WHAT'S HOT: You can easily tote the Evo N200 all day long without breaking a sweat or stopping to recharge its battery. An ultrathin, ultralight model, the Evo measures only 1 inch tall and weighs a mere 2.8 pounds, not including peripherals. By supplementing the Evo's six-cell primary battery with a four-cell barrel battery that attaches to the back of the unit, we got almost 6 hours of work done; that's 90 minutes shy of the vendor's estimated 7.5 hours, but it's impressive nonetheless. The barrel battery costs an extra $149 and adds about half a pound to the Evo's weight.

WHAT'S NOT: The Evo's small keyboard takes some getting used to. We liked its four shortcut buttons, but typing on it was a bit difficult. The keys look and feel like small Chiclets, with a petite, slippery surface. Some common tasks, such as paging up and down, require combination keystrokes. The mouse buttons are small and sit too close to the touchpad, so you must aim with care to hit them reliably. What's worse, the white lettering stamped on the keys looks blurry when viewed from a typical typing angle, though it sharpens to a normal crispness when viewed straight on. Compaq couldn't explain the odd effect.

Though the Evo's battery life is impressive when you use both batteries, the standard six-cell battery alone could muster only a little over 2 hours of life, which is far less than we would have expected, given its power-sipping processor.

The Evo includes no internal drive bays; optical drive; floppy drive; or standard parallel, serial, or PS/2 connections. It does have two USB connections, so you can add your own USB floppy drive (though Compaq doesn't sell one for the N200), but to gain other missing features you must dock the Evo onto one of Compaq's optional mobile expansion units.

WHAT ELSE: The Evo N200 comes dressed in a thin black case trimmed with silver. It supplies most connections on the back, including the USB ports, the modem and network jacks, and a monitor connection. If you buy the optional barrel battery, you can either position it over the back of the notebook to protect these connections or rotate it underneath the notebook to create a foot for typing at an angle. Accessing the Evo's hard drive and memory is easy--an unusual convenience on such a small laptop. The 10.4-inch screen is too small for tackling some jobs (such as working with huge spreadsheets) comfortably, but it's fine for most other work.

The N200 has just one built-in speaker, but it conveniently locates headphone and microphone ports on the front. For this review, we looked at the 2.4-pound $379 mobile expansion unit, which includes an internal 8X DVD-ROM drive. The MEU, which snaps on and off easily, adds pretty good stereo speakers, two more USB ports (for a total of four), and missing legacy connections, but not much more. The N200 does not have Compaq's unique MultiPort, found on the lids of its more affluent cousins, the N400 and N600. Extra-cost plug-in MultiPort modules allow you to add features such as 802.11b wireless receiving. If you wish to add 802.11b to the N200, you'll have to put a PC card in the single PC Card slot.

We haven't tested any other laptops that use the ultra-low-voltage Pentium III-M-700/300 processor, but the Evo N200's PC WorldBench 4 score of 83 indicates reasonable speed compared with a notebook using a PIII-700/550 processor.

UPSHOT: Business users on the go will appreciate the easy portability of the Compaq Evo N200, which is reasonably priced for a corporate ultraportable at $1799. But be prepared to set aside another $379 to get a docking station with an optical drive.

SUMMARY

Compaq Evo N200 PC WorldBench 4 score of 82, Pentium III-M-ULV-700/300, 192MB of SDRAM, 512KB of L2 cache, Windows 2000 Professional, 10.4-inch screen, 4MB of SGRAM, 20GB hard drive, 8X DVD-ROM drive, built-in V.90 modem and network connections, touchpad pointing device, 6.8-pound weight (including Mobile Expansion Unit, AC adapter, and phone cord). One-year parts and labor warranty; free, unlimited 24-hour toll-free phone support. $2178 (including $379 mobile expansion unit) 800/345-1518 www.compaq.com