The Netbook Thread

[VNVObit]

while eebuntu is one release candidate 1

I'd prefer a keeebuntu...

not quite the same but you can install the KDE desktop
Have to admit tried it and didn't like it all that much (at least KDE4) but that is personal preference

But some people
are willing to trade some performance for a much smaller computer.

That's me. I don't need a fantastically high powered laptop and my number 1 requirement is small. My Eee 900 does the job perfectly.

Me also
it's primarily about email and diary and a small knowledge base
works fine for me when out and about

at home iMac or my sony laptop if I need to do some work (bought it before I got the iMac and Fusion)

[Kronos]

Kemper told you why people buy these things and you're still posting about 14 inch Dells. What on earth are you gibbering on about? Does it matter if some other company did something similar umpteen years ago? Asus are doing it now and selling so many almost every major manufacturer wants to get in on the act. What's the problem?

KB said it is 'new' due to the price/performance. All I pointed out was it is not new or 'new' as in 1998 you could get a UMPC which was pretty much the same performance and price as the topline standard notebook of the time just 6 months later on. That was the whole point of my response so I have no idea what you're going on about

I didn't say there was anything wrong with the eeePC or UMPCs in general just that it's nothing new and a natural progression of ever decreasing cost of laptop tech

I would buy the Dell 'Mininspiron' tomorrow too, doesn't have to be revolutionary just has to run XP very well (which my current UMPC doesn't) but other than that I will be buying it for the same reason I used to carry my libretto with me to buy stock at suppliers and not a widescreen 15.4 D810 or something. And of course the same reason I swap laptops every year or so...it's new and shiny and that is good anyway so required purchase

[Kemper_Boyd]

I reject the argument that there's nothing new about the situation.

1. Netbooks are coming out from across the industry not just from a handful of companies.

2. Prices or netbooks and laptops are relatively close but in absolute terms they netbooks
are cheap. Many of the components are shared so of course there will be similar bill of
materials for some aspects of each type. That doesn't negate the point that a £199 netbook
is a different proposition to a Libretto or similar previous machines.

3. Atom really was designed for this niche. There's no need to use a slow Geode, or expensive
LV mobile CPU, or the best efforts of Via or Transmeta which were neither that cheap, fast
or efficient. Atom is cheap to buy, cheap to make, fully up to date ISA-wise, very efficient,
and performance wise pretty good. FWIW the 1.6 GHz Atom is about as fast on SPEC 2000 as a
1.5 GHz K7 or 1.8 GHz P4? Okay it's not a Penryn Core 2 Duo but how in the hell could you call
that slow?

4. Don't forget size when making comparisons. Most of the netbooks are a lot smaller than
cheap laptops.

[Dio]

I doubt it's in the ballpark of either a 1.5GHz K7 or 1.8GHz P4 on anything done with a C compiler. Probably about a GHz of the former and maybe 1.5 of the latter... but yeah, the enhanced ISA should make it relatively good at hand-scheduled media stuff.

[Kemper_Boyd]

I doubt it's in the ballpark of either a 1.5GHz K7 or 1.8GHz P4 on anything done with a C compiler. Probably about a GHz of the former and maybe 1.5 of the latter... but yeah, the enhanced ISA should make it relatively good at hand-scheduled media stuff.

Well SPEC CPU2000 is Fortran, C and a bit of C++.

These are results that Intel claims to have achieved and the best K7 and P4 results I could dig
out of the SPEC results database by trying to find the a better result at the lowest clock for a K7
and P4. I'm not claiming Intel's latest compiler with every button pressed is the same effort as
these older results, and I recognise that current CPUs perform a lot better. I think it shows that
a modern ~2W CPU has potential, and is not much slower than processors we considered state
of the art only 6-7 years ago. It's also amazing to see how much faster Atom is on paper than
a lot of Alpha, Power and PA-RISC boxes that were way out of reach of most people relatively
recently.

Code: Select all

CPU       Atom   Atom   Atom   K7    P4
Clock     800    1200   1600   1533  1800
CINT2000  319    439    653    671   650
CFP2000   294    402    582    615   711

[Kronos]

I reject the argument that there's nothing new about the situation.

1. Netbooks are coming out from across the industry not just from a handful of companies.

2. Prices or netbooks and laptops are relatively close but in absolute terms they netbooks
are cheap. Many of the components are shared so of course there will be similar bill of
materials for some aspects of each type. That doesn't negate the point that a £199 netbook
is a different proposition to a Libretto or similar previous machines.

3. Atom really was designed for this niche. There's no need to use a slow Geode, or expensive
LV mobile CPU, or the best efforts of Via or Transmeta which were neither that cheap, fast
or efficient. Atom is cheap to buy, cheap to make, fully up to date ISA-wise, very efficient,
and performance wise pretty good. FWIW the 1.6 GHz Atom is about as fast on SPEC 2000 as a
1.5 GHz K7 or 1.8 GHz P4? Okay it's not a Penryn Core 2 Duo but how in the hell could you call
that slow?

4. Don't forget size when making comparisons. Most of the netbooks are a lot smaller than
cheap laptops.

The situation is new I agree I was commenting that UMPC as a concept or purchasable product wasn't new.

All my comments were in relative terms regarding speed and size though which address points 3 and 4 above ie the 110CT was also powerful for it's day compared to a Tecra 550CDT and it was tiny too, but still a full blown 233mhz Windows laptop). The only thing that has really changed is the affordability of mobile computing, for which the lowest price possible over the last 24 months or so has dropped significantly, and I totally agree with points 1 and 2. Toshiba was way ahead of it's time, computing in general just wasn't affordable enough for the Libretto to achieve huge sales at the time (through no fault of their own). And credit to Asus for kicking off the trend again making the most of these circumstances now AND deciding to make it an affordable product (rather than some expensive yuppie toy which is pretty much how the last Libretto was priced as @ $2000 for a 1.2ghz Pentium M machine)

There has always been a market for such things and now, thanks to technology dropping in price so much in the last decade, the price point has reached a level that can support a mucher greater share of potential owners even as an impulse purchase (£200 is not a lot of money really nowadays...2 weeks shopping?) should someone choose to do so. So yes not new, but good on Asus for making it less of a yuppie toy and doing it for a reasonable profit along the lines of similarly pricing them as regular low-end notebooks. And competition is great with even cheaper equivalents being readied for market.

(I used to work with someone who used a Libretto instead of a normal laptop for all his contracting and just like everyone else who saw it we all wanted one but then in 1998 a basic laptop was almost a four figure sum,so even being priced the same as a normal basic laptop it was a big investment but no less fun, huzzah for cheap computing of today!)

[Kemper_Boyd]

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Librettos skip from the Pentium MMX to the
Pentium M? So who enables such machines, Toshiba or the component suppliers?

Toshiba could only build such computers because other companies made suitable
components. Toshiba deserves credit for taking the opportunity but it's not like it
was all their own work or an idea that was entirely theirs.

If you go far enough back then companies like Grid and more broadly Sharp, Tandy
and Psion deserve some credit for the 'computer in your pocket' idea.

So why are netbooks (smaller than laptop PCs) back in the limelight?

Three things stand out to me:

1. Cheap, fast-enough, low power processors. A PIV netbook was never an option.
I've already gone through this, but having a part designed for rather than adapted
to the goal makes a difference.

2. Cheap displays; the panels used in many of the netbooks are cheap because they
are being used in other devices such as in-car entertainment, and digital photo frames.
If they weren't mass produced building a small netbook would be much more difficult
as small high res screens have been quite expensive until recently.

3. Flash prices fell of a cliff. 'Enough' flash is now affordable, and of course it's low
power as well. But in the context of a netbook flash beats an HD because - a) it is
smaller than standard 2.5" and 1.8" HDs, and even the smaller drives for modest of
amounts of storage and b) if you only need a few GB it will cost just a few dollars,
there is no just a few dollars HD, the '$5 HD' does not exist.

Most of the other components haven't changed as much in terms of technology or
cost. Batteries, back lights and chip sets are likely to improve in the future and
assist further reductions in cost and power usage.

I'm not disputing that small PCs existed before, but I do think it's clear that several
trends have come together to make them more available and probably successful
then they were before, or indeed could have been. That's the new bit.

[Dio]

These are results that Intel claims to have achieved and the best K7 and P4 results I could dig
out of the SPEC results database by trying to find the a better result at the lowest clock for a K7
and P4. I'm not claiming Intel's latest compiler with every button pressed is the same effort as
these older results, and I recognise that current CPUs perform a lot better.

If I had to guess, it's down to vectorisation; K7 didn't have SSE2, which P4 and Atom both have. That's the only reason I can see for the P4 getting that close to it .

[Dio]

El Reg slavers over the 901. 10 minutes short of 4 hours battery life playing mpeg4 in max performance mode at max brightness with wifi on - nice. Should make over 5 in powersave mode with typical use and screen settings, I reckon. Ticks all the boxes for what I need...

Hold off a month or two for the Wind and the Aspire One and to let the dust settle and then it's get the plastic out, I think...

[Misfit]

El Reg slavers over the 901. 10 minutes short of 4 hours battery life playing mpeg4 in max performance mode at max brightness with wifi on - nice. Should make over 5 in powersave mode with typical use and screen settings, I reckon. Ticks all the boxes for what I need...

Hold off a month or two for the Wind and the Aspire One and to let the dust settle and then it's get the plastic out, I think...

Yes a glowing review, and at the end they do mention the other models....

Anyone considering the Eee 901 will almost certainly also be pondering whether to go for the Acer Aspire One or MSI's Wind. The Wind first. It's slightly more expensive than the 901 - £334 - and it's not expected to hit the UK until almost three weeks after the 901. Crucially, the only advantage the Wind offers is storage space: it has an 80GB hard drive. It's memory and processor match those of the 901. It too has Bluetooth but its WLAN is just 802.11g. It comes with a three-cell battery. We haven't yet tested the Wind, but all in all, we think the 901 is the better offering.

The One has a slightly sub-901 spec too: 0.3-megapixel webcam, 802.11g, only 8GB of storage - but it's more stylish, we think, and it's got the same CPU, memory and screen as the 901. And given it's only £199 - £120 less than the 901, we can forgive those differences. It too ships with a three-cell battery as standard, but that £120 difference is more than enough to pick up a six-cell power unit.

Much as we like the 901, if Acer ships the One at the promised price and at a comparable build quality to the 901, Asus is going to find it hard to compete. If we're happy with a 4GB Eee PC 701, we're certainly not going to find the One's 8GB too small.

[Kronos]

I'm not disputing that small PCs existed before, but I do think it's clear that several
trends have come together to make them more available and probably successful
then they were before, or indeed could have been. That's the new bit.

Pretty much what I was trying to say re: the old 110CT in 98 and the eee PC today in regards to cost of tech falling like a stone in the last few years The market was there IMO and the product could be produced but the critical price point was unachievable through no fault of Toshiba in the late 90s. Laptops were a luxury item then, and a UMPC even more so.

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Librettos skip from the Pentium MMX to the
Pentium M? So who enables such machines, Toshiba or the component suppliers?

Toshiba could only build such computers because other companies made suitable
components. Toshiba deserves credit for taking the opportunity but it's not like it
was all their own work or an idea that was entirely theirs.

If you go far enough back then companies like Grid and more broadly Sharp, Tandy
and Psion deserve some credit for the 'computer in your pocket' idea.

So why are netbooks (smaller than laptop PCs) back in the limelight?

They used
AMD 5x86
Intel Pentium and PentiumMMX,
Transmeta Crusoe
Pentium M

Then they gave up, probably due to the prohibitive cost of the tech limiting their market size. I believe they made their own screens for each originally and used their own notebook battery experience too. The hard drives were their own aswell as they were about as slim as current 80Gb PATA drives. Possibly RAM have to check that too. Rest is down to cost and availability (CPU/audio/video/heatsink technology)

I don't want to belittle things like the Psion and Atari DIP etc as they did indeed prove there was a market for a 'laptop in your pocket'. I only picked the 110CT simply because it was effectively shrunken 550CDT. It was the only real mini laptop as opposed to a PDA type device that doesn't run Windows and Office etc. They could have sold it a bit cheaper in the past, but never down to the impulse purchase level of the 701 eee PC simply because laptops haven't been an impulse purchase for more than the last 18 months let alone 10 yrs ago due to cost of tech. The 701 manages well enough with a Pentium M 3 yrs after the Libretto U100 used the same, but obviously much cheaper now, CPU.

I was agreeing the available tech limited what could be done hence the current situation of companies racing to cash in on a market that's always been there and these consumers have never had it so good. And I agreed it is a new, and indeed good, situation for the potential for these mass market UMPCs like you say. There was nothing stopping Toshiba making the first £300/200 UMPC so in that instance all credit to ASUS for giving it a go and bringing it together as a mass marketable product which now has many others companies onboard the bandwagon.

[Rhythm]

I really want one of these for work for providing on-call support - I'm currently using a massive old HP thing. Only thing is, it'd need to be compatible with Safeboot. Does encryption software like this screw up solid-state hard drives?

[Baggypants]

If you go far enough back then companies like Grid and more broadly Sharp, Tandy
and Psion deserve some credit for the 'computer in your pocket' idea.

So why are netbooks (smaller than laptop PCs) back in the limelight?

one big one stands out to me, The Internet. Back in the Day there was no wireless connectivity, and only pages of Star Trek and Pammy Anderson to look at.

Now of course the Pammy pages are gone.

[Misfit]

Expansys have prices up for the Acer one. Not quite the £199, but then they are usually an expensive site and it could change when they actually release....

http://www.expansys.com/tag.aspx?tag=as ... umpcportal

Cheapest version (512MB, 80Gb HD, Linux) comes in at £244

[xav]

Expansys have prices up for the Acer one. Not quite the £199, but then they are usually an expensive site and it could change when they actually release....

http://www.expansys.com/tag.aspx?tag=as ... umpcportal

Cheapest version (512MB, 80Gb HD, Linux) comes in at £244

From El Reg's review (and quoted in Misfit's post above):

Much as we like the 901, if Acer ships the One at the promised price and at a comparable build quality to the 901, Asus is going to find it hard to compete. If we're happy with a 4GB Eee PC 701, we're certainly not going to find the One's 8GB too small.

So either there's been a typo somewhere, or there will also be an 8GB flash-based version of the One and that's the model which has been touted as £199. Personally I'd prefer a flash drive for an ultra-sub-mini-net-notebook-thing anyway, so I hope it's the latter.