A few months ago we were given a couple of old laptops by some relatives. I cleaned both of them up, gave one a fresh install of XP Home and the other Ubuntu. The former has now become the family PC and the latter is sitting on top of some draws in my room unused because the power supply connector is nearly unusable.

Being the lazy person I am, wanting to be able to watch TV and surf from the comfort of my bed, I decided I needed a laptop that actually works. When someone on the UKHA mailing list pointed to an offer on Amazon for an Acer Aspire One L150 (white) for £199, I decided I had to go for it. I wasn’t too keen on the white netbook though, so I paid a little more for a lovely blue number.

It came well packaged in a nice compact box. I was at work when it arrived, and didn’t have much time to play with it, but I powered it on and filled in the details it requested on first boot. After that I had a brief play with the interface.

The specially designed RedHat linux-based UI is very friendly for a novice user, categorising everything into 4 groups. I used it for a few hours at home, eventually realising that while the interface is perfect for a normal person, power users who want to do more than just web surfing, checking emails, writing documents or playing solitair are stuck. There is no option to install extra software and no (easy) way to get a console window up.

Ubuntu to the rescue! I got out my USB DVD-RW drive and installed the only version I had at the time (8.04), with mixed results. Hardware support on that version was very flakey, and when I tried to upgrade to 8.10 through the Update Manager it died completely. On my second attempt I downloaded the ISO for 8.10 and installed again. After some tweaks it was working nicely, or at least the important stuff was (screen, keyboard, touchpad, wireless, ethernet). The webcam also works, thanks to V4L. I’ve not bothered testing the microphone, but I know the SD card readers don’t work. I don’t plan on using them anyway, and if I do need to then I can just boot into the original OS which is still stored in a (shrunken) partition.

The performance is surprisingly good. It’s just fast enough to run a MythTV frontend, meaning I can watch recordings or live TV without turning my TV & attached MythTV box on. The onboard graphics card even copes with the special window manager effects included in Ubuntu. Web browsing is reasonably smooth.

I have ended up buying a wireless mouse because the touchpad is very fiddly when browsing. The keyboard is just smaller than a normal laptop keyboard, which takes a little getting used to but it’s still quite quick to type.

Battery time is nowhere near the 3 hours claimed on Amazon. Ubuntu estimates it at 1 hr 55 mins from a full charge, although it seems a little less than that when I’ve tried running it completely disconnected. Wireless probably zaps a good bit of power, but if you don’t have a power supply to hand then it’s unlikely you’re going to have an ethernet cable to hand either, so most of the time wireless needs to be on while on battery power. An extended life battery can be purchased for about £50, which I’m guessing would give a real world runtime of about 3 hours. If I find myself using this netbook a lot then I might buy one.

All in all it’s a nice little computer. Build quality is very good, as is the performance. I would recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a light-weight netbook to do light tasks (i.e. don’t plan on playing Left 4 Dead on it).

Apple have once again put a lot of work into their interface design and made the touchscreen work quite well. One odd thing though is the home button is a tactile one situated on the front surface at the bottom – I kept expecting to find some sort of ‘Home’ button on the touchscreen interface. You get used to it though.

We don’t have wifi at work at the moment, so I borrowed it for an evening to test it out on my connection at home. To start with I experienced quite a problem with dropped connections. The first time I tried to connect it was successful, but not long after that the connection dropped and the AP was not listed in the list of available networks. My brother, the only wifi user in the house, only occaisionally has problems with the wifi network so I didn’t think it was a problem with the trusty Linksys box but just in case I checked the cables and rebooted the access point. Got it working again in the end.

When I first turned on the iPod, having removed it from it’s elegant packaging, I went through the apps that were included. I had assumed that the latest software update would be installed as standard, but it turns out (unless I just received stale stock) that you have to pay for the latest version with the extra apps regardless of whether you’ve got a recent model or not. I wasnt going to pay the £12 for something that work owns, so I made do with trying out the basic apps – Safari, iTunes and YouTube.

For me, Safari is the most important app on the device. It’s what opens up the mini-tablet-PC to a world of possibilities. By playing with it I managed to get a feel for how pages are rendered, which plugins are supported (Flash isn’t, unfortunately, but QuickTime is) and how people have implemented web apps designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Some sites have trouble with javascript in the portable version of Safari which results in the site being slow to respond to clicks. This may be due to intensive processing or a limitation of the browser. There are also occaisionally problems with zoomed rendering of pages that have complex styles such as flexible rounded-corner designs, but it’s nothing serious.
Scrolling is pretty slick, using both drag and ‘flick’ gestures, though zooming can be tricky sometimes as it requires you to use an ‘expansion’ gesture which is a little difficult with one hand (the other hand holding the device).

iTunes is slightly more limited in terms of features than I expected, but it’s still quite a slick app. I think the emphasis will continue to be on using iTunes on a Mac/PC, but for quick purchases the iPod version is perfect.

The YouTube app is a great way to waste time watching random stuff, and it demonstrates how streaming video can be used on the iPod. When using Safari I discovered that you don’t need a native app to stream video – the built-in mini-version of QuickTime does the job.

I really like the iPod Touch, and as soon as I can justify the expense (considering I got my 40GB iPod Video – now called classic – in July last year) I will get one for myself and pay for the extra apps. It will also be used for my remote control project.

The storyline has several twists, one from the start being that you’re playing the part of an ‘evil’ force which battles against ‘angels’, though it’s not the deepest plot I’ve encountered in a game. The best part about this game though is the graphics. The levels are stunning, and judging from the detail that has gone into them I would say that a significant part of the development of the game was dedicated to the level graphic design. It’s all accomplished without resorting to DX10 and shaders that require a graphics card from 2009 to run – I managed to run it at the highest settings with the top AA that it supports for the most part, only having to remove the AA for the last mission. They must have pulled some trickery to make the game look so good without causing the problems that plague Crysis (which is still on hold until I can beef my computer up enough).

It took most of the day on Sunday to complete, so there’s probably a good 8-9 hrs gameplay there, and I played it on easy cos I prefer enjoying the scenery and storyline to facing frustratingly difficult challenges.

The other games in the pack are: Just Cause, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, Project: Snowblind, Rogue Trooper.