It might not feature Intel's new Santa Rosa technology, but the Philips X200 sticks its head out above a crowded notebook market thanks to a 5.4cm plastic extender.
The 12.1in LCD display has rails so it can be moved vertically up, making it easier to type and look at the screen.
A hinge just behind the monitor also allows you to pull the screen forwards over the keyboard, making it ideal for watching a film where space is limited, for example on an aeroplane.
Aesthetically, the X200 is an attractive piece of kit. The compact chassis has a clean grey and black finish on the front and a smooth, high quality finish on the back of the display. The downside is that it's prone to small scratches and fingerprint smudges.
Philips says the device only weighs 1.8kg, but it tipped our digital scales at 2.05kg. Add the power supply, and this rises to 2.5kg.
The LCD has a widescreen 1,280x800 resolution and a rather large bezel. This adds 1.8cm to either side of the display and 2.4cm on the top and bottom; a 1.3-megapixel webcam is installed just above the screen.
A reflective coating on the display improves contrast, which gives DVD picture quality a boost, but group viewing could prove tricky since viewing angles are a bit on the slim side.
The tried and tested i945GM chipset combined with a Core Duo U2500 1.2GHz and 2MB cache powers the system. This is an ultra low voltage dual core chip that has a maximum thermal design point of just 9W, a third of a regular Core Duo chip.
Although the U2500 has been superseded by the Core 2 Duo U7600, the new chip only adds 64-bit instructions. This isn't important since Philips has provided the most popular version of Vista (and the one we'd recommend) - 32-bit Vista Home Premium.
There's a stick of 1GB DDR2 533MHz Ram sat in the single slot, deep inside the machine. If you want to upgrade, you'll have to remove 16 screws and then almost tear the top of the notebook from bottom to finally get rid of the 1GB stick already present. This is a difficult chore, and one that could end up in damaging the notebook so we wouldn't recommend it.
Removing and replacing the spacious 100GB Sata hard disk is a quick and simple affair by comparison.
Performance was fairly typical of a notebook using a low voltage Core Duo. The X200 picked up 2,362 points in PCmark05, which is fine for office tasks and internet browsing. Philips has used Intel's GMA950 onboard graphics chip, which is no use for gamers and scored just 145 in 3Dmark06 and 345 in 3Dmark05; this translated to an unplayable eight frames per second in the game Fear.
The notebook lasted an excellent two hours 52 minutes when under a reasonably light load with the Wifi turned off. You'll get even more battery life by turning down the brightness of the display.
In our DVD battery run down test, the X200 kept going for two hours 31 minutes, which is excellent. What wasn't so good was the quality of DVD playback. Stuttering playback with dropped frames is shocking to see on a £850 notebook these days. The X200 even struggled with a standard resolution DivX file.
This is most likely due to the integrated graphics since Vista now offloads more task to the graphics card. Video playback was also ruined by a red pixel in the middle of our screen, plus the DVD writer makes a quiet but annoying high-pitched whir when in use.
The keyboard is firm to use and the alphabetical keys are a fine size, but the arrow and enter keys are a bit too small to use for prolonged periods of time. The trackpad is borderless and not comfortable to use either, and the right click button was extremely unresponsive. The quick access media buttons sat on the front of the notebook are firm though and give a reassuring click when pressed.
Connectivity is good and Philips has wisely included a DVI-I port for connecting monitors and projectors, be they digital or analogue models. However, there's no card reader built into the chassis.
Small notebook designs often come at a premium, but this Philips model is reasonably priced at £850. The 'longneck' design is a genuinely good feature, but the stingy one-year warranty and a lot of niggles hold it back.
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