CrunchGear

It’s either feast or famine when it comes to laptops. If you need something small and light, you’re stuck without an optical drive and poor performance. If you need something for gaming or high end apps, you’re stuck with something that you need a truck to lift. That’s why I’m pleased with the VYE S41 from Kohjinsha, a Japan-only — but available at Dynamism.com import convertible that is small enough to get lost in a man purse.

This laptop has a 7-inch swivel touchscreen and an 800 MHz Intel A100 processor. The model I tested included a 120GB hard drive with 1GB of RAM and, amazingly, a DVD Super Multi drive. The laptop weighs 3 pounds and is 1-inch thick and 8-inches long. It is about as big as a hardback book.

The laptop came with Windows Vista Premium along with some special touchscreen software. The keyboard is quite cramped and is almost unusable until you get used to it. The screen was amazingly readable and sharp and the build quality was excellent, overall.

In our tests the laptop hit 531 in GeekBench and lasted one hour and 45 minutes on one charge while playing a DVD video.

Sadly, I suspect the tiny keyboard to be the biggest problem when looking at this laptop. While it does have a touchscreen, these tiny Japanese ultraportables are often too delicate for our rich, meaty American man-hands. However if you’re looking for a cool laptop that no one has, take a gander at the S41.