“The Sony UX1XN is quite possibly one of the smallest laptops ever. Think of the smallest laptop you’ve ever seen, and this will be smaller. Probably. Everything about it is dinky – it’s barely bigger than a thick-ish paperback book, yet it packs a full Vista-touting PC inside its diddy dimensions.”
I think a recent version of Samsung Q1 is better to have.
Or an OQO whose most expensive model is $1850 USD. I’m looking forward to having one of these ultra-smalls in the next couple of years even if their battery life is crap. But, no, I wouldn’t pay lb2000 for it.
Actually you probably meant a Samsung Q2 as found on the engadget site. Samsung Q1 compared to the new Sony is not at all impressive.
Edited 2007-03-15 14:46
I happen to think that Q1 is rather impressive too as far as price and battery life go. And we don’t know the price for Q2 yet, do we?
Vista takes something like 15GB of that tiny 32gb flash drive just for the install. And the recovery partition takes 6.5GB… That’s just crazy.
I’ve also read reports that battery life is much shorter with Vista than with XP.
As far as the resource usage goes Linux would be much better OS choice for this little beast. Nobody is gonna buy this device for gaming anyway.
Anyone concerned with battery life shouldn’t use Vista. They should have made it easy to disable SuperFetch, idle indexing, and other power-hungry performance enhancements while on battery power.
AFAIK, the battery life is bad because of the network stack not allowing the wireless card go to sleep or something like that. Not super fetch and not idle indexing. The indexing if I understand the technology correctly only indexes new things once the preliminary indexing is over…..it would be foolish to reindex the whole hard drive. Isnt Google Desktop search something like that as well? It just crawls ocassionaly and doesnt it automatically index the particular files everytime you create/modify them? I would think they meaning Microsoft and Google would have thought of that…
As far as the resource usage goes Linux would be much better OS choice for this little beast
Well they wanted to sell more than 3 of them.
Well they wanted to sell more than 3 of them.
This device isn’t exactly something you’d play games, or do photo editing on etc. Linux would have been the perfect OS for it.
Vista takes something like 15GB of that tiny 32gb flash drive just for the install. And the recovery partition takes 6.5GB… That’s just crazy
That’s one of the downsides of Vista. It doesn’t scale well with different kinds of devices. It tends to be a big pig in little clothes! Linux, et al., does a better job of scaling up and down. Almost any distro I can think of would fit in this device and only use a few gig after the install. In addition, the 1GB of ram would be more than enough, while you are pushing the limits with Vista and 1GB.
why does someone have to say ‘they should have used linux…’ or whatever on every bloody article about a nonlinux device?
as far as vista goes, you are right IMO
xp would have been better.
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This isn’t a “nonlinux device”, dude. It’s a small laptop, which you can easily run Linux on, in case the appropriate drivers exist.
You’re on a OS news site, dealing with _various_ OSes, not only with different flavours of MS Windows.
“why does someone have to say ‘they should have used linux…’ or whatever on every bloody article about a nonlinux device?”
If anything this is a nonvista device. I really doesn’t make sense to run super bloated OS like Vista on a device like this.
Furthermore, the overall specs are just perfect for Linux and _not_ for Vista. It even has Intel graphics which work very well in Linux with Free drivers.
“as far as vista goes, you are right IMO
xp would have been better.”
Too bad XP is largely considered as obsolete by hardware manufacturers and MS. So unfortunately we’ll just have to live with Vista shoved down our throats now.
Too bad XP is largely considered as obsolete by hardware manufacturers and MS. So unfortunately we’ll just have to live with Vista shoved down our throats now.
Too bad 2K is largely considered as obsolete by hardware manufacturers and MS. So unfortunately we’ll just have to live with XP shoved down our throats now.
Too bad 9x is largely considered as obsolete by hardware manufacturers and MS. So unfortunately we’ll just have to live with 2K shoved down our throats now.
“Too bad 2K is largely considered as obsolete by hardware manufacturers and MS. So unfortunately we’ll just have to live with XP shoved down our throats now.
Too bad 9x is largely considered as obsolete by hardware manufacturers and MS. So unfortunately we’ll just have to live with 2K shoved down our throats now.”
Ok, I got your point. And yes, MS stuff have always been shoved down our throats…
But this time it’s worse than before, though. We all know that 2k was a huge step up from 9x in many ways. And even if XP wasn’t that big of an upgrade, it didn’t make things worse either. But Vista is whole different animal altogether – its disadvantages (e.g. drm/wga/activation/bloat) far outweight its possible advantages (IMHO).
But there may be a positive side to this too: hopefully it will make more people and businesses to reconsider whether it makes sense to stay in the MS’s boat anymore.
Edit: small clarification
Edited 2007-03-17 02:40
Heh… Well I liked Win9x so I’m already weird there…
That said, I absolutely agree, but I’ve already made the decision to not purchase Vista. If that means I am unable to get a laptop with Linux preinstalled or empty (at an acceptable price point) then I’ll either move on to the MacBooks or do without. I may love my laptop, but I’m not willing to pay the Microsoft tax. This doesn’t really apply to my desktop machines, since I’ve always either built my own or bought one without an OS and threw on one of my unused copies at home.
–bornagainpenguin (who wishes there were non-X86, non-windows laptops with more than five hour battery life somewhere)
What are you talking about. Linux is the best OS in this planet. Any device should use Linux (from Embed to desktop to server). It’s a huge mistake that Sony take a non-linux OS as their default OS. Damn it.
Nobody is gonna buy this device for gaming anyway
It would be the most expensive but the most powerful portable console it even have compactflash for a hypotetical selfbooting games
Anyway, it is an impresive device.It's almost the same size that a PSP, only a bit more thickness.If only the battery last a bit more
RE: Nobody is gonna buy this device for gaming anyway
[sarcasm]
Isn’t Solitaire a game?
[/sarcasm]
I dunno; I can’t see lugging around a device that doesn’t have much more functionality than a PDA but is four times the size and four times as expensive.
It can run all your windows (or linux if you’re that way inclinde) software on something much smaller and easier to carry around than a laptop. No PDA can do that. If it didn’t cost stupid amounts of money and had slightly better battery life I’d buy one in a heartbeat just to put mathematica and matlab on and use as an uber-calculator.
Well, it’s just my taste: but I find that so awful, the keyboard looks toyish, the shape just make it look like a startreck device. Besides the screen on the upperside will make it prone to scratches. And the docking station is even uglier.
I wouldn’t even be proud to carry it around or show it off to my friends!
IMO Sony can do better designs than that stuff…
i’m impressed that they got Aero running on the little thing. granted the GMA 950 is known to support it, but still. i think that’s a first in the UMPC category.
“it’s barely bigger than a thick-ish paperback book, yet it packs a full Vista-touting PC inside its diddy dimensions.”
Give me Linux and then we’re talking.
“why does someone have to say ‘they should have used linux…’ or whatever on every bloody article about a nonlinux device?”
I’m not saying they *should* have gone with Linux. I’m just saying that with a modern Linux OS on it, it’d be a more interesting proposition for me.
Since we’re discussing a world of free software, I fail to see why it makes a difference if the device comes pre-loaded with Linux or not. AFAIK, the GMA950 has X.org support. If you want one but would rather it run Linux, then you can always buy the device, and install Linux on it.
That’s the beauty of free software. You are not tied to what the manufacturer gives you.
Now granted there’s always the ‘Windows Tax’ but a quick Google search will show that getting a refund for your unused windows is not unheard of.
I like the idea of small ultraportable devices, but the OS is all wrong. I’ve played around with the previous XP models, and it just wasn’t comfortable to use on such a small device(mostly due to the screen).
You can probably install Linux on it. People have installed Linux on most Sony ultraportables up till now, including its direct predecessors (the U line).
The weakest point of this and similar devices is their keyboard. There’s no way I ever buy a device you can’t touch-type on.
What happened to those great clamshell devices like Jornada: http://www.lowlevel.cz/log/images/j720_front_s.jpg or Vadem Clio: http://www.pocketpcmag.com/_archives/Jan00/images/Vadem_Clio_group…. or NEC Mobile Pro http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/parekh/features/CeBIT-2003-2…
Why can’t they just beef them up, add bluetooth, wifi, better screen and all and sell them insead of those pointless “wanna be a pc” oversized palmtops?
Indeed. Add the Psion netBook and netBook Pro to your list–they pack some of the best keyboards out there. The answer to what happened to those devices, though, is that they are being replaced with ultra-portable laptops these days.
But calling this device a “laptop” really is misleading, considering it doesn’t have a proper keyboard. It’s a
“UMPC”–Unsuitable for Most People’s Conditions.
Reminds me of an oversized Blackberry or PSP.