The Everex CloudBook marks the latest entry to the expanding world of UMPC-type subnotebooks at affordable prices. With a 7-inch display, 1.2GHz processor, and 30GB hard drive, the CloudBook certainly doesn't make a very good desktop replacement computer, but it does look like one impressive little road warrior. What did we think of the CloudBook after one day in our office? The answers may surprise you.
[tabletpcreview.com]
Showing posts with label Reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reviews. Show all posts
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Everex CloudBook First Thoughts Review
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
10-Year-Old Reviews the Asus Eee PC (Video)
Now that the Asus Eee PC is on sale at Best Buy, more of the general public will be exposed to the tiny laptop companion. It will never replace your home computer, but it certainly makes mobile blogging, web browsing, and other basic computer functions a heck of a lot more convenient.
One complaint that people have about the Asus Eee PC is that it is too small, making the keyboard a tad uncomfortable. But how does this complaint pan out for someone with smaller hands? Say, a 10-year-old boy?
Well, Tyler here says that he likes the Asus Eee PC. The operating system isn't quite as pretty as OS X Leopard, but it's definitely easy to use and he immediately thought of Apple when he saw the glossy white finish. To get his full impressions, check the video below. Note that this is his first time on camera! It's a 12-minute video, so grab some popcorn.
ASUS Eee PC Video Review - PC Magazine
PROS:
Amazing bargain. Designed like a high-end laptop. Integrated webcam. Three USB ports. Good speakers. Xandros Linux is speedy and solid. Comprehensive selection of software.
CONS:
Only 4GB of storage. Not powerful enough to stream audio and video from an external optical drive. Cramped keyboard.
BOTTOM LINE:
Despite its minor annoyances, the ASUS Eee PC 4G—a 2-pound ultraportable—is sleek, versatile, and well worth the $400.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Asus Eee PC 701 Review - laptopmag.com
Date Posted: 10/25/2007
This past weekend a circular advertised a Vista-powered laptop equipped with a Celeron processor, 14.1-inch display, an 80GB hard drive, and a DVD drive for only $399. For the same price, the Asus Eee PC (see the photo gallery) offers the same amount of RAM and Celeron processor but a smaller seven-inch display, a measly 4GB of storage space, and no DVD drive. And yet there's no way we would give up this two-pound wonder for a "regular" notebook. The Eee PC may be designed to appeal to children and older customers, but it should also tempt anyone looking for a lightweight budget PC that weighs next to nothing and connects to the Internet easily. It's ten times simpler to use than any Windows machine, starts up twice as fast (no crapware!), and is only about a fifth of the cost of other systems in its weight class. It's a little rough around the edges, but the Eee PC is a remarkably versatile machine for the price.
Refreshing Interface
The reason why the Eee PC should appeal to kids and grandparents alike is the streamlined, tab-based interface that offers only six easy-to-understand options: Internet, Work, Learn, Play, Settings, and Favorites. In some cases the Asus-designed menu (which runs on top of Linux) merely offers links to sites that Web-savvy users have already bookmarked, like Yahoo e-mail or Google Docs, but these choices are welcome for a target audience that may not be able to find these resources easily. We also appreciated the option of using these quick shortcuts, as opposed to opening the browser first. Users will love having a clutter-free desktop for day-to-day use and will likely find navigating the various options refreshingly simple compared with XP or Vista, as well as with Mac OS X.
Small, But Not Too Small
We found the small seven-inch, 800 x 480-pixel display pretty easy on the eyes, especially when compared with Ultra-Mobile PCs like the OQO model 02 (5 inches) and FlipStart 1.0 (5.6 inches), but most users don't have that point of reference. A three-year-old accustomed to a 14-inch LCD didn't mind the screen while she was having fun with Mickey and friends on Playhousedisney.com. On the other hand, we don't see many people above the age of 50 using this device as their primary computer unless they hook it up to a bigger external LCD, which start at about $170.
Overall, the Eee PC's design is fairly solid and incredibly travel-friendly for the price. Our white model (black and other colors will come later) features an SD Card slot, two USB ports, and a VGA port on the right. An extra USB port, Ethernet and modem connections, and headphone and mic jacks line the left side. The keyboard is cramped but is just big enough to touch-type on; the biggest annoyance is the proximity of the Up arrow key and right Shift key; we accidentally moved up a line on several occasions while trying to capitalize a letter. And although we didn't mind the unified, slightly chintzy-feeling touchpad button that you can left- or right-click on, our kid tester found it confusing at first.
Chock-full of Useful Apps
So what can you do with this mini notebook? Practically anything you would do with a Windows-powered one. Teens and adults will likely spend the most time in the Internet area, where you can launch the Firefox browser, Wikipedia, Skype (for making cheap calls), and the instant messaging program (which includes clients for AOL, Google Talk, MSN, and Yahoo).
In fact, the Eee PC is the perfect device for households that fight over the primary PC (and its Internet connection). Why waste money on a two-trick pony like the ZipIt 2 Communicator (which offers only IMing and MP3 playback) when you can get a featherlight PC that does those things and surfs the whole Web, too? And that's not all the Eee PC can do. Under Learn, for example, you can launch word games like Hangman and math games like Tux of Math Command (starring the Linux penguin), which gives flash-card-style math questions the space-shooter treatment.
Under the Work menu you'll find quick links to OpenOffice.org 2.0's various Microsoft Office-compatible apps, including Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations. These programs took more than ten seconds to load the first time but only eight seconds after that, and we had no problem composing a Word document on the Eee PC, saving our work to a memory key and then continuing to work on that file on a Windows laptop. Asus also includes a file-manager utility, a PDF reader, the Thunderbird e-mail client, and a Notes app.
No, the Eee PC doesn't do iTunes, but the preloaded Media Player and decent-sounding speakers get the job done. The device played MP3s and WMAs stored on a memory card while we surfed the Web, and the built-in mic performed admirably when making Skype calls. The Eee PC also did a nice job handling MPEG-4 videos captured by a 720p Sanyo Xacti camcorder and stored on an SD Card; the video looked surprisingly smooth on the seven-inch display. The Photo Manager took its sweet time loading large image files, however. Overall, the Media Player app looks positively crude compared to Windows Media Center and Apple's Front Row, so a makeover is certainly in order.
Good Performance and Peripheral Support
Getting online with the Eee PC 701 via Wi-Fi was pretty painless; once you set up a profile and enter the encryption key, the notebook will automatically connect to that network the next time you boot up. Although surfing wasn't quite as zippy as it is on our ThinkPad, it was still plenty fast. The device had no problems handling Web 2.0 sites powered by Ajax technology (like Netvibes) or Flash (YouTube). We encountered a screen-resolution issue with the new Yahoo Mail, but we still got it to work.
Overall performance was pretty snappy, even though this machine uses a Celeron processor. Most apps loaded quickly, and the 512MB of RAM is more than sufficient for an operating system with such little overhead. A mere 4GB of storage space tells you that the Eee PC isn't going to be your primary digital media vault out of the box, but you can easily augment that capacity with an external drive. Plus, that 4GB solid state drive can withstand being dropped by Junior.
Speaking of external devices, the Eee PC did an excellent job recognizing all sorts of peripherals, from a Kingston USB drive to a USB dongle for a Logitech wireless mouse. When we plugged in a Casio Exilim camera, the Eee PC asked us if we wanted to open the images in the File Manager or Photo Manager. Not surprisingly, the device wouldn't load music from our iPhone, but the Eee PC did charge it.
Eee PC owners will be pleasantly surprised with how well this tiny machine can double as a desktop replacement. We connected the device to a 20-inch ViewSonic monitor and used the built-in utility to scale the resolution up to 1024 x 768 pixels, and the resulting picture was nice and sharp. The Eee PC also instantly recognized a full-sized Dell USB keyboard and a wired Logitech USB mouse.
This notebook lasted the rated 3.5 hours of battery life on our tests. That's not nearly as good as the five-plus hours of endurance offered by the best ultraportable notebooks. Those machines tend to cost $2,000, however. Bonus: The Eee PC's power adapter is even smaller than what most notebooks in this weight class ship with; it's not much bigger than a cell phone charger.
Room for Improvement
Although there's a lot to like about the Eee PC, there are some telltale signs here that the device may have been rushed to market. Take the webcam, which is launched under the Play menu. We were able to record footage from within the webcam app, but couldn't get it to work with either the preloaded Skype program or Pidgin instant messaging program, and with good reason: Asus is still working on drivers for the webcam, which it says will be released early next year.
Finding and adding applications could also be more intuitive. When we attempted to update Skype after being asked if we wanted to do just that from within the app, the Skype icon ceased to work from the main menu. Turns out you're supposed to update software from within the dedicated Add/Remove Software utility, located under Settings. Also, we didn't see any new applications we could add, although Asus promises to certify applications as they become available and make them available to users via software updates. The intrepid can install applications themselves, but you'll have to dig into the File Manager and launch them manually each time.
We have one other major complaint. Menu screens dipped below the taskbar occasionally, making it difficult to click Next or OK. This happened when we were attempting to set up an e-mail account from within the PIM application. We couldn't move the window in question up high enough or shrink it down enough to move to the next screen, which was quite frustrating. You're supposed to click the Alt button while moving the window with the mouse.
We'd also like to see Asus make the Eee PC mobile-broadband friendly--so you can surf beyond hotspot range--either by adding Bluetooth support (using a 3G cell phone as a modem) or by adding support for USB-powered modems.
Is the Eee PC for You?
Asus is forging a new class of device with the Eee PC. Yes, you can get a laptop with a bigger screen and better specs for the same amount of money, but this machine wasn't designed to go toe-to-toe with bargain-basement Windows laptops. It's an excellent secondary computer for households with children, and it's a very good primary computer for novice PC users who never had the time or patience to master an operating system.
In many ways, too, the Eee PC is a new-and-improved version of the Internet appliance concept, as its easy-to-tote, easy-to-use design makes it simple for anyone to get online.
When it comes to road warriors, the Eee PC runs circles around UMPCs powered by Vista and XP in terms of performance, price, and ease of use, but not application support. Despite a few issues, such as a webcam not yet optimized for online video chats, the Eee PC is also a worthy alternative to devices like the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. The Nokia is more pocket-friendly, is Bluetooth-enabled for using a cell phone as a modem, and has a built-in GPS receiver, but the Asus sports a better keyboard, can be connected to a big-screen monitor, and is $80 cheaper.
As for that other famous low-cost notebook: The $188 OLPC XO laptop is a far more ambitious product in that its purpose is to educate children in developing nations. But that doesn't mean the Eee PC isn't a breakthrough in its own right. It brings affordable computing to everyone else, and without a learning curve.
Asus Eee PC Initial Hands On and Video Review - NotebookReview.com
by Jerry Jackson, Kevin O'Brien and Andrew Baxter The Asus Eee PC 701 4G is the new affordable ultraportable notebook that's bound to be on many consumers' Christmas wishlists this year. Retailing for somewhere between $299 and $399, the Eee PC isn't exactly a workhorse, but it will do just about every basic task you'd need from a laptop. Our initial hands-on actually proves it does more than we expected. First, the specs for the review unit we have on hand, which is the Eee PC 701 4G: We've only had the Asus Eee PC for a few hours at the time of this writing, but wanted to share a few thoughts and some video before we do a more complete review next week. Looks The Asus Eee PC isn't half bad looking. It's all white, which in the long term might not do so well with showing dirt, but while it's pristine and clean in the first few hours, it sure looks nice: Size Comparison The Asus Eee PC is small, very small. It weighs only 2lbs, if you include the power adapter then it still weighs under 2.5lbs. That's great for travelling. If you're on the go and want a cheap device to take with you but still do some work or have some fun, this could be it: Screen: The screen is 7-inches diagonally and has a resolution of 800 x 480. For the sake of a reference, here's what you can see when you pull up the homepage of the site you are on right now: As you'll see from some of the videos in this article, it's no Sony XBrite display that offers jump off the screen contrast, but for your web surfing (Firefox is pre-loaded) and Open Office (also pre-installed) work needs you won't really care. We even found the colors serviceable for You Tube video watching needs (more on that soon). Below is a screenshot we took on the Asus Eee PC of the YouTube.com homepage, this is a good example of what you'll see using the Eee PC screen resolution and size: Keyboard and Input: Okay, so the keyboard is far from being a ThinkPad keyboard, but it's not (quite) the worst keyboard we've ever experienced on a notebook. That said, we have to be honest and say it's a real challenge to get used to this keyboard if what you want to do is fast touch type input. Some of the keys are a little wobbly, most of them are undersized and your fingers will most definitely strike the wrong keys as you get used to the weird size and positioning of the keys. The Asus Eee PC likes the Apple iPod Pleasant surprise number one. We plugged in an iPod to the Eee PC and braced ourselves for nothing to happen. But it did. Upon plugging in the iPod the Eee PC launched the built-in music playing application. It took about a minute for this to happen, but once the application was open we could see all of our playlists on the iPod and could play them through the Eee PC. That called for playing some AC DC "Back in Black" to celebrate: The Asus Eee PC works with USB devices flawlessly We were concerned that all of the normal devices we use with Windows would flake out and not work on the Eee PC. We were wrong again. We plugged in a Logitech wireless mouse and it right away worked with the Eee PC. Even the scroll wheel worked without issue, scrolling through FireFox was a breeze. An external keyboard worked along with any thumb drive we plugged in. Now don't go expecting your USB based TV card tuner to work out of the box with the Asus Eee PC, but it seems that most common peripherals will instantly have a happy relationship. Voice prompt capability One little fun thing about the Eee PC is that it has a built-in microphone and basic voice recognition software. A built-in application that you can enable makes it so you call out to the Eee PC to open applications. For instance, say "Computer Web" and it will chirp back "Web" and open FireFox. Or say "Computer Clock" and it repeats back "Clock" and then pops up the time. While neat, we found that after a while it started being a bit too good. Jerry said "Sony" out loud in the room and the Asus Eee PC decided to open the "Movie" player. Well, here's an example of when it works how it should: Outputting to a larger monitor We tested outputting to a monitor at 1280 x 1024 resolution. The output was fine, but for video playback things began to choke a bit. When opening up other applications at the same time as playing a video the sound and audio went out of synch and things got choppy. The good news is that the built-in game PlanetPenguin Racer (based on Tux Racer) worked at a whopping 5 frames per second on the large monitor at max resolution. It worked at 15 fps on the regular old 7-inch screen. Video playback Again we were pleasantly surprised. It seems that any MPEG4 based video will play back on the Eee PC. DivX and xVid videos play without issue. And yes, if you want to watch You Tube within your Fire Fox browser on the Eee PC that's completely doable. In fact, here's a You Tube video of a You Tube video playing on the Eee PC to prove it (that hurts to think about): Web cam The Asus Eee PC comes with a built-in 0.3 megapixel web camera that works quite well. Once you enable it that is. For whatever reason the camera was by default turned off in the BIOS and we had to go in and enable it for the camera to work. For something that dubs itself as "Easy to work, Easy to play, Easy to learn" that's not exactly something you'd expect. We don't think grandma will figure that part out on her own. Below is an example shot we took using the Eee PC webcam, it's a picture of the box it came in. Not the greatest, but certainly not bad. Updating the OS and Software It turns out that all updates are done internally, including everything from Skype to the BIOS. All you have to do is click on "Add Remove Programs" in the Settings area and it will check to see if any updates are needed to the system. It will download any updates, apply them and restart itself. So far this has worked flawlessly in our testing. So far, so good While this is in no way a comprehensive review, we just wanted to get some of this video out there and some first real hands on thoughts. We'll have a more honest and in depth formal review in the days ahead once the Asus Eee PC has stood the test of time for more than just a few hours with us. A note on Availability The caveat we have to throw out there is that we know the Eee PC is going to be hard to get for some time. Supplies are short at the moment (for various reasons) and because of the price and expected high demand the Asus Eee PC is going to be another one of those gadgets that gets sold for a much higher price on eBay than it does at Best Buy. Asus tells us the Eee PC should hit U.S. store shelves within weeks. Keep your eyes open, because even if you blink it might be gone not long after it has touched those shelves.
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