Hands on with MSI's Wind mini laptop
Mini laptops have been a surprise hit over the last year or so, following the launch of the original Asus Eee PC. Other vendors have since brought out numerous models to try and emulate its success.
The latest to become available is the oddly named Wind from Micro Star International (MSI), a firm best known for its motherboards and 'bare bones' PC and server systems.
Despite the dubious name, it seems to be rather a well designed mini laptop, just slightly larger than the Asus Eee PC 900 and 901, thus making room for a keyboard that users can live with and a decent 10in screen.
It is based on Intel's 1.6GHz Atom processor and has 1GB RAM, and unlike the Eee PC it has an 80GB hard drive instead of Flash SSD storage. It also ships with Windows XP, although this is the Home edition rather than XP Professional.
While screens smaller than 12in are considered too small for business use by some experts, I found the Wind's 10in display with its 1024 x 600 resolution quite comfortable for productivity applications, and the system's keyboard is large enough for typing at a reasonable speed.
The evaluation unit I saw had Microsoft Office 2007 installed, and the Wind seemed to handle applications such as Word and Excel with little difficulty. It would thus seem to make a good mobile system for workers needing to access documents and their email while on the road.
However, the downside on all small systems like this is usually battery life. I didn't have enough time using the Wind to test this, but MSI rates it at up to three hours with the three-cell standard battery pack, and this is likely to be an optimistic figure. An optional six-cell unit will provide longer life, but this bumps up the weight from just over a kilogram to about 1.2kg.
The Wind has three USB ports, a slot for SD Card and Memory Stick Flash disks, VGA and Ethernet ports, and includes 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. It costs £329.
Hands-on: Asus Eee PC 901 and Acer Aspire One
Following IT Week's full review of the Eee PC 900 and HP Mini-Note a couple of weeks back, I grabbed the chance to have a quick look at two new mini laptops that are currently being evaluated by colleagues on other publications at our offices.
The Asus Eee PC 901 is, as you might expect, very similar to its predecessor, but has a more polished feel and slightly more rounded styling. It actually costs less, at about £272 + VAT, but has the same 8.9in screen and is pretty much the same size and shape.
In fact, the most significant differences are that the 901 is based on a 1.6GHz version of Intel's new Atom processor and has a larger 6-cell battery. The older model had a 900MHz ULV Celeron and a 3-cell battery.
Sadly, the larger battery bumps up the weight from just under 1kg to 1.15kg - nearly a 20 percent increase. However, one of my colleagues reports that the battery life is much improved because of this, going from just over an hour and a half to several hours.
The same Intel Atom processor powers Acer's Aspire One. This is very similar in size to the Eee PC and also has an 8.9in screen, but is just a couple of centimetres wider. This extra width allows for a keyboard with slightly bigger keys that I found much easier to type on.
Like the Eee PC, the Aspire One ships in Linux or Windows versions. The Linux model has 512MB memory, a 3-cell battery and an 8GB Flash SSD for storage and costs £199 +VAT, while the Windows version has 1GB, a 6-cell battery and an 80GB hard drive and costs £299 + VAT.
The Linux-based Aspire One is lighter at just under a kilogram, while the Windows-based unit weighs about 1.26kg. With Linux, the Aspire has a battery life of just over two hours, according to another colleague who has used it at length.
Both of the models I looked at here were Linux models, and the two had quite similar user interfaces that separated the built-in functions and applications into categories such as 'work' and 'play'. Both have a built-in office suite - StarOffice 8 on the Eee PC and OpenOffice.org 2.3 on the Aspire One.
For users who just need a light, low-cost device for word processing or surfing the Web, both of these machines would seem to fit the bill, although I found the larger keyboard of the Aspire One preferable. Both are also capable of running Windows, but are only available with Windows XP Home edition.
One of my colleagues hopes to have a Windows version of the Eee PC soon, so that we can compare benchmark scores between the 901 and the 900. However, we will not be able to do the same for the Aspire, as Acer has said it wants to push the Linux version and so will not be making any Windows models available for testing.
Photos: Asus and HP mini-laptops
This photo shows the Asus Eee PC 900 next to HP’s 2133 Mini-Note PC, two miniature laptops that are approximately the same size and both of which cost less than £500.
As should be apparent from the picture, HP’s model is slightly wider, which enables it to have larger keys and thus makes for easier typing. The Mini-Note is also more polished, with a brushed aluminium case, while the Asus feels rather plasticky by comparison.
However, the Asus has the advantage of weighing under a kilogram, while the Windows version of HP’s pint-sized portable weighs almost half again as much at 1.46kg.
There are other notable differences; the Eee PC has Windows XP installed (although the Home edition rather than Professional), and with 1GB memory, it feels as responsive as any other Windows XP system. The HP Mini-Note ships with Vista Business Edition, and despite its having 2GB of memory, Vista is a severe drag on its performance.
Asus also ships the Eee PC with 12GB of Flash solid state disk (SSD), while the HP model has a more conventional 120GB hard drive. Both have an 8.9in screen, but the Eee PC has a native resolution of 1024 x 600, while HP’s is a step up at 1280 x 768.
In early tests, the HP Mini-Note appeared to have a longer lasting battery than the Eee PC, but a full report will appear in a future issue of IT Week.
Photos: The HTC Shift from Orange
I took this photo to give readers some idea of just how small the HTC Shift really is. No, that isn’t a giant comedy mug next to the unit, but an average sized one such as most people have in their kitchen.
The unit weighs just 800g and has a 7in touch screen, specifications comparable to an ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) such as those from OQO or Samsung. But the Shift is better thought of as an ultra-petite laptop; it has a full qwerty keyboard, and the screen slides back and tilts into a configuration just like a typical laptop when opened up, as you can see. It even has a mini touchpad, the dark square to the right of the screen.
The Shift is actually two devices in one. Turn on the power, and it boots Windows Vista. However, it has a second environment called SnapVue that can be activated at any time by pressing a button next to the screen.
This allows access to email, calendar and contact information - even when the main unit is shut down - and also lets users send text messages via the Orange network. The second photo shows the main SnapVue screen (apologies for the slightly blurry quality of the image). The beauty of this is that you can quickly check your email without waiting for Vista to boot up, and this also saves on battery power.
My first impression is that the Shift really struggles to handle Windows Vista, although I found the display a pleasant surprise and easy to read for such a small sized panel. The keyboard is also too small to type at any speed, and the battery is unlikely to last for more than a couple of hours.
Nevertheless, the Shift is much easier to carry around than a full-size corporate laptop, and could quite easily fit into a briefcase without weighing down an executive’s carrying arm. With Wi-Fi and 3D wireless built-in, users can stay connected from virtually anywhere.
Microsoft Office 2007 is bundled with the unit, so those who absolutely must have access to Office applications (including Outlook) while travelling should find the Shift worth evaluating. A full review of this system will appear in a future edition of IT Week.
Photo: Maxdata's tiny laptop
This photo shows just how small Maxdata's Belinea s.book 1 ultraportable is when compared with a standard-sized laptop.
However, while the s.book 1 is small, I found it perfectly capable of running standard applications under Windows XP, and its keyboard is just big enough to type on at a reasonable speed.
The 7in screen is what lets it down, though, especially as this has been squashed up to make way for a detachable Bluetooth handset, used for making VoIP calls when the laptop is connected to the internet. At a native resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, the screen feels cramped in use. The VoIP handset itself is designed to be used with Skype, which ships pre-installed with the system.
The s.book 1 is based on a 1.2GHz VIA C7M processor with 1GB memory and an 80GB hard drive. With a price tag of £419 including VAT, it is also inexpensive for such a small system, although still about twice the price of the Linux-based Asus eee PC, which is comparable in size. A full review of the s.book 1 will appear in a future issue of IT Week.
Vista's big disappointment
My partner – otherwise known as 'The Boss' – recently decided to invest in a laptop to help her work from home more frequently, and also to assist with a distance learning course she is currently studying for.
As the unpaid technical support, it became my job to help pick out a model that would meet both her needs and her budget. As always seems to be the case, this advice could be parodied as "buy the most powerful processor and the largest memory capacity you feel you can afford". Job done, I thought. Oh, but all the models she was interested in run something called Windows Vista – is that a problem? Not at all, I said.
How wrong can you get? The laptop takes an eternity to boot up, and seems to spend an inordinate amount of its time chugging away at the hard disk. Vista makes a brand new system with a 1.7GHz dual-core Athlon 64 processor and 1GB of memory feel like a Reliant Robin trying to climb a very steep hill.
The new user interface has also caused some difficulties. I'd grown accustomed to this after using the beta releases of Vista last year, but The Boss expressed her frustration at the disappearance of familiar landmarks as 'My Computer' and also her utter contempt for Vista's much-vaunted search facilities.
The lesson from all of this is just how easy it is for us techies to forget how daunting computers can be to those less familiar with it all. In this respect, I am coming to believe that Windows Vista is actually a retrograde step from earlier versions; the Windows 95 desktop was a huge advance over Windows 3.1 in making it as clear as possible to untrained users exactly what they had to do to find programs and other information.
By comparison, Vista's user interface seems to have been thrown together in a hurry by someone desperate to differentiate it from other operating systems and earlier versions of Windows.
Then there are the compatibility issues. The Boss has already run into problems with some applications she wants to use. But it's not as simple as Microsoft saying that a program will not work; instead, one particular application installs and runs fine, then in the middle of being used, throws up an odd bizarre error message that gives little clue about what might be causing the problem.
Small wonder, then, that businesses whose bottom line depends on their workers being able to actually get their job done have so far regarded Vista with a less than friendly eye. You might argue that all new versions of Windows have thrown up compatibility issues, but these were minor compared to the troubles Vista seems to have. I regularly use several handy little utilities that were designed for Windows 95 on my office system running Windows XP, for example, and they work just fine.
Based on this experience, My advice for businesses is; don't assume that your users will be able to operate Vista without some training, and don't even begin to consider migrating until every application you need to run has a Vista-compatible version available. Whatever some people might say, Vista is possibly the biggest ever change in the Windows platform, full stop.
First impressions of OQO's new UMPC
OQO launched its first model of ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) aimed at the European market earlier this week, and I went along to get a closer look at the device.
The OQO model e2 is a full-spec PC that just happens to fit in the palm of your hand. What images don’t convey is how good the screen is – even though it is only 5 inches across the diagonal, I could quite clearly read the text on the 800 x 480 Windows desktop.
The unit itself is quite comfortable to hold, at least for the short period I tried it out, and it feels quite natural to type with thumbs BlackBerry-style while cradling it in your hands.
One concern of this model is likely to be battery life. The company quotes the OQO as offering up to three hours only on the standard batteries. Nevertheless, this looks like the only UMPC I have seen that could stand up as a serious rival for a full-blown laptop.
Look out for a full review of the OQO model e2 in future, when IT Week will evaluate the performance and battery life of the model, as well as reporting on using such a small form factor device for productivity work.
Nivio to provide virtual desktops via web
You can get email in a web browser, and even edit documents in a browser using web-based applications such as Google Docs, so why not go the whole hog and have your entire Windows desktop accessed via a browser?
One company that will soon offer users this option is Nivio. Its service lets users subscribe to access a Windows XP desktop through a browser for £7.99 per month. The desktop is hosted by Nivio, and accessed through any browser supporting Java or ActiveX.
Anyone who has used a service such as GoToMyPC or LogMeIn to view their PC desktop remotely will be familiar with the concept, but in this case the system you access isn't a real physical PC, but a virtual one living in a datacentre.
The drawback of this approach is that you can't install your own applications. Nivio provides a selection of free applications such as those from the OpenOffice.org suite, plus others such as Microsoft Office 2003 applications, which cost extra. Once you subscribe to an application, its shortcut appears on your desktop and the app itself is streamed in when you access it.
As you can see from the screenshot, a Nivio hosted desktop is nothing really exceptional to look at – it looks pretty much the same as any other Windows XP desktop, as it should.
Nivio believes that this service could save smaller companies on the cost of owning and managing their own PCs. Customers could instead use terminals or outmoded PCs to access a Windows XP desktop remotely. However, you would have to be pretty confident about the reliability of your internet connection to follow this route.
Another drawback is the difficulty of getting data files on and off your virtual desktop. Nivio provides an application to let you upload and download files, but for this you need….a Windows PC.
Microsoft got there first
When in early 2006, Microsoft unveiled some of the new features to come in Windows Vista, some Apple followers were quick to point out the similarities between the Windows Sidebar and the Dashboard introduced in Mac OS X 10.4. Both of these features host small applets, snippets of code that provide at-a-glance access to information such as weather updates.
However, during a recent clear-out at IT Week's offices, I discovered some faded old presentation slides from a Microsoft reviewer's workshop for Windows XP and Office XP. There, in a presentation given by Rick Rashid of Microsoft's research division, is a screenshot showing an early version of the Windows Sidebar.
Back then, the technology was called Sideshow and was being used internally by some Microsoft workers, and I now recall that Rashid gave a brief demonstration, showing how it displayed the status of his instant messaging buddy list and how many unread emails were sitting in his inbox.
This is not quite the same as the Sidebar and Gadgets that ship as standard with Vista, but still recognisably the same concept. My notes accompanying the slides are dated 6th April 2001, which pre-dates the launch of OS X 10.4 by four years.
Rashid also talked about other projects that Microsoft was working on, including something called TerraServer, which from the old slides looks remarkably similar to Google Earth. As part of a user interface talk, he also demonstrated a Pocket PC handheld that had been fitted with motion sensors so that the display scrolled up or down or panned left or right, depending on how it was tilted. Sound familiar?
Perhaps Microsoft is in danger of following the example of Xerox's former Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), which is known for inventing useful things such as the graphical user interface, but failing to capitalise on them?
IE problem caused by Flash
A few weeks back, I blogged about an apparent bug that kept crashing Internet Explorer on the thin clients with XP embedded (XPE) that I have been testing out.
The flaw affected three out of the five terminals I had in IT Week Labs, but the vendors I contacted were at a loss to explain the problem. I reported the issue to Microsoft, and the company has eventually got back to me with an explanation.
As we in IT Week Labs suspected, the problem appears to be with Adobe's Flash browser plug-in and not Internet Explorer or XPE itself. Microsoft told me that the issue is likely to affect older versions of Flash, and so I checked which versions were installed on the thin clients under test.
All the terminals that exhibited the problem turned out to have versions of Flash Player 6 embedded in their firmware build, while those that appeared to be immune to the bug had Flash Player versions 7 or 8.
While this does not appear to be a serious problem, companies looking to deploy XPE thin clients should ensure they are updated with a more recent version of Flash Player or be prepared to update the firmware themselves.
