The AS1410-2285 has the following notable specifications:

• Dual-core 1.2 GHz
  SU2300 “CULV” processor
• Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics chipset
• Full-sized Keyboard
• 11.6″ LCD w/LED backlight
• Windows 7 Home Premium x64 edition
• VGA and HDMI port
• 6-cell battery
• Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11 a/b/g/n
• 0.87″ to 1.18″ thick and 3.08 lbs
• 160 GB 2.5″ SATA HDD
• 2 GB RAM
• Two real mouse buttons instead of a cheap imitation MacBook button that
  works like garbage.
• Did NOT see anything about BlueTooth but you can buy one of those tiny
  dongles for $10 or less if you get a bargain.

This is the sort of specification that would have probably fetched close to $2000 just two years ago but the “race to the bottom” has been won by Acer.  While I’m sure this saddens those in the notebook industry, consumers are rejoicing.  I saw an ad over this weekend for a netbook with Windows 7 “Starter Edition” for $368 so I feel for the poor guy/gal who buys it.

It’s worth noting that the HP Mini 311 netbook with NVIDIA Ion still sells for $400.  While the NVIDIA Ion LE graphics is about 79% faster than the GMA 4500MHD in 3DMark2006, the Atom CPU in the Mini 311 CPU is slower than a dual-core 1.2 GHz SU2300 especially for multi-thread optimized workloads.  So which one is better depends on your preferred workload, but I personally don’t take gaming on netbooks too seriously.

The $330 and above netbook market is dead is a post by George Ou from Notebooks.com.

The only down side is all the trial and crapware that Dell ship with this thing, but that can be wiped out with a fresh OS install and you can use the OEM license sticker on the bottom of the laptop. If Vista refuses to activate, call into Microsoft activation and they’ll fix it for you quickly.

For a total price of $434, it is an unbelievably low price for a real ultraportable laptop that performs like the $2000 ultraportables of 2006. I never expected these CULV (stands for consumer ultra low voltage) notebooks to sell at this price point since that is overlapping with netbooks, but I’m not complaining.

The only downside to the 11z appears to be the weak trackpad and relatively slow single-core low frequency CPU.  But it’s still faster than the Atom processor and at least it supports the SSE4.1 instruction set.  Some of the power saving features like speed step is disabled, but the system still has a very impressive battery life.  Dell does offer a $75 option to upgrade to the fully featured SU4100 processor which has two CPU cores and it also has speed step enabled to improve battery life.  Then if we add the $25 802.11n and $20 internal Bluetooth upgrade along with Windows Vista Premium with Windows 7 upgrade for $30 and the total price comes to $584 which is still a great deal considering the specifications.

Forget Netbooks, Ultraportable 11.6″ Laptop for $434 is a post by George Ou from Notebooks.com.

For this particular review, I’m not going to get into the performance aspect of this netbook in terms of video playback capability since it’s identical to the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE.  I explain in detail how well a netbook with this type of CPU and chipset configuration works in this Asus Eee PC 1000HE review.

The Good

The size, shape, and weight of the clamshell netbook are simply amazing.  It’s something you can just toss into a backpack or purse and it doesn’t even feel like you’re hauling a laptop around.  There are no breaks in the contour and even the Ethernet port uses a collapsible opening to follow the flow of the clamshell.  Even the power port is tiny so that it doesn’t ruin the contour.  For a netbook this light with a small and light battery, I was shocked that it was still possible to achieve nearly 6 hours of web surfing over Wi-Fi.  It’s one thing to achieve 6 hours with a bulging heavy battery; getting it in such a lightweight form factor is a great engineering achievement.  The edge-to-edge keyboard is almost full size and they actually give you a full size right shift key (though I’ve long trained myself to only use the left shift).  The slight keyboard-flexing problem I noted in my Asus 1000HE review doesn’t affect the 1008HA keyboard and it is fairly easy to type on.

The Compromises

The beautiful clamshell design does pose some interesting compromises.  For one thing, there’s no immediate VGA port on the netbook because it’s too tall to fit into the side. What you do get is a dongle that connects to a miniature port hidden behind a contour cover on the side that’s tucked away underneath the 1008HA.  It’s quite a clever design that makes it so that you won’t lose or forget the VGA dongle like you would on a MacBook Air, but it does take some delicate work hooking up the dongle and VGA cables.  This is why I can’t wait for the day that we can drop the DB-15 analog VGA port altogether for a simple small and consolidate audio/video HDMI port, and that trend seems to be happening already with some of the newest netbooks.

The other challenge of the clamshell is that just plugging in a headphone requires you to flip open the side panel and leave it open while you’re plugged in.  The power plug is so tiny that I’m sometimes afraid that I might bend or break the plug although it seems to be fairly sturdy so long as you handle it with finesse.

The bad

Every product has bad points, and the Asus Eee PC 1008HA is no exception.  But what kills me is that every netbook and even some notebook makers are doing the same thing.  For one thing, the glossy screen just makes it hard to see in a brightly lit room or one with many windows.  I know this is the trend these days, but the Asus 1000HE had an absolutely gorgeous screen with almost no glare.  Why the industry is hell bent on putting in a feature” that might look nice and shiny when the netbook is turned off is beyond me.  I guess until consumers stop buying netbooks and notebooks with glossy screens altogether, our eyes will continue to be assaulted.  So for this reason alone, I would declare what I would otherwise consider a great product a bad buy.  I’m almost loathed to give any positive review of this netbook because I hate glossy screens that much.  It is possible to put a coating on the screen or an anti-glare sheet, but it’s still not as good as a screen that didn’t have the glossy surface to begin with.

The other show stopper for me is the single bar mouse button.  Reviewers and consumers alike almost universally hate this feature”.  It’s almost as if some idiot product manager decided that they wanted to emulate the look of a single-button MacBook, but the fact that you can’t actually push down the middle of the button makes these trackpad buttons unusable.  There’s nothing more frustrating than pushing down the middle of the button only to find out that it’s not going anywhere.  The actual area you can push is only along the left and right edges of the bar.  The Asus 1000HE had it perfect and I don’t know why Asus felt it was necessary to ruin a good thing.

I don’t care much for the glossy body but that isn’t a show stopper for me.  But between the crappy mouse button and the blindingly glossy screen, it stopped me from buying a 1008HA.  So if you don’t like glossy screens and single bar seesaw buttons on the trackpad, this netbook is not for you.  Now I understand that Asus isn’t the only guilty party here and most other notebook makers are following some of these same nasty design principles.  All I’m saying is that I’m fed up with these bad design choices and you should be too.

The Great Battery Life

The Asus 1008HA uses a non-modular lithium polymer battery that is molded to fit into the chassis to exploit every bit of space.  Most laptops use lithium ion batteries that are modular and quickly detachable, but lithium ion can’t be shaped as easily and they have to be cylindrically shaped which makes them bulkier.  More importantly, lithium ion has a much shorter life span and you can expect to lose around 7% of your battery capacity every year.  Lithium polymers cost more and they lack modularity, but they are more compact because they can take any shape.  Lithium polymer batteries also last twice as long as lithium ion which is probably good enough for the useful lifespan of the netbook.

The power consumption of the Asus 1008HA was surprisingly low.  I was able to achieve 5.82 hours while refreshing two websites every minute using a Wi-Fi connection and having the LCD set to 40% brightness.  That translates to an average power draw of just 5.33 watts, which is nothing short of amazing.  By comparison, this HP DV2 netbook based on an AMD Neo platform consumes 20.1 watts, which forces it to sacrifice significant battery life even while carrying a larger heavier battery.

Note: This 5.82 hour result comes in slightly short of Asus’ six-hour advertising claim, which shows that Asus is very honest with their battery life claims.  With the Wi-Fi off and LCD set to minimum brightness, I could achieve 8 hours of document editing or reading time which is a valid use case for business travelers on airplanes.  However, I think the more common usage scenario is Wi-Fi enabled web surfing and I think Asus’ claim of six hours not only meets legal requirements, but also it matches user expectations.

For a netbook of this class with a standard Intel Atom N280 and GMA950 graphics chipset, it almost seems that Asus was able to drop the total power consumption by 25% when compared to other netbooks with the same CPU and chipset.  The Asus 1000HE, which uses an identical CPU and chipset, can drop down to around 5.5 watts while idling with the screen at minimum brightness.  The 1008HA somehow manages to drop power consumption down to 3.9 watts.  Even during standard definition DivX/XVID video playback with the LCD set to 40% brightness, I was able to achieve slightly over 4.5 hours which means the unit was drawing 6.9 watts of power on average.  I didn’t think that was possible to go that low until we got to the next generation Intel PineTrail-M platform.

Summary

• Very good looking and desirable form factor with the exception of the bad glossy display and bad single bar mouse button.
• Keyboard is very nice, possibly nicer than the Asus 1000HE because there is less keyboard flex.
• Battery life was outstanding considering the small lightweight battery you’re carrying.  The Asus 1008HA is probably the smallest netbook you can find that gets close to 6 hours of honest to goodness usable battery life.
• It performs like any other netbook with this type of hardware, and 720P video playback works fine so long as you’re using efficiently coded software.

ASUS Eee PC 1008HA Review is a post by George Ou from Notebooks.com.

For a typical street price of $375 to $399, the Asus 1000HE netbook simply can’t be beat in terms of value.  It is one of the best netbooks on the market at any price.  The netbook is a bit bulky compared to other 8.9″ netbooks with 3-cell batteries but you don’t need to carry your charger with you and the bigger size screen and track pad is a welcome change in netbook design. You can’t put it in a large coat pocket like the Sony Vaio P but the Vaio costs $900+ and has horrible battery life and a tiny display.

If you’re looking for a reasonably priced 10″ netbook with a great looking non-glare display and all-day battery life, the 1000HE is for you.

The Intel Atom N280 CPU

The Asus 1000HE is one of the first netbooks on the market that use the slightly faster N280 1.66 GHz Atom processor with a faster Front Side Bus (FSB) whereas most netbooks use the N270 1.6 GHz Atom.  The 1000HE uses two additional unofficial clock speeds of 1.25 GHz in low voltage mode and an overclocked setting of 1.75 GHz.  It’s actually quite common for netbook makers to offer a “turbo” mode for their products and MSI even pushes some of their N270 netbooks to 1.9 GHz and some users even push their Atom processors to 2 GHz.  At the stock speed of 1.66 GHz, the Intel Atom N280 has a super low Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 2 watts compared to the 2.5 watt TDP of the N270 processor.

The Intel Atom’s closest competitor is the Via Nano 1.3 GHz processor which has a TDP of 8 watts.  The Nano 1.3 doesn’t perform as well as the Atom 1.6 or 1.66 processor. There have been many mainstream websites that have deceptively compared the Via Nano 1.8 GHz 25 watt TDP desktop processor to an Atom 1.6 and incorrectly declared the Nano the superior netbook product.  But when we compare actual netbook parts and usable clock frequencies, it becomes apparent why netbook manufacturers have overwhelmingly selected the Atom.  The Atom as a netbook processor simply has better performance and battery life than any other netbook processor.

The Intel 945GSE GMA950 graphics chipset

One of the disappointments in the Asus 1000HE is the continued use of the Intel 945GSE GMA950 graphics chipset when the newer Intel GN40 chipset is available.

Unfortunately, we’re going to have to get use to GMA950 because even the next generation of Atom processors will have the 945GSE processor embedded on to the processor package itself as a separate die.  But some good can come out of this as software makers are being forced to optimize their software again which results in better performance for everyone whether they use a netbook or high-end desktop computer.  However, I see the Asus 1000HE as more of a premium netbook and I wouldn’t mind paying an extra $20 to $30 for a GN40 chipset which decodes 720P or 1080P high definition video.

Asus is coming out with the 1004DN netbook with a GN40 graphics chipset with a smaller 1.8″ hard drive and battery to make room for the optical drive but I’d rather have the bigger/faster 2.5″ hard drive and bigger battery.  Optical drives are obsolete as far as I’m concerned and you can always hook up a USB optical drive and rip the movies you want on to the hard drive or just put a bunch of movies on a cheap SDHC flash card.

Glare free vivid contrast display

The first thing I noticed about the 1000HE was the gorgeous 10″ 1024 by 600 display.  The display is probably one of the best netbook displays I’ve ever seen and it’s one of the few on the market that doesn’t use a glossy coating.  That means you get to look at the actual content on the screen and not the bright reflection of the lights or windows.  This particular matte finish display was surprisingly vivid in contrast and it has one of the deepest blacks I’ve ever seen which makes all the brighter colors pop out.

The 1000HE LED backlighting is also super bright.

Tip 1: There are third party tools like eectl can boost the LED brightness high enough to make the display very readable in broad daylight.  You wouldn’t want to use that tool indoor because it makes the screen too bright and it drains the battery much faster.  Eeectl can also control the fan speed, CPU clock speed and voltage settings though you should be very careful with the tool because you can lock up your system requiring a hard reboot and possibly even damage it.

Unfortunately, most netbooks (and laptops) on the market have unfortunately switched to glossy displays because it’s one of those cheap aesthetic effects that consumers seem to be swayed by.  It’s refreshing to see Asus bucking the stupid glossy LCD trend.  The only bad thing to say about the display is that it doesn’t have a resolution of 1280 by 800 which is typically only available on 12.1″ LCDs and rarely smaller screens.  I could see a lot of demand for a higher priced premium netbook with higher display resolution and GN40 graphics chipset.

Video playback performance

As far as video playback and CPU performance is concerned, the Asus 1000HE is essentially not much different than any other 945 plus Atom N270 1.6 GHz netbook on the market.  The N280 1.66 GHz processor makes it slightly faster than the N270 as expected because of additional 3.75% clock speed increase.

I’ve managed to get good 720P video playback performance even in 1.25 GHz power save mode if the application is optimized.  Adobe Flash and Apple QuickTime are some of the least optimized video playback software on the market and they fail badly at 720P playback. Windows Media Player, VLC, and Media Player Classic using the K-Lite Mega Codec pack works well with 720P playback.  Luckily, I’ve found a great way to convert Apple QuickTime MOV files to AVI files which allow for very smooth playback using VLC using FFmpeg and I’ll follow up with a tutorial on that.

For browser embedded video content, Windows Media Player works the best though it only works on the Windows platform.  For cross platform compatibility, Silverlight stutters slightly with 1280×720 (720P) content but runs 854×480 (480P wide screen) smoothly and barely runs 1024×576 (576P widescreen) content in 1.75 GHz turbo mode.  Adobe Flash has no chance with 720P and barely handles 480P widescreen content on Hulu.com.  You can compare all three embedded players here.  The popularity of netbooks will hopefully get Microsoft and Adobe to optimize their video playback though Microsoft clearly has a substantial head start.

The chassis and overall design

The Asus 1000HE chassis has a glossy finish which looks great until you actually touch the darn thing.  Once you touch it, it looks like you’ve been

slobbering all over it because the material is a huge finger print and oil magnet.  The 1000HE also has two USB ports on the right hand side which is

really useful for hooking up an external USB-powered optical drive.  You need two USB ports to provide enough electrical power to drive an optical drive

and the last thing you want to have to do is use a USB extension cable to reach the other side of the netbook.

Tip 2: There’s a single access panel to gain access to the 2.5″ hard drive and memory slot.  If you want to boost the performance of the Asus 1000HE netbook, just put in one of the fastest and lowest power 2.5″ 320 GB hard drives on the market for around $75.  I took my Vista storage score from 5.3 to 5.9, doubled my capacity, improve battery life, and boosted transfer times by 50% with this relatively inexpensive investment and it’s the best improvement you can make on any laptop or netbook on the market.  For another $20, you can replace the SODIMM and double the RAM which is also very beneficial especially if you’re going to upgrade to Windows 7.  1 GB will worked fine when I tested Windows 7 beta but more RAM always results in better performance.  Storage and memory performance is as important as CPU and graphics and often overlooked.

The LCD lid unfortunately doesn’t quite open up 180 degrees or more which is annoying to me since I like to prop my fully opened Lenovo ThinkPad X200 on my thighs on an airplane and read it like a book.  The display becomes twice as large because it’s half the distance to my eyes and I can comfortably view two pages side by side.  I can still do this to a certain extent with the Asus 1000HE but it’s not comfortable because the display isn’t quite facing me.

Overall, the Asus 1000HE is a slightly larger and heavier netbook because it uses a 10″ display and a huge capacity 6-cell battery but it’s a good trade off

because the product is much more usable.

Bluetooth and 802.11n wireless

The wireless capabilities of the Asus 1000HE are impressive.  It comes with both 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth out of the box when many laptops charge an extra $50 for these two features.  Having 802.11n means you get to transfer files more quickly though you’ll probably want to opt for a wired interface or just using the SDHC slot to transfer larger files.  Bluetooth is an absolute necessity for a wireless mouse and cell phone tethering for wireless Internet

access.

The keyboard

The Asus 1000HE keyboard uses a Chiclet design which is common on Apple Macbooks. Overall, I found touch typing on the 1000HE reliable and fast so long as I didn’t accidently palm the track pad (which is why I usually prefer track points).  There were some minor keyboard flex issues in the upper left hand corner of the keyboard with the F1, F2, F3, ~, 1, 2, and 3 keys but I don’t use those keys that often and it’s more of a minor annoyance than a problem. This annoyance might be attributed to the fact that this is a pre-production unit.  I noticed there were even a few screws missing inside that were supposed to hold the hard drive in place, so I expect the production units to be better.

Best netbook track pad on the market

Although I personally prefer a track point over a track pad, the Asus 1000HE probably has one of the best netbook track pads on the market.

It’s big enough and the buttons are correctly placed so you can operate it like a normal track pad on a full size laptop.  Most netbooks track pads are frustrating to me because they put the buttons on the sides of the track pad or use a silly single wide button on the bottom that seesaws left and right.  Because of the way the 1000HE mouse buttons goes over the bottom edge, your thumbs can actually press forward and down which is more ergonomically correct for a track pad of this size.  It’s also a multi-touch track pad that supports zooming, two finger scrolling, and maybe some other gestures.

Scrolling worked fairly well but zooming is a bit difficult to control. Most desktop operating systems and applications (including those from Apple)

don’t really have good smooth scrolling/zooming interfaces like the iPhone so I place the blame on the software than the hardware.  Modern computing hardware (including netbooks) is fast enough to play video on a 3D surface so there’s really no excuse they can’t get the scrolling and zooming on a simple webpage smooth and responsive.

Super long battery life

Battery life is one of the most important metrics on any portable device and this is where the Asus 1000HE shines.  I measured the peak battery life of

the Asus 1000HE to just over 11 hours if everything is set to the absolute lowest power setting.  No, that’s not a typo when I wrote over 11 hours.

That means the 1000HE draws less than 5.3 watts in this lowest power operating mode.  That is with 802.11n, Bluetooth, and camera is turned off and the screen is set to the lowest possible brightness and nothing is taxing the CPU, GPU, or storage subsystem at all.  Realistically, this is not a common

usage scenario for most people but I have on occasion used my laptop in this manner when I’m reading or editing documents on a darkened airplane.

The other common usage scenario is 480P H.263 video playback which is the codec commonly found in DivX video files.  H.264 would likely result in slightly higher CPU utilization and lower battery life but I used H.263 for the video playback battery drain test.  I used VLC because it was the least CPU hungry playback software.  On the hardware, I shut off 802.11n, Bluetooth, and the camera and set the display to 40% brightness and clocked the processor down to 1.25 GHz low voltage mode.  I ran a full power drain in this configuration and managed to get an astounding 6.8 hours which is simply crazy.  That means I’m drawing a mere 8.53 watts during video playback.

For most other tasks, I can usually get an honest 6 to 9 hours depending on what clock speed I’m running at, how CPU and graphics intensive my applications are, and whether wireless is running or not.  Most netbooks and laptops won’t even touch this kind of battery life and you can reliably go around all day without carrying the AC adapter which makes up for the slightly bulky weight of 1000HE at 3.2 lbs.  You just throw the 1000HE in your bag and never worry about untangling or tripping over the AC adapter’s wiring.  Simply wake the machine when you need it and put it to sleep when you don’t.  Just be aware that there is about a 25% power drain per 24 hour period in suspend mode because power is needed to keep the memory state but that isn’t a problem if you’re charging the laptop once a day.

Other features of Asus 1000HE

The webcam is a decent 1.3 megapixel camera rather than the usual 0.3 megapixel cameras you see on many netbooks.  I’ve posted some samples on

YouTube here and here and the performance for a built in webcam is relatively good.  You’re not going to be running Skype in HQ video mode anytime soon because the processor isn’t fast enough to encode/decode 480P H.264 in real time nor is the camera capable of producing a low noise image needed for Skype HQ mode, but standard Skype video conferencing runs fine.

Instant OS restore is another good feature.  Simply hit the F9 at boot time and it will load Norton Ghost and restore the system image to factory settings.  The 1000HE comes with two hard drive partitions so if you store all your data in the second partition, you won’t have to worry about losing any data when you invoke the factory restore and recreate the C drive.

Another good feature is the “boot booster” feature in the BIOS.  Once you turn it on, the BIOS post time drops from 13 seconds down to 2 seconds so you can start loading the OS sooner and cut down the overall boot times After system post, the system takes another 27 seconds to get to a fully operational Windows XP desktop.  With boot booster on, it’s possible to finish a complete boot in just under 30 seconds though I generally use suspend mode to start up the system in about 4 seconds.

Review: Asus Eee PC 1000HE Netbook is a post by George Ou from Notebooks.com.

Novatel MiFi:

Novatel’s new MiFi” personal pocket Router/Access Point was definitely one of the more interesting products I saw (and craved. This It’s about the size of a business card and a few millimeters thick, and it lets you create a Wi-Fi hots)pot using 3G technology such as GSM based HSUPA or CDMA based EV-DO Rev A. While no carriers have been announced yet, AT&T offers HSUPA 3G technology and Verizon offers EV-DO Rev A 3G technology. The Wi-Fi hotspot you create supports a secure WPA2 802.11 wireless network which can connect up to 5 IP devices (which I assume means they’re using a 255.255.255.248 subnet mask which is limited to a total of 5 usable IPs).

While this isn’t a new technology and you can already do this with some Windows Mobile smart phones, you’re not going to drain the hell out of your cell phone battery because the Mi-Fi supports 40 hours of standby time and 4 hours of active usage. You can also recharge the MiFi via mini-USB from your laptop if you happen to be plugged in on the laptop somewhere.

The advantage of this kind of technology is that you don’t need to plug it a massive dongle in to the USB port of your laptop which ruins the laptop’s form factor and also requires a boat load of complex drivers, software, and configuration. You also don’t need to bother with Bluetooth tethering which is a real beast to configure even for computer savvy users. Furthermore, a lot of mobile devices and Netbooks don’t have Bluetooth unless you pay extra money. With a Wi-Fi network, you just click on the SSID and type in a WPA-PSK (I recommend a minimum of 11 minimum random characters) for the passphrase and you’re up and running. With a product like the MiFi, you can surf the Internet on your Wi-Fi enabled cell phone, iPod touch, netbook, Mobile Internet Device (MID), UMPC, laptop, desktop (as a backup for wired broadband service), and anything else that uses Wi-Fi for network connectivity. If the product runs smoothly as advertised (which I hope I’ll get to review), then it’s a must have.

The MiFi is $200 MSRP before contract subsidies.

Redfly’s Smartphone terminal

Redfly has an interesting new product that turns your cell phone in to a computer. Basically it’s a input/output extension of your laptop by gives your cell phone a larger 7” 800×480 display and a small netbook-style keyboard. Because it doesn’t have an operating system, it may be an easy sell to IT departments since they don’t have another computer to manage.

However, the product starts at $200 for the 7” model and it’s nearly as big as a netbook so I’m not sure who’s going to want to use such a device. I suppose you could use this as a computer replacement if everything you want can be done form a Windows Mobile or Google Android phone, but the user interface seems slightly sluggish to me and the 7” model keyboard seems cramped though I think I can get use to touch typing on it. But for some people, this might be the perfect device to have if all they wanted was a bigger keyboard and display for their cell phone. You can connect the device over Bluetooth or USB cable. Redfly also makes a small hand-size box that connects to any standard computer monitor.

Hantech Tablo

Hantech has an interesting pen-input device that doubles as a paper digitizer or screen digitizer. The device uses a sensor that either snaps on to your laptop’s screen magnetically or clips on to a pad of paper. If you use it in screen mode, make sure you remember to change to the plastic head and not the ball point ink head because the lady showing off the technology accidentally wrote on the LCD screen with an ink ball point pen (I hope she can clean it off). Forgetting to change heads in paper mode isn’t too big a problem because you’ll know immediately when no ink comes out.

The interesting thing about this product is that it tracks well even when you’re hovering an inch more away from the paper or screen. Accuracy seems to be a little off at the far corners of the LCD display even after we ran some calibration, but accuracy is good on most of the screen. In paper mode, the accuracy isn’t that big a problem since the content you’re writing still comes out looking OK even if you’re off by a few millimeters because there is no abrupt discontinuity in what you’re writing or drawing. Being a few millimeters off when you’re trying to tap the close button in Windows on top-right corner is a bit more challenging if you miss the button. The other problem is that the pen isn’t pressure sensitive because it isn’t spring loaded. This may have been a conscious design decision since normal LCDs don’t take too kindly to pressure unlike tablet PC computers with hardened screens. Hantech’s representative said that they use pen velocity to determine thickness.

PPC’s high quality antenna connectors

One of the things you’ll notice at CTIA is that not only is it a consumer oriented tradeshow, it’s also an industry specific tradeshow where vendors show off their wares to other companies. PPC’s showed off its heavy duty compression connectors that are used to hook up a heavy coax cable to a cell tower antenna. While that doesn’t sound terribly sexy to consumers, PPC says that these connectors will produce a better quality cell signal which could translate to lower customer dissatisfaction and customer churn. I’ve never worked with antenna connectors this big and the biggest connectors I get to work with in the corporate enterprise space with Wi-Fi gear is the N type coax connector which is about the size of your cable TV coax connector.

These connectors from PPC are several times the diameter and it’s crucial that it is completely sealed with solid contact. These compression connectors apparently grip like crazy in 3 separate places. While I’m no expert of this type of product since I haven’t seen other too many other connectors on the market, these seem solid and it’s worth checking out. Considering the fact that a cell tower costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, spending a few extra hundred dollars on one of the most important components is well worth the money if the product delivers on its promises. This is definitely one of those things a wireless company wants done right the first time since it costs a lot more money to send out a technician or lose customers.

Showstoppers, Night Before CTIA is a post by George Ou from Notebooks.com.

According to the article, the MacBook Pro 17” has a 95 watt*hour battery that weighs 1.5 lbs. My 9-cell in my ThinkPad X200 weighs 1.12 lb and has 84.2 watt*hours of energy. That means my X200 battery has 75.2 watt*hour of energy per pound and the MBP 17” battery only has 63.3 watt*hour of energy per pound. That’s a little surprising because I would have thought that the super exotic battery from Apple would have higher energy density.

Furthermore, it would seem that the battery life is low for something with such a large battery. Eight hours peak battery life would indicate that the MacBook Pro 17” switched to the lower power NVIDIA 9400M consumes a minimum of 11.88 watts. When switched to the NVIDIA 9600M GT, the MacBook Pro 17” gets 7 hours of peak battery life which means that it is consuming a minimum of 13.57 watts.

Meanwhile, I have actually stretched my ThinkPad X200 12.1” laptop with its 9-cell battery to 11 hours at 7.65 watts on the plane and in theory can get up to 12.87 hours operating on 6.54 watts if I were only reading a long document without generating any load. While the size of the MacBook Pro 17” display might explain some of the extra power consumption, it can’t explain most of it since the ThinkPad T400 14.1” laptop can also get close to 11 hours of peak battery life in stretch mode.

Considering the fact that the same Intel 45nm CPUs are used in the ThinkPads and MacBook Pro, my guess is that Apple’s use of an NVIDIA 9400 as its low-power option may not be the best decision for power efficiency. The ThinkPad T400 is able to get close to 11 hours with a smaller battery by using the standard Intel 4500 integrated graphics adapter in its low power mode while switching to the discrete ATI 3470 GPU. It might have been better for battery life if the MacBook Pro 17” switched between an Intel 4500 and an NVIDIA or ATI GPU.

photo via iFixIt

MacBook Pro 17″ Battery is Huge and Not so Dense in Energy is a post by George Ou from Notebooks.com.

Like all new products, the netbook has had its share of growing pains. Prices were too high and the lack of raw performance to handle suboptimal operating systems and suboptimal video playback software meant that many customers who spent $600 or more were disappointed in their netbooks. While this is due to unrealistic expectations for a product that was originally developed for the emerging world, it didn’t change the fact that millions of netbook customers were being inadequately served. Asus, the pioneer of the netbook, recognized this inadequacy and they have ushered in the next generation of netbooks that sets a new bar in price and performance with the Eee PC 1000HE.

The first generation of netbooks primarily came in one flavor which is the 45nm 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 coupled with an ancient Intel 945GSE chipset manufactured 130nm process which is three generations too old. While this configuration could handle 1280×720 video playback which were optimized for minimum CPU utilization such as Microsoft’s VC-1 (Windows Media 9 advanced profile) and even H.264 MP4 files, it choked on less optimum video playback software such as Apple QuickTime.

The other problem with the first generation netbooks was that they were either cheap but stripped down to the bare essentials or they often cost $600 or more by the time features like Bluetooth, 801.11n, and large capacity battery were added. Furthermore, the larger capacity batteries on products like the Dell Mini 12 completely ruined the sleek form factor of the product with a bulky thick battery that nearly doubled the thickness of the product. And while the costs have recently dropped below the $500 range for these fully loaded first generation netbooks, it was still too expensive for many people to justify.

Asus’ second generation netbook Eee PC 1000HE changes everything by offering all the high-end features for less than $400. It dispenses with the thick protruding 6-cell batteries of old with a flush 6-cell high capacity battery that can stretch beyond 9.5 hours when operating in airplane mode” with all the wireless features turned off and the screen dimmed to 40% brightness. It not only offers integrated Bluetooth, but also 802.11n wireless networking. Instead of a small solid state hard drive, the 1000HE includes a 160 GB 5400 RPM hard drive. Instead of a dinky 0.3 megapixel webcam, a 1.3 megapixel webcam is included. It uses an N280 processor which is 60 MHz faster than the N270 and has a 2 watt TDP instead of 2.5 watts for the N270.

The one disappointment on the 1000HE is that it keeps the ancient 945GSE chipset instead of going to the new GN40 which features full HD video offloading acceleration and is manufactured on the 65nm process and is a derivative of Intel’s G45 desktop chipset. Many in the blogosphere assumed that because the N280 supported the GN40 chipset, the Asus 1000HE would be using the new chipset but this has unfortunately been confirmed to be false. But considering all the other features and the price point, it’s still sets a new bar in features and price.

When we take the 63 watt-hour battery energy of the 1000HE and divide it by 9.5 hours operating in battery stretch mode, the power consumption of the entire netbook is mere 6.63 watts. I would suspect that if we dropped the LCD brightness from 40% down to 0% brightness, the power consumption could drop to around 6 watts and the battery life could stretch to 10.5 hours which would be the theoretical upper limit of battery life. While this wouldn’t be a typical usage scenario, reading or editing documents on a dark airplane does match this scenario.

So what does this mean for netbook market and the consumers that buy them? It’s great news for consumers because they can expect to see vast price cuts across the board on all netbook products and they can expect more reasonable performance and features on very affordable netbooks. Amazon is already discounting the 1000HE by $25 to $374.

The wildly popular Acer One 8.9” netbook for example has substantially less storage, smaller screen, small 3-cell battery, no Bluetooth, only 8 GB of solid state storage, and no 802.11n yet it still costs $300 which is only $75 cheaper than the Asus 1000HE. This means that basic entry level netbooks like the Acer One will at least need to drop down to $250 to compete and we may even see $200 netbooks arriving in 2009. Then hopefully, we’ll see some GN40 equipped models for not much more money than the Asus 1000HE soon.

Update 2/16/2009:

It seems that the price of Acer Aspire One Netbooks with 8 MB of flash memory have dropped down to the $260 range. That makes a lot more sense given the fact that the Asus Eee PC 1000HE is only selling for $375 list price.

Asus Eee PC 1000HE Sets a New Bar in Features and Price on Netbooks is a post by George Ou from Notebooks.com.