Community Matters

At a press conference at CeBIT in Germany Asus shared more details with the public. So far they are mostly focused on the German (and Austrian) market. The second generation EeePC will come with a T-Mobile Hotspot bundle that gives the user 300 hours of free use of T-Mobile hotspots – so no WIMAX, just a WiFi bundle.

The other bit of news that had been rumored before – primary OS for the new model will be Windows XP. The reports contradict each other regarding the availability of Linux as an option; so maybe the addition of a Microsoft OS is part of the 100 Euro ($150) price hike? Thanks for nothing, Asus. If this gets confirmed we all should start a petition for them to keep selling a Linux version. I don’t want to have to pay for the license to an OS that I certainly won’t use!

Still no information on processor and chipset…

Not a huge surprise, but Asus announced the Gen2 EeePC at CeBIT. All the reports that I’ve seen so far are in German, but they don’t really contain much information, anyway, and in some aspects even contradict each other…

Here’s what we seem to know so far:

• 8.9 inch wide screen with 1024×600 resolution
• 1GB Ram by default (but most people will upgrade that, anyway, right?)
• 8GB or 12GB of SSD (there are some contradictions here)
• higher price (399 instead of 299 Euro – no idea what that will translate into for the US market)

The information that I’m most interested in is missing. Which CPU / chipset? And when can we have it?

I’ll keep looking.

I still haven’t been able to get my hands on a Cloudbook, but the good folks over at NotebookReview.com did and posted a very interesting review of it. Their conclusion:

…upon closer examination it’s clear that VIA and Everex had to make a number of sacrifices to bring this ultra-mobile notebook to the market for such a low price. The low-capacity slow hard drive, and slow overall performance make the CloudBook a less than compelling purchase compared to the current generation Asus Eee PC 4G.

They also report of excessive heat issues and a few other problems (apparently the Cloudbook doesn’t deal well with the small screen size and even has problems when connecting to larger external screens).

What I found most interesting were the benchmarks. Please go to to the NotebooReview.com review for all the details, but here are the highlights as far as I see them: (note, these were done under Windows XP in order to make it easier to compare with other notebooks)

• The PCMark05 scores for the 1.2GHz VIA C7-M based Cloudbook are abysmal. 612 PCMarks (compared to 1132 PCMarks for the 630MHz Intel Celeron M based EeePC).
• The wPrime (32M) time is equally bad: 249 seconds for the Cloudbook vs. 201 seconds for the EeePC.
• And finally, the SSD in the EeePC got to shine. The Cloudbook with its hard drive reached a transfer rate of 18.3 MB/sec with 34ms access time. The SSD in the EeePC is about a third faster in transfer rate (24.3 MB/sec) and of course simply blows aways the disk in the Cloudbook with 0.5ms access time.

I think the benchmarks make it clear – the Cloudbook is painfully slow compared to the EeePC.

Looking forward I can’t wait to see Benchmarks of the rumored second generation EeePC based on the Intel Atom (yep, Intel released the official processor brand for the chip codenamed Silverthorne).

No, this won’t be a real benchmark comparing my PowerMac G5 Dual Core 2.0GHz with my brand new Mac Pro 8-core 2.8GHz. I haven’t spent the time to create hard numbers. But I can give you some subjective impressions.

First, things that are I/O bound are still as slow as they were. Like reading eight gigabytes of photos from the SanDisk Extreme FireWire 800 reader. Or transferring 200+ gigabytes of data from one disk to another. Not surprising, but still… darn.

Second, and much more important – Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS3 just fly on the new box. Especially compute intensive operations that mostly happen in memory (sync the settings of 25 pictures Lightroom; apply filters in Photoshop) – you suddenly see all eight cores busy in MenuMeters and things that took several seconds on the PowerMac are done instantaneously.

Nice – I will post more comparisons later. Promise.