NEC VersaPro VS netbook in the wild: painfully skinny

We knew NEC's VersaPro J UltraLite VS netbook was slim – how else could the company justify the fat price tag? – but even the teardown we saw back in May didn't quite convey quite how skinny the Atom Z540 ultraportable really is.  Thankfully Akihabara News have righted that situation, being in the enviable position of having the 15.8mm thick netbook in to play with.

As the photos in the gallery below show, what you're paying for is an almost unbelievably slender 752g netbook with a lower half that looks somehow slimmer than its screen is.  If you're expecting the pay-off to be specs that would make a 1999 notebook look snappy, think again; there's a 64GB SSD, WiFi b/g, gigabit ethernet and three USB 2.0 ports.

NEC even promise up to 4.7hrs runtime from the standard battery (or up to 9.4hrs if you're willing to sacrifice a little portability and strap on the extended battery).  We'll have to wait until Akihabara News finish marveling at the design and move onto some benchmark testing to see whether those figures hold up.