Full power computing in a paperback sized package
Written: Jul 21 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Bright screen, nice form factor, slick package.
Cons: Poor battery life, slugish CPU, Windows Vista eats limited system resources.
The Bottom Line: If you absolutely need the power of a laptop in a paperback book sized form factor, and don't care about the price, the OQO's not a bad little device.
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| live4java's Full Review: OQO (SKU-1160103-US) Tablet PC |
Caveat: I received my OQO 02 as a hand-me-down from a fellow Engineer because "it's not working right" and he figured I'd have fun with some new kit. He was right. Though I would not have purchased any UMPC on my own, as I don't honestly have much use for them.
The Concept:
UMPC's, or Ultra-Mobile PC's, fit into the gap between PDAs, Smart Phones and normal Laptop computers. They try to give you the functionality of a laptop with a full OS, with as small a form factor as possible. In many cases, a UMPC will offer some kind of stylus input so you can use it as a tablet, while also offering some kind of mini-keyboard for data entry.
The question is, though, whether you'll have any actual use for a palmtop computer with a 5" screen, 800 x 480 resolution, and a battery life of only a few hours, as is typical with this class of device.
The OQO 02 is the second offering from OQO, and has quite a few improvements over the original, released in 2004.
The Package:
The OQO is roughly the size of a paperback book and weighs about a pound with the standard 4500 milliamp hour battery pack. The device actually has a pretty nice feel to it. It doesn't feel flimsy or cheap even with the screen slid up to give access to the miniature QWERTY keyboard and little thumbstick it uses in lieu of a mouse.
The keyboard is really only suitable for two-thumb typing, but there is a dedicated number pad, right and left mouse buttons, and a fairly intelligent layout for the function keys. One nice touch is that hitting the shift button once 'lock' the shift button for the next keystroke, and light a little led on the shift button. Hitting shift again, lights the LED full bright and acts as a caps lock.
The back mounted "smart" (more on that later) battery back includes a little button that will light up one to four LED's to show the state of charge. The optional 9000 milliamp hour extended battery is just under twice as thick as the standard pack, but doesn't feel substantially heavier when mounted.
The OQO's got a multi-function auto-switching headphone/mic/headset jack, a USB 2.0 port, and an HDMI out to attach an external monitor. There's a set of horizontal and vertical touch sensitive 'sliders' at the lower right corner of the screen. The screen itself is not touch sensitive, so the tablet uses a dedicated stylus not unlike an artists computer tablet.
The optional dock, a slick looking affair that holds the OQO above it on an arm, offers three USB ports, an HDMI port, Ethernet, and a slot for the built in DVD/CD burner, or optional DVD burner.
There is built in Bluetooth and Wifi 802.11 a/b/g connectivity, and there's an optional WLAN setup through Verizon or Sprint.
The unit I have is the top of the line, with a 60Gig, 4200rpm, 1.8 inch hard drive, a gig of RAM and a 1.5 Ghz Via CPU. The drive is fairly slow by modern standards, and the VIA CPU is really loaded out by the standard Windows Vista installation on this system. There are two other version of the 02, both of which come with Windows XP instead of Vista and they are probably a much better option on this device.
A number of people have reported good results using Linux on these devices, but that's probably not for your typical user who just wants to surf the web and do some light App work.
The Good:
For someone who wants to read web pages, do a bit of light application work, like word processing or spreadsheets, or just check their email, this is a great little device. It's ultra-portable and with the broad availability of WiFi hotspots everywhere, getting on-line is a piece of cake. If you go for the optional WLAN card and a service plan, you'll have all the capability a road warrior could need.
Sort of.
Having a "real" operating system, rather than the chopped down OS found on a smart phone or PDA, give you the ability to install pretty much any application you'd like. Provided it'll be usable on the small screen.
Handwriting recognition in Tablet PC mode actually works better with cursive writing than printing. Though in either case, I prefer the 'Graffiti' system used by the old Palm devices. It really is easier to train the user than to train the machine.
The Bad:
Let's start with Windows Vista. My personal opinion of Vista is, at best, poor. Given the resource requirements just to run it, Vista was a really poor choice for this device. Since the video card is limited, you can't really use any of the fancier Aero features either. The "Tablet edition" of Windows XP is a much better option.
Better still would be installing Linux, though at this time there's no drivers for the Tablet functions.
Battery life with the standard battery is about two hours provided you're not streaming video or anything else that puts a lot of stress on the CPU or Wireless card. Doing any real surfing and streaming cuts battery life to under an hour and a half. The extended battery doubles the capacity and the run times, up to 3 to 4 hours. Not unreasonable, but the extra battery is a $199 option.
The stylus works fairly well, though calibrating it with any precision is a bit of a pain. It's not a touch sensitive device, so there's a set of sensors that track the stylus's position above the screen. The pain comes in when you're trying to access the tiny icons down in the Windows 'tray' area, and the pointer just doesn't want to follow the stylus.
While this might not be the case with all of OQO's, mine makes a noticible fan/drive sound when it's running and that can get a bit annoying. It can also get quite warm, which is an issue when you're holding it in your hands typing with your thumbs.
The built in speaker is anemic. Headphones are really a must if you want to do any multi-media with this little device.
The Correctable Bad:
As mentioned earlier in this review, I got mine because "it didn't work right" and was taken out of service. The part that didn't work right was the batteries. Both of them.
It seems there is a known issue with the OQO "Smart" battery packs. They have a small PC board inside that acts as a charge controller for the Lithion Ion Polymer batteries. These are 4500 milliamphour batteries. A single pack in the normal battery, and two joined in parallel in the extended life one. They're rated at 3.7 volts, and then the charge drops below 2.7 vdc, considerably below 'time to recharge', the charge controller loses it's mind and the pack effectively becomes dead. It won't take a charge from the charger or the OQO itself.
If the pack's not under warranty, the solution is to perform a bit of careful surgery to open the pack, and manually charge the battery inside back up to 3.0 volts or so, so the controller can come back to life and flly recharge.
Both of the batteries for mine had suffered this 'low voltage death' and both have been restored to full capacity after opening and manually boosting the packs.
The Bottom Line:
UMPC's aren't for everyone. In fact, they may not actually be for anyone. They're less portable than a PDA or smart phone, and not as useful as a real laptop. In short, they fill a need that doesn't really exist.
With high prices - mine would have been around $2000 purchased - and limited battery life, it would be hard for anyone to justify getting one of these ultra-portables unless they really needed something that was that portable. That, and they had more money then sense.
Bottom line? If you really need one, go for it. Otherwise? Get a smart phone AND a laptop and come out ahead.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
live4java
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Member: Mike
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Reviews written: 31
Trusted by: 0 members
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