Elonex's project to produce a £100 laptop has spawned a secondary Ultra Mobile Computer (UMC), rather confusingly called the ONEt. The name may only be slightly different from the company's ultra-budget handheld, but the design and specification is quite a bit better; not surprising, since the price is £80 higher, unless you're in education. If you can show you are, you get a £50 discount, bringing the price back down to £130.

The ONEt is very much a miniaturised laptop, like the Asus Eee, with a conventional clamshell design. It's only 210mm wide by 140mm deep and 27mm thick, very much the size of a mid-range blockbuster paperback, and comes in a range of colours. Ours was a hard-not-to-notice scarlet, while alternatives include black, white, green and pink. The sample weighed in at a very portable 0.58kg.

So that's the cosmetics. Around the edges of the machine are three USB ports, jacks for microphone and headset, a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port and a socket for the external battery charger. Last but not least, there's an SD card slot, which can take cards of up to 32GB. You're likely to need a memory card, as the ONEt has a Solid State Drive (SSD) of just 1GB, and 320MB of that is used by the operating system. There's 128MB of main memory.

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The ONEt is based on a 400MHz processor, which we suspect is from embedded chipmaker Ingenic, though Elonex calls it the LNX Code 8. This is a bit slow for anything graphical, like scrolling round a Web site, and it's possible to outstrip the keyboard buffer if you type fast. The keyboard is surprisingly good, with a reasonably conventional layout for a laptop and a fair key response.

Keys are obviously smaller than on a regular laptop, but useable, even with big, male fingers. The touchpad is also adequate, but the touchpad buttons are noisy enough to attract attention in a library or the quiet carriage on a train.

The 7-inch widescreen LCD display is bright and sharp and colours are generally well-rendered. Sound from the ONEt's internal speakers is tinny, but no more so than from many a full-sized laptop, while through a headset it's listenable, but is no iPod.

Pre-installed on the Linux-based desktop, which is divided into three separate screenfuls of icons, is the Xip suite, which includes a Word-compatible word processor and an Excel-compatible spreadsheet (both Office 03, not 07). There's also a media player, photo viewer, dictionary (just a word list), calculator and ancillary utilities.

We've seen the form factor of the ONEt before, of course, with Windows CE notebooks. A few years back they promised less bulky computing but died a death, mainly due to CE's heavily restricted feature set. The ONEt has much better on-board applications, WiFi connection and modern facilities like PDF and video, MP3 and Flash support (though only level 7 Flash).

Elonex's ONEt uses Linux to provide a lot of functionality in an inexpensive box, and features like WiFi Internet and storage expansion through SD cards make it a useful machine to carry with you. There's not much memory in the basic machine, though, and it could be quicker, but it deserves to sell well into education and to those who mainly want Internet browsing. It proves that both the form factor and price point are right.