Rather than follow the more usual design path and create an ultra-portable with no drives bar a hard disk, and about two ports to its name, Toshiba has tried a slightly different approach with the Portégé A100.

Instead of being 20mm thick, the A100 measures 35mm with the lid shut, which is much the same as many A4 format notebooks. Yet it is small enough to be classed as a sub-notebook, with a 288mm x 238mm (W x D) footprint, and it weighs 2.2kg which compares favourably with the 3kg-plus of most full-sized machines.

The advantage of this tactic is that the Portégé A100 is more or less entire unto itself, unlike most sub-notebooks which need to be accompanied by various plug-in modules if you want full functionality out of them.

The Portégé has an integral optical drive for example, and also a decent complement of ports, so it doesn't rely on an external replicator for connectivity. If you like all your notebook in one box, but still small enough to carry around with you, the Portégé A100 might be what you are looking for.

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It's quite a nice looking machine, with a sort of pearlescent finish to the lid and a silver-grey body and white keyboard. This all works together surprisingly well, and there are pleasing touches like the brushed metal mouse buttons and the illuminated power stud. Open the lid and it lights up helpfully; when the machine suspends or goes into hibernation, the colour of the light changes to indicate what state the system is in.

On a strictly practical level though, we were disappointed to find that the lid was plastic, inevitably less durable and effective at protecting the screen from travel damage than metal alloy. Otherwise the build quality is fairly good, if not quite up to the standard set by Toshiba's more expensive notebooks.

The screen and keyboard are above average by sub-notebook standards. The screen's strengths are a sensible combination of 12.1-inch diagonal and 1024 x 768 (XGA) resolution, which is readable despite the modest overall size, plus good brightness and a wide viewing angle. The keyboard has usable-sized keys, a logical enough layout and a pleasant feel.

The Portégé doesn't stretch to a parallel port, but you do get four USB 2.0 connectors, FireWire, an RCA jack TV output, VGA-out for an external monitor and a Secure Digital (SD) flash memory card slot. This might be a bonus if you have a camera or PDA which also uses SD. Conventional expansion is possible by way of twin Type II PC Card slots, stacked so you can get a single Type III hard disk in there if you prefer.

The notebook has both standard 10/100Mbps wired networking and 802.11b WiFi hidden away inside. This has the respectability conferred by a Centrino certification (in other words it should actually work most of the time), but we were disappointed at the lack of 802.11g support. After all, this is the current standard, and it's five times faster than the original, so why not put it in?

The optical drive turned out to be a Matsushita (Panasonic) CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo. It does all that one would expect, from 8x/24x DVD/CD play to 24x/24x CD-R/RW. DVD playback was of acceptable quality, but headphones will be an improvement over the typically tinny integrated speakers.

Sub-notebooks are not generally designed with power as the primary consideration, so we didn't expect wonders from the Portégé when it came to speed. Even so, it proved to be slower than we would have liked, to the point of feeling subjectively sluggish on occasions. It was hard to know why. The 1.4GHz Pentium M processor is snappy enough, boosted by its 1MB on-die Level 2 cache, and the 256MB of memory was fast 333MHz PC2700 DDR. Perhaps 512MB would have helped things along.

The graphics subsystem is contained within the Intel 855GM motherboard chipset and is fine for 2D work but really not at all suitable for 3D. It also operates on a shared memory architecture with the main system, which might be another reason to consider a RAM upgrade at the outset.

Battery life was acceptable but not at the upper end of what Centrino systems can deliver. You should get a good three hours from a full charge, and possibly more, but it won't see you from London to New York, as it were.

Which brings us to the end, once again. The bottom line here really is that the Portégé A100 is a good idea which isn't quite perfectly implemented. This in turn made it look just a little pricey compared to some of the competition when launched, although Toshiba appears to have quickly realised that and cut the price by over £150 to what you see below. If Toshiba could just straighten out the performance and add a feature or two, it would change the picture completely.

This is a sensible compromise between weight and functionality, but slightly let down by unexceptional performance and a couple of missing features.