One thing is clear: higher-resolution displays do, indeed, work on small Netbooks, and once you get used to having a little more screen real estate, it's hard to go back.
A standard collection of ports and connections offered no surprises, and as this system is available only as a fixed-configuration retail laptop, there are no options to speak of. If you need high-end features such as 802.11n Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, look elsewhere.The most interesting thing about the LT31 is its choice of processors. Instead of the Intel Atom, it uses an AMD Athlon 64 L110. With a clock speed of only 1.2GHz, you'd expect this to be a non-starter, but in fact, we found the Gateway ran smoother and quicker than nearly any Atom-powered Netbook we've tried. The comparison is especially interesting because the other 11-inch Netbooks we've seen have all used the Z520 version of the Intel Atom (rather than the more common N270), which led to annoyingly slow overall performance.
The single-core L110 CPU did better than most Netbooks in single-app tests, such as iTunes, but considerably worse in our multitasking test. It's worth noting that our multitasking test is not always an accurate measure of single-core CPUs, and in anecdotal use, we found this to be among the zippiest-feeling Netbooks we've ever used.AMD's other Atom-like CPU, the Neo, has been seen in only a handful of more expensive step-up systems, such as HP's dv2, so it's a pleasant surprise to get better-than-average performance in the same sub-$400 ballpark as typical Netbooks. Having twice the RAM of most Netbooks, at 2GB, also helps, and explains why the LT31 uses Windows Vista Basic as its operating system. (Although as this product, like most Netbooks, doesn't qualify for a free Windows 7 upgrade, it might make sense to hold off on a purchase until October.)
Jumping away from the typical Atom platform also allows Gateway to include ATI Radeon X1270 graphics, which will help with some very basic casual gaming and video viewing, making it easier to take advantage of the high-res screen for HD video (but we still found full-screen HD video streaming to be occasionally stuttery).Looks like it's laptop day over at Samsung, with the N series of netbooks getting two additions, joined by two high-definition models: the Q320 and R552.The Q320, pictured above, sports an edge-to-edge 13.4-inch LED screen, with 16:9 aspect ratio. Samsung claims the screen is hi-def, which isn't much of a boast on a laptop, but hasn't yet revealed its resolution. Having said that, the Q320 packs a fair bit of movie-watching and gaming grunt with an Nvidia GeForce G105M graphics card and dedicated 256MB of GDDR3 memory.
The whole shebang is run by an Intel Centrino 2 Processor. You get a slot-loading optical disk drive -- referred to by Samsung as an ODD, which must be some kind of joke -- and one USB port. There's also a combination USB and eSATA port.The Q320 weighs 2.2kg with a six-cell battery, which is claimed to last up to 4.6 hours. A 12-cell option is also available.The R552, pictured below, packs a 15.6-inch screen, also in 16:9 HD. Samsung is trumpeting 5 hours battery life, so you could watch two films or get in an eyeball-straining gaming session. Design-wise, there's a light-up touchpad and an 'aluminium-style' palmrest, whatever that is. Something's either aluminium or it's not, you'd think.You also get a whopping four USB ports, including one that's powered to charge devices even when the computer is turned off. A separate combo port also supports both USB and eSATA connections.
Like the N310 netbook launched yesterday, both the Q320 and R552's keyboards are coated with anti-bacterial science-y stuff. They'll show up in April. We'll keep you posted on pricing when we know more.After 19 months of consulting--in Silicon Valley, we prefer that term to "unemployment"--I've accepted a job.Once I start, I'll have to stop blogging. But while I'm still independent, I'd like to wrap up here by offering a short series of articles addressing several key topics in the area of personal computing.Energy efficiency has become a major selling point of today's personal computers, especially laptops, because power consumption determines battery life.Unfortunately, laptops are being optimized for energy efficiency in a way that isn't fully consistent with the needs of laptop users.Advances in process technology and CPU design have greatly improved the power efficiency of modern microprocessors when they're running. This improvement is most visible at the highest performance levels.Over the last few years, dual-core laptop processors have gone from maximum speeds of roughly 2.4GHz to 3.0GHz without consuming any more power. The newest quad-core chips provide much more aggregate performance in a similar power envelope.
This improvement in operating efficiency is great for gaming, mobile video editing, and a few other applications. But it's not very meaningful for most consumers.What the rest of us need is non-operating efficiency, the ability of the laptop to consume very little power when it isn't doing much because that's what our laptops are usually doing.We need laptops that can do nothing--more efficiently.I've been looking at the newest crop of ultra low-power laptops. Based on published benchmark data, they consume an average of 8W to 10W of power when doing essentially nothing (what we call "idle power"). Even the best of them consumes about 6W of power at all times, getting 10 hours of battery life from a 60WH battery. Maybe 2W of that is spent keeping the display on. The other 4W to 8W is just wasted by the CPU and other motherboard circuitry.When your laptop isn't doing much--for example, when you're typing in your word processor--it's using only slightly more CPU performance than your cell phone is when you're texting. Your cell phone consumes very little power to do this meager amount of work, usually no more than 0.25W or so for the CPU and its support chips. The corresponding elements of your laptop, however, may consume 50 times as much power under similar conditions.
Some of this difference is inevitable; your laptop has wider data buses, more and faster RAM, and so on. Nevertheless, your laptop motherboard could be designed to idle along on 1W or so.That would give you a total system-level power consumption of around 3W--half the power of today's most energy-efficient laptops and about one-quarter the power of an average machine. Because there's a relationship between peak CPU speed and idle power, today's fastest laptops consume 20W or more at idle. With more energy-aware designs, these systems could see even greater proportional reductions.In other words, adopting more aggressive methods for reducing idle power could easily double battery life across the board, and some systems would see much bigger improvements.This is not merely a quantitative improvement. Consider what happens when your laptop can comfortably operate for 20 hours with the display on, or 60 hours with the display off.For one thing, it never has to go to sleep. Your cell phone never really goes to sleep, and that's a great part of its value. Your laptop can have this same cell phone operating model.
Closing the lid should turn off the display, but the machine should keep running. It can stay connected to the Internet over Wi-Fi or 3G, periodically download your new e-mail messages, watch that eBay auction, and do whatever else you need it to do...all the time. Just plug it in to recharge while you're asleep. (If the laptop is in your briefcase, it'll have to slow down a lot to keep from consuming too much power, but that's easily managed.)When you're ready to start using the machine actively again, it shouldn't take any longer to turn the display on again than it does to physically open the lid. Think "always on," not "instant on."All of this is possible with today's technology, but nobody's doing it. I think one of the reasons we don't see this usage model is that laptop buyers don't know to ask for it. Incremental improvements produce adequate sales figures with each new laptop generation, and everyone figures that's good enough.But mark my words: the first full-function laptop that works like a cell phone--always running, always connected, always ready--is going to hit the market like a sledgehammer. Everything else is going to seem obsolete overnight.
Asus is perhaps best known for virtually creating the Netbook phenomenon with its line of inexpensive Eee PCs. The company has subsequently done a good job of refining and expanding on the Netbook experience, with systems such as the slim Eee PC 1005HA and the touch-screen Eee PC T91.The latest move is to add an 11.6-inch display, which, while not currently a threat to popular 10-inch models, still shows a lot of promise for Netbooks becoming ever more useful to mainstream laptop users.Asus' take on an 11.6-inch Netbook retains the slim, attractive styling of the 10-inch 1005HA, and wisely upgrades the screen to a higher-resolution 1,366x768 model. Like the first 11-inch Netbook we checked out, the Acer Aspire One 751h, it uses the Z520 version of Intel's Atom processor, instead of the more common (and faster) N270 and N280 CPUs.In the Acer version, that made the system feel just sluggish enough that we were occasionally tempted to throw it out of a window. In a concession to reality, Asus allows for some overclocking of the CPU (up to 30 percent via the system's BIOS), which brings the performance up to standard Netbook levels. Still, it's an inelegant workaround, and makes us eager to check out 11-inch systems due later this year with more powerful CPUs from Intel and AMD.
- (cliquez ici pour suivre le lien)
- (cliquez ici pour suivre le lien)
- (cliquez ici pour suivre le lien)">(cliquez ici pour suivre le lien)
- (cliquez ici pour suivre le lien)