Over the last few years Apple raised the bar for cool product design and, in our unhumble opinion, few companies manage to get anywhere close. But a product we've had in our hot, sweaty hands for a few days is a great example of outstanding engineering that approaches Apple's design quality, but just misses.

The product is OQO's eponymous OQO Model 01+ - the company and computer with the unpronounceable name.

The OQO is undeniably cool. Despite being the size of a PDA (4.9 by 3.4 by 0.9 inches) and weighing 14 ounces (somewhat heftier than most PDAs), the OQO is a complete PC with a pen interface capable of running Windows XP Home, Professional or Tablet editions.

The OQO comes with a 1GHz Transmeta Crusoe processor, 512MB of DDR RAM and a 30GB shock-mounted hard drive with auto-parking when free fall (as in being dropped) is detected. (We doubt how well the OQO would stand even moderate abuse.)

A slick feature of the OQO is the screen (a 5-inch, 800-by-480-pixel W-VGA transflective display, which is reasonably readable outdoors) that slides up to reveal a full, albeit miniature, qwerty keyboard with a TrackStik (a mouse controller). There's also a well-designed thumbwheel on the side of the OQO that provides vertical and horizontal scroll for applications as well as volume control.

Another neat design feature: The keyboard uses sticky Function, Control and Alt keys - press one once and it's combined with the next key you press, press twice and it's locked on, press a third time to unstick it.

The OQO's input and output features are remarkable for such a small package and include 802.11b wireless support, Bluetooth, a four-pin FireWire port, a miniature USB 2.0 port, a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack, a microphone and a speaker.

The removable but not hot-swappable lithium polymer battery is supposed to have three hours of life, but we got only about two and half hours out of it.

The OQO comes with a docking cable that provides a 1,280-by-1,024-pixel VGA video output, another USB port and another FireWire port, an Ethernet connection, audio out and DC power input. A simple stand also is included, but it isn't stable enough, particularly when the docking cable is connected.

The OQO kit includes a protective carrying sleeve and a universal power supply with aircraft and automobile adapters. Optional accessories are a metal carrying case and a belt-clip carrying case.