| Author: crisp on December 09 2006 Viewed 8694 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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12/11/06
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crisp
Battery life? I havent benched it as yet - it seems nice and long, and your figure (Steve) of 3.5 hrs wouldnt surprise me with wifi enabled. I could run a run-down test if you are interested (sitting idle with wlan, sitting idle without wlan, continuous video, cpu busy etc), but i think there will be some variance in the figures, e.g. due to battery, other apps running etc.
My usage tends to be in short bursts, not far away from the charger. I bought the device so i can lug it to/from work with a 1.5 hr commute each way, so it should be more than sufficient, i.e. am not planning on carrying the charger round.
BTW - love carrypad - great site. I am too scared to visit it now I have spent my money! Will keep monitoring for the next device as new ones hit the street during next year tho.
12/12/06
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crisp
I was reading Steves writeup of my writeup :-) (thanks Steve) over at carrypad.com. A note of another happy chappy called Dave and a link is listed there. A mention was made of the keyboard being very "hard" - i was experimenting with hitting the keys harder, and it may be that this is te key to more accurate typing on the keyboard - certainly hitting the keys harder makes them respond, so maybe the springs just need a bit of burning in.
12/26/06
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davidG
I'm very happy with this machine - I bougth it here in Japan at a Dai Ichi electrical store while on holiday. I've loaded Excel and Word, and it's going to be great to take to (coffee shop) meetings - where it won't hog the table, and I can show my clients their tax and accounts results in tablet format. Yes, it's not touch screen, and the tablet pointer is fiddly, but I'm using a normal mouse for that. The only downside is that XP home pre-loaded is in Japanese, great for my wife, but I guess I can load 'normal' XP without ruining any of the functions (?). Battery life seems very good. The keyboard doesn't have a right shift key though. Overall I'd say this machine is a lot better than the Pda alternatives I was thinking of buying instead, and no 25 pound per month subscription with this machine's use.
12/28/06
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path6336
Agree that it seems to perform faultlessly in XP providing nothing too strenuous is asked of it.
Seems so much faster than the Libretto 110CT it replaces and has all-in-one so many of the things that had to be added-on to the basic Libretto ie USB, Networking,WiFi.
Have booted it with Puppy Linux 2.12 off a USB stick, main problems I've found so far are that it doesn't see the WIFI or the soundcard further testing with 2 other small Linux distro's suffer the same problems with those two interfaces. Haven't yet tested the Bluetooth or the modem under Linux.
Overall, I'm more impressed than I thought I'd be with it and am glad I didn't go down the Q1 route that I was originally going to take.
Pat.
01/03/07
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crisp
Hi guys - me again. Time for a followup on the Khoji baby. I have been using it over the last few weeks as a glorified PDA mostly - web browsing, tried a few games etc, but mostly browsing and syncing with my main machine for sw development. Its been good - I think the keyboard will possibly improve with age and use, but its still a bit erratic.
I have been using it in a suspend mode - press FN-2 to go into suspend-to-ram, close the lid. Open lid, resumes from where it left off (in about 5-10s). Good stuff.
Today, i carted it off to work, and open the display and its broken :-( The machine is well, but the LCD has gone bad - pure white screen with odd color striped (pixel-wide lines) at intervals - looks like a broken connection. Could be cold/humidity, so will try it throughout the day in the office and back at home with the main PSU. (Working off batteries throughout the day). If this doesnt work, may have to tackle disassembly.
It has been perfect to date, and even tho i tend to leave it in the utility room in our house (cold, little/no heating), its been fine. But today (not wet or precipitous especially), its like the connections/wiring have gone, or something shorted on the board. I dont tend to use the swivel feature of the screen which might put more physical load on the wiring, so am at a loss.
Shame if this is bust - as otherwise, its been excellent so far.
01/15/07
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angelv
Hi crisp,
sorry for the broken display... Did you manage to get it working again? I just happened to read this when I'm waiting for my Kohjinsha and I'm a bit worried...
By the way, since the manuals for this machine come in Japanese and we are not many users outside of Japan, I thought that it could be useful to create a mailing list where owners can discuss anything realted to this beauty (where to buy it, repairs, tricks, etc. whatever is directly related to the Kohjinsha). So I created a Google group (which anybody is welcome to join) at: link
Cheers,
Ángel de Vicente
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