It’s hard to believe that it was less than a year ago when higher end netbooks still commanded $600 and maybe even above. But if you bought a netbook in the last month or two for $400 or more, this is a good time to kick yourself. Last week a premium netbook should fetch well below $400, but that market just died with the arrival of cheap $400 Acer Aspire AS1410-2285 ultraportable.
The AS1410-2285 has the following notable specifications.
- Dual-core 1.2 GHz SU2300 “CULV” processor
- Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics chipset
- 11.6″ LCD w/LED backlight
- Full size keyboard
- Windows 7 Home Premium x64 edition
- VGA and HDMI port
- 6-cell battery
- Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11 a/b/g/n
- 0.87″ to 1.18″ thick and 3.08 lbs
- 160 GB 2.5″ SATA HDD
- 2 GB RAM
- Two real mouse buttons instead of a cheap imitation MacBook button that works like garbage.
- Did NOT see anything about BlueTooth but you can buy one of those tiny dongles for $10 or less if you get a bargain.
This is the sort of specification that would have probably fetched close to $2000 just two years ago but the “race to the bottom” has been won by Acer. While I’m sure this saddens those in the notebook industry, consumers are rejoicing. I saw an ad over this weekend for a netbook with Windows 7 “Starter Edition” for $368 so I feel for the poor guy/gal who buys it.
It’s worth noting that the HP Mini 311 netbook with NVIDIA Ion still sells for $400. While the NVIDIA Ion LE graphics chipset in the Mini 311 is about 79% faster than the GMA 4500MHD in 3DMark2006, the Atom CPU in the Mini 311 CPU is slower than a dual-core 1.2 GHz SU2300 especially for multi-thread optimized workloads. So which product is better depends on your preferred workload, but I personally don’t take gaming on netbooks too seriously.
Now here’s a great deal on a laptop with a modern CPU and chipset for $378. It’s basically the same laptop I talked about here but this time it comes with a bigger hard drive and a free upgrade to Windows 7.
15.4″ dual-core Intel laptop from Lenovo for $330. This is better than the black Friday deals from last year. And since I don’t feel like standing in line for 30 hours, I might just grab one of these as a gift for someone.
Update – I got one of the last units before Fry’s closed. Mom needed a laptop.
The specs include a GS45 graphics chipset and a Pentium dual-core T4200 operating at 2.0 GHz, 35mm package, and 35W TDP. The stock OS is loaded with crapware as usual, but I’m installing from scratch so it should run extremely well after I’m done. Based on the stock install, it appears the laptop can stretch to 4 hours idle with wireless off and minimum brightness (which is not that dim and perfectly usable on an airplane), but I need to test it on movie playback mode. I am hoping it will get close to 3 hours battery. If not, I’ll try running RMclock on it to see if I can underclock and undervolt it to get more battery life.
Dell has the new Inspiron 11z 11.6″ ultraportable laptop for just $434 (order here and just add the $35 6-cell battery option). It’s much faster on the CPU and graphics than a Netbook but it’s priced like a Netbook. This is an Intel Celeron 743 45nm Core microarchitecture single core processor running at 1.3 GHz with a mere 10W TDP so the performance is better than the 1.6 GHz Atom processors used in Netbooks. The graphics chipset is the GS45 which absolutely annihilates the aging G945 chipset used in most Netbooks. The 11Z also has an HDMI out.
The only down side is all the trial and crapware that Dell ship with this thing, but that can be wiped out with a fresh OS install and you can use the OEM license sticker on the bottom of the laptop. If Vista refuses to activate, call into Microsoft activation and they’ll fix it for you quickly.
For a total price of $434, it is an unbelievably low price for a real ultraportable laptop that performs like the $2000 ultraportables of 2006. I never expected these CULV (stands for consumer ultra low voltage) notebooks to sell at this price point since that is overlapping with netbooks, but I’m not complaining.
The only downside to the 11z appears to be the weak trackpad and relatively slow single-core low frequency CPU. But it’s still faster than the Atom processor and at least it supports the SSE4.1 instruction set. Some of the power saving features like speed step is disabled, but the system still has a very impressive battery life. Dell does offer a $75 option to upgrade to the fully featured SU4100 processor which has two CPU cores and it also has speed step enabled to improve battery life. Then if we add the $25 802.11n and $20 internal Bluetooth upgrade along with Windows Vista Premium (which also comes with a free Windows 7 upgrade) for $30, the total price comes to $584 which is still a great deal considering the specifications.
I just got my Lenovo X200 12.1″ ultra-light laptop yesterday in the mail and here are the options I got.
- 6-cell battery (9-cell option)
- 7200 RPM 160 GB hard drive
- 2 GB RAM
- Intel P8600 45nm 2.4 GHz CPU
- No Camera or Mic in the lid this particular version
- Bluetooth and Fingerprint reader
- Intel Wi-Fi 5100 802.11 AGN
- Vista Business license with XP Pro preloaded
Buying mistakes you might want to avoid
I paid $1400 including shipping for the above specs and didn’t get the 9-cell because of the 2-week delay and I figured that I’ll eventually order a second battery anyways. If I had to order again, I would have waited an extra week or two for the cheaper model for $1175 including shipping. 7200 RPM 250 GB hard drives are only about $100 and I would have ordered a 9-cell for about $180 to complement the 4-cell that comes with the cheapest model.
I might have been better off just ordering from
Lenovo.com and paying the California sales tax because then I would have at least gotten a Microphone and Webcam. Sure I have much better external mics and cameras, but having integrated ones is still good to have because it’s convenient.
The good:
- Make no mistake, this is a road warrior’s machine
- Intel Centrino 2 platform
- 2.4 GHz 45nm Penryn class processor slaughters the 65nm processors in the MacBook Air or other previous generation Centrino laptops with sub 2 GHz processors. Despite the fact that this is a 25W TDP processor, its 45nm process makes it competitive with the 20W TDP 1.6 or 1.8 GHz 65nm processor in the MacBook Air in terms of power consumption. The battery drain tests I’ve seen on the X200 are even beating laptops with Ultra Low Voltage 10W TDP 1.33 GHz CPUs! 2.4 GHz is not only a much higher clock speed, but you get SSE4 capability which doubles the performance of certain operations like video encoding.
- Integrated AT&T 3G or Verizon 3G wireless Internet option with 3G antenna built in to the display lid
- Integrated BlueTooth makes tethering to an Internet connected phone fairly convenient
- Glare-free and very bright 1280×800 display
- Bright enough to run at mid-level brightness even in brighter room
- Great price for this class of machine. Most 12.1″ notebooks in this class are much more expensive.
- Full size keyboard just like the 14″ ThinkPad models
- Great battery life even with 6-cell, outrageous battery life with 9-cell
- Light weight
The bad (or good depending on how you see things)
- My only major disappointment is that the larger 6-cell battery extends down instead of to the back. I hope the 9-cell extends back and down so that it doesn’t get any thicker than it already is.
- Some people would fault it for the lack of a track pad and/or optical drive, but I personally don’t care for either item. I prefer the track point anyways and DVDs and videos can be ripped to the hard drive or better yet, played off the SDHC card so you can let the hard drive rest.
- Some people might find the dull harsh machine look of ThinkPads ugly and maybe it is, but the surface isn’t slippery and doesn’t put glare in your eyes. It’s nowhere near as pretty as a Mac Air, but all the ports on the side are way more practical.
- Would have been nice if an HDMI port was included.
Verdict
The bottom line is that I can recommend this computer for highly mobile professionals who want a powerful yet light and affordable notebook.
I’ll be posting some more test results tomorrow on battery performance and tweaking.
I started off as the proud new owner of a brand new Sony VGN-FW140E notebook with the latest processor and chipset, but happiness turned to severe disappointment as the flaws rolled in one after another. The notebook looks deceptively sleek and cool when it’s actually quite bulky with a 16.4″ LCD display, but that’s not one of the many reasons it failed.
The first problem with this laptop is that the display is so glossy that I could literally shave myself it in. Take it in to any semi bright room with a window or bright lights and it’s basically worthless because you can barely see a thing. I have no idea why laptop manufacturers keep putting out glossy displays but this particular laptop was particularly horrendous.
The second problem with this laptop is the buggy drivers. The HDMI audio drivers for example simply refused to install on a fresh install of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition 32-bit claiming that it only installs on Windows Vista (don’t know how much more Vista I can get). Clearly Sony has not tested this driver. The other problem was the panel button drivers which disabled Vista UAC and rebooted and then installed itself. I re-enabled UAC after Vista warned me and then all hell seemed to break loose with these drivers. Vista now complained about a missing battery (strange considering the fact that it has power to warn me) and dropped me in to hibernate mode. You boot up again and same thing happens again and I had to do a system restore to put the computer back to the ways things were before I installed those drivers.
The third problem is this laptop’s hardware. The battery simply stops charging after a few minutes whether it’s in suspend mode or whether it’s powered on. When you first plug the power cord in, the battery indicator in the task tray charges but it stops in a few minutes. Even after leaving the laptop plugged in all night long, it refused to charge the battery. I think the only way to charge the thing is to completely shut down and I’m still not sure if that will work.
The verdict on this laptop is that it’s a miserable failure because it belongs in a lab somewhere as a beta product and not as a production product. It’s going back to Fry’s where I bought the machine at a discounted $899. It’s not that the laptop is a complete design failure, it simply needs a lot of work to hammer out the flaws. The camera and microphone worked fairly well, the inclusion of an HDMI port was a welcome entry, and the discounted price was reasonable for a high-end laptop. But until these issues are worked out and the LCD replaced with something that works in a bright room, it’s a nonstarter for me.
Moving forward, I just bit the bullet and ordered a real road warrior’s laptop the Lenovo X200 12″ ultra-mobile laptop for around $1120 (need to order 9-cell battery extra) which got a fairly impressive review (especially the 6+ hour DVD playback drain test and CPU performance). I was very tempted to go with an Asus 1000H NetBook at only $450 but I really wanted a high performance ultramobile with the Intel 45nm P8600 2.4 GHz CPU.
I think that this video says it all:
Thanks to “Fake Steve Ballmer” for the video!But let’s get real folks. The MacBook Air is a pretty slick design. Regardless of what peripheral capabilities it does and does not have, it packs a lot into a pretty tight package, and Apple deserves kudos for that. I am fairly certain that most users don’t need an optical drive, either (especially if they get media via iTunes or something similar). And a lot of consumers (and prosumers), basically anyone not tied to a corporate desk 8 hours a day has a WiFi connection, so the wired NIC is less of a requirement for a lot of people. But where did Apple miss? The mouse. Every laptop user I know who uses it for more than 1 meeting a week is forced to drag a mouse around with them everywhere. And that’s the real rub. I don’t care what you do to the device, users hate the trackpads and pointing sticks, and these devices will always be cumbersome if the user has to drag one (and a power cord) around. That’s the real pain point, not the thickness or even the weight.
J.Ja
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