It was approximately A4 paper sized and lightweight at 0.9 kg (2.0 lb), running on four AA batteries for 20 hours of use.

[6] Early models were contract-manufactured by Thorn EMI but production later switched to SCI Systems in Irvine, Scotland.

[7] The Z88 is a notebook computer weighing 0.9 kg (2.0 lb), based on a low-power CMOS version of the popular Zilog Z80 microprocessor.

An integrated capacitor prevents the Z88 from losing its data for the limited time it takes to change the batteries.

However, the latter requires some extra board modifications, and 512 kB is the biggest size that can be addressed by the Z88 for the internal RAM.

A 512 kB flash chip can replace the original ROM, allowing an upgrade of the operating system.

He said that the screen was small but readable, and thought that his $894 estimate for a minimum configuration was "not a lot of money for good hardware".