Yesterday, having been invited by fellow FV crew member Pat Mangubat (he, Ding, and I were to meet with Carlo to discuss a number of matters that afternoon), I attended the product launch of Neo Manufacturing and Services, Inc., at Spicy Fingers at Greenbelt 2.
Quite a number of mainstream media folk were there, but I was pleased to see that there were other bloggers in attendance, like techblogger Yuga and Zenmeister Juned.
It was an interesting experience. Ding gave a bit of a hard time to the Microsoft people with regard to PC resource allocation and power consumption, while I was able to speak with someone named Marc of the open source crowd about how Microsoft Vista still has that annoying incompatibility with software of older operating systems (I would suppose this would be whether the OSs were by Microsoft or otherwise).
(Maybe I should nag Ding and Pat about writing posts on the product launch from their perspectives as PR experts... you should've heard them make comments, folks.)
But all that is not the point; the point is this -- I WON A NEO VIVID V1190!
So here I am going to talk a little about the UMPC that blogging won... folks, I'd like you to meet Vivi D., my new red Neo Vivid V1190.
(Neo isn't new to me, by the way -- my currently hors de combat Empriva is by the very same manufacturer; I guess you could say that with Vivi D. now in my life I'm dating the absent Emmie's cousin heh heh.)
Vivi D.'s Vital Statistics:
HardwareProcessor: Intel Atom N270, 1.6 GHz, 512kB cache
Memory: 1 GB DDR2
Storage: 160 GB SATA HDD (Western Digital)
Display: 10.2" WSVGA LCD, 1024x600 pixels, Mobile Intel 945 Express Chipset Family graphics media accelerator
Webcam: 1.3 MP fixed
Battery: 3-cell Lithium-Ion
Available Ports:USB 2.0 ports (3)
LAN port
Modem port
Serial port for external display
SD flash memory card slot
Connectivity Options:Modem - Agere Systems HDA internal modem
Wifi - 802.11g Mini Card wireless adapter
LAN - Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast LAN card
Bluetooth - none installed
Sound: Realtek internal high definition audio bus
Bundled SoftwareOperating System: Microsoft XP Home Edition
Antivirus Software: McAfee VirusScan Enterprise (60-day evaluation version)
Productivity Software: Microsoft Office 2007 (60-day trial version)
Others: Krazy Kart by Level Up! Games, CrazyTalk CamSuite by Reallusion
Bundled AccessoriesCharger
Phone jack
UMPC jacket
System Recovery CD
PC drivers CD
Quick start guide
Warranty card
Unboxing photos:
She's rather purty, isn't she?
Now, let's talk about how well Vivi D. and I are getting along so far.
Hardware review
For someone who's been used to standard desktops, laptops, and notebook PCs and the ubiquitous Intel Core2 Duo chips, there'll probably be a bit of disappointment over the performance of the Intel Atom processor. The processor won't be anywhere as fast, but if one manages one's expectations, then I'm fairly certain it won't be too much of an issue.
(Or, one could hold off and buy the product lines that will use the Atom Dual Core processors, to be released sometime next year.)
The onboard wifi seems to have a rather low degree of antenna sensitivity, or perhaps the range is just too short. Not too different from my Emmie, Vivi D. seems to have an effective wifi range of less than 10 meters. This would not be an issue at Starbucks or similar, but when at home (or within Malcolm Hall) and sharing a router that's located on the next floor, that's not a good thing.
There's no Bluetooth. I would've said "'nuff said", except that Ding lent me his Bluetooth dongle... and found that it didn't work too well. I couldn't access my cellphone's memory card via Bluetooth.
(I think that Neo's designs are plagued by wireless connectivity issues, such as they are; Emmie has the same wifi connectivity problems, while my sib's Compaq and my former company's official issue Lenovo have much, much better range.)
Vivi D.'s battery life is, as expected of a 3-cell LiOn, short. Even after tweaking the power consumption settings to max battery life and reducing screen brightness, Vivi D. is dependable only for no more than two and a half hours... maybe I could have squeezed a little more if I had killed the wifi, the webcam, and the sound, maybe set the fan to quiet mode.
I also noticed that the Neo Vivid V1190 UMPC gets warm very quickly; I'm going to make sure that I remove the netbook jacket if I intend to use Vivi D. for extended periods. The good thing is that the charger brick doesn't get too hot (which I experienced with the Empriva and the Lenovo).
The keyboard is nice and soft, and I'm fairly confident that learning how to touch-type at this key size won't be too difficult. However, the Fn+(dn), and similar combinations (which correspond to PgDn, et cetera) tend to be unresponsive, especially when using them with the left Shift key to highlight text. The other Fn combinations tend to work nicely.
The screen is nice and bright, although adjusting brightness via Fn+F8 isn't too smooth; there is no brightness level indicator, to boot. It's a little weird to have the volume and brightness reduction/increase buttons arranged from right to left, and for the mute button not to be adjacent to the volume buttons, but one can live with that, I suppose.
I'm probably going to look for a wrist pad for this little baby, to avoid carpal tunnel and suchlike.
Software review
Vivi D. runs on Microsoft XP! Yay!
Now, it's more or less a no-brainer, really; I'm not going to buy Microsoft Office 2007 after the trial period expires. After uninstallation, I'm probably going to install for my licensed copy of Microsoft Office 2000 (which means I'm going to have to borrow a USB CD-ROM drive somewhere), but if I can't I'll go for those cool open source productivity software like OpenOffice or StarOffice. Likewise, after the McAfee Antivirus' evaluation period expires, I'll uninstall it and replace it with by AVG or something.
As for Krazy Kart, I'm going to uninstall it; I don't want the the game, but even if I did I wouldn't want to play it on a platform with such performance and that is not very connectivity friendly. On the other hand, I'm keeping the CrazyTalk CamSuite; it might prove useful sometime.
Accessories review
Now this is where the ball was dropped.
The system recovery software and pc drivers are on CD-ROMs... for a PC that does not have a CD-ROM drive. It might have been better to have supplied these software via a read-only-memory flash drive, which Vivi D. has four ports for.
The quick start guide makes mention of a user's manual... of which there is none (unless it's on either of the two CD-ROMs, which makes the user's manual unusable, not having an organic CD drive). Either Neo should consider supplying a printed user's manual or perhaps adopt the idea of providing an SD-ROM or a USB ROM drive.
Kinda weird, if you think about it.
Price to value review
According to the hand-out we got yesterday afternoon, the Neo Vivid V1190 has an SRP of PhP 22,999 (but PC Corner is offering it on a cash-only price of PhP 19,900).
With this UMPC's specifications and performance, I'm not sure I would be gung-ho about buying this model, as quite a number of other UMPCs in the PhP 23k to 25k range have better specs and performance.
On the other hand, Vivi D. is cute, with her pretty red and white case -- I like the color combination, although I worry about the eventual aging of the white plastic. I'm sure that the Neo Vivid V1190 just might appeal to those who are more into the external aesthetics than the stuff inside the body... it's a nice, cute starter UMPC, for all its flaws.
Overall, I think that we can give three out of five stars to the Neo Vivid V1190.
And I got Vivi D. for free. How rather lovely. Tee hee hee.
Later, folks.
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6 comments:
Sheesh! Such a sellout. You're no better than those journalists who just attend these parties to win a raffle and eat for free.
You just copy-pasted the entire specifications from the neo site. You don't even know half the stuff you're talking about in this post.
Get a real job, sellout!
Anonymous,
Your wholesale, shoot-from-the-lip reaction betrays your bias against journalists. Why don't you do a review yourself and show me your stuff.
alangan naman imbentuhin niya ang specifications????
moran.
Midfield,
Ask your friend Jester how he attacks the media. I simply aligned him to the bad apples among those journalists. In Jester's case, he attacks the media like it's a shooting gallery at that and now he attends those kinds of events where the carrot-on-stick is a laptop?! Then he wins a laptop and makes a very long review as if he had to pay his dues to justify his win. Now that's a sellout.
actually, the review was fun to do -- since it wasn't a door prize, not a gift, and i could review it without feeling beholden at all. i especially like your comment saying i copy-pasted the specs; i didn't have to, as any tech-capable person would know, they're all on the help-about stuff onboard. :D
i'm sure you're the ethical, straight-arrow sort of fellow who would have returned a prize had you one won, yes? :D
wow! congrats you are one of the lucky guys ha c: am happy for you Pierre c:
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