Anyone who has ever used Asus’s original Centrino offerings will feel at home using the company’s first Sonoma notebook. Like its predecessors, the V6V is housed in an understated chassis which, despite having a brushed-metal finish, is not likely to get users noticed on their travels.

The laptop is well-equipped, with a fast 2GHz central processing unit, although it only has 512MB of RAM. Its Radeon X600 graphics card helps it run Far Cry at a decent 19.14fps.

Unfortunately, the V6V has comparatively limited storage capacity. Its 60GB hard drive is smaller than notebooks of this spec, so if users want to store large volumes of data they should consider investing in extra external storage.

Some amends are made by its battery life of three hours, 19 minutes, which is a fairly long time for a notebook of this type. In contrast, the similarly equipped Asus M6700NE series (based on original Centrino technology) lasts just one hour, 37 minutes.

The V6V’s display is slightly disappointing. The 15in panel is one of the largest around, but it lacked the brightness and definition seen on the Vaio VGN-S3XP. Its viewing angle is also relatively narrow across both the horizontal and vertical axes, so it won’t be particularly good for DVD movie playback.

Its keyboard feels solid and is logically laid out. But the mouse touchpad is disappointing, with an outer border that isn’t very well defined, so fingers may stray from the touchpad when moving the cursor.

The V6V is by no means perfect and, at £1,599, it is not cheap either. However, it is an excellent example of a next-generation Centrino notebook and should certainly appeal to a variety of users.