Got a nice present delivered yesterday. Belated birthday present from the parents. It’s a Lenovo S10e. Nice little piece of kit, for a couple hundred comes with the bare essentials. I like the design, I had a T60p when I worked at IBM and that was an excellent machine, so I have some high standards to be met with this.
Having used it for a day I have to admit I’m both impressed and a little bit disillusioned. I’ll start by explaining that second part with an analogy.
Getting a netbook is a bit like getting a hair cut. You realise you probably should get a cut and have a few thoughts of how awesome it’ll look compared to the current thicket on your head but usually put it off or don’t get around to it until it’s necessary. Then you finally decide to get it and pop down to the barbers. You describe what you want and off you go. Usually when you’re done they ask you how it looks and you think it looks fine. Then for the rest of the day you keep catching it in the mirror and you start to think that it’s not all that great. However the next day you jave a go at styling it yourself and the results are quite good, so you are quite pleased. Then every day after that it’s just hair.
Ok so not EXACTLY like that but I’d seen the notebooks originally and had an internal struggle of the fact they are portable, look good and are quite cheap facing off against the fact that I probably didn’t need one and spending a load of money on something that might not even be used just doesn’t make sense. With my dissertation now in full swing I figured my reasonings against it were gone as I would most likely use it to write stuff. The idea is to pop a LaTeX editor and compiler on to it so I can do my writing from anywhere whilst keeping development on my main PCs which have the brute force. When it comes to writing I enjoy brain storming and have a terrible habit of keeping everything on paper so I can explore tangents by just idly jotting down notes or ideas. I’ve always found sitting at my PC coming up with ideas is quite difficult where as sitting on the couch with a pen and paper opens up the flood gates. The issue with that is turning it back into a digital medium for writing up or submitting. The netbook I was hoping to give the portability that where ever I went, if I had a good idea or revelation about something I could just take it out and type away.
So I had my ideas of how I wanted to use it and what it would let me do and I used that to talk myself into picking one up. Originally one of the guys in the course was selling off a Dell Mini 9 which I figured would be a good buy. I thought the size combined with the solid state hard drive and the ability to run Mac OS-X on it would make it ideal for me. However just after I’d finally caved my parents decided to get me a late birthday present and since I’d been looking into Netbooks decided that’s what it would be. Lo and behold I would up with the 10″ Lenovo S10e.
Now the computer itself I have to admit is quite nice, the classic thinkpad style no nonsense case with a plain black finish. Disturbingly thin and seriously light, I’m afraid of dropping it but kind of suspect if I did it would just float to the ground a feather though I won’t be testing the theory out. Then again I should expect those to be obvious features since that’s the whole point of the netbook, ok machines that are ultra portable. It just takes a while to realise how portable and how ultra that means, just check out the hand to netbook ratio.
Once overall size shock is out of the way I realised that all the talk from reviews of it that mention it having a decent size keyboard doesn’t exactly translate to what I thought it dod. There’s no way around it, the tiny keyboard is awkward. While my hands were able to get around without too much thought into what I was typing, muscle memory did seem to cause a few issues with overreaching top rows keys and my natural “home row” isn’t the traditional ‘asdf’ and ‘jkl;’ so I had to adjust a fair bit in order to avoid my fingers just wrapping around each other. The screen is another case of being much smaller than expected. I’m glad I got a 10″ as frankly anything smaller would start giving my phone a run for it’s money. The resoloution is quite good though so no complaints hardware wise. The rest of the harward is fairly standard Intel Atom N270 running at 1.6GHz, it came with 1gig of ram which I upped with a 2gig stick to 2.5gig since 512MB of it was integrated, 80 gig hard drive, wifi, bluetooth, sound and the tiniest touch pad on the face of the eart. There’s more distance between knuckles on my pinky than the height of the touch pad. Oh yea and a web cam but fact of the matter is I wouldn’t have lost any sleep over not having that. All in all it’s an interesting setup if not slightly dissillusioning when it comes to comfort of us.
The hardware I think was definately worth the money, but when it comes time to get things done that’s going to have to be all about the software. There’s features on this for starting up internet browsing and IM stuff quickly, which I think is just a Linux distro or such on some part of the ROM, but frankly I’ve not had any need to use it, what I’ve been getting stuck into is the SUSE operating system that ships with it. I’m a Windows user in that I use Windows but that certainly doesn’t mean I don’t know how to or have any aversion to using Linux, I develop under several Linux distros heck my old laptop runs Fedora, but I prefer to do things with Windows because that’s what the applications I prefer are developed under. Once I’ve found an application that has the features I like and works the way I want it to I have no issues just using it indefinately. With this netbook however I figured I might as well have a gander into the Linux/crossplatform based applications that would be equivelant to what I normally use. SUSE itself runs fine, comes with loads of the default stuff you would expect, heck I don’t even know which GUI environment it uses as I’ve seen them all and have gotten to stage where they’re all just one big nameless blur, but it’s there, I can use it and it does it’s job. However while doing a bit of digging while just trying to grab a LaTeX editor and compiler I discovered that SUSE, either by itself or the fact it’s stuck on a DVD Driveless Netbook, pretty much falls on it’s face the moment you try to add something out of the norm. Even things like GEdit wouldn’t behave and load plugins let alone trying to install new apps. Again the features that are already in place are pretty thorough and I can honestly say “most” students would never really need more than it has. Out of the box wireless handling, bluetooth features, sound cards work, almost no setup operating system, Firefox, open office and Even things like TightVNC integrated are handy. But step beyond it’s feature set and you just run into issues. Maybe it’s just me not knowing some things or just I’m not aware of other soloutions but I’m certainly not a novice Linux user as I think most students that this is marketed to. I guess it’s a good introduction to the Linux world while not building yet more mindless Ubuntu drones but it could be a bit difficult to expand from especially if they are non Computer Science students and have only experienced other operating systems where adding new applications of feature is just a click of a button and terminal windows are laughed at, we all know how students either have Macs though they’re probably not sure why or the nice and easy Windows machines which they bog down with so much useless stuff.
So I guess that’s my little synopsis of the Netbook, fairly wordy for just a days worth of use. Overall a nice piece of kit though for the sake of productivity, as much as I’d love to spend days on end tracking down various nuances and errors, I think I’ll be popping Windows on at some point so I can just quickly throw on the same apps I use currently on my main rigs. At some point I’ll get round to looking into OS X as well as apparently the Lenovo is one of the top compatibility rating.
Oh and also FIRST POST!! Yay!!!! I’ve got about 4 other ones right now but they’re in draft and I’ve not gotten round to finishing them off so this one will have to be the big one.