Subscribe to RSS 2.0Most Shiny
Last time I bought a really small laptop it was about four years ago and it cost nearly £2000. That seems an unimaginable amount to spend now, not just because I'm poorer these days. Last week I bought the smallest and most beautiful laptop I've ever owned, and it cost £300 (ex. VAT.). It's got a keyboard that's over 90% of full-sized, so I can touch-type without a hitch. In fact it's probably the silkiest keyboard I've ever used. It's got a bright and beady little display that crams some ridiculous resolution onto its 9" screen. Not so good if you struggle with small print, but great if you're me.
The processor is very slow by today's standards, but I don't care. I've loaded it with Windows XP (designed to run on the computers of the year 2000) and Office 2000, and now Word starts up in much less than a second. It weighs 1.2kg and slips into the smallest bag. I swapped out the hard drive for one of these new solid-state ones with no moving parts, so the machine is also completely silent. It is, in the hacker vernacular, freakin' awesome. I plan to keep it exclusively for writing my next book: no Photoshop or Illustrator, no programming, and only the most basic web-browsing setup.
Other than the fact the battery life is less than two hours, I've got no excuse for not writing wherever I am - and I can always take the charger with me. The only reason that I wouldn't recommend anyone in the market for a tiny, fabulous laptop to gallop out and buy one right now is that every other computer-maker on the planet is rushing a similar device to market. Until a year ago, tiny laptops commanded a really high-end price ; you can now buy one for under £300. Get a Linux one and the software's all free: as soon as the thing's out of its box you're ready to start work on your magnum opus.
Look. Despite the healthy size of its keyboard, you can nearly lose the thing under a paperback book. Pai an jiao jue, as they would have said on the short-lived TV show, Firefly.
I was looking for some press photos I could use to demonstrate its diminutive dimensions, but all I could find were trade show photos with beautiful Asian girls holding them up - and the girls are so tiny the thing looked like a full-sized machine. Top tip: hire WWF wrestlers to demonstrate how delicate your bijou-tech is.
I can't believe either of these girls is much over 4'6".
Comments: 7
That's a handsome looking machine. The UMPC category is looking really quite interesting at the moment: there's a quite good summary of the various competitors here.
Battery life does seem to be the killer though. I've had the same experience with my EEE PC701, which can scarcely manage my ninety minute commute on a single charge. I'm hoping that the advent of the Intel Atom processor will deliver UMPCs with reasonable endurance.
HP have suggested that they might have an "interim refresh" of the Mininote line in six months or so, and offer a model with an Atom processor rather than the VIA C7-M. At that point, I'd be hard pressed to turn it down, as the form factor looks really terrific.
Posted by: George on May 30, 2008 09:42 PM
Oooh, pretty! And I want one! For no real reason except that it would be handy for my morning trips to Starbucks to read manuscripts and write reviews etc. And I suppose I could work in bed sometimes which would be nice. Note to self: think of cast-iron excuse for buying one.
Posted by: Vanessa on May 31, 2008 09:40 AM
OT, sorta: Rob, if a beginner (i.e. me) wants to learn how to use Linux, where's the best place to start? Or do you know of a book you'd recommend? I know, I know ... there's thousands on the market. Exactly the problem, and it has to be idiot-proof.
Would this sort of laptop do a decent job of substituting for an eReader?
Posted by: Lee on May 31, 2008 01:37 PM
Lee, the Linux question is sort of a tricky one. On the one hand, many Linux 'flavours' now have a 'front-end' that looks a lot like Windows - and come pre-installed with OpenOffice that looks a lot like Microsoft Office - so you can do 90% of what an ordinary user wants to do just by pretending it's like Windows or OSX and just clicking on things. Slightly more involved things, like updating applications or installing new ones, seem to work differently on different flavours. And then if you get really advanced, and dig into the system itself and want to make changes to how it works, all the flavours start to look similar again, because they're based on the same core code. But that's beyond the stage I've got to. I reckon if you got a machine that came pre-installed with a flavour of Linux, you'd probably be able to get by using the method above: just pretend it's Windows. And if you do that, just make sure you go for a machine that a lot of other people are buying, because then there'll be tons of wikis and help sites for 'newbs' who hit problems.
As for e-Readers, the popular ones like the Kindle and the Sony PRS-505 have paper-like displays that you can read in bright sunlight and have zero flicker - but which aren't much good for ordinary computing. So it depends if you can bear to look at an ordinary laptop screen or prefer something more paper-like. And whether you want something book-sized and neat or can live with the bulk of a laptop. The HP2133 (which I bought) or the Asus EEE are both very cheap and very small... for laptops. And there will be a dozen similar models out in the next few months.
Posted by: Rob on May 31, 2008 01:46 PM
That is a nice computer. I love laptops as well but my new one is large 17in wide screen and heavy to carry long distance, but that doesn't stop me taking it to the library and to work.
Posted by: writer113 on June 1, 2008 04:03 AM
My dad tends to buy flimsy, tiny laptops and load them with ludicrous amounts of late-model software, so I have an automatic prejudice against wee laptops, because my only experience is that they're slow and rapidly out of juice. Also I have an iBook, which is just fine in terms of weight, size, and battery life, so I need nothing more.
Posted by: KatharineC on June 2, 2008 01:49 PM
Man, I am going to have to hunt you down... I've just spent the last 5 hours trudging up and down Tottenham Court Road thinking SURELY I'd be able to pick one up while I was in the country... not a single one... ahem.
Posted by: Steven Savile on June 3, 2008 10:49 PM