Digital Trends

UX50 is one sweet machine.

by LorinT on Jun 12th, 2006 at 9:11 PM:

I am having a ball with this little thing. I bought it a week and a half ago while on vacation in Japan, and it served me well since in any city I could easily find an unsecured WiFi signal and keep in touch with the family back home, or look up details about attractions in nearby towns. It came with Japanese XP Home, and that worked fine for the week I was there. Once back in the states it was a fairly simple thing to install English XP Pro.

I can't believe how crisp and beautiful the screen is. Simply amazing. A little small, but still usable since it's got a great contrasty screen, and a pretty good backlight.

A little tough to do thumbs-only typing, especially when you want to hit ALT-F4 to close a window or something. That becomes three keys because to get to the Function keys (like F4), you have to also hit a Fn button. I wish there was a row dedicated to function keys. Still I can't complain too loudly with how small and useful it is and still how powerful it is.

Battery life is really only about 2 hours of real surfing, or a little over an hour if you're watching high def video. It will play back WMV-HD just fine, or footage from my HDV camcorder. (That new consumer-grade high definition format.)

I wish the RAM was upgradeable. You're stuck with 512 megs in this platform. It uses 533 MHz DDR2 chips that are directly soldered onto one of the two the little circuit boards in the unit.

Glad to not get the US version for one reason: they bundle that hellish EDGE service from Cingular. I tried that out for a month and what a mistake! Horrible spotty reception everywhere I went. I'm on Sprint's EVDO now since they don't throttle your bandwidth like Verizon's EVDO. If I want to set up a little web cam on it, Sprint doesn't mind. Verizon would have my neck if I tried that on their service. But hey, this isn't a wireless carrier review so I guess I should get back to talking about the cute little machine.

There are two port replicators included: one true docking thing with 3 USB, ethernet, VGA, firewire, etc. And another really cute little dongle that gives just Ethernet and VGA. Perfect for anyone giving a presentation. It also has an NTSC out, but who would ever use that? Seems kinda pointless on a unit that does 1024x600! (The screen resolution is absolutely SO good. If you have good eyesight then you'll really appreciate it.)

For more details including a video, check out my blog:

http://geekswithblogs.net/lorint/archive/2006/06/1...