If you think of HP’s 2530p as a strapping workhorse of an ultraportable, Toshiba’s R600 is like a stylish, sophisticated cousin—and we were quickly smitten with its charms. The R600 shares much in common with Toshiba’s R500, but with improvements to its build quality and structure. At 11.1x8.5x0.8 inches and a weight of two pounds, six ounces, the R600 is so thin and light as to seem ethereal. There’s some flex to the magnesium-alloy case when you lift the notebook by one corner and some bendiness to the display enclosure, but the notebook doesn’t feel fragile.

And svelte as it is, the R600 is packed with features. It offers a healthy array of ports, including an SD media reader, an ExpressCard/54 slot, and three USB ports—one of which doubles as eSATA and can even be used for charging devices when the notebook is off. Amid all that is a DVD burner, as well as a volume dial.

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Lenovo’s X200s has qualities we’ve come to expect from a ThinkPad—and that’s a good thing. Its magnesium alloy chassis is wrapped in the line’s signature matte black finish, making for a notebook that feels sturdy and looks serious. And at 11.2x8.25x1.25 inches and weighing less than three pounds, the X200s is also lightweight and compact. Yet not so compact that the keyboard suffers—it’s full-size and quite comfortable for typing. A handy light positioned above the screen will illuminate the keyboard and there are dedicated buttons for controlling audio volume.

As with all ThinkPads, the X200s also features the TrackPoint navigation system, whereby you control the cursor using an isometric joystick in the middle of the keyboard, with the left- and right-click buttons in close proximity just below the spacebar. For the uninitiated, TrackPoint can be easily mastered and it’s nice that you can perform navigation functions without moving your hands off the keyboard. But unlike larger ThinkPad models, the X200s doesn’t feature a conventional touchpad as well, which will disappoint folks who like that option.

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Asus’s Eee PC kicked off the netbook craze in 2007, and now the grandmaster of small-and-shiny returns with its best Eee ever. The 1000HE combines the 901’s extra-long battery life with the power and capacity of the 1002HA (which we reviewed in March), and throws in a nearly MacBook Pro–style full-size chiclet keyboard.

The 1000HE is the first netbook we’ve reviewed with Intel’s new Atom N280 processor, which kicks up the clocks from 1.6GHz to 1.66GHz, and the front-side bus to 667MHz from 533MHz. Other than that, it’s virtually the same hardware as Asus’s other 10-inch models, like the 1002HA. The 1000HE trades the 1002HA’s brushed-aluminum exterior for glossy fingerprint-prone plastic, with the chiclet keyboard supplanting the 1000HA’s more standard keys.

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