One glance at VNB100 was enough to conclude that ViewSonic intention was not to experiment to much and take a gamble on unpredictable market in these troubled times. Whole chassis is made out of black plastic with decent built quality. Bottom side of chassis is matte, while cover and area around keyboard are made with piano finish. Only under bright light can be noticed dark grey small overlapping spirals on the cover which nicely break the monotony of black cover surface.

Connector layout is very good, and what is more important, ViewSonic VNB100 has a lot of them. One of the most important features of every netbook is keyboard. VNB100 has one of the best keyboards that we saw so far on any netbook: firm and without bending, so you can precisely feel when you pressed a key. There are no additional buttons, but all function keys (F1 – F12) have second function that can be accessed with Fn key. Thanks to these, beside usual controls for brightness, contrast and so on, there are also multimedia controls present. Touch pad is surprisingly big but since this was just a pre-fabrication sample its drivers support was not finished so we had few precision problems. ViewSonic assured us that these problems will be solved on retail products.

Since ViewSonic signed this netbook we had very high expectations for display, and we were not disappointed. We already mentioned few times that matte displays (non-glare) are better choice because picture on those displays is much better under daylight or intensive artificial lighting conditions. Since these displays are pricier it is logical that most manufacturers decide to implement glade displays into netbooks. Luckily, ViewSonic made no compromises in this area and, as consequence, VNB100 has best display among all netbooks tested so far. Maybe brightness could have slightly more intensity but all other parameters are great. Uniformity of black and wide viewing angles are most common netbook problems but not on ViewSonic VNB100.

Speakers are good, but since those are positioned at the bottom side, sound is muffled. We can only hope that some future models will have those positioned above keyboard. Webcam won’t be a selling point of this model since is offers a picture with lot of noise and low frame rate.

Inside ViewSonic VNB100 cannot be found nothing spectacularly new and interesting. This netbook is based on Atom N270 CPU that is backed up with GSE945 chipset. Performance levels are as expected for such combination: enough for less demanding users. Nice detail is presence of Bluetooth adapter and Express card slot. VNB100 isn’t light notebook especially if we take into consideration presence of an 3-cell battery.  Autonomy is good and, in correlation with battery capacity. Cooling of this netbook isn’t too good so warming up is noticeable. If it’s any consolation, this netbook is very quiet.

We could say that ViewSonic VNB100 is a textbook example of an netbook. It doesn’t offer nothing more, but also nothing less, than similar models, so it comes natural that VNB100 can fight for its place under the sun only with its price. Models that can be found in the stores are slightly different from model that we tested. First model will have Windows XP preinstalled, 1GB of RAM and 160GB HDD with expected price around 300€. Second model will be sold without OS but with 2GB of RAM. Price tag of second model is not known yet.