| Author: crisp on December 09 2006 Viewed 9385 times. 4 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
I ordered this from Conics.net about three weeks ago and it arrived on Friday. Its brilliant - everything i expected it to be.
Conics were exceptional - had never dealt with them before, but they sent and responded to emails when i was raising the order, and send me tracking details so i could follow it around the globe.
The machine itself -- 1GB RAM + 80GB hard drive and 800x480 screen are great. For the UK, the price is brilliant and beats the pants off the competiton. (I had to pay UK VAT which i expected, but all told, the price is around the 700 GBP mark).
The only downside is the very crappy keyboard -- it mistypes and misses keys, but i dont mind - it has bluetooth, wireless and fixed wire ethernet, and screen is nice. Its very lightweight and, although the cpu is only 500MHz AMD Geode, is sufficient. The person in Conics (Brett), had installed english XP for me (i didnt have to ask) and it has firefox 2.x on it, so all i needed to do was install visual studio and a few tools and i am away.
I rarely notice the cpu speed issue, and the extra RAM avoids a few disk accesses.
I look real hard at the Asus, Samsung and OQO as alternatives, and I really wanted a builtin keyboard. I am so glad i did, because the odd times when i try to twist the screen and use it kbdless, is "strange".
The way i see this device is a glorified PDA rather than a shrunk down laptop, and it is a great replacement for a PDA, and useful for things like browsing youtube.com.
if anyone wants to know more, feel free to ask.
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12/09/06
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crisp
Ive just been playing with the kids to record some sound from the windows sound recorder, and it has a good quality builtin in MIC. We used this to add some sound to a "film" we were making (so they could learn). The Khoji comes with SKYPE s/w preinstalled - so you can talk into the keyboard and look really goofy.
The folks at conics have included a burnt DVD of winxp and the drivers etc on there.
The only downside is they created two 37GB partitions rather than a single one, but thats more than enough. I could copy my MP3 collection on to this - may experiment with video viewing as the disk capacity would be sufficient for a good few films on it.
12/09/06
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crisp
i dont use the Bluetooth, and havent yet tried the wired lan, but the wireless is great. It took me a few goes to get it right - when resuming from suspend/hibernation, the wlan defaults to off, so you have to Fn-XX a key to enable it. Its very quick to become available and active.
JUst a couple more points - i have a camera bag for which, size wise, its ideally suited - bought it many years ago. The unit comes with a "pouch" which is ok for transportation, but not enough to field off knocks and bruises.
Secondly, in case any one wants to know - i have nothing to do with the company which markets the device or conics - solely that i have hung out in handtops.com for many years reading reviews, and got "bit" by the UMPC bug when i realised i could finally find a replacement for my aged Librettos (50 & 70), This baby is good enough for soooo much - i just wish i could be bothered to install linux+vmware+winxp on it (in that order, as i usually do), but i know if i do that, i will try and do too much on the device. I installed VNC on it, and its nicely responsive (given that the screen is so small).
Theres a hot key to switch between 800x480 and 800x600 screen size - curiously text is still readable, but "smudged" as it tries to do its stuff. Nice to have - not sure if i will use it.
12/09/06
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crisp
The unit thoughtfully came with a generic PSU (relatively small) and a UK "shaver plug" adapter - never seen that before - a nice touch.
The screen swivels thru 360 degrees - not sure how useful it is in tablet mode (the screen is not touch sensitive). It has a mouse cursor and buttons and pgup/pgdn on the screen - so can be used for light browsing and point and click operation.
The on/off/standby button is a bit awkward to use - but the plus side is that you arent going to accidentally going to turn it on whilst in a case or trying to grab hold of it.
It has an SD and CF card slot on the device - a nice touch - just need to figure out what i might use it for.
It also looks like it has stereo speakers - having tested for loudness or hifi - but good enough in a quiet room or office.
12/09/06
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rr0123
does it play video smoothly?
edited: Dec 09 2006
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fil
The SD slot is nice.
You can easily transfer stuff without an adapter.
I ended up getting a USB-SD card from Sandisk ( link ) to offset this, but it's nice to have built-in.
The CF card is also nice to have if you have a CF memory card and/or a microdrive.
There aren't too many CF or SD devices that work with Linux or XP, but here are some things to check out in my FAQ (Search CF): link
Think Cellular or GPS add-ons via the CF slot with drivers for XP or Linux.
Don't you find typing on it cumbersome?
I ended up hating my Sony Picturebooks after a while because I never felt that I could type on it well enough and the quad battery made it so big, that I kept wanting a normal subnotebook like the TR or T -series or the Fujitsu P or B -series.
Otherwise, nice update and thanks for sharing.
Any pictures?
12/10/06
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crisp
i'll try some video later - do you have anything in mind to try?
i tried some youtube videos - fine, but they are low quality or blocking due to the wlan and cable modem setup.
ive taken some photos of the beast - am not a photographer, so they are likely bad - will update later.
yes - the keyboard is by far the worst part of it - dont expect to touch type -- it has a nice feel, but it drops keys (no proper rollover or just not tested in real life). As i mentioned before, its better than a PDA with touching the screen to type, but you arent going to be writing shakespeare on it.
I have a Fujitsu FMV T70k - almost a bigger brother of teh Khoji - nice kbd, screen etc - and similar looks. I keep switching between the two. The t70k (over a year old now) is nice, but am still attracted to the baby sister because its "less delicate" and it costs half as much and the screen is easily readable.
The Khoji has a bit which sticks out at the back where the battery goes -- enough that you can grab it by the scruff of its neck -- even with the screen opened.
More later...
12/10/06
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crisp
Just tried some video - 300k, 750k .wmv/avi assortment - nothing of major high quality and it does these without a sweat using media player 10. About 40-50% cpu usage - even in full screen mode. This isnt definitive, eg i have tried dvd images etc, but it looks ok for occasional video.
12/10/06
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GreatDane
Hi Crisp,
All the best with your new machine, may it give you many hours of pleasure.
I would just love for someone to run a few comparative benchmarks on the AMD and Transmeta CPU's. I am not interested in which one is "best", but would like to see how they stack up.
12/10/06
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crisp
i dont have access to a transmeta - and that certainly worried me for the OQO - my guess/readings is that an Transmeta 1GHz is equal to about a P-III 600Mhz. I suspect the AMD is more like a P-III 450-500MHz (its not optimised for speed but the P-III was). I guess it really depends on what you want to compare it to.
Do you have any benchmarks I can try? I have my own -- integer/cpu based for most machines I have owned back to the 18MHz Sparc chip and 386/25. I'll do a test and see how it goes and post back later.
BTW I really am a bad photographer :-) the photos i took are very dark or flash-spots on the images.
Do i just load them on to my own site and link to them from here?
more later.
12/10/06
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crisp
Ok - heres a benchmark. Its my own code -- this is for the product CRiSP - an emacs like editor (see link if you are interested, but i am not here to sell my own sw!).
CRiSP is an editor with a built in macro interpreter. Much of the details dont matter, suffice to say its pure C code, and the same code executes on numerous platforms, including Windows, Linux and MacOSX. Over the years, i built a benchmark to get an idea of the performance of the new machines i build, so i have collected these stats over the years, and over the numerous versions of CRiSP. Much of CRiSP is just pure integer-branchy code (very little floating point and zero SSE/MMX/etc type instructions).
The benchmarks are written in the macro language. Originally the benchmarks were of the form "how quick can I do a for-loop to count to a million", but as machines got faster and faster, and sub-second times were common, i changed the benchmarks into "how many units of work can i do per second", so the benchmarks wont keep breaking.
Listed below are benchmarks for the various machines I have owned/own. Pre-2002 benchmarks are available, but use a different metric ("how quick" rather than "how many").
Just as a summary, this baby is about 1/10th speed of an Intel Core Duo 1.66GHz machine (32-bit).
Khoji results at the end. Timing results are "how many per 5s interval +/- measuring errors, so allow 10/20% variance".
PERF3: 27 October 2002 14:21 v8.0.9a, AMD 750Mhz, Linux 2.4.19
1) loop Time: 5.01 545,000/sec
Mac OS X 10.1.5 PPC G3/500MHz gcc 2.95.2
PERF3: 5 December 2002 09:45 v8.0.9c
1) loop Time: 4.91 230,000/sec
Intel P4 2.53GHz Linux 2.4.20
PERF3: 29 July 2003 23:14 v8.1.2b
1) loop Time: 5.01 1,475,000/sec
Intel P3 1.2GHz, WinXP, CL .NET 7.00
PERF3: 19 April 2004 21:08 v9.0.3a
1) loop Time: 4.99 805,000/sec
Intel P3 1.2GHz, WinXP, CL 2003 7.10
PERF3: 19 April 2004 21:06 v9.0.3a
1) loop Time: 5.00 940,000/sec
Sun Ultra-10 440MHz solaris-10-sparc64
PERF3: 25 March 2006 09:37 v9.1.5a
1) loop Time: 4.99 170,000/sec
Sun Ultra-10 440MHz solaris-10-sparc64
PERF3: 25 March 2006 09:39 v9.1.5a
1) loop Time: 5.12 155,000/sec
Linux 2.6.16.5 Intel Core Duo 1.66GHz 32 bit gcc-4.0.3
PERF3: 10 December 2006 14:05 v9.2.1c
1) loop Time: 4.97 1,030,000/sec
Khojinsa Windows XP - AMD Geode 500Mhz Visual Studio 2005 Express
PERF3: 10 December 2006 14:11 v9.2.1c
1) loop Time: 5.05 175,000/sec
12/10/06
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crisp
Someone asked for photos - probably pointless doing my own, but look here for a review of the beast
link
with lots of piccies.
Heres some other URLs i was using over the last months to track down the ideal candidate:
link
link
link
link
From these, you will see they tend to feed off each other -- handtops.com seems to be a lonely outcrop of enthusiasts, but all have varying merits. link is generally good - seems to update once a week.
Their seems to be general acceptance that Jan will see the release of lots of more new devices, but decided it wasnt worth waiting any longer for mine, and best just to get on the bandwagon, and replace/upgrade maybe in 6-18months depending on the market and my experiences.
12/10/06
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JPRDias
how about VS2005?
did you installed it?
It run's smooth?
I have the Vega that is about the same arquitecture.
TIA
JPRDias
12/10/06
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crisp
i installed vs2005 - but i tend to use old makefiles and just the compiler, rather than all the other gui bits and pieces, so i cannot really comment. certainly when browsing and other things you might think are heavy duty cpu users, you find they arent. so i would expect for the express edition (which doesnt have much in it anyhow), it may be acceptable - but it depends on the size of the projects you work on. it seems to start up quickly enough.
12/10/06
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rr0123
How about VOB or Divx video files?
12/10/06
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chippy
rr0123.
I'd expect Divx's to go up to near 2mbps. Thats very good quality on a 7" screen. The LX800-based Vega will run 2mbps Divx's and its really impressive quality. (5" screen) The LX800 based PepperPad 3 also runs up to near 2mbps. There shuld be no diff at all with the SA1
Crisp.
How's the battery life. There are claims of 5 hours but my estimate would be around 3.5hours with Wifi on. Still a very good score. Any ideas on that.
I have one on the way here to Carrypad so i'll be testing it out soon. In the meantime, keep posting your thoughts. Its great to hear.
Oh, and BTW, Carrypad is updated at least 2 times a day - on the journal. Front page was fairly static (just major reports) but has changed slightly. Thanks for the link!!
Steve.
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