Iridium Starbook 865

CTO (August '03)

Iridium’s latest, the Starbook 865 isn’t the most portable of notebooks on the market. It’s comparably big, a bit heavier than usual, and happily eats away at battery life. But then, this is the firm targeting the desktop replacement market, and they’ve done it with some style. The 865 is highly specced, very capable, and throughout the duration of our review period has been a delight to use. Plus, for the desktop replacement market, Iridium boast that this 865 has the smallest form factor.

Sitting at the heart of it is an Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz processor. This is a straight desktop chip, and thus lacks some of the power-saving capabilities of dedicated mobile processors. But the compensation is in the form of the price tag, which is startlingly good value for the spec of the machine. The 865 also comes with 512Mb of RAM, an ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 graphics solution and hard disk space (40GB on our test machine, but as with most Iridium computers this is an option that can be altered). And in practice this combination of components produced good test scores. Our PC Mark 2002 tests gave a CPU total of 4202, memory score of 3728 and 284 for the HDD. These all compare well for a portable solution. 5846 on 3D Mark 2001 is more than we were expecting though, and the 3D Mark 2003 result of 957 was too.

Other features? Well the Iridium software bundle is getting more generous, too. The firm recently committed to including the Ability Office suite with their portable solutions, and whilst the software lacks some of the bells and whistles of it’s Microsoft equivalent, it’s nonetheless a welcome and useful addition. Other include packages are Panda Antivirus, Easy CD Creator 5 and Win DVD 4 (the latter two could rightly lead you to conclude that an optical DVD-ROM/CDRW combo drive is built in too – as, surprisingly, is a floppy drive).

Faults? Very few, to be fair. The bulkiness we didn’t find a huge problem, as we were still easily able to carry the machine around (the included carry case was a help!). The keyboard we found very comfortable to use, although a few more quick access buttons would have been nice. And longer battery life is always welcome, although we were getting around 90-100 minutes out of a full charge.

A quality product, in all, and one we spent far too long playing with. Little features such as having a webcam mounted just above the razor sharp screen, combined with the strong build and overall performance of the 865 make it an excellent purchase.
Strongly recommended.