Five Disappointing Days on the Road with a Cheap Mini-Notebook
Over the last 6 months, I have heard a lot of industry insiders vehemently defending the cheap mini notebook (aka netbook) as a great device to travel with given its cost, size weight and applicability to task. I don’t have anything against these new cheap mini notebooks, but I think it is VERY important that consumers are educated to their weaknesses as well as their strengths, and all I see talked about are the strengths, a disservice to consumers in my opinion. I have used five of the cheap mini-notebooks over the last 6 months and yes, there are strengths and more weaknesses compared to an inexpensive full-sized notebook at the same price. I had written a lot in previous blogs on my personal interaction with these inside the home, so I decided to put it to the test outside the home, a contrast to what I had done and written about in a previous blog.
I needed to travel to Florida last week to look for a new show horse for my wife. She is a “hunter/jumper” and competes at the local, state, and national level along with my two young girls. Buying a horse is a very personal activity, and you have very little time to ride and test many horses. It is important to videotape, take still images and be able to share the videos and pictures with the other horse professionals back home in Texas over on-line services like YouTube and Flickr.
I technologically armed myself with the following:
- Aiptek HD video camera ($179) for capturing 720P and 1080P high definition video to view high quality off-line videos
- FlipVideo camera ($159) for capturing lower-resolution, easy to upload to YouTube and will also convert to the new “watch in high quality mode”
- Kodak V1253 ($175) digital camera to capture high quality 12MP 16:9 stills
- MSI Wind U100 ($579) mini-notebook with no mods
- AT&T 3G USBConnect 881 ($149) modem to connect to the internet remotely
The daily regimen consisted of driving a half hour to the horse barn and trying out a bunch of horses by riding them, videotaping and photographing them while taking notes on the pros and cons. At about mid-day, we would load all the content onto the MSI Wind to view and/or upload the content while still at the horse barn. We would do this in the car and on the way home. That’s when some of the challenges started hitting.
1) Extremely Short Battery Life
I only would get 1.5 hours battery life per charge so I was either not able to load the content in the car, view the content I had loaded in the car or had to wait until I reached the hotel to load, view and upload. I suppose I could have bought another $25-50 car adapter, but hey, these are supposed to be cheap mini notebooks, not the expensive, full featured ones, right? Additionally, because I preferred not to upload 15 separate files and preferred one, I used Windows Movie Maker to stitch together all the SD (standard-def) Flip videos, which of course wouldn’t last an entire charge and could only be done back at the hotel. Even basic usages like surfing the web at the pool was useless given the low battery life. By the time you would get to the pool, you might get an hour to read the news, get caught up on current events, etc. After that hour, its right back up to the hotel room to plug the unit back in. Forget it, easier to use the BlackBerry.
2) Choppy, Unplayable 720P Video Playback
I like slide shows, but not when myself, our trainer, and I are trying to evaluate a horses timing, skill, personality and potential problems with health and price. I estimate that the 720p video playback on the Wind was operating at 15 frames per second, a slide show. This was MOV files read from VLC player and of course QuickTime. Completely useless 720P video playback with the cheap mini-notebook. I didn’t even kid myself into thinking it was a good idea to stitch the HD files together. Encode would have been painful.
3) Choppy NBCOlympics.com Internet Video and Compromised UI
During the downtime, we wanted to watch some of the events on NBCOlympics.com, you know, with the Microsoft SilverLight experience… I then discovered a new challenge with the netbook’s 1024×600 screen resolution and maybe even with the Silverlight performance on these new notebooks. This may seem like a nit, but a couple big issues surfaced. When I clicked on the left icon “Olympic Sports” many sports icons were cut off at the top. Not real useful or intuitive and not a big deal to everyone, but new netbook and new website, it should work.
On the “Most Watched” icon on the left rail, once clicked, you cannot read the white text at the top of the screen. Annoying.
The worst part was the “As Seen on TV”, where if clicked, you get a bunch of cool videos selected by day. The big problem was that the days were covered by the browsers at the top. See that yellow half moon at the top right? That’s supposed to be a day. You can theoretically pick previous days if you could actually see them……… but you can’t.
I can’t blame the browser, I need to blame the display and controller for not being able to display those vital 168 (768-600) missing pixels. When I could actually get the videos to play, they were hit and miss, most being choppy and pixilated, some very good. The CPU varied between 75-100% depending on the content.
Hopefully others can learn from my latest science experiment….. when in doubt in my opinion, if you want to do ANYTHING other than surfing basic, light websites AT HOME without the bells and whistles, go for the full-size notebook, not one of these cheap mini-notebooks. With any form of decent video playback or any video recoding, even with Microsoft , I wouldn’t, couldn’t recommend these cheap mini-notebooks in their current state and configuration.
I would love to hear your feedback on this or of your experiences have been any different.
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD.His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
POSTED IN: Digital Lifestyle, VISION
TAGS: Battery Life, HD video, mini-notebook, Netbook, notebook, Turion
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COMMENTS: 30
I bought a Acer Aspire One, and brought it back around one week later. Useless…
1. Noisy, why is the fan on all the time! It may have a energy efficient chip but coupled with a old 945 chip set this thing puts out way too much heat. These netbooks shouldn’t even have a fan they should be passively cooled
2. Slow, I didnt do my research and I thought the Atom would be as fast as a Pentium M class processor, it isn’t. The in-order design of this chip may reduced die space but depending on the task being performed this processor can be a REAL dog! Id rather a under-clocked under-volted chip.
3.Battery Life, around 2 hours which isn’t very revolutionary.
4.Screen, Needs 768 lines or resolution, nothing fits, some apps with scream at you for not having at least 1024X768
5. Design/Build Quality, Buzzing speakers, poor touchpad design
At $399, for an extra $100 your can get alot more.
Dont get me wrong I think this form factor has potential. However, a few things need to change, first on the list dump these useless Atom processors!!!
Richard’s comments are right on target, and I think you’ve missed the point of a netbook. I was looking for a portable method to read email, browse the web, edit documents, and provide entertainment. Various iterations of PDA’s and smartphones handle email, but that’s about it from a practical perspective. I watched the UMPC market, but found them to be overpriced “super smartphones”. The early netbooks appealed to me as a cheap alternative, but frankly couldn’t incite me to give up my 13″ laptop. Now that the 10″ netbooks have hit the market, I picked up an MSI Wind (with 6 cell battery). Frankly, I’m amazed with it. It’s much more portable than my laptop (and there’s no comparison to 17″ behemoths). It handles every task I need it to, and I think the complaints of the Atom processor are unfounded. Sure it’s no match for my gaming rig, but it’s not supposed to be. An extra $150 gets me an additional gig of RAM and an external slim DVD burner, which brought the total price to $750. The Asus 1000h would have saved me $100, but I chose the Wind for the better keyboard layout. I get about 4 hours of battery life with WiFi and Bluetooth enabled, and a little over 5 hours without. I find that I’m dragging this thing around wherever I go. I imagine a great many computer users are like my wife, and need little more than a netbook for their daily computer needs. I have ordered one for her in fact, because she’ll grab mine over her 13″ XPS while having coffee in the morning on the patio. AMD missed the boat here, and I wish you guys would enter the market with a viable competitor, and I long for the days of Athlon/Pentium4 battles. Honestly, your post sounds a little like sour grapes.
Thank you for posting your comment. I really appreciate it. If you go and actually read a prior post, I do point out the plusses from my personal testing on the netbook. I think it is very important for consumers who may not be as technically savvy as you to understand the trade-offs. You had to spend $750 to get your notebook to the point where it met your needs. Do you think the average consumer knows these types of things? Maybe not. Again, thanks for the post.
WOW Hd editing on a netbook…
Sorry but this blog and the video seems more like mn why did we missed this.
As stated before you should not compare a net book with a fullsize notebook. Wich will have no longer battery life ( i know cause i own a eee pc 5h and a turion based notebook 3h)
The only right comment is about the way they develop atm beeing fairly priced and small to getting to big and expensive compared to low end notebooks that coe standard with vista.
increasing the speed of the vitual memory on these netbooks will yield better video playback, installing say, an X25-E in one of these netbooks will give you a pretty dramatic framerate improvement.
Well Pat, I think this post should be revised in the light of new offers on the market today. The MSI Wind is one of the most expensive netbooks around. You should go with Acer or ASUS. Personally, I’ve been waiting for netbooks to get a few enhancements for quite a while: decent battery life (now 6 cells = 5-7 hours), more storage space (80-160GB available now), more memory (1024MB now), bigger screen (10.2″ available) and of course Windows (most of us are more familiar with it). So after only 4 months all this has changed completely as you can see about specially pricing (you should have waited too). Now
I’m now waiting for a few things: (a) 1024×768 display please, (b) AMD to launch a good ultra-low TDP dual core Athlon to kill Intel Atom N270 and 330, (c) a decent and less power hungry chipset from AMD/ATi (in contrast to the Intel 945G dump) with a real IGP (low TDP Radeon 4XXX) with an S-Video output.
If AMD delivers, Intel will take a big hit. I hope this message gets forwarded to some guys in the engineering and marketing departments since this is a good niche with very high profits to take over Intel. Meanwhile we are all stuck with the same low value offers from Intel. Value is at what AMD excels, I hope the company stands for it to come to our rescue as it did with Turion CPUs for notebooks and the spider platform.
Give me hint or contact me if AMD can finally put us out of our misery.
I just purchased a 900HA (comes with an internal 160 Gb 2.5″ SATA drive) and it has 5 hours battery life and feels as fast as my Core 2 Duo E8500 desktop when doing web, email and other light computing work, for which the 900HA was designed. All this in a 1.1 kG tiny package for $320 USD. Yes time to go out and have another look PAT.
Scott, thanks for the comment. On the battery life, can you please post exactly how you are testing the unit? The more specific the better. For example, are you running BatteryMark, are you literally browsing for 5 hours straight, are you using the standard power settings, etc. Thanks!
Hi Pat, I wanted to just give you a quick thank you for this thread regarding netbooks. You have given me much food for thought from your comments and the other contributors. I have fairly limited needs but like any good consumer, I’m looking for the best value for my money. I can tell this however, I have lugged around my circa 1999 behemouth Winbook and relish the thought of a device as small and light as my dayrunner. Thank you again.JCSmith