Community Matters

Lots of new ultralight notebooks are being announced these days – I’m already at a loss trying to keep track of all the little machines entering the market (or at least being announced – very few seem to actually be shipping). But I’ll admit that this one sparked my interest: the 3K Longitude 400 uses (and I quote) a “Low Power Consumption Ingenic 400MHz 32-Bit Single Core CPU”.

What’s most interesting about this (besides the fact that Ingenic seems to be the International Group for Genetic Improvement of Cocoa – but a little more googling gets you to Ingenic Semiconductor) is that this appears to be the first laptop design based on this CPU. The information on Ingenic’s site is rather sparse. It appears that the CPU was originally only designed to run at up to 360MHz, that it’s based on a 180nm process (the Intel Atom processor, for comparison, is built on a 45nm process) and (based on the data sheet claim of <0.5mW/MHz) it should consume only about 0.2W. It’s a MIPS derivative which means it doesn’t run x86 software like more or less every other laptop out there, which will make comparing the 3K Longitude 400 to other contenders pretty hard; I’ll try to find some benchmarks but am not optimistic.

Everything else seems fairly low-end / standard: 512MB of RAM, 4GB of flash, 7″ 800×480 display (bad), 3 USB ports, wired and wireless Ethernet, Linux pre-installed, estimated price of USD 400. Given all that, I cannot see why someone would prefer this over the original (i.e., the EeePC 701).

While doing some googling I ran across this auction/buy-it-now item on Ebay. A New ASUS EeePC Eee PC900 20G/1G RAM 8.9″<1KG Laptop for USD 650 + USD 60 for shipment to the US. No indication how quickly it would arrive, but likely this will be the fastest way to get your hands on one.

Still, I think I’ll pass.

TrustedReviews has another EeePC 900 review. This is maybe the most positive review that I’ve seen so far; the only thing they criticize is battery life, and that’s where the Atom-based successor will certainly provide a major improvement.

One little gem that I found in the review and hadn’t seen before: instead of the “right edge scroll” on the touchpad of the EeePC 701, the new model uses Mac style multi-touch scrolling. Simply put two fingers on your touchpad and move them vertically or horizontally and you are scrolling instead of moving the mouse pointer. Apparently the display even supports iPhone style zooming motions – sweet.

Given that Gartner expects 293 million PCs to be shipped this year one has to be impressed with Asustek’s expectations for the success of the EeePC. According to DigiTimes, Asus has ordered 2.5-3 million Atom processors from Intel – and the Atom based EeePCs won’t start shipping for another couple of months, so if you add the about 2 million Celeron M based EeePC 701 and EeePC 900 that they will ship on top of their Atom based units, one can extrapolate that they expect that the EeePC series will account for more than 1.5% of all PCs shipped this year. That’s quite impressive!

Add to that the roughly 2 million Intel Atom and Via C7-M processors ordered for this year by the other major competitors in the Netbook space, then you can see that these tiny computers are becoming a significant part of the market, fast. A year ago they sounded like toys and not something that the market was ready for (except for OLPC’s XO which claimed that the market was ready for it, only it wasn’t ready for the market).

The folks over at VR-Zone got their hands on production EeePCs (I still have not been able to get ahold of one – life’s unfair). They have tons of details comparing the different EeePC versions.

The pictures show that I was right that the EeePC 900 has a slightly larger body than the EeePC 701. And most of the other data had been known before, but still, it’s a great summary and confirmation of all the details.

Their overall conclusion is extremely positive. Bigger screen, bigger SSD, bigger touchpad, more memory, CPU clocked higher by default, higher resolution webcam… what’s not to like!

Today I was thrilled to see that a couple of Oregon schools have started to roll out EeePCs for their students. What a great way to get computers in the hands of children. Affordable, useful, and not based on Windows.

I hope this program is successful and gets deployed more broadly. Computers help kids learn – and everyone needs to learn how to use a computer.

Excellent!

Over at XEPC there are the first unboxing pictures of an EeePC 900.

Since IDF the rumors have been flying that Asus would delay their Intel Atom-based product in order to be able to bring an updated EeePC with a bigger screen to market quicker.

The article I link above doesn’t give final clarity on the issue, it only confirms some of the other expected changes (8.9″ 1024×600 screen, 1GB RAM default, 12GB SSD). The system also seems to be slightly heavier (990g instead of 920g) but that’s not surprising, giving the larger LCD. From the pictures the sticker on the front of the tiny laptop doesn’t mention an Intel Atom processor, so that might confirm that this is still a Celeron M based system. I’m sure we’ll know more details in a few days.

Closely studying the pictures you can make some more observations:

• The plugged modem port is gone
• Still three USB ports and an SD card slot
• Still a VGA connector as well as microphone and speaker jacks
• The touchpad seems somewhat bigger and now has two buttons instead of the one button with two press zones on the EeePC 701
• Comparing the spacing of the connectors I am pretty sure that the case is slightly bigger than the previous model; look at the position of the audio jacks and SD card slot in relation to the front edge – there are a few extra millimeters there; maybe it’s to accommodate the larger touchpad.
• Bigger power supply (not sure I like this – the EeePC is all about traveling light!)

For now I can’t wait to get my hands on an EeePC with a larger screen and larger SSD!

Now that the Intel Atom processor has been officially released at IDF, the big question of course is about performance. And of course I was excited to see that LaptopMag had the first full review of the Classmate (CL2). But then, as I read the article, I was puzzled. They are talking about the performance as being “relatively weak” – but then mention an Intel Celeron M CPU – but the CL2 is based on the Intel Atom processor… what’s happening here? Update: what’s happening is that I am confused (as Steve correctly points out in the comment below). The second generation Classmate PC brings the 9-inch screen, but is still based on the Celeron M CPU – the third generation will be based on the Atom processor. Oops.

So far I haven’t found any real benchmarks on Atom-based systems. I played with the two on display at IDF, but that was rather inconclusive. The Linux system took forever to boot, but once it was up and running it felt reasonably fast. I never use XP, so I don’t have any way to compare the performance of the XP-based system.

When I talked to the folks in the booth about the slow boot time of the Linux installation I was told that this was an out-of-the-box distribution that hadn’t really been optimized for this system. Given that the Atom is an in-order processor (and that booting a computer quickly requires some serious customization of the specific Linux install) I figure that this doesn’t really allow for fair performance comparison, yet.

I’m at Intel’s Developer Forum in Shanghai. And of course I was very eager to see if I could get my hands on an EeePC 900. After all, the Atom processor was launched here yesterday. But much to my dismay, there was no sign of any notebooks at Asus’ booth and at the Netbook booth they had an EeePC 701 next to a few Atom based machines from other vendors. One was from an unnamed OEM, the other one a pre-production MSI model. Both with 1.6Ghz Atom processors with Hyperthreading (Windows reports them as N270), one running Windows, one running Linux. Both with 1024×600 displays that looked to be about 9″ screens (there were no specs or other material that I could find).

I’ll admit that I was disappointed, but then I played around with the no-name system running Linux and got pretty excited after all. Intel 945GM chipset, Intel wireless, 4GB SSD, 1GB of RAM. And according to what the people in the booth said it should be priced at about the same price as an EeePC 701 – so about $400 street price in the US. With the 1024×600 screen.

The MSI system (on the left) had an 80GB hard drive, other than that its specs seemed to be very similar. Both systems were slightly bigger than the EeePC, but not by much – certainly still a size that I’d be comfortable carrying around with me.

So maybe there will be some interesting EeePC competitors after all. I can’t wait to see more product announcement. IDF didn’t bring them.