The laptop market may have entered an era of wireless internet access for all, but somebody forgot to tell Nusystems. The Nu-Audio Duo Pro comes without built-in wireless as standard, and making this component optional in a laptop that costs £1,000 simply doesn’t make sense to us.
To give Nusystems the benefit of the doubt, built-in wireless could have been left out to keep the Duo Pro inside the budget price category – adding wireless raises the tag to £1,029. But this vital component is a part of every other budget laptop, many of which cost considerably less than a grand.
Thankfully, the Audio Duo Pro comes with some rather more pleasingly unusual features. As its name suggests, it's aimed very much at the audio enthusiast. The software bundle includes a large number of music programs, including Steinberg Cubasis VST 5.0 and WaveLab Lite. The speakers are pretty good for a laptop.
The 1.8GHz Intel Core Duo T2400 and 1GB of RAM pulled in a very respectable WorldBench processing-speed score of 97. The hard drive is less satisfactory, though. Given the space that audiophiles will need to store their music files, 60GB of storage doesn’t seem anything like enough.
On the plus side, the 15.4in widescreen display is decent, providing a wide viewing angle and crisp, clear images. And the battery life isn't bad either – the Audio Duo Pro notched up 101 minutes in our MobileMark tests.
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