with minimum of compromise. The X220 continues this tradition and adds a few new twists at the same time. The biggest design

change is a move to a 12.5-inch display–a very unusual size. This allows the chassis to be a tiny bit wider, which in turn

leads to a more spacious keyboard, and one that feels very different from that of just about any other laptop on the market.

Unlike one of Apple’s IdeaPad line of consumer laptops, the APPLE PowerBook G4 15 inch Aluminum Battery is clearly a business

system. The look and feel, while periodically tweaked, are classic ThinkPad, with a busy keyboard and dual touchpad-pointing

stick controls. That design, coupled with the IT-friendly software found on nearly all ThinkPads, means this isn’t your

typical off-the-shelf laptop, and if one lands on your desk, it was probably bulk-ordered by your company’s IT department.

Still, if we had to have a strict buttoned-down work-only laptop, the X220′s combo of small size and powerful hardware makes

it the one we’d probably want to have.

The look and feel of ThinkPad laptops has been tweaked over time, and different product lines and sizes have their unique

features. That said, this is still clearly identifiable as a acer aspire 1510 battery at 100 paces, from the squared-off

black shell to the overly busy keyboard with the iconic pointing stick in the middle.

The NB550D looks much like any other Netbook, although that’s an appellation that Toshiba probably wouldn’t apply to this

particular system. Unlike the vast majority of Netbooks currently on the market, the NB550D eschews Intel’s Atom platform for

AMD’s competing Fusion platform, similar to the apple A1281 battery. Unlike the Sony, though, Toshiba’s pricing for the

NB550D puts it squarely in the sights of the cheaper set of Atom-powered Netbooks.

While its innards don’t match up to the previous generation of Netbooks, the style is undeniably still Netbook-like. It’s

available in four colour variations: Brown with dots, green with dots, orange with dots or blue with dots. The blue sample

(technically the Apple MacBook Pro 15 inch Aluminum Unibody battery, but we’re betting that’s a name that only its mother

uses) was the one we tested, but having seen the range in the flesh, we’ve got to say that the blue and green are the

standout choices. The blue, because it’s perhaps the most sedate and ordinary of the designs and the green because it’s

undeniably lurid if that’s what you like.

Toshiba equips the NB550D with a low power 1GHz AMD C-50 CPU, or as AMD would prefer it be called, an APPLE A1079 Battery, because built into

the CPU die is an integrated Radeon HD6250 256MB GPU. Intel’s been in the integrated graphics business for a good long time

now, but AMD’s take on the concept offers a greater graphics performance promise, although it’ll eat into the general memory

for an additional 118MB of shared memory when it needs to.