Amilo Li 1818 Battery |
Posted: February 22, 2015 |
Netbook specs are so similar that manufacturers have to find other ways to differentiate them. Right now appearance seems to be one of the big differentiators, and the HP Mini looks great. Its black body is clean and svelte. You will immediately notice how thin it is. Actual dimensions are: 10.3 in (L) x 6.56 in (W) x 0.99 in (H). It weighs 2.25 lbs so you will hardly notice the extra heft of this netbook in your bag.Construction and materials used on this netbook feel solid and durable. Like many other HP notebooks the Mini has a distinctive geometric pattern on its lid. This motif is carried into the OS with matching operating system. It’s cool and pulls the design together. Pop the lid open and you’ll see a nicely proportioned keyboard – complete with function buttons. Keys make a light plasticy sound and travel is short. The base of the keyboard does not flex at all. You’ll notice that the Windows keys are replaced with dedicated HP MI ‘Home’ and ‘Task Switcher’ keys. The hardware is well integrated to the software. A selling feature for English speaking Canadians is that you can get a plain US English keyboard on the HP Mini up here in Canada – something that is becoming rare in favor of French keyboards. The touchpad borrows the unorthodox layout from the Acer One and HP 2133, putting buttons on the left and right side rather than underneath. A vertical scroll zone is present, but unlike the Asus Eee and Apple MacBook there is no multitouch capability. The mouse control panel has a couple of interesting options such as Dwell Click (where the software detects no mouse motion and prompts you if you want to click) and Simulated Right Click (hold the left button down for a definable period to right click) but neither of these works as well as two finger clicking and scrolling. On the 1110NR a 8.9” LCD screen fits where a 10.2” would normally be, so this means there is a large bezel to fill the otherwise empty space. Resolution is 1024600 like almost every netbook on the market. Its LED backlit is bright and even.HP software, particularly the shells it has created for Windows and in this case Linux have a distinct look and feel. A black, high contrast theme couple with HP’s own user interface elements. It seems like a great way to differentiate their product in the WinTel world without resorting to making their own OS. In this case HP has designed a simplified interface that is much better than those found on other Linux netbooks such as the Acer One and Asus Eee PC. The main feature is HP’s Home screen which gives you access to email, web, music, photos and program launcher. The Home screen has a dedicated button on the keyboard and an icon where you would expect to find the Windows Start menu. Switching between running programs is accomplished by clicking on a switcher icon in the system tray, or pressing the dedicated task switcher button. I have to say, HP might be on to something here. I prefer this UI to both Windows (XP, Vista and 7) and OS X for basic computing tasks. I am not just referring to the eye candy factor. Having almost everything I want to do waiting for me on the Home screen as soon as the computer boots is great. It’s like the Today screen on PocketPC PDAs but adapted for full featured computers. You can ignore it if you like, but I like the convenience. Also, unlike some simplified Linux shells access to the terminal is just one quick setting away (Fn-F2 brings up a command line where you can launch the terminal – or anything else). With only an 8GB SSD, of which 2.1GB is available for use, having music and photos on the Mi Home screen is a bit of a tease. This OS really calls for either a full sized HDD or integration to online services (such as Live, Flickr, Google, etc.). The Mini needs one or the other – its either a cloud computer or it needs proper storage capacity. As it stands the Mini seems to have a foot in each camp and that compromises the experience. It’s incomplete.MediaStyle’s music capabilities are more of the same; a nice simple interface but very little common sense applied to the challenge of how to play media on a device that has 2.1GB of available storage. Some Internet radio capabilities would be great for this device as it would give you access to lots of music despite the limited storage space.
The speaker bar is 324 mm, or 1.063 feet in height and is lightweight, making it a true portable speaker bar. From left to right, the buttons are volume up, power, and volume down. A light glows “green” when the speaker is switched to “on.” There is an auxiliary input located on the back of the bar. The actual speakers are on both the left and right sides of the speaker to better allow for a “surround sound” or 360-degree sound effect. The Z305 is made mostly of plastic and some rubber, and the speakers are made of metal. The actual clip is made entirely of plastic, including the hinge. Rubber stretches to both sides of the clip for extra protection against potential scratching. The bar has only one cord: a USB 2.0 cable so the speakers can act as a plug-and-play device. The USB cord is also made to fold up into the bottom of the speaker so you don’t have to deal with loose cables while traveling. It also comes with a cloth travel case.According to Logitech, the bar will clip onto and fit “most” notebooks. To test this claim, I clipped the Z305 onto seven different laptops and notebooks of different sizes and styles. The Logitech speaker bar fit fine on every single one, but it was a little too heavy for the hinge on my 17” HP Pavilion dv7. I had to adjust the slant of the screen position to keep it from pulling the monitor forward or backward. When tested on the Acer Aspire 1830T netbook, it clipped on correctly and the screen didn’t move, but the speakers did stick out by almost an inch on both sides. The Logitech Z305 speaker bar is a two-chamber 2.0 speaker system. It has dual 32mm drivers with audio enhancement features. The driver includes these optional enhancements: bass boost control, virtual surround, room correction, and loudness equalization.The design of the Z305 portable speaker is bar-shaped with a plastic clip so it can be attached directly to the back of a notebook, laptop or netbook. It is designed to relieve the potential clutter on your desk that may be forming from the many electronic devices and accesories you use on a daily basis. The Z305 is also designed to be a portable alternative to larger external speakers for notebooks whose sound quality is less than appealing. After I tested the plug-and-play specifically on three different notebooks, it took about 10 seconds to download the driver onto each machine. (Mac users may have to enable the speaker on their sound settings, but the user documentation will show you exactly how to do this.) After I unplugged the cord and re-plugged it into each system, the drivers did not have to re-download or reconfigure.I tested the sound quality by playing 10 bass-heavy songs and while the bass sound was great, especially with the driver’s bass booster. I was immediately impressed with the quality given the speaker bar’s smaller size design. The audio was crisp and clean-sounding and the sound distortion was minimal, yet present while playing some songs on maximum volume. While the speaker bar was clipped to a notebook, a sound level meter was held 12 inches from the bar, and a metal song was playing at full volume, the signal-to-noise ratio measured in at just a bit greater than 80 dB.
The “surround sound” feature was a no-brainer. Moreover, I went into the next room and shut the door, and could still hear the music playing pretty clearly, even though the volume was playing on less than half of the maximum volume. The range for the speaker must be over 30 feet, and I’m guessing that it’s significantly over that. After spending a few weeks testing the Logitech Z305 it became clear that Logitech’s engineers put a lot of thought into this product. The design is simple and compact enough that most laptop users won’t hesitate to bring it in their notebook bag. The plug-and-play simplicity of the USB connection makes it easy for anyone to use these speakers. Most importantly, the audio quality is a huge improvement over virtually all notebook speakers. As long as your laptop doesn’t have weak screen hinges this is a perfect solution for audiophiles who can live without a subwoofer. Performance of the included 3-cell 26 Wh battery was 2 hours and 37 minutes using a highly unscientific mix of word processing, lots of Web surfing and a little bit of YouTube watching. In other words pretty close to the typical usage scenario for this type of device. The result is good but HP needs to figure out some form of Asus battery magic, or they need to equip these with bigger batteries. The less expensive Asus Eee 900HA gets almost double the battery life.If you have your heart set on a netbook you will almost certainly find the combination of features and value you need – it just may not be this one. You might want to wait for the PC makers to bleed a bit more red ink and get aggressive with pricing before you plunk down your cash. This is one of the quietest systems I have used (though not quite as quiet as the Asus A8 I recently reviewed). On battery with light load the fan remained off, or so quiet it was barely audible in an absolutely silent room. Even during the stress test, the fan was quieter than many other laptop’s quietest mode. Noise is very important to me, so I was naturally very pleased by this outcome. Undervolting the processor would yield even better results, but due to RM Clock not being compatible with the Santa Rosa refresh just yet, I was unable to test that assumption.
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