Kohjinsha SA1F00A Full Review

The smallest notebook PC in the world, the most energy efficient and the quietest also has the lowest CPU clock-rate. The Kohjinsha SA1 takes a low-power approach to computing in order to enable mobility and long battery life. Carrypad used it for a month and here’s the detailed report.

First five minutes.

You can’t fail to be impressed with a notebook PC that is this small. As you’ll see in the unboxing video there was quite a bit of surprise at just how small it was. The packaging is good and the wow-factor is pretty high. In the box you find the SA1, a slipcase, the battery, power cables, the usual set of manuals (in Japanese – this is an import) and a recovery disk. Startup was without problems and the familiar face of XP was ready for use. Dynamism, our supplier for this device pre-installed a US version of Windows Home, Firefox and the InterVideo DVD application.

From the outside.

Its not what you would a call ‘svelte.’ device. Its small and impressive and its even attractive in a techy kind of way but its got some quite hard lines which remind of Japanese cars. The Toyota Celica comes to mind because of the beveled edges and cut corners. The battery sticks out of the back which also gives it an awkward look. The black parts of the casing look good but the grey parts appear quite cheap and feel quite toy-like. The mouse pad buttons wobble about like they’re about to fall off!. Nothing has fallen off though and everything still seems to be stable and working well after a month.

The screen is a 7″ LED back-lit 800×480 part and it is surrounded with a series of buttons for scrolling, mouse, page up/down and brightness. There is a synaptics touchstick on the left-hand side of the screen and at the base of the screen are a the power and radio-on indicator lights and two small speakers. The screen and screen frame are covered with a shiny perspex cover and mounted on a bracket that allows the screen to rotate through 180 degrees and lie down flat with its back on the keyboard for a tablet effect. It looks great but there’s limited practical use in this mode because the screen isn’t touch-enabled. You’re unlikely to use this mode for anything other than demonstrations. One wonders why they went to the bother of including it. Marketing springs to mind.

Moving down to the keyboard, its a dual language English-Japanese unit which is covered in symbols and letters. It makes it look messy and is hard to learn because many of the keys are in different positions. Fortunately it doesn’t take long to get acquainted with. In front of the keyboard is a very small touchpad and those (wobbly) mouse buttons. The touchpad supports tap-to-click (as does the mouse pointer) and there’s a scrolling area on the right and bottom. Its difficult to use to start with and the mouse buttons are a shiny non-tactile plastic that are hard to click but like the keyboard, it gets better and very useful. On the front panel you’ll find the SD/MS slot, audio in/out and the indicators for disk activity, num lock, scroll and caps lock. The On the left hand side are the standby light, the power switch (rocker type), volume rocker a flip down panel which covers the USB and Ethernet ports and finally a power input port. Its takes 19v. On the Right hand side is a compact flash port, the VGA-out port a kensington lock port and the second of the two USB ports. On the back you’ll find the battery.

Underneath the device is the memory upgrade window. The Kohjinsha SA1 can be upgraded to 1GB. Instructions are in the manual so there’s no worry about voiding the warranty.

In the hand, the device feels very very light, very small and its easy to carry around. The form factor is also small enough to enable two-handed mode, one handed mode and even by resting the notebook on your wrist and holding the back of the battery. Its a suprisingly useful holding technique. In two-handed mode its possible to flip the screen right open and hold the device completely with the screen in lione with the keyboard. You can use the mouse pointer to navigate in this mode and if you need to type a URL or quick IM message, you can thumb the keyboard. This is what you might call the ‘surfing mode’ and is especially good for the sofa! The mouse pointer, buttons and scroll buttons make it very easy to navigate web pages either lying down, sitting down or standing up. This is something you can’t successfully do on bigger notebooks.

On the inside.

The Kohjinsha SA1F00A uses a AMD Geode LX800 as its CPU with a 30GB hard drive and 512MB of memory. The LX800 runs at 500Mhz and doesn’t support much in the way of extended instructions sets. There’s very little 3D support although some 2D and video decoding acceleration is supported. Starting up applications for the first time is certainly slower than you’d be used to on a desktop. Firefox, for example, takes 10 seconds to start after a fresh reboot. OpenOffice writer starts in 5 seconds if the taskbar ‘quickstart‘ background launcher is running. While these figures aren’t quick, they would work for someone that is prepared to trade a bit of speed for the portability. And battery life.

Because of the low-power components used, the Kohjinsha SA1 is one of the most power efficient PCs you can buy. As a notebook its probably the most efficient example in the world and there are only a few UMPC’s that can deliver similar battery life. Only a RISC-based Windows CE device could deliver significantly more battery life and with CE, you’re in a different league as far as software is concerned. CE is not really for the consumer.

The unit is near-silent, fan-less like the Raon Digital Vega and Pepper Pad 3 Geode LX-based devices. You can hear the drive clicking occasionally but only if you hold the unit close to your ear. Interestingly, there’s a 2.5″ drive inside the SA1 (not confirmed) which opens up some nice possibilities for HDD upgrades. 160GB should be fairly easy to drop into this assuming you don’t mind voiding your warranty. 160GB is an awful lot of storage!

Software.

The Operating system supplied is Windows XP Home and it was a nice clean install. Readers will probably be aware that this is the base version of Windows and does not includes extras like touch support (not needed in this case) remote desktop server (although you can request help via a similar remote service) , IIS service (web server – not needed), multi-processor support (not needed), multi-lingual support and some group working/sharing/permissioning functions. The choice of software seems sensible as the memory footprint is small and learning curve is short. One can’t help wondering if you could save some money and opt for a Linux version though!

Speaking of Linux…DSL booted from USB CDROM but didn’t find the WIFI. Knoppix 4.0 was the same story.

[pagebreak]

Performance.

Here’s the important section for many of you that are reading this. You want to know how Windows XP runs on a 500Mhz processor right? Well, you’ll be surprised. Although the processor technology itself is comparable to processors that were in consumer pcs 5 or 6 years ago, the disk and memory technology isn’t. What you end up with is something much more usable than a 6 year old PC. It doesn’t take much effort to move a chunk of data from disk to memory and so you get quite a responsive feel. Applications do take longer to start and complex web pages with animated gifs and flash are slower to load but that doesn’t mean that simple image processing or even editing short videos with Windows Movie Maker is out of the question. Its all a trade-off between the time saved by having such a portable device and the time lost while waiting the extra seconds for the applications to do their work. As we all know, after a while, things start to slow down on any PC and housekeeping becomesimportant. Its even more important on the Kohjinsha and a regular clean out of unwanted startup processes will be needed.

Lets get on to some important figures then. If you’re on standby with the browser open you only need to open the lid and wait less than 10 seconds before you’ll be able to enter a url or search term. The Kohjinsha sets the Wifi to OFF when returning to standby but there is a BIOS option to disable this.

• Cold Bootup to login screen. (after 3 weeks.) – 40 seconds.
• Return from Standby. (to login screen) – 8 seconds.
• Browser startup. (first startup after boot and login) – 8 seconds

The screen quality is very good. I have been using the 800×600 non native resolution almost exclusively. Even the 1024×600 mode is usable and it seems to be better than the Intel-based i7210 i use regularly. Of course its not perfect but there’s appears to be some automatic anti-aliasing feature that really helps. Another nice feature is that the resolution switching is almost instant using the Fn–ESC key which cycles through three resolutions. Brightness is excellent and the dedicated brightness buttons are far better than on-screen solutions. Its nice to have the screen protected when not in use too. This is an ever-present worry when owning a naked tablet style PC. Driving an external monitor up to 1280×1024 is possible and the quality was good. The built in graphics adaptor has screen memory adjustment all the way up to 256MB if needed (probably not!)

Of course the big disappointment with the screen is its lack of touch capability. Someone coming from a notebook PC may not even notice this but in comparison with other UMPCs of the same size, weight and cost, its a real negative point. The convertible screen looks great but is just unusable without any touch input capabilities.

Connectivity options on the Kohjinsha SA1 are very good. A USB-connected internal Wifi adaptor and BT2.0+EDR adaptor are provided along with a compact flash slot (PCI-connected) and Flash media slot (SD/MMC/MemoryStick.) We haven’t tested the CF slot but the SD slot is fast. A budget 1GB extrememory premium SD card was performing well with read speeds around the 6Mbps mark.

The Wifi performance is very good easily outperforming that on the i7210 and Pepper Pad 3. Bluetooth speed or range was not tested but 3G connectivity through a UMTS phone was no problem at all. The BlueSoleil application is pre installed to assist with BT management.

• Disk reads 20-25MBps
• CPU arithmetic. Dhrystone 757MIPS. Whetstone 283MFlops (Equivalent to a Celeron 266-class CPU)
• SD card read. 6MBPS
• CF card not tested.
• MP3 playback load. 192kbps mp3. WMP11 (compact mode) 35% Zoomplayer 20% Winamp 30% CPU.
• Bluetooth connectivity to Internet via Nokia 6280 and UMTS network (Vodafone Germany) Max Download 352kbps – Max Upload 56kbps.

Video performance tests

• Divx, Xvid. Very good. Over 2mbps. (zoomplayer and Media player classic.)
• WMV9. Average. 1-1.2mbps. (Media player classic)
• Real. Installed. Only audio streams tested (OK)
• Quicktime. Itunes installed. No video tested.
• FLV (YouTube). Small format OK. Normal format Very poor.
• DVD (Mpeg2) – Poor. Playback jerky. Some audio dropout. (InterVideo WinDVD)

Here’s a Google YouTube video example of a 2mbps XVid file.

Real-World performance

As was mentioned earlier, the real world performance is suprisingly good. Here are some notes that were made in relation to certain applications.

• Open Office. Good. 5 second startup for document editor.
• ITunes. Installs and operates. 3D effects not enabled (video carrousel for example)
• Livewriter. 22 seconds first startup time.
• Trillian. No problem
• Gimp. No problem
• Canon Zoombrowser. No problem
• WMP11. Annoying. Unusable. URGE service takes too much CPU. Long periods of waiting.

Audio

The Kohjinsha includes two speakers on the front at the base of the screen. The quality and volume is adequate. At the front, the headphone jack provides good quality output. EQ control works along with a Karaoke mode and pitchchanger.

Heat and noise

If you listen very very carefully (device-to-ear carefully!) you can hear the 2.5″ drive chattering but apart from that, its silent. No fans. There’s no heat build up at all on the device either. It stays very cool.

Battery Life

Battery life is one of the key features of this device. It really is in the top league with a normal wifi browsing time of around 3.5 hours and under load, well over 3 hours. One of the test I did included running an Xvid video non-stop with the screen on half brightness and the WiFi off. It returned 3hrs and 22minutes.

At one point during the tests there was a problem getting screen standby to work but after clearing up some background processes (The suspicion lies with WinDVD which seems to install an ‘always-on’ profile) it seems to have corrected itself.

Stability

During the months test there were no software problems, crashes or blue-screens. The Kohjinsha seems very stable.

BIOS

The BIOS – XpressROM (V S18 Ver 1.0A_0527) is quite simple and gives you the ability to change the Video memory (up to 256MB – I used 32MB) the boot order and the status of the WIFI and BT on boot. (Off or on). It is also capable of LAN booting and Wake on LAN.

Accessories

There aren’t really any accessories available for the Kohjinsha SA1 which is a real shame. The provided pouch case is OK but only as a dust protector. It would be nice to see a better case option along with an extended battery solution.

Comparison to similar devices

Its very difficult to compare the Kohjinsha with other devices because this is a fairly unique computer. At $1000 its far cheaper than comparable devices like the P1610, Flybook V-series and its more fully featured than devices like the Raon and Pepper Pad that share the same processor. The nearest comparison one could make would be a Samsung Q1B with keyboard case. The Samsung would be have higher performance, a similar battery life and a better keyboard for the same cost but you would lose the all-in-one usefulness of the Kohjinsha. The Q1B with an add-on keyboard would definitely not be a sofa-surfing solution.

The Kohjinsha is undoubtedly going to have competition in the near future. The Medion UMPC offers a similar spec and price (only a thumbboard solution) and there have been prototypes of similar devices. The Flipstart concept and teaser site is also one to watch for but for the time being, the Kohjinsha is really without peers.

Who’s the target customer?

Over the last month the Kohjinsha has proved itself as a fantastic mobile blogging too. We have no hesitation in saying that its probably the best mobile blogging tool there is. In addition it handles media cards very well and has the WiFi and BT needed to ensure connectivity options are always there. Other customers could include mobile digital photographers, frequent-flyers, train commuters, maybe someone that can justify a holiday or RV/Camper-van purchase or even someone planning to journal a long journey.

Example of a mobile blog using the Kohjinsha SA1.

Faults and Issues.

The lack of touchscreen has to be the most disappointing thing about this device. If it had a touchscreen it would be able to embrace the CarPC tasks quite well. We also have to highlight the keyboard as being an issue. It’s usable but it could be a lot better. Processing power needs careful consideration too as this is a low-end device that should be used for one task at a time.

For details on typing speed testing with the Kohjinsha, see here.

Minor issues include style and finish. The device is cool in a technology sense but it could look a lot more stylish.

Summary

This is a device without peers. It performs surprisingly well considering its low processing power and its quite an amazing bit of fanless PC minaturisation. It will certainly appeal to mobile bloggers who want to reduce weight and it could perform some mobile photography tasks pretty well too. At $1000 its a device that requires careful thought and some justification. Don’t expect a touch-typing experience on the keyboard and if you have thick fingers then maybe you need to consider a keyboard-less device with an external keyboard solution.

Availability and Pricing

The Kohjinsha was kindly supplied to us by Dynamism and is available for order now at $1000 base price and avialble for delivery throughout many parts of the world. A second model is available, the SA1F00B, with an 80GB hard drive.

Resources

There’s much more to see and learn about the Kohjinsh SA1. Take a look through some of these resources for more information.

Kohjinsha SA1 unboxing.

Live photo-blogging with the Kohjinsha

A full data sheet with specifications and further links is available here .

A gallery of SA1 photographs is available .