If the name Hannspree rings a bell, chances are you've seen it adorning either an LCD TV or a monitor, but with the HANNSnote SN10E1 the company has taken quite a plunge and entered the highly competitive - make that cut-throat - netbook market.

Not that there's any thing remarkable about the HANNSnote SN10E1, as it's basically a re-badged original MSI Wind U100 with a chrome strip added to the lid. But as the Wind was one of the best of the first generation 10-inch netbooks, its not a bad place to start from, though it does suffer in comparison to some of the latest 10-inch models.

Under the fingerprint-magnet glossy black exterior (a white finish is available), and thankfully matt black interior, it's standard first generation netbook fare all the way; Intel Atom N270 CPU, integrated GMA950 graphics, 1GB of RAM, 160GB of storage, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, three-in-one memory card reader, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0.

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The only other changes compared to the original Wind can be found under the lid and they are merely cosmetic; the power button is chromed while the status LEDs in the palm-rest have been built into a single translucent bar.

The keyboard is the original, which is both good and bad; the good is that the Wind always did have a good keyboard once you get around the bad point, which is the positioning of the Ctrl and Fn keys, but this unit's keyboard is far from being the only one that suffers from this flaw.

The 10-inch LED backlit screen has the familiar 1,024 by 600-pixel resolution panel found on the vast majority of models in this market segment, but thankfully it has a matt finish meaning you can use it in offices with bright overhead lighting, and outdoors on bright days, without suffering from annoying screen reflections.

Hannspree has listened to the multitude of netbook users moaning about battery performance and fitted the HANNSnote with a half-decent, six-cell, 4,400mAh battery as standard, something most of the other Wind clones failed to do.

The larger battery gives the HANNSnote a battery life of around four and a half hours. OK, so it doesn't stand up too well against the latest Asus or Samsung models, but it's not too shabby and judicious use of the power settings should get you close to, or just past, the five hour mark. Despite the larger battery, the HANNSnote weighs just 1.27kg.

Unfortunately for Hannspree it has launched the HANNSnote SN10E1 at the same time as the market leaders are launching the second generation of 10-inch netbooks, so it was always going to be tough to stand out from the crowd, and sadly the HANNSnote SN10E1 doesn't. Having said that, the price is good, until you realise that by stretching your budget by fifty pounds or so you can get something like Asus's EeePC 1000HE with its much longer battery life and better keyboard.