MSI Wind U123 and ASUS 1000HE Show Netbook Evolution
by Wesley Fink on July 17, 2009 12:02 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
When the first low-cost "computing appliances" arrived in 2007 as solutions to the non-profit OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative, few realized a new class of computer was emerging. As frequent travelers to Asian shows and markets, many of the AnandTech staff had embraced the idea of the small full-featured notebooks that were all the rage in Asia but which were almost nonexistent in the US.
For some reason those same small notebooks that were so popular in Asia just weren't available in the US market. The notebooks available in the US were the heavy "full-featured" 14-17" models that were barely portable. Just lug one of those beasts through a few airport security lines and the small light and elegant Asian notebooks for writing, web-surfing and spreadsheets start to look like a great idea. Of course in typical notebook fashion the smaller the notebook the more it generally cost at that time. That was a hard pill to swallow, but the charms of the smaller notebook were hard to resist if you could afford the price of admission.
The first OLPC notebooks in 2007 were a different breed than the small full-featured notebooks that were so popular in Asia. The OLPC units were also small, even downright tiny, but they were much more limited in capabilities than most were willing to accept. Of course they weren't designed to even be sold in the general computer market. The $200 subcompact Intel Classmate PC was targeted at a third-world user who could finally afford a real computer or who was the recipient of one bought by an international agency as an education grant. The early models looked like toys but they were real computers aimed at education and children in the developing world.
They were called subnotebooks at first, but the idea was one that was hard to resist for many potential users outside the developing world. Provide just the computing power a user needed to do research on the web, write, manipulate spreadsheets, and do general educational computer use, and make it available at a very low price. Computing power had grown so fast in recent years, and costs had dropped so dramatically, that a pretty powerful computer could be built with a very low cost CPU and clever engineering. ASUS saw the potential and introduced the Eee PC late in 2007 to the American (and later worldwide) market. The Eee PC changed everything about the market.
The original ASUS Eee PC was a massive hit in the US and it became popular throughout the world. It was tiny, weighing just 2 lbs, with a 7" screen, built-in WiFi and regular network ports, with standard ports and an integrated webcam for a price of less than $300. The ASUS Eee proved there was a market for a small, light, less powerful, low-cost laptop and the netbook was born. ASUS has produced many evolutionary Eee netbooks since and it seems every major notebook manufacturer has since jumped on the netbook bandwagon. Two of the last PC holdouts were Dell, who finally jumped on the bandwagon with their Inspiron Mini 9 and Mini 12 models, and Sony, who recently introduced the VAIO W "mini notebook".
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crimson117 - Friday, July 17, 2009 - link
Where can I get one of these with Linux pre-installed?rad999 - Friday, July 17, 2009 - link
Visual is right on the money with his comments. Based in Taiwan I watched first hand that Asus tested the market and it paid off. Now they try to bleed the distinctions between a regular notebook and a netbook by offering old chipsets , larger displays and inferior specs amd rake in the cash.What is an atom CPU but a rebranded cpu from say five years ago.
Hav4e you ever tried to play a 3d game on a netbook, maybe upload video or make a DVD from a camcorder. It's a painful experience at best.
rembo666 - Friday, July 17, 2009 - link
Atom CPU is ANYTHING BUT a re-branded older CPU. It is using a collection of older and newer Intel technologies in a combination to get the best performance vs. power consumption vs. price balance. They chose to go with an in-order architecture (which is a lot older than 5-years, you're talking Pentium II as the last Intel in-order CPU here) with hyper-threading (which is about 5 years old, but it's re-appearing in the latest Core i5 and i7 CPUs), with the latest or recent manufacturing process. It's a completely re-designed CPU for the specific marked to Netbooks and MIDs. The chipset could use updating though...On AMD front, they are using the old Athlon XP designs with their "new" mobile CPUs, so you get proven performance from 8-10 years ago multiplied by manufacturing process advancements; which allow the CPUs to be clocked higher with lower power consumption.
Do research before you flame please.
And why would you even dream of playing a 3D game on a $350 netbook? They're not made for performance or gaming. They are essentially designed to run Internet Explorer or Firefox, nothing more. Come on...
swaaye - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
Atom is actually sort of a failure really. I believe that it's actually meant to compete with the popular embedded CPUs, such as the Arm and MIPS archictectures. But it consumes too much power for those applications and it's not nearly as flexible (the Arm and MIPS chips are sorta cut and paste "what u want" designs.)Atom is lucky that it found the netbook area, but it's definitely not exciting outside of its relatively low power envelope. Relative to other x86 chips that is.
Atom was born out of the Larabee project too actually. It's an offshoot of one of those cores if I recall correctly.
agent2099 - Friday, July 17, 2009 - link
While I agree surfing the web is probably one of the most common things a netbook is used for, it isn't the only one. As the article admits, people also buy netbooks for those long plane or train rides. Considering internet access is not available on most commercial airlines, I think the battery testing should be a bit more broad.In particular I would like to see testing for divx and h.264 playback, or even mp3 playback while web surfing.
goinginstyle - Friday, July 17, 2009 - link
I agree. I travel a lot and usually watch movies or TV shows on the plane, if not I am listening to music. I am tired of lugging around a rather heavy 15" notebook and want something easy to carry and use while traveling.The majority of people I see on the plane or waiting in the airport are either doing work or watching video/listening to music, sometimes both. I would think doing a test with video playback would be a given as would using Office.
I am still bummed about the lack of wireless testing and was hoping for a reply today.
Lifted - Friday, July 17, 2009 - link
Just had an idea reading this article with respect to the battery power and performance tests.Put both the battery life and "general" performance results for each netbook/laptop in a horizontal bar chart as you have in this review, then have a slider at the top that lets you specify in percentage of importance (to the reader) battery life vs performance. When you slide it to the left, for 100% battery life and 0% performance, it would order the horizontal bar chart in order of performance for battery life alone. Slide to the middle and you have 50-50 for battery/performance and the chart sorts accordingly.
Yes, people will argue about the relevance of the battery and performance tests to their specific needs, but they will do that regardless. At least this tool would help to find a balance that is important to the readers using the results provided.
Visual - Friday, July 17, 2009 - link
This is just terrible. Don't post any more articles like this. You'll convince the manufacturers that they actually have a decent product, and then they will not bother improving it ;)But seriously now, I am really disappointed by the slow rate of progress in the netbook area. They are all still using the same old crappy intel chipsets with terrible igp performance. Still on the crappy 1024x600 resolutions. Still no rotating screens and touchscreens. That is not evolution, that is milking the same old cow over and over.
I have the Gigabyte M912X tablet-convertible netbook, it is a model old as the world now, and yet it hasn't been surpassed by anyone yet. Even the fresh new tablets by Asus T91 and T101 are a step back, again with the lower resolution.
And here I was hoping we would even have multi-touch tablets by now. The initial misleading advertising of the Asus T91 as multitouch (which turned out to be about the touchpad and not the screen, damn Asus) had hyped my expectations way high.
Ion or at least the faster Intel GMA X4500, dual-core Atoms or Via Nano, are all getting old already without even appearing in a netbook product yet. If even existing tech takes so long to be adopted by the industry, how can I even hope for some future tech? At this rate I'll probably grow old and die before OLED displays, Moorestown, external/dock graphics, usb 3 or bluetooth 3 arrive.
AstroGuardian - Sunday, July 19, 2009 - link
I agree. Totally! I am waiting ages already to see OLEDs and Ions in a netbook. But things look boring at this time.KeypoX - Sunday, July 19, 2009 - link
agree agree... this is total bs. Netbooks run flash like crap too. I dont care who's fault it is. Try to play two or more youtube at once your screwed.Also 400 for a netbook is about 200 to much. You can get 400 notebooks core 2 duo almost everyday now.
I remember this site a few years ago, every article was gold, it was interesting and seemed honest. What happen?