Photos: OQO Model 01 compared to SmartBook

Sorry for the crappy camera on my phone. It really sucks in low light environment, like the coffee shop where we had the PPC group meeting. A guy named Sarwat brought an OQO to our meeting and I took some quick shots.

(Others in the group also took pictures with a proper camera; I'll upload them if I get those too.)









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OQO-G138-open.jpg (43KB - 1 downloads)
OQO-G138-closed.jpg (38KB - 1 downloads)
OQO-e830.jpg (39KB - 1 downloads)

Probably not what you were getting at, but man now I want a smartbook...

look up its specs before rushing out to get one. it is not for everyone. but it must be a nice hpc!

OQO: nice too... what is the keyboard like?

Yes I love my SmartBook. The guy with the OQO was interested in my SmartBook too. He asked how much these devices (HPCs) would cost, so I did a quick look up on eBay.ca for the MobilePro 900... In the mean time I pointed out to him how quickly I typed those words on the keyboard.

TBH I never got used to thumbboards, even tho I try hard to. The OQO one is actually one of the better ones. The keys are softer to press than I expected, and are easily reachable by my thumbs. However, like most thumbboards, touch-type is simply not possible with thumbs. I had to constantly look at the keys to find them. Trying to hit the right keys without looking is futile, even if you've used the same keyboard for a long long time.

BTW there were also Audiovox PPC6700s in the same meeting, and I found their square keys harder to indentify than the circle keys on the OQO.

The OQO is a really impressive device. It lasted the 2 hour meeting with some charge to spare. OK it was not constantly used, but it was used a lot because everyone wanted to play with it. It could go in and out of standby mode fast enough - something like 5 seconds each? I didn't test the performance of the device, but from general usage it loaded programs quick enough. And that was the original model with 256MB RAM.

mmm, ... thumbboards.. have to hate them.. ok i got used to the the bsquare's, i can comfortably type an SMS on it, or write two lines, but anything more than that: NO WAY! too much suffering for me!

OQO: that battery life sucks
but if it can multitask just a little (cpu cant be that bad), that would be enough for me

I hope you didn't say that because of what I wrote. I only stated that it lasted at least two hours. I have no idea how long it would have lasted if the meeting was longer.

Typical for a Windows XP notebook. I just hope that the screen looks clearer and brighter in person - it doesn't look so impressive in the photos (though I know that could just be because the phone camera is not the best).

umm, you said it still had some charge to spare. that doesnt sound too much for me.

CE Geek,
That is because of the viewing angle. When I took the open picture, the SmartBook screen was almost at straight angle of the camera. But since the OQO was laid down in all the pictures, the angle is too steep to see the display clearly.

In real use, the viewing angle is quite acceptable; similar to most VGA screens on PPC. The contrast was a bit weak tho. The screen has an active digitizer, like those in Tablet PCs, not a touch sensitive one. So you must use a special stylus and not any other objects. Strangely the screen does not have a hard surface, so tapping the screen causes ripples like on last generation desktop LCD displays. This is quite an oversight as all other Tablet PCs have a hard surface for on-screen writting.

cmonex,
Oh I didn't mean "not much". I remember late into the meeting, I checked the charge was at 59%. So I am quite positive the charge dropped below 50% after 2 hours... other than that I really don't know.

I thought it was the camera angle. But I'm not highly surprised to hear that the contrast is less than the best. But the non-rigid touch screen (a la my old notebook) is a real surprise.