I did the traditional benchmarks such as HD Tune, PCMark, 3DMark, Super Pi, Everest and HDTach. As I don't have an OQO I can't list comparison numbers, but I have made notes of my subjective impressions of various areas.
Pi test
This popular yet simple utility benchmarks the amount of time it takes to calculate Pi to 2 million decimal places. My run resulted in a time of 2m 42s.
HD Tune and HD Tach
HD Tune
The Hard Drive used in the FlipStart is the MK3008GAL 30GB drive from Toshiba which uses UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100). Here's a screenshot of the supported features.
Toshiba MK3008GAL Supported Features
Here's a graph of the benchmark according to HD Tune.
Toshiba MK3008GAL Supported Benchmarks
HD Tach
Benchmarking in HD Tach was done using the Long bench (32mb zones) method. Results are below.
Toshiba MK3008GAL Supported Benchmarks
Many were hoping that with such a small capacity, and with Sony's move to include a flash disk, the FlipStart might feature the same. But for now we have to deal with a regular Hard Drive.
PC Mark 2005
The final PC Mark score is 1286. Individual results are given below.
• HDD - XP Startup 4.32 MB/s
• Physics and 3D 45.23 FPS
• Transparent Windows 132.11 Windows/s
• 3D - Pixel Shader 4.07 FPS
• Web Page Rendering 1.67 Pages/s
• File Decryption 26.85 MB/s
• Graphics Memory - 64 Lines 235.4 FPS
• HDD - General Usage 2.55 MB/s
• Multithreaded Test 1 / Audio Compression 564.82 KB/s
• Multithreaded Test 1 / Video Encoding 78.18 KB/s
• Multithreaded Test 2 / Text Edit 29.23 Pages/s
• Multithreaded Test 2 / Image Decompression 6.42 MPixels/s
• Multithreaded Test 3 / File Compression 1.24 MB/s
• Multithreaded Test 3 / File Encryption 6.68 MB/s
• Multithreaded Test 3 / HDD - Virus Scan 4.45 MB/s
• Multithreaded Test 3 / Memory Latency - Random 16 MB 6.01 MAccesses/s
3D Mark
3D Mark crashed after the first test. I read that there might be an issue with 3D Mark and Windows Media Player 10+, so I downgraded to 9.0 but it still crashed. Read the next FlipStart segment for my detailed look at gaming. In short, you'll be surprised and impressed.
Battery Eater
Battery Eater's intensive tests were run with all the power-saving functions set to off. This means that the hard drive and screen were set to not turn off like they normally would after a bit of inactivity. Furthermore, the graphics were taxed heavily, so this is probably akin to watching a movie. The total time to deplete the battery from 99.9% was around 2 and 1/4 hours. Under more 'normal' conditions that one would expect to use this machine in, such as a bit of word processing, browsing, file management, etc, you could easily expect up to 3 hours or maybe more.
Everest Hardware Report
If you want to know the names of all the ports, settings, versions and capabilities of components used in the FlipStart, the Everest hardware report is for you. You can view it here.
Overall
In the end, the above numbers and graphs only tell part of the story. I found the FlipStart to be plenty adequate for the tasks I was doing. It's hard to expect such a small device to be a powerhouse, but even going in with that presumption I was impressed. File manager tasks work fine, the USB 2.0 port was more than capable of copying files around and general system performance was great. No complaints whatsoever.
Other parts of my detailed look at the FlipStart
FlipStart E-1001S first impressions
FlipStart E-1001S Pics and details
FlipStart E-1001S Benchmarks
Gaming on the FlipStart E-1001S
Interview with FlipStarts Keith Amodt