Advent 4213 HSDPA 3G-enabled netbook

Integrated cellular connectivity... at last

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

20th October 2008 11:02 GMT

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As you can see, the results aren't bad, though there are SCCs with greater single-charge runtime out there. Curiously, Silent Mode had no apparent effect on battery life, which suggests the system's set to crank up the CPU beyond 800MHz if an app needs more clock-speed. We saw the same thing with Advent's 4211.

Battery Life Results

Time in minutes
Longer bars are better

At this point we should mention Microsoft Works. We're often puzzled why vendors still include this, but for once here's an up-to-date version. Except it incorporates ads. Now we're used to ads appearing in magazines and online - heck, it's how Register Hardware pays its way - but it seems out of place in a productivity tool.

The ads appear in a box in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, and they change frequently. We found them distracting. You can pay £30 for an ad-free copy of Works, but we'd recommend downloading OpenOffice instead, which is both ad-free and free of charge.

The 4213 also comes with Avanquest's Connection Manager utility to manage your cellular links. It's pre-programmed with connection details for all the UK carriers, so it's easy to set it up for the SIM you have. It'll maintain multiple carrier preferences, which is handy if you tend to swap SIMs a lot. You can tweak the template connection settings if you need to.