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paulm64 - 2010-03-27 9:53 AM
Chinese No Name 7" Mini Netbook
First Impressions
I got my new Chinese no-name 7" mini netbook the other day. And when I say no-name. I mean no-name. There’s no brand name, or stickers of any kind anywhere on this thing. It doesn’t get any OEMer than that. I was surprised at how small the box it came in was. I was even more surprised to find that it was packed inside of another even smaller box along with a user manual and an ac adapter. It's alot smaller than I expected. It's also very lightweight. It's fire engine red and silver plastic case makes it look and feel like a toy. The first thing I'm going to do is buy one of those laptop skins and put it on here to try to make it look a little better. I've also taken a cool Windows XP wallpaper and put it on it as well as the WinXP system startup sound. Makes it a little better.
The unit has an SD card slot on the left side as well, as, microphone and earphone jacks. On the right side are two USB ports. On the back edge are a dc input, another USB port, and an ethernet port. One of the strange things I noted was that while the back of the netbook has an DC power input that is labeled 9Volts, the AC adapter that comes with it is rated at 5Volts, 1Amp. Hmm. Another oddity is that the manual implies, though not very clearly, that the USB port on the back is for something called a U disc. Not sure what that means. I assume they mean a flash drive. Not sure why one USB port would be different than any other. Just for kicks I plugged my 1TB WD MyBook external hd into the USB port on the back but it didn’t recognize it. I also tried the other USB ports also with no luck. I don’t have a usb flash drive, mouse or keyboard to try. I mostly just use SD cards since I have an SD card reader on my desktop and laptop. I also managed to get it to see my network. Which is great because I can now transfer files without using the sd card or a USB drive. Which I couldn’t get to work anyway.
Now to turn it on. It take about 15-20 seconds to boot up. There’s a black screen that says “Smart Book” Not too bad. Unfortunately, that is the fastest thing about this netbook. It runs Windows CE 6.0. It has 128MB of RAM and 2GB of storage space. It's got a 7” screen that looks pretty good. I looked at some photos on it and they have a lot of banding. I'm not sure how many colors this screen has but it's definitely not high color. The keyboard feels pretty good. The keys are a little small so I have a tendency to hit the wrong key a lot. But I'll probably get used to it. It still better than trying to type on one of those thumb keyboards or even the ipod touch keyboard. I really hate typing on those.
The applications installed are Calculator, Internet Explorer, Mailbox (nPOP V1.0.9), Windows Media Player V9 Series, Windows CE Messenger V5 (which works), Microsoft Wordpad, Picture Viewer, The Core Pocket Mediaplayer 0.72RC1, Audio Recorder 1.06, Skype, Windows Explorer, WinRAR, YouTube 1.16. There's also a spreadsheet program that says Excel but it's really SpreadCE 1.17, Foxit Reader for .pdf files, and a suite of office type programs from Softmaker Software; Planmaker (spreadsheet), Presentations, Textmaker. Files created with these are MS Office compatible.
As for games there is Freecell, Solitaire, PaoPaoLong (which has all the menus are in Chinese.)
Naturally, the first thing I did was try out the Internet Explorer. Connecting to my Wifi router was fairly easy. But browsing the web shows how slow this thing is. On regular web pages like Yahoo, and CNN, it was excruciatingly slow! Some sites just cause IE to just lock up altogether. Though it may have eventually finished loading someday. While webpages like Wikipedia, HPCFactor and other mostly text pages weren’t too bad. I had much better luck using the mobile versions of webpages. I found that you can put ‘m.’ in front of alot of popular webpages’ url and get the mobile version, i.e., m.cnn.com, m.yahoo.com, etc. of course, MSN is different, it is mobile.msn.com. Using the mobile version of these pages makes them fairly usable on this thing. I have already bookmarked the mobile versions of some of my favorite sites.
On to the “Office” apps. The netbook has Wordpad and SpreadCE installed. SpreadCE is incorrectly labeled as Excel. Maybe they just wanted people used to MS Office to know that it is the spreadsheet program. These work as expected. As I mentioned earlier, there’s an 'Office Suite' from Softwaker on it that offers PlanMaker (spreadsheet), TextMaker (wordprocessor), Presentations (like Powerpoint). These are very good and usable programs that are compatible with MS Office formats. They also export into PDF format. Cool. I just save onto an SD card and then bring it into my desktop or laptop for polishing and printing. At least that's what I'll have to do until I can figure out how to print directly from this thing. While it seems that every program capable of creating documents has a print option, there is no printer installed and no option in the control panel to add one.
The stuff that didn’t work. As for the Youtube program, it doesn’t work. It does let you search, or see most viewed, recent videos, featured, etc. and lets you see thumbnails of the videos but when you try to play a video it gets an error that says ‘video not found’. Bummer. It would’ve been nice if this program worked. As for Skype, I tried to log into my Skype account and it crashes with a ‘severe error’ message when you try to make a call. Looks like that program is also non functional. Mailbox, works, but. After configuring it to work with my Yahoo mail account it seemed to be working fine and was was alot faster than accessing the yahoo mail through the browser. It works ok for simple text emails but anything with any HTML in it just looks like you’re looking at the source code of a webpage. Not really too useful. It also had problems when sending mail. But that may have been a config problem on my part. I think I’ll just keep checking my email on my ipod touch.
There are no PIM programs. The Mailbox program has a contacts list but I have no idea how you would import contacts from another device or anything. As I said earlier, the mail program is not really that useful anyway. I don't plan on using this thing for PIM. Also, I can't find Activesync anywhere on this thing. I don't think it has the ability to sync with anything There's no connector to connect to a desktop. This thing is pretty much a stand alone device. I can't even figure out how you would install software on it unless you use cab files on an sd card or maybe download the cab files directly. I still have to work on this.
The battery life is excellent. I charged it up and played around with it (with the wifi on) for 3 hours straight. Then I continued to use it on and off for a while longer. I would imagine that if you only use it intermittently it will probably last all day. Or if you turn off wi-fi and turn down the screen brightness it will probably last long enough to get quite a bit of work done. But, the bad news is that you will get no warning at all when the battery is low. It just turns off. There is a battery gauge on the taskbar but I don’t believe it is accurate There are no options to adjust power settings. Luckily, I’m in the habit of hitting CTRL-S very frequently to save my work. This saved me when I was writing this and the battery went out.
Like everything else about this netbook you have to take the bad with the good. Will it replace my laptop? Yes. I’ve actually been using this thing instead of my laptop since it arrived. My laptop is an old Toshiba that weighs like 10lbs. and has a fan in it that sounds like a jet engine. Very distracting when I was trying to work on it. This netbook is small, lite, and quiet. Sure, it can’t do alot that I was hoping for but what it can’t do my iPod touch can pickup the slack. I mostly use it for writing, doing my budget, and simple browsing. It handles these tasks well enough. Besides, what do you want for an under $100 netbook?
how come my netbook doesnt work in smartbro?
