When I was in Val d’Isere the other week, it was, alas, mostly work-work-work.

I did manage to put on some skis and arse about on the green slopes — the real focus of my attentions was the technology I’d brought with me to field-test and the iPhone 3G users all over the place.

Val d’Isere is THE place to be seen with an iPhone it seems. I’ll write more on that later.

For the subject of today’s post is the LG X110 ultra light laptop. Currently retailing on Expansys for £349.99 including VAT (pre-order, it’s not available yet it seems), the machine is a delight to use. An absolute delight.

I’m used to ultra light or mini laptops being total rubbish. Usable, but total rubbish. The LG X110 is actually highly usable, very well made and rather powerful.

It’s got a 1.6Ghz processor. You never know what that means nowadays. So I’ll tell you the experience. It’s fast. It puts the Dell Mini Inspiron I’ve got from Vodafone to shame. You know when you run Internet Explorer on one of these minis, even on XP, the thing chugs along for a good 20 seconds before doing anything. Not with the X110. I began to think of it as an 800 quid laptop squeezed into a decent sized mini.

It’s built nicely. Like an 800 quid decent laptop. I don’t feel like I could snap it in half if I tried.

It’s got 1GB RAM plus there’s a whopping 160GB of hard disk space and it’s sporting Windows XP Home. This was super at taking half a gig of photos and uploading them to Flickr over the wifi connection in the hotel. Although that sounds like a fairly innocuous task, your average 300-quid mini laptop would seriously struggle with the memory demands.

I’ve not yet finished playing with the X110 so standby for more soon. If you’re thinking about buying one and you’ve got some questions, either email me or post here and I’ll do my best to answer them.