What's The Perfect Balance For a Budget Laptop?

cheapbob writes "Recently HP officially unveiled a budget ultraportable laptop aimed to compete with the likes of Asus Eee PC. According to Compal, one of Dell's assemblers, Dell is also going to enter the budget ultra-portable market soon. All of these devices lack many of the features associated with larger-sized laptops, such as optical drives and large amounts of storage space, yet demand for them is very high. Initial reviews of these devices unsurprisingly expose them to be underpowered and lacklustre. What's the appeal? What do you think is the perfect balance of features and price point for a budget laptop?"

4 hours commuting a day...

I commute two hours each way, by train bus and subway. Those of us who spend hours in transit every day can't even understand why someone would need to ask the question about what the appeal is.

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

No, we just wonder why the hell you commute so much. I'd never take a job that required me to waste 4 hours of my life daily just going to and from it.

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

Get another job is easier said than done.

2 hours each way seems a bit high, but at least he is using transit so he is not wasting all that time (thats why he got the freaking laptop!)
I know people who spend 45 minutes driving to work, one way. Thats 1:30 wasted in traffic.

In many places, most of the jobs are in the center where rents are very high.
I know plenty of people who live in San Francisco and commute to San Jose because they want it.
In Paris, young single people who can afford to rent a small flat would rather live close to the nightlife even if they work in the suburbs.
On the other hand, family would rather get an affordable house in the suburbs even if there job is in the city.

Your not even thinking about couple, whose jobs maybe in oposite directions. And its not always that easy to move when you own a house, or when your children are going to school.

Your priorities maybe different...
 

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

I can't fathom why someone would travel 2 hours each way, every day, just to get to the place where you work. Maybe it's cheaper, but aren't the minutes of your life worth more than saving a few bucks? Even if you worked in NY you could find a reasonable (relative to the payscale and market) place to live that's 30 minutes away.

Speaking as someone who lives in NYC, yes you can find a reasonable place to live in town on a middle class paycheck. If you don't mind renting forever (median apartment prices are over $900k) and you don't have kids. As soon as you actually care about the schools and neighborhood cultural ideals, acceptable places to live become amazingly scarce. Most of the towns around NYC where the soccer mom lifestyle exists also are priced that $200k a year salary is the entry level. The median housing prices are around $600K and property taxes are high. [lohud.com] So anyone who makes less than the requisite $200K lives farther away, and your don't have to get all that far away for a rush hour commute to take two hours or more. Minutes of your life may be worth more than a few bucks, but your family's standard of living is worth more than a few minutes. This is where the jobs are, so millions of people make the daily trek.

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

Natürlich ist es besser in Deutschland zu leben. Leider bin ich Amerikaner.

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

"Naturally it's better to live in Germany. Unfortunately, I'm American."

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

So who's IAN

That would be me...

and why does he 'heart' AL?

Beats me.

The Appeal?

I can't speak for anyone else, but the appeal to me is that the machines can do enough- and they do it for an affordable price. That's the key. It was not long ago - and still is the case - that anything this small and underpowered cost a lot.
 
The HP review says it does fine doing the basics - that's all most people need. For people who are on the move a lot, lugging around a full size laptop gets really old. People want to connect to the internet anywhere, but they don't want to carry a boat anchor to do it. These umpcs may be small but they are a lot bigger than many phones that would by the way, cost more. So there is the sweet spot. Price and size.

Re:The Appeal?

Absolutely agreed. I can totally see the market for laptops that'll run games, Photoshop and the like but I'm not in that market - I'll do those things on a bigger screen for less money with my desktop because I don't need to do them on the move.

What I want from a laptop is small size and weight - something I can carry everywhere just to get the odd bit of work done, browse the web or check my email. The system requirements for that really aren't changing that greatly any time soon. Previously there was no such thing as a small cheap laptop, you couldn't trade off power for price and you simply couldn't buy a small machine for anything like the same money as a 15" one. I'm exceedingly happy that there is now a machine that fits my needs, and I can't wait until the various 8.9" models come on sale because I'm buying one in a snap.

Re:The Appeal?

Calling these machines "underpowered" shows a gross misunderstanding of their purpose. They're not supposed to be desktop replacements. They're designed to be "enough" computer for use on the road or in the field. You don't need a supercomputer to run an office suite, web browser, and e-mail client, and these laptops are designed with that in mind.

Re:The Appeal?

I've got an Eee with Windows XP installed on it and it runs just fine, even at the stock 630Mhz. Overclocked up to 850Mhz, which mine is perfectly stable at, it's genuinely snappy.

XP isn't too much of a resource hog even with all the chrome on, and you can turn most of it off if it does impact performance.

It's really no different than the Duron 800Mhzish I had back in the early 2000s. The only downside is the small screen, but the 2nd generation fixes that this year with a full-sized 9" 1000x600 screen.

What tablets were supposed to be

They are basic, note-taking, doc-writing, email-sending, web-surfing, e-book-reading, port-able, wire-less, hand-held AKA lap-top devices that don't cost much. Perfect for the coffee table to look up imdb ratings in front of the TV or to check the weather radar/forecast before heading out in the morning.

Couldn't fit-in any more hyphens.

light and cheap

There's a market for light and cheap. To high income people, $400-$500 is practically disposable. You can spend that much on an iPod touch. It's not a big deal to break it or lose it because it's not expensive.

If all you want is email or web access, a cheap ultra portable like an ASUS eee is a perfect match.

Comparing these devices to full sized laptops misses the point.

Re:light and cheap

Comparing these devices to full sized laptops misses the point.
 
Exactly. I'd like to see a review of a pda that complained about the lack of screen size, power, and inputs/outputs. These aren't laptops - they are something between a pda and a laptop and they do a great job of filling that niche. The demand demonstrates that people have been hungry for something like this that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I don't even bother trying to use my laptop when I'm actually traveling anymore. For a host of reasons it doesn't work - but one of these would be perfect.

Re:light and cheap

No, it's not. The Asus eee suck at web broswing I'm typing this from a MacBook and its 1280px horizontal size is NOT ENOUGH for some sites. So, a screen that's 800px wide, for web surfing? They're CRAZY.

1. Invent time machine.
2. Go back 8 years.
3. Use eeePC when Web pages were designed for 800x600 screens.

Oh, and

4. ???
5. Profit.

What's the appeal? You're looking at it

Web two point oh. If you spend all day reading/posting on slashdot, you don't need a whole lot of CPU power (as long as you run adblock plus.) People have less and less use for big local apps, and more and more use for web based apps, so this is where demand is going. If it can post on slashdot, it's good enough for everyday use. If it gets 8 hours on a charge and has multi-band wi-fi and a little hard drive space for MP3s and pictures, it will get the job done for most users, most of the time.

Finally, if it's cheap enough to not really force a user to chose between owning a portable and owning a desktop (or better equipped portable) and instead they can have both, then you sir have a cash machine!

Budget vs Ultraportable

I think you're asking the wrong question. Budget, Ultra-portable, Powerful - you can have any 2 out of 3.

If the question is truly about Budget and "powerful enough", obviously the thing won't be ultraportable. You can get a reasonable machine (~5 lbs, 14" screen, low-end Core Duo or Turion based) for about $500, or even lower if you look for sales or rebates.

You can then add a cheap or free office suite (e.g. OpenOffice), Firefox, etc., and you're ready to go.

Re:depends on your salary

Macbook air low end is what? $1799?
 
The low end on this HP is under $500. I'd say if it takes me an extra hour to get Suse tweaked just right on this box then my time is worth over $1300 an hour.
 
Even with extra ram, a hard drive and suse - I'm still going to come in a thousand or more under the comparable apple.

Re:depends on your salary

ONE hour to tweak a Linux distro as tight as MacOSX? Your time is worth much, much more than $1300 an hour. Your time could make SuSE replace Apple. Yeah, 15% market share in a year, that's how much for the Messiah who figured out how to configure the distro Just Right?

That everything works? I mean EVERYTHING. Temperature sensors and webcam and all... No, you lie. No one can do that. In under a year? No, you said under one hour. YEAH RIGHT.

Re:depends on your salary

No we're talking ultra portable and budget. The HP 2133 is lighter than the air - and so my point stands.
 
I wouldn't want to work with office or photoshop on an air or the 2133 - that is not the point. I want something that size to be mobile. Suse is great for browsing, email, and if I needed to I could even handle office docs sufficiently.
 
I don't work in the business world - I work in the tech world and there isn't really anything I can't do, that I need to do, with a linux box.

Re:depends on your salary

In my experience, if you're posting on internet forums about how everyone should be using your favourite operating system you're a platform snob, even if you claim you're not.

Re:I don't like the direction they're taking

Then you're not the market for this particular device, just as simple as that. It's like saying you don't like the direction Honda is taking with the Fit when you want to buy an SUV.

Are we asking for small, or cheap? Pick one...

About a year ago I needed a lappie and was low on cash. I found an Acer 3680 "Best Buy special" for $400. This is a standard 15.4" screen-size laptop BUT they put a 14.1" in to save a bit of money. It's still 1280x800 and very readable. Other specs:

* About 6lbs.

* Celeron 1.6 single-core with a 533 memory bus.

* 512megs RAM, 80gig SATA, DVD-read, CD-R/RW.

* Intel 945 video.

* PCMCIA slot.

* Atheros WiFi.

This is about the same horsepower as the recent crop of "ultra-lights", with more disk space of course.

I dropped an extra gig in it for cheap and nuked Vista Home Basic immediately for Ubuntu. I'm typing this on it now, with Ubuntu Gutsy. I have full Compiz support although the limited graphics speed seems to limit the "cube" to a two-sided plane (two desktops) with full speed. I also have VirtualBox and Windows XP running perfectly.

I even run whole-disk encryption with TrueCrypt with no noticeable speed penalty.

It's been dropped twice and survived a water-glass spill that nuked the WiFi card but that was a $20 fix. It's been carried *daily*, used hard and runs like a champ still.

This low-budget critter is enough to make anybody re-think the need for anything more potent, if you're running Linux.

I mention all this to establish what performance baseline is really needed today.

I wouldn't trade this critter for anything physically smaller, but then again I'm a big guy and am not bothered by running a sizeable "messenger bag" style laptop case.

Finally, thumbs up to Acer for offering a cheap, tough and useful as hell little critter.

Thumbs down to Micro$loth for fostering a crapware OS on them...

Re:OLPC

Back in the days, when we were young wee bairns, those bits of paper our elders bought stuff with were worth a lot more elsewhere in the world than they are now.

Cheap, small laptops in the next year or two will be very popular though. People will be cutting back. They're not going to buy something fancy, they'll get something that will do the job. As long as it does the full internet, does their email, has information manager functionality, they'll be happy.

It's not about CPU power in this form factor, unless you do something silly like running Vista on the device. The iPhone shows that you can have a slick, smooth interface, fully featured (um, cut and paste excepted) that works well for the user, on a mere 412MHz ARM11 CPU. I suspect that some tasks (music decoding) are offloaded to the ARM9 on another chip in the system that has acceleration for that. Oh, there's also an ARM7 in that other chip. Probably ARM7s in the wireless controller too. Intel - you really think you can compete when something like an iPhone has so many ARMs to slap you about with?

Oh, I digress for a bad joke. Anyway, it's about the software and its optimisation. Linux has a grand chance here to shine on the lesser hardware.

Re:OLPC

"As gigahertz race is over and mobility takes over, size, power and price are becoming more important than performance"

Don't forget the silence and no-maintenance aspect that going completely passively cooled and solid-state affords you. And even in a desktop system all the other issues apart from computing speed become important once you experience the difference.

Such other concerns are the whole raison d'etre of silentpcreview.com. There have been some clever cases designed for silence, but they lack the elegence of a small enclosed box that never needs to have filters cleaned or the worry that a fan will seize at an inopportune time.

With the release of the Intel Atom and the Via Isaiah I suspect that it will be only a matter of time before we get the desktop system with essentially no downside. Which is why I'm waiting for it, because at that point the upgrade cycle will likely be over for me. Maybe there will be a killer app coming along, but we are 4 cores into the parallelization path of more CPU horsepower and I haven't seen it yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Isaiah [wikipedia.org]