The screen, bundle, and warranty
Open up the X20mv Pro and you're presented with a plain-looking interior. The trackpad and buttons feel like a Dell XPS M1330's, and the keys have adequate travel and spring. We'd prefer to have larger buttons between the 'm' and 'right shift' keys but can understand that spatial limitation come into play on a notebook with a 12.1in screen.
Note the gap between the two trackpad buttons? That's where an optional fingerprint reader would be installed. Novatech doesn't offer it as an upgrade, though.
There's a fair surround around the 12.1in panel and, perhaps, a 13.3in screen would have been a better bet. Clevo manufacturers such a model, weighing, in full laptop form, just over 2kg.
The screen's bright and sharp and the resolution, 1,280x800, is just about right. Users coming from 15.4in laptops with an identical resolution may find the pixel-pitch a little small but it's easy enough to get used to.
Placed under full load the laptop does become warm on the left-hand side but not overly so. No skin-scorching possibility here, folks.
Bundle and warranty
Responsibly, Novatech adds in a recovery partition that can be accessed by pressing F8 during the POST sequence. Doing so lets you repair the laptop to its factory-shipped state.
The shipping bundle includes Windows Vista, the various pre-installed drivers and a multi-language instruction manual. A 60-day trial of Microsoft Office 2007 and DVD decoder software are the only pre-installed programs of note.
The X20mv Pro is sold with a standard one-year collect-and-return warranty, with the customer footing the courier bill when returning the machine if it should require repairing.
Contact can be made by email, telephone, or 'live chat', but, be warned, the warranty isn't insurance-backed, meaning that if Novatech happens to cease trading the warranty disappears too.
Our live-chat representative indicated that Novatech has been successfully trading for over 20 years without having an insurance-backed warranty. We're not sure whether that's comforting or not, given the current economic climate enveloping businesses.
