Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li 2727 review

Borrowing (read: stealing) a neighbour's Wi-Fi won't be too difficult with the Amilo Li 2727. It has an 802.11b/g wireless adaptor that's compatible with the wireless hotspots used by most establishments. There's no dial-up modem, but it has an Ethernet port, which you can jack into your home or school network for Internet, file- and printer-sharing purposes.

Software's pretty thin on the ground. You get a copy of Windows Vista Basic -- the version without the fancy Flip 3D effect Vista is so famous for -- but very little else. Fujitsu Siemens provides options for software though, so you can get one kitted out with Microsoft Works and Norton Internet Security Suite at the time of purchase.

Performance
Like Equatorial Guinea's Olympic team, the Amilo Li 2727 tries hard but won't win any awards for performance. It scored a paltry 1,403 in PCMark 2005, and 1,310 in 3DMark 2006, so it isn't much faster than an Eee PC 901. It'll let you surf the Web, listen to music and watch videos of up to 720p resolution with relative ease, but it really does start to stutter if you try to multitask.

Battery life is low to average, depending on what sort of application you're running. In our CPU-intensive BatteryEater rundown test, it lasted 1 hour 28 minutes, and 1 hour 58 minutes in the far less intensive reader test. That's not bad considering the size of the laptop.

Conclusion
It's cheap and cheerful. If you're after a low-cost second laptop, or something for the kids, then you could do a lot worse than the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li 2727. If you're serious about computing, though, you should look elsewhere and prepare to shell out more. The Medion Akoya S5610, for example, offers much better multitasking and graphical performance for £600.

Edited by Nick Hide