Joey deVilla: Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck
A very interesting read on netbooks and why having something in the middle of established form factors can suck. In fact, I’ve made some of these same arguments when talking against tablet PC’s that didn’t have a convertable keyboard option with them. Way too slow to write everything down if you can type 120wpm on a keyboard. Similarly I’ve argued against email on phones in the past because tapping out full paragraphs with a stylus, on-screen keyboard, or physical keyboards (a la Dash) is just far too painful to make it useful. Why shouldn’t a new device or form factor fill this void?
And so enters the netbook, which very often has a small screen with a miniscule resolution and as little as 85% of a full size keyboard… why would I like these restrictions, considering that I bought a Lenovo S10 in the past? Well, for quick meetings at work they are pretty freakin’ great. For watching movies, they are pretty good. For coding and gaming, it’s fair. For having portable “hard drive” that can have my entire PC experience and preferences in a 2.43 pound package that will drive Aero on Windows 7 [RC] and project HD resolutions to external monitors, it’s great…
Wait, movies, coding, and gaming on a notebook? Yes, I said that. You haven’t had that experience? That’s because all Atoms are not the same chip…
This whole effort of self discovery started with the Lenovo S10 10.2″ and ended with an Acer Aspire ONE 11.6″ model.
The Lenovo S10 was a complete impulse buy from Circuit City as it closed its doors. That it runs Windows 7 [RC] really well without having Lenovo-crafted drivers was a bonus. That it’s a relatively quiet machine with a pretty solid performance, speaks well of the design. Jolene has coded on it. I’ve gamed a little bit with it. I’ve hooked it up to projectors running 1280×1024 and higher – I have little doubt that it could drive 1920×1200. The only gripes I’ve had with it have been: a slightly weird keyboard in the layout, the loud clicking trackpad buttons, and the piss poor resolution. When I plug this into a USB keyboard/mouse and external monitor those gripes simply go away.
While in Costco last week, I stumbled upon the Acer Aspire ONE 11.6″ netbook. Full size keyboard. Multi-gesture trackpad. Same size HDD. Used the same RAM as the S10 so I could take this to 2GB easily. The screen was great too, since it was bright and shiny, with 1.4″ more visible space. And it weighed less than the S10.
Since Costco treats its customers right, I was able to buy this worry free, knowing I could return it within 90 days if I didn’t like it. Ran it home, installed Win7 RC with Office 2007 and handed it to Jolene. She fired up all sorts of stuff with it and that’s when the ceiling came down on us.
The S10 uses an Atom N270. The Acer uses an Atom Z520. Huh???
Based off what I found on Intel’s spec site, there are four Atom processors in the wild right now that range across two families. There’s the Z520/Z530/Z540 chips that are all in the same class of performance: UMPC. While the GHz speeds change across these three chips (Z520 being the slowest) all of these chips were originally designed for UMPC usage, which is fine if you want a lightweight portable device that is geared to Ultra-Mobile tasks. The N270 was designed to be put into netbooks: lightly-powered notebook PCs. Subtile but critical difference there. The N270 had little problem with video in that it runs it fine but it puts the onus on the CPU for decoding (while newer PC’s – i.e. MacBook – have a dedicated chip for this) while the Z520 had a major issue with it. The N270 could handle Visual Studio; we never bothered to ask the Z520 to do so. According to the Windows 7 PC assessment, the least powerful part of the S10 was the graphics card for gaming; on the Acer it was processor. And don’t get me wrong: the Intel 950 graphics adapter is old, stale and has been lackluster almost since its inception… it couldn’t run Aero in Vista and I’ve never expected a lot from it. In the Acer, however, there was a new-to-me Intel graphics adapter (GMA500) and while it could run Aero in Win7, there were painting issues all over the place and playing back an H264 file just… well, it just plain failed. Even loading web pages were markedly slower compared to the S10…
Guess what I’m saying is that if you are in the market for a netbook, look at the technical specs closely and make sure you are getting enough power for what you are looking to do with it. There are at least two different families of chips under the Atom label and they are not equal no matter what the GHz speeds are (both the N270 and Z530 are 1.6GHz chips.) The N class was the obvious winner to me, in terms of processing power – the Z class may use less battery power but it’s so woefully underpowered compared to the N class, I think you’ll use that saved energy just waiting for pages to load.
It also makes me wonder that for people that aren’t a fan of the netbook, which the chip did you use when you formed that opinion – I think it could definitely impact opinions on the form factor.
Either way, the only netbook I would consider replacing my S10 with would be the S10-2 – even the new MacBook wouldn’t do it, since it’s heavier with the new battery and with the same lackluster resolution…
Meanwhile I continue to battle pocket lint as it attacks my iPhone 3GS.