Sometimes gadget purchases go from zero to ‘own’ in a very short time. That’s how it was today as I assessed devices for the Ultra Mobile Video Editing series and checked out the Acer Aspire One 522. It’s an AMD Fusion device running on the C-50 APU at 1Ghz. CPU performance, as we’ve already determined, is lower than the dual-core Atom N550 CPU but there’s a trick or two up its sleeve when it comes to video playback and 3D graphics performance because the processing platform includes a Radeon HD6250 GPU. The whole AMD Fusion package is also tuned for low power consumption making it compete in the netbook power envelope but with better capability.
I’m not convinced the Aspire One 522 will help me achieve my goal of 720p editing on a lightweight, low cost computer but at €299 and with a need to research what AMD are doing with Fusion it makes sense to buy it. When your local store has it in stock and there aren’t many reviews out there already, it adds up to a must-buy for this blogger! Update: Liliputing is also testing the 522 right now.
Acer aren’t regarded as a high-end product builder as they tend to build to a price. Quality does suffer and I’ve experienced it first hand. Others will report similar experiences but out of the box, the Acer Aspire One 522 appears to be an absolute bargain. I seriously don’t think I’ve ever had this much computing power in my hand for so little money and it looks good and feels good too. It even weighs under 1.2KG which, for a netbook with a 6-cell battery, is class-leading. 1080p playback? No problem (*1). A hi-res 720P screen (1280×720) is included too. Long battery life? You’ll clearly have trouble getting less than 5 hours out of this and I’m sitting here now with 43% battery left after 4 hours of on-and-off testing. 3D performance will blow any Intel-based netbook out of the water. Even the build quality seems better that you’d expect for this money.
As I write this, I’ve had no showstoppers so far. BUT – I’m only into the 7th hour of ownership here so beware, there could be issues. Don’t get over-excited about the CPU or GPU power too. It’s good for a netbook but nothing like a low-end notebook. A 3D Mark 2001SE score of 5959 is good for a netbook but I seem to remember that my 5-year old Ti4200 graphics card would pull in 12K on that test. For 300gm and 200 Euro more you can get something much, much more powerful.
A glossy screen with less than 768 pixels in the vertical (important for some software installs) a fan (barely audible) and a disk that, like other netbooks, seems to slow down applications load times are the only things I want to complain about so far. In reality, that’s not a bad hit-list and I’m feeling confident that when I put this through our live, open review, it will come out looking good.
LIVE OPEN REVIEWof the Acer Aspire One 522 is planned for Tuesday 8th March at 2100 Berlin Time [Other times here]. Join us at UMPCPortal.com/live for video, chat and your chance to ask questions and watch everything happen live. Nothing is covered-up!
Thanks to Tegatech we now have the 10” capacitive touchscreen Tega V2 in our hands. I’ve just uploaded the unboxing video and as I write this, am preparing for the live session this evening at Carrypad.com/live. It starts at 2100 CEST – just over an hour from this posting time but we will record parts of the session. Also in the live session – Samsung Galaxy Tab.
Update: Live session over. Thanks for all that joined-in. Unboxing, open review video and first impressions will be up at my xperia sub-blog.
Yup. Heads-up because Chippy just bought his first ever Android phone!
I’ll be unboxing it this evening. Check out the details at a new sub-blog I’ve started just to track my experiences on the Xperia X10. We’ll have JKK of JKKmobile with his 2.1 Droid and i’ll have the Archos 5 Andoid tablet to test against.
Netbooknews.de has the IdeaPad S10-t3 [Product page] and pops the box open to let us all have a look. This multitouch convertible looks quite slick and comes with a massive battery. They were even kind enough to include an English unboxing (embedded below) in addition to their usual German one.
If you’re relatively new to the UMPC scene, the name ‘EKing’ probably doesn’t mean much to you. They arrived on the scene to rescue the failing Wibrain brand and took on production of the i1; an ugly but very productive UMPC. In the last year they’ve also been working on new devices and the S515 [specifications] is one of them. We’re not sure who’s manufacturing this as it’s also been spotted as the Digicube Z8. There’s also a hint of Viliv in the packaging and marketing but at the end of the day, it’s a new UMPC and it needs checking out.
The S515 surprised me when I first unboxed it. The black and rubberised finish, keyboard and build quality are way better than on the silver one I saw at IDF and I was very pleased to to confirm that there is a good quality mouse pad integrated into the frame. Performance with the Windows 7 build was quite impressive too. On the negative side, this is an 800×480 screen (not WSVGA as indicated on the box) which, while near perfect for web browsing and mobile video, becomes a problem when you try to run desktop operating systems on it. A 1024×600 screen would have been better. Lets hope that we can find a nice Linux-based small-screen optimised distribution that works on this Menlow platform because at 50-100 Euros, a Windows XP/7 license is going to be a significant portion of the overall cost of the S515.
As always, there’s a potential show-stopper. In this case, as with many other device we’ve reviewed, it’s the battery life. Is there still no global agreement that anything under 3 hours is a problem? The 2.5 working battery life of this (as I’m seeing right now) is a figure that many will balk at.
The PC-based architecture of the E-King brings the usual advantages of browser quality/choice, USB support, Windows application compatibility and processing power and for some, this is right at the top of their list. For those people, the Eking is worth looking at.
Here’s an unboxing of the UMPC that might just get an award for ugliest device of the year!
It looks to be more usable than the UMID M1 that we think it is based on which puts it in that category of devices like the WiBrain which sometimes turn out to be very useful devices indeed!
A very warm welcome to the HTC Touch HD2 into the MID/Phone crossover category of devices. It coincides nicely with the work I’ve been doing today to update the product database with all the WVGA phones out there. I’m trying to write a summary article too but this unboxing video from Chris at SlashGear is keeping me away from doing that right now!
The HD2 is due to launch this week with availability in the following few days. Pricing is already available in Germany too with latest prices hovering around the very expensive 599 Euro mark.
Clearly though, a multitouch capacitive touchscreen with Opera Mobile 9.7 on a 1Ghz Snapdragon CPU is something rather special and with the Windows Mobile 6.5 OS and Sense UI adding to the experience, I think it adds up to make it of the most exciting ‘Slate’ style high-end phones out there and definitely one that readers here should check out.
Chris will be getting into some more testing with the HD2 over the next few days and it will be interesting to see where he thinks this one fits in. Unlike the (240 Euro) Archos Android Tablet that I use as a secondary device, this (600 Euro) tablet is targeted at being a primary device. Is it really going to slot into the 24/7 usage scenario or is it designed to be used as part of a two-smartphone strategy?
It seems like Steve has had his hands all over the early white UMID M1 [Portal page], but I happen to have just received the official matte black UMID M1, courtesy of Dynamism, with twice the storage space (and a production model at that), oh and a nice case that Dynamism is offering with orders that even Steve didn’t get to check out! Let’s quickly review the important specs of the device:
1.33GHz Atom CPU
512MB of RAM
32GB SSD
Windows XP
1024×600 4.8” screen
So you’ve probably seen Steve’s white UMID unboxing, so I’ll try to keep the unboxing pictures brief, but let you scope out the sexy matte black finish and the quality leather case.
There were reports of poor build quality on the early UMID M1s. I’ve only been playing with it for a few hours, but everything feels fine as far as build quality goes. There are only a few issues I have. The first of which is the included stylus and the silo that it is housed in. The telescoping stylus doesn’t slide in and out of the silo very easily, and for some reason it feels awful when used to stroke the screen. Tapping is fine, but if you are trying to run it across the screen it feels like you are drawing with a pencil on sandpaper. I’ve been using my similar UX stylus on the screen instead which makes alleviates this feeling to some extent. The keyboard is a bit squishy to a certain point, but it is within a reasonable tolerance. UMID said that they increased the angle that the hinge would open to as there were early complaints. After consulting an expert who had her hands on the earlier UMID (hat tip to Jenn from Pocketables), it doesn’t appear as though the screen can actually go back any further, though I’ve noted that the viewing angels are excellent, so this diminishes the issue to some degree.
I’ll be checking out this sleek version of the UMID for the next few weeks. Steve has covered much of the device already; drop a comment here if there is anything in particular that you’d like me to look at.
Welcome to this week’s netbook roundup. In this space every Monday I’ll highlight netbook news items that might not need their own individual posts but may still be interesting.
Rumor: Verizon and HP Readying Subsidized Netbooks – Cheap netbooks due to subsidizes from cell phone carriers are fairly common outside the US, but it seems like HP might be teaming up with Verizon to offer a discount on a netbook if the consumer wants to start a Verizon contract. If this comes to fruition, we’ll probably see a USB WWAN card offered with the netbook, but I think most of us are hoping for a more elegant internal solution.
It looks even better now than it did at CeBIT last week and as an extra bonus, there was a great suprise for me when I unboxed it. The Viliv S5 I received today came not only with a beautiful leather case but with a complete car kit and protective plastic housing. And to top it all off, the supplied headphones are really good. You know that when the headphones are good, someone has really put some thought into the quality!
The version I have here is the 1.3Ghz version with 60GB drive and 1GB RAM, GPS, Wifi and Bluetooth. DMB is also included but of course, it’s not useable here in Europe. There’s no SKU on the box so I can’t tell you what version it is but I suspect it’s a Korean retail package with English Windows.
If you’re reading this on March 9th, note that we’re running a live video and chat session at UMPCPortal.com/live. At 2000hrs CET we’re running a podcast and afterwards I’ll be going through some tests and answering questions. Join us!
Stay tuned for more details, reviews and overviews. The S5 will be going with me to SXSW later this week so check UMPCPortal and MIDMoves regularly for updates.
Today we got a Vaio P [Portal page] review unit from our friends at Dynamism. This is the high end model running a 1.86GHz Atom Z540 CPU, 2GB of RAM, Windows Vista, and a spacious 128GB of SSD storage. Have a look at the unboxing, and the first thoughts below that.
Unboxing
First Thoughts
The Vaio P is impressively small. It is one thing to cram the necessary computer components into a device and make it run, but it is another entirely when you make a device that is tiny but actually usable. Despite all the marketing that tried to convince us that the VAIO P is pocketable, it is not. However, it is really light and thin. One might think that the keyboard would be hard to type on considering the initial footprint of the unit, and the fact that some key real estate was lost with the chiclet style keyboard, but it is incredibly usable. I have had no issue immediately typing like normal on the VAIO P. One thing that absolutely frustrates me though, is that the keyboard layout has a small right shift key. This is the biggest mistake they could have made after engineering a tiny but wonderful keyboard. I’ll map out my review for the VAIO P in the next few days and start laying down the content. I’m excited to use the VAIO P as I’ve enjoyed the VAIO UX180 [Portal page] for several years.
UMPC Fever has gotten a Viliv S5 [Portal page] and already have some videos up. There are also lots of good unboxing pics up over at UMPC Fever, have a look! (auto translated by Google). The S5, as you will recall, is a MID device that has been very popular according to our Portal charts.
Here are the specs of the device as shown in the video:
Day three and four of my Mid Moves tour and I’m switching devices. The Compal and it’s slide out keyboard stays behind, and is replaced with the BenQ S6. What’s in the box in hear you ask?
Dynamism kindly provided us with an Asus R50A [Portal page] to take a look at. It is a Slate UMPC with a 32GB SSD, 5.6″ screen, 1GB of RAM, 3G connectivity, and the less power hungry 1.3GHz Z520 Atom CPU. Will the R50A cut it as a quality UMPC? You’ll have to wait for the full review to find out. For now have a look at the unboxing below and read some initial impressions.
The upcoming MSI Wind U120 has been unboxed over at MSI WIND en Español. The MSI U120 is very similar to the original MSI Wind U100 [Portal page], apart from the U120′s standard larger capacity battery, larger HDD (120GB), 3G option, and color. The unboxing video isn’t terribly exciting; it seems a bit confusing that the box says "MSI Notebook" and "Wind Netbook" [my emphasis] on the very same side of the box. Head over to MSI WIND en Español to read some Google translated first impressions and see the unboxing video below.
Have a look at this quick and clean unboxing of the Mini 1000 [Portal page] from Notebooks.com. The short video shows a simple box and packaging that seems nice enough (after all it is just packaging…). I’m was very impressed when I saw the unit itself out of the box toward the end of the video. The keyboard looks gorgeous and the screen seems to take advantage of the space given to it.
Netbooknews.de has the IdeaPad S10-t3
Have a look at this quick and clean unboxing of the Mini 1000 [
