If you need lots of USB ports for connecting peripherals to your notebook, the ABS Zensation Z3 sports four, two more than most notebooks typically have. Equipped with a 1.6-GHz/600-MHz Pentium M processor, it's also one of the fastest portables we've tested to date, earning an impressive PC WorldBench 4 score of 126. Battery life is good, too: almost 4 hours in our tests.
The Zensation has most of the important notebook connections; missing is a TV-out port, a key feature if you plan on attaching a TV or other large monitor to your laptop. A proprietary connection on the back of the notebook accepts the ABS PortBar, a docking station that replicates the USB, monitor, LAN, and parallel ports.
Though the Zensation comes with a multipurpose bay, the choice of optional devices is extremely limited. A removable DVD-ROM/CD-RW combination drive is standard, and the only other bay option ABS currently sells is a secondary battery.
Both the hard drive and the memory are user upgradable. In fact, the notebook comes with a whopping 512MB on the motherboard, leaving a RAM slot free. At 60GB, the hard drive is significantly larger than the 40GB drives we see in most portables.
Flip the Zensation over, and you'll find a couple of nice design touches: a plastic business card sleeve and a rubber strike zone to protect the hard drive from knocks and drops. The Zensation Z3's keyboard is comfortable and offers a handful of shortcut buttons, including a cursor lock for the touchpad, always a useful feature. The audio is about par for a notebook: Located under the front edge of the case, the Zensation's stereo speakers emit good volume but so-so quality. The print manual adequately covers the basics.
With its light weight and good speed, the Zensation Z3 seems best for someone looking for a mobile companion to their desktop PC.
Carla Thornton
