Marginalia

I’ve been sitting on the Eee PC S101 for rather longer than I ought to have done – sorry about that Asus. But one of the reasons is that it is really a very nice machine indeed.

The Eee PC S101 is a netbook, but you’d hardly know it. Right out of the box it looks like a businessperson’s kind of computer. No plasticy casing here. Instead the brown lid looks classy enough to pass in a business meeting. And inside the quality construction continues with good looking components all round.

The keyboard is nicely made. No flex, large keys, comfortable to use. And the screen measures 10.2 inches across the diagonal and has a wide format offering 1024 x 600 pixels. There is a 0.3 megapixel webcam above the screen.

The internals are very netbook, The processor is Intel’s Atom N270. There is Ethernet, Wi-Fi that supports Draft-N, Bluetooth. 1GB of RAM ensures that Windows XP Home runs smoothly enough. Three USB connectors, headphones and microphone connectors, an Ethernet port and a VGA connector sit around the edges.

And there is an SD card slot on the back edge of the casing. An unusual place for it, perhaps, but the provided 16GB SDHC card fits in to it fine and augments the 16GB SSD inside the S101 to give you a total of 30GB of storage.

A neat touch is the suede-alike slip case for carrying the 1Kg S101 around. And Asus throws in 30GB of online storage for a limited period too. You’ll find all the details and specifications here.

The problem with the S101 is its price. It’ll cost you over £400 inc VAT, and for that kind of money you can get a low cost fully fledged notebook. Or, put another way, you can match the specs of this netbook and spend a heck of a lot less money.

With that in mind, like lots of other people, I’m very interested to see what happens to the netbook concept during 2009 both in terms of its infringement on low cost notebook territory, its extension at the lower end of the market and the expansion of the concept.

Computer in a keyboard, anybody?

One of the things that amazes me both in work and personal life is how some really bad design faults can make it past product testing and into the real world.

There are degrees of terribleness here. In some instances what one person will see as a fault another will find quite workable. As Exhibit #1 I offer the BlackBerry Storm.

I reviewed this last November and have been using it regularly ever since.

Its depressing screen is a key feature. The whole thing goes down a millimeter or so when you push it, and there is a dual touch system in play where you touch the screen to highlight something and to scroll, and press to select.

I can confirm that it takes a bit of getting used to and may well be both depressing (as in ‘pressing down’) and depressing (as in ‘making you sad’) for some users. Others may love it. I’ve certainly come to terms with it.

Providing the technology actually works, this is a design fault only in as much as it will put some (not all) people off from the start. As anyone who ever made anything for public consumption will tell you, the first few minutes of user experience are crucial in terms of, well, let’s call it bonding.

The other type of design fault is that which permanently renders a device unusable in the way it is intended to be used. And that is unforgivable.

Exhibit #2 is HTC’s S740.

This is a Windows Mobile Standard smartphone with a sliding keyboard. The problem is that it has a shaped backplate which renders it impossible to use the keyboard when the device is sitting on your desk. Press a qwerty key and the S740 rocks and rolls all over the place.

Now, I know from having used a slidey-keyboarded smartphone for the past several years that I do from time to time want to prod at the qwerty keys while the thing is on my desk. The S740’s backplate makes this impossible.

Sneakily, this fault isn’t going to be immediately obvious to everyone when they first take the S740 out of its box. But the first time they try to tap the keyboard with the thing on their desk it’ll jump up and bite them.

Fujitsu Siemens' first netbook has the rather ungainly title of the Amilo Mini UI 3520. I can't say it trips off the tongue very easily, and market share in this rather full area of computing could arguably be said to turn at least in part on such technically irrelevant matters.

Still, let's not get stuck on naming. For around £250 (inc VAT) you get fairly standard netbook specs including an 8.9 inch 1024 x 600 pixel screen, Windows XP Home and 60GB hard drive. There is 1GB of RAM and the processor is Intel's Atom N270. There is a webcam, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The full specs are here.

One quirk of the Amilo Mini UI 3520 is that you can change its white chassis by slipping a second lid section over the top of the white one. This adds a few grams to the weight but lets you personalise the look. There aren't any clips holding the second lid in place, and I'm not sure how well it would stay in place in a bag, though. You get a deep red lid with the netbook and can buy others including a transparent one into which you can put your own photos. The personalisation possibilities are, therefore, endless. Eeek!

There are a couple of USB ports, Ethernet, SD card reader, microphone and headphones slots, VGA out and an ExpressCard slot. This latter is a rarity for a netbook but the rest is par for the course.

So far, so acceptable. But the user ergonomics are a real problem. The mouse buttons are to the left and right of the touchpad rather than being beneath it and while that is not unheard of in netbook territory I don't like it. Worse, and the deal-breaker for me, is the keyboard.

It doesn’t stretch to the full width available and far too much height is lost to speaker grilles. The keyboard was always going to be small, but Fujitsu Siemens seems not to have put any thought into maximising the space available to it. And it has far too much flex.

If Fujitsu Siemens wants to make headway in this crowded area it needs to improve user ergonomics as a matter of urgency.