I'll report more about my impressions in the printed PCW but broadly they are in line with what I wrote when the Air as first announced. This is an exquisite design, aesthetically and (up to a point) ergonomically, marred by two or three screaming snags caused by form being given priority over function.

Apple boasts that it is ahead of the curve in dropping the wired Ethernet port and relying on wireless, but that cuts both ways. It may be that the port will be unnecessary once wireless infrastructure has matured; but this is not yet the case and the boast sounds more like an excuse for a poor design decision. Many hotels sensibly offer only wired networking in rooms, so if you mean to use the Air on the road in earnest you will have to buy a £19 USB-to-Ethernet adapter. This will use up your single USB port (another snag) so you will also need a powered USB hub (upwards of £17), which means another mains adapter to carry around.  The extra cost is not huge but the ergonomics are questionable.

The Air slotted into my home network very much more easily than Vista, which seems to resent the presence of XP machines (something SP1 is supposed to fix,  but I haven't loaded it yet). The network was particularly necessary because as the Air stands it is the only way to load software – there is no on-board DVD drive. The Air's Mac OS Leopard could not see my bog-standard Samsung DVD drive; Apple's own Air USB 'Superdrive' costs £65 extra.

To compensate for this Apple provides a feature called remote disk which allows you to set up any optical drive on a linked PC or Mac as an auxilliary drive by using a bundled utility. I set up a shared drive without problems before I discovered this feature.

I anticipated problems loading software across this link but Steinberg's Cubase 4 set itself up quickly and easily. Actually the most impressive part of this was Steinberg's USB dongle system, something that had previously irritated me. The dongle needs to be plugged in before the software will run, and of course the device is easily lost; on the other hand you can run the software on any machine you like, which is fair and very useful. My copy of Cubase came with both Mac and PC versions, so I can run it on either platform. It would be great if you could do this with all applications, provided you could use a single dongle that could be backed up.

In sum, the Air is a beautiful mixed bag. It is a joy to use provided you have good Wifi access, and it is great for using around the home or office. Like the EeePC it recognises that mobiles can travel light provided they can draw resources from the network. But, as it stands, it lacks the i/o to exploit those resources easily. So, despite its weight and those elegant slim lines, it is not the best choice for people who need to work on the move.