Review: New Intel Chips Power Skinny Laptops

Atoms are adequate for Web surfing and e-mail, the primary uses for a small laptop. It doesn't matter so much that the Atom chokes on video editing or 3-D gaming, and most netbook owners are happy with them.

But there are two things I'd like to do with a small laptop that the Atom does not do well. One is to watch high-resolution Internet video in the Flash format, used by YouTube, Hulu and several other sites. This is very taxing on the processor and will make an Atom-powered netbook stutter badly.

The other challenge for the Atom is videoconferencing. Laptops today come with built-in webcams, but the Atom has a hard time producing and decoding high-quality video.

So how do the ULVs handle this? The Timeline does it with aplomb, smoothly playing high-resolution video from Hulu and producing images with Google Video Chat.

The X-Slim, meanwhile, was only slightly better than a late-model Atom-powered netbook. Action scenes in "Prison Break" on Hulu were jittery, and videoconferencing suffered too.

The difference, I believe, is mainly in the specific processors they use. The Timeline has a dual-core ULV, meaning there are two computing engines, while the X-Slim has a single core. The single-core ULV appears to be only a slight step up from the Atom — something to keep in mind when looking at other models that are sure to come out with these processors. (There's a confounding factor here: The Timeline runs the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, which processes data in larger chunks, while the X-Slim runs the somewhat slower 32-bit. But the differences I observed were too large to be attributed to the software.)