[REQ: GLOBAL] - Viliv N5

Hi,

While obviously not an HPC I wondered if anyone here with a dispensation for mini computers has one they'd like to sell!? Impossible to find online!

I'm in Canada (and also an address in the UK) but willing to pay international courier...

Cheers

JT

EBay has them for sale all the time actually

Yeah...but they want an arm and a leg for them...

Still...when there is no other option...

Would love to have one, though.

J

Have one, would love to help but I still get use out of it during business trips as my go to non-work-PC which consumes small packing space. Bought this a while back on ebay for $400 (no 3G model). Surprising that prices are still near there after all this time. To shrink my packing, I also made a customer charger for the unit using a dual USB wall socket to Dual USB to single USB cable to a proper tip for the item.

One thing that would have been perfect for my use case would have been external display support. Most of my hotel rooms offer VGA and HDMI inputs, which would alleviate some of the issues of staring at a small screen for longish periods of time. Curious to hear your use case for the device! Apparently others are still finding these useful given the ebay prices remaining higher than we'd expect!

Are you running XP or Vista? Is your battery still holding up?

Jake

Battery holds up decently. Difficult to quantify, because I never use from full charge to empty though. Also, they had a promo in the early days at dynamism for an extra battery. The one I bought included an extra battery, usually I only swap the battery to charge the non-used dormant battery and let the active battery go dormant.

The operating system was Windows 7 starter. Due to screen size and the need to use Remote Desktop to interact with a larger LCD, I bought an upgrade. I think it was Win7 pro, certainly not ultimate. RDP into the Viliv N5 using a Surface RT is a nice experience, though you wind up draining batteries on three devices at the same time (N5, SurfaceRT, and the portable hotspot they connect to w/o WWAN)!

I suppose that machine is small enough that fixing up an external battery pack wouldn't be too cumbersome an addition. It looks like a ton of fun. My only criticism of the form factor is decided waste of screen space on either side. 4.8" isn't the biggest space to begin with; I wonder why developers didn't take the screen to the case's edges.

Similar to the strange decision of the Libretto series, another machine I very much admire.

Jake

Normally the manufacturer uses the space alongside the lcd to place the exciter board for the lcd backlight. Since they fail, it generally is not part of the main motherboard. But I agree, 4.8" isn't huge...but I think a person gets used to it after a while and doesn't even notice the smaller size. Look at all the people who use smartphones as their main computer and they are often smaller than that.

That's a good point about a smart phone's screen. And I hadn't known the particulars/reasons behind the exciter board.

Thanks,
Jake

Hmmmm.... do you think you'd really make good use of one of these for the price, Mr. JT?

For years, I've had this incredible gadget-lust for the Sony Vaio P (lifestyle) series. Emerald Green. It has to be emerald green.... (picture Mr. Burns doing the thing with his fingers here)....

Anyways, I've never pulled the trigger because I know it's just ridiculous and that I wouldn't do enough with it. I have a 11.6" netbook and even it feels a little claustrophobic when I do actual work with it (which I often do).