Which Chinese Netbook?

Okay, so I'm after a cheapo chinese netbook for use while travelling; I've got an EeePC and used to do both hardware and software mods on it, so the more customizable the better.

From what I can gather, there appears to be four or five options; the VT8500, VT8505, WM8505, and VIA 920 chips, with varying amounts of persistant and non-persistant storage, as well as CE 5.0 and CE 6.0 R2/R3 variants.

The question is, what are the main differences between each chip, and which ones present the most difficulty with upgrading / reflashing CE? Also, I've rolled my own x86 images of CE before; how customizable are the ROM images for these machines? I'm assuming there's no hardware support in the standard repositories...

Most all present a problem with being able to reflash. Very few are able to do so. The others probably "can" be reflashed, but the manufacturers havent released any recovery files for most. The vt85xx/wm85xx machines have the best official and unofficial support. There are CE6, Android and Debian OS's available for those. They can be reflashed multiple times to see what OS you like best without much issue. The cnmbook silver, selar epc and the razorbook 400 also have CE recovery files available. Now what else do you plan to do with the machine? My O-Digital TinyBook is 667mhz with 256mb ram and 1 gig nand blows my other CE netbooks out of the water speed-wise and program compatabilty-wise. It even has a decent 5-7 hour battery life with wifi enabled. My razorbook 400 has a slow 248mhz cpu with 128mb ram and 4gb of nand, but gets an amazing 7-9 hours battery life. The vt85xx/wm85xx are mostly 300mhz machines with 128mb ram, 2gb nand and get a miserable 2-3 hours of battery life. The other brands also vary but have similar specs. Otherwise all these various machines are quite similar to each other. Same case, keyboard, screen, etc, just different CE installs. The recovery files for the vt/wm85xx netbooks can be somewhat changed (uses a script to flash) to add extra files/software in the reflash process, but the physical ROM (so far) is not hackable. So yeah, depending on what your ultimate goal is it's hard to choose a particular "brand".

Cheers.

There are faster versions of the WM8505 as well. The Sylvania Netbooklet has a 533 MHz version and, from what I've heard, a 1 GHz version.

I'm almost certain that sylvania CE netbook ad had a serious typo. Highly doubt it's 1ghz for $89, and i have yet to read about anyone having one. Scouring the net only brings up the legit 300mhz 85xx ones so far.
This is undoubtedly the worst case of misrepresentation ever. It's exactly the same machine as all the other wm/vt85xx netbooks.

Cheers.

Edited by RTFM 2010-12-10 4:15 AM

Well my primary concern is low cost (as I've already got the EeePC for "serious" use, as well as my main system) and secondary concern is battery life... Support for 3G (I hear the Huawei dongle is supported on some platforms) would be a nice bonus as well.

Seems like a WM8505 might be a good compromise, as there are 533mhz versions for around £70, only £15 more than the basic 300mhz VIA 920s.

If battery life is 2nd next to price on your list forget about the 8500/8505 powered netbooks. They have the worst battery life of all that i mentioned above. 2-3 hours is subpar for a CE device and compared to other units with different cpu's that average 5-9 hours.

Hmmm, is there any space inside the case to wire up additional li-ion cells in parallel? We used to do this hack on the EeePC but it was easier as the battery was externally-mounted. From what I remember from the old old days, ARM boards are pretty small, so there should be more room inside one of these than an EeePC...

On my Wabook Sky, I did exactly that. I have two batteries hooked in parallel. It works well, and it uses the resistance feedback method of charging cutoff versus the temperature sensing method...so that lets them charge together evenly. With the two side by side, I get about 5 hours continuous use with wifi.

I also like the larger screen form factor, 1024x600 over the 800x480 of the smaller units. Makes surfing much nicer without all the wraparound problems. The drawback is that so far I haven't found any other compatible web browser that works.

The 8505 however is the way to go. I have customized my flash to run my legal copies of Textmaker Office 2006 and all of my other favorites...which means, hard reset and I don't have to reinstall anything. Everytime I add a software app to my netbook, I also add it to my rom flash to keep it updated.

I've pretty much customized everything from the logo boot screen to the sounds, replacing the default ce sounds to my xp desktop sounds to even customizing my log-off screen. I've even gotten used to that stupid damn chicklet keyboard....