The Netbook Thread

[piku]

The Asus Eee Keyboard:

Although I'm really thinking of this



with this glued to the side



But I bet that's just coincidence.

[Firefox]

A couple of interesting new devices on Engadget this week:


The Sony Vaio P.


Mio concept mockup.

I doubt I'll be buying the Vaio (or the Mio one, if they make it), but that's very much the form factor I'd like a netbook in. I'm finding that the palmrests and trackpads don't really work for me when I'm using my EeePc, they're just in the way.

What I really want is something very like an Apple wireless keyboard (which has full-size keys)



with a lid full of screen and the optical mouse thingy out of the Vaio's keyboard (or an IBM-stylee nipple).

[DutchLlama]

You can make the EEE PC's keyboard slightly more responsive with several pieces of aluminium foil:

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=39113

[fog]

It seriously handles VS2005 and SQL Server... at the same time, without grinding to a crawl? And you can cope with developing on the tiny screen?

Would it cope with XNA Game Studio?

I'm running VS2008 with XNA 3.0 and it works fine. Performance wise it will obviously have issues if you really push it, but in testing I'm shifting several hundred sprites with pixel shaders etc and having no problems.

The tiny screen is obviously something of a compromise in the editor, but have all your Solution Explorer, Properties windows etc auto-hide, and I find it perfectly usable. (FWIW I get around 25 lines of code on screen and width isn't an issue at all.)

[Misfit]

A couple of interesting new devices on Engadget this week:


The Sony Vaio P.

The Viao P is interesting until you see the price. It looked expensive starting at $900 in the US, until the UK price for the base model was announced at £850! (going up to £1369!).

It is quite pretty though!

[Cloudane]

Nice, but having had an Eee 701 and all the vertical space issues there, that screen looks a nightmare.

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

Nice, but having had an Eee 701 and all the vertical space issues there, that screen looks a nightmare.

I don't think they're helping their cause there by using stupidly big icons on the screen...

[Misfit]

Nice, but having had an Eee 701 and all the vertical space issues there, that screen looks a nightmare.

Screen is 8" 1600 X 768, which is greater than any netbook on both axis.

[zip accident]

Nice, but having had an Eee 701 and all the vertical space issues there, that screen looks a nightmare.

Screen is 8" 1600 X 768, which is greater than any netbook on both axis.

I am sorry, I don't like wide/shallow screens at the best of times, there was at least the golden mean excuse for 1.6:1, why anyone thought 1.6:0.9 was better than 1.6:1 is anybody's guess, and over 2:1 is silly. It reminds me of the screen on the apricot portable all those years ago.

[Cloudane]

Nice, but having had an Eee 701 and all the vertical space issues there, that screen looks a nightmare.

Screen is 8" 1600 X 768, which is greater than any netbook on both axis.

Golly. That's quite surprising. It doesn't look that size, but just shows!

Not so much the icons that made the 701 hard work as the size various developers made their dialogs - a vertical res of 480 was nasty.

[Firefox]

An Asus spin-off company has produced a reference design of a netbook based around a new Freescale SoC which is powered by an ARM Cortex A8 core clocked at 1GHz:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/09/pega ... -netbooks/
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8595694202.html

* <$200
* Eight hours runtime on a two-cell battery.
* No heatsinks or fans. (Yes! )
* Comes with Ubuntu preinstalled.
* The usual 8.9" screen, 8GB SSD, etc etc.
* 720p video playback, hardware accelerated OpenGL.

I really hope someone does one with a four- or six-cell battery!

[HGFB]

Should my Eee 1000H be able to playback 720p mkv files?

[Firefox]

The Sony Vaio P is actually a bit bigger than it looks. Here are a couple of shots of it on top of an Aspire One:



(From this review.)

[sillytuna]

Just got my Samsung NC10 to replace my Eee 701 (which my sister is getting for chrimbo as she's had her eye on it all year).

I've also got an NC10 and I bloody love it. Battery time is incredible and the screen great.

I have two minor issues. The speakers are pretty hopeless, and I find I get a slight cramp in my left hand when using the keyboard. Guess that would be an issue for me on any netbook.

[oNyx]

Should my Eee 1000H be able to playback 720p mkv files?

Depends on the bitrate. 720p animes with up to 400mb for a 25min ep work fine on my 900A (CPU usage is between 70-80%). However, I only got that to work with WinXP.

Stuff you need:
1. MPC Doom9 fork
2. ffdshow-tryouts
3. Haali splitter

Then start MPC go to View->Options->Playback->Output->Direct Show Video->[x] System Default. This is the fastest renderer. Unfortunately you cannot use MPC's subtitle rendering anymore. However, you can use ffdshow's instead. Start a video then right click on the "FFv" tray icon, tick "subtitles" over there and you're ready to go.

The advantage of MPC's subtitle renderer was its ability to use the whole viewport. So, if you were watching some 16:9 video on a 4:3 screen the subtitles were mostly inside the lower black bar. Well, with the EEE's 5:3 screen this would rarely happen anyways. On the flip side ffdshow's renderer can do karaoke effects properly (MPC's renderer didn't update them frequently enough).