any flex, even when you press the keys down firmly on the keyboard. The color options for the rear end of the lid are white, blue and black, we had our review unit in black and it was smudge-prone.

The design of Booklet 3G personifies the work “book” in its name and the system has sharp and angled edges like a book, and the overall design of the netbook also has a booklike squareness. Opening the lid reveals quite a shocking interior, with no shortcut or quick launch buttons, even the power button of the Netbook is positioned on the right edge of the system, just besides the tiny hatch casing SIM and SD card slots.

The keyboard here also is cramped with petite key size which is really hard to hit precisely. Especially after so many comfy keyboards in the similar sized netbook this was a bit disappointment. Though, the touchpad here is spacious and easy to use, even though we had to boost the pointer speed for our Windows 7 options.

The Nokia Booklet 3G has a 10.1 inch display with native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixel, which is easily found on many of the high-end Netbooks. Covering the glass of the screen and most of the display bezel is a single sheet of glass.

System Configuration

Price: $549.99
Manufacturer: Nokia
Part Number: 02718S0
Notebook type: Budget and   Netbook
Operating System Provided: Microsoft Windows 7 Starter

Processor: 1.6 GHz Intel Atoms Z530
System weight: 2.8 lbs
Dimensions (W x D x H): 10.4 x 7.3 x 0.8 in
RAM: 1GB, DDR2 SDRAM – 533 MHz

Display Type: 10.1 in TFT active matrix
Graphics Processor / Vendor: Intel GMA 500

Screen size: 10.1 inches
Hard Drive: 120GB 4,200rpm
Hard drive type: Portable
Graphics: Intel GMA 500 (integrated)
Supported flash memory cards: SD Memory Card
Software Provided: F-Secure Internet Security 2010 (Trial), Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 and Microsoft Office Small Business Edition (Trial)
Video: HDMI
Audio: Stereo speakers and Headphone jack
Features: Assisted GPS
Optical drive: None
Wireless capabilities: IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11b, Mobile broadband, Bluetooth and GPS
Built-in Devices: Stereo speakers, GPS, Wireless LAN antenna and Bluetooth antenna

Performance:

The performance of Nokia Booklet 3G gets a serious blow due to its slow Intel Atom Z530 CPU and in most of our tests the Booklet 3G were struggling behind the other Netbooks with comparatively faster N280 and N270 Atom processors. Although, the Netbook delivered satisfactory performance in most of our basic tasking tests such as running Microsoft Office docs and multiple Web browser windows. The 1GB RAM and slower 4,200rpm hard drive can also be blamed for the sluggish performance of our Netbook, but if you are not in need of any hard multitasking netbook then the Nokia Booklet 3G is a decent option to consider.

It’s really disappointing for us, as we really liked the Nokia Booklet 3G and if it wasn’t for the performance the Nokia Booklet 3G would have made its place right on top of our favorites list. Though, the battery of Nokia Booklet 3G gave some relief and with its included 16 cell battery the Netbook ran for 7 hours and 14 minutes in our challenging video playback test. Now that’s some of the best score we’ve seen in our lab. So the battery here is no more a problem.

Support

The Nokia Booklet 3G comes with a one year standard parts and labor warranty from Nokia. There was no specific information available about Nokia’s Web site, but we came to know that the customers can visit nokiausa.com/support for any sort of troubleshooting or can call on 1-888-665-4228 from Monday to Friday, between 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. EST.

Word from the Experts

The Nokia Booklet 3G is the latest and impressive entrant in the Netbook pool from the house of Nokia and it clearly shows the hardware expertise of Nokia, although the poor selection of CPU ruins the game here.