From iconic machines like the IBM PC to the silliness of Sony’s £1,190 netbook, we’ve scoured the darkest corners and blown dust off some of the oldest, oddest and rarest kit we can find – starting with a true icon of the industry.

IBM PC

Introduced on August 12 1981, IBM’s Personal Computer was the first machine to popularise the now-ubiquitous term – and one of these antiques sits at the back of the PC Pro Lab.

Processing grunt was provided by the single-core, 4.77MHz Intel 8088, and floppy disks and cassettes are both supported. There’s a mighty 256KB of RAM, with 64KB of that soldered onto the motherboard. The IBM PC didn’t come cheap, either: a barebones model without any drives cost $1,565 and the top-end model came with bells, whistles and a monitor for $20,000.

The motherboard includes five eight-bit Industry Standard Architecture slots, with three of ours occupied: there’s a floppy disk drive controller card a SixPakPlus memory expansion board packed with 64KB chips, and a multidisplay adapter that’s actually two slabs of PCB stuck together. In the middle of the machine is an IBM 5 ¼in Diskette Drive.

Only one question remains, though, once we’ve blown the dust off this venerable old machine – can it run Crysis?

Apple Macintosh Plus

The Macintosh Plus might be a disturbing shade of yellow but that’s hardly surprising – it first saw the light of day in 1986. Released for £2,599, it was produced until October 1990 – the longest production run of any Macintosh – and was supported by Mac OS up to 1996.

It broke ground in other ways, too. As the first Macintosh to include a SCSI port it paved the way for external devices such as hard disks, tape drives, printers and CD-ROM drives, and this was also the first Macintosh to use SIMMs for its memory – with a massive 1MB of the stuff included as standard across four 256KB sticks.

Our particular model bears the familiar Cupertino, California label on its rear, but the sticker also reveals that this machine was “Assembled in Ireland” – a far cry from today, where most technology seems to be produced in Asia.

Apple Macintosh Colour Classic

Fast forward a few years – and look under a different test-bench – and you’ll find another piece of Apple history. It’s the first compact Macintosh computer to come with a colour display, and we wouldn’t have the iMac – the world’s finest all-in-one PC – without the Colour Classic paving the way.

Originally priced at $1,400 in February 1993, it ran on Mac OS 7.6.1 – the first version of the OS to drop the “System” from its name so the more distinctive moniker could be trademarked and the OS licensed to third-party Macintosh manufacturers.

This ancient all-in-one was more upgradeable than most of today’s models, too. The Processor Direct Slot was used with the Apple IIe Card, and ran software designed for the older Apple II. This backwards compatibility was supposed to entice the education market to upgrade from Apple II machines to fully-fledged Macintoshes, but other upgrades were also available, from CPU accelerators to Ethernet and video cards.

This versatility means the Colour Classic enjoys a cult following today: users have modded the machine with Power Mac parts so its screen runs at 640 x 480 rather than 560 x 384, and others have fitted motherboards from more powerful models.

Casio Cassiopeia E-115

Technical editor Darien Graham-Smith found the Casio Cassiopeia E-115 hiding at the back of his cupboard, but it first arrived back in October 2000 when PDAs, rather than smartphones, were big news.

So, what did you get for £422? There’s the sturdy exterior, which we described as “dull-grey silver” and “resting on its laurels”, alongside a cradle that “feels cheap and doesn’t engage with the Cassiopeia as solidly as we’d like” in its full review.

It wasn’t all bad news, with a 240 x 320 LCD screen that was better than its rivals, and a 131MHz StrongARM processor that was “fast enough to ensure instantaneous contact searches and speedy application switching”, according to us. It also had 16MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM memory – “about as much as you currently need”, at least back then.

Oh, and the software? Microsoft Windows CE 3.0 PocketPC Edition. Our model is old and, presumably, scarred by Darien’s cupboard, so it wouldn’t turn on – although that’s probably for the best, given that we concluded that the Casio simply couldn’t “match the standard” set by Compaq’s iPAQ.

Apple iMac G4

The G4 marked the first major redesign of the iMac, but the forlorn model found in the PC Pro Lab has clearly seen better days. It’s missing its monitor bezel, the distinctive round base is looking grubby, and it wouldn’t turn on – although that chrome, cantilevered arm is as smooth as it was when the G4 was eased from its box in 2002.

We described the G4 as “smooth and elegant design that puts other computer makes to shame”. Even now it stands out in a sea of modern all-in-ones that all look a little too familiar.

Our review also highlighted Apple’s concentration on “excellent design and ease of use”, but that has downsides – a specification we described as “Paleolithic”. It’s the first time we’ve seen computers compared to dinosaurs, but the SDRAM was slow and the GeForce 2 MX graphics chip was a generation behind the curve. It might look nice – as Apple devices are wont to do – but PCs ran our Photoshop 7 benchmark almost twice as quickly.

Dell Latitude

The oldest laptop we managed to find demonstrates the changing of technology. This Dell Latitude isn’t quite as backward as we first thought. It’s either a C540 or C640 – we’re not sure which, as it’s been hidden on a high shelf for far too long – and it’s a mix of old problems and forgotten boons.

It’s running a Pentium 4 chip with Windows XP, but the most striking thing about this machine is its design – or lack of it. Plain plastic is the order of the day, and the lid features the familiar Dell logo, along with the kind of build quality that we’d slate if this machine were reviewed today.

The base doesn’t cover itself in glory, either, with stickers, flaps, screws, feet and even some exposed fans. It’s also obvious where laptops have fallen backwards as companies rush to build slim, snazzy Ultrabooks: we rarely see keyboards with the kind of comfort, responsiveness and travel as this Latitude offers, and the 4:3 screen has a native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 – a huge amount of desktop real estate compared to the 1,366 x 768 and 1,600 x 900 screens that now seem to be the norm.

Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT, 7600 GS and AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT

We’ve a big plastic tub full of graphics cards in the Labs and, while most of them are recent, a trio of PCBs lurking amid the anti-static bags and DVI to D-SUB adapters come from decidedly older stock. Two Nvidia cards, the GeForce 7300 GT and 7600 GS, are joined by AMD’s Radeon HD 2600 XT.

They were launched in 2006 and 2007, and they handily illustrate the impressive speed at which technology is pushed forward. The first 28nm GPU has just arrived but, back then, Nvidia and AMD were using 90nm and 65nm processes – and the 390 million transistors in the AMD card pales when compared to the 4.3 billion in AMD’s latest.

The bandwidth statistics are telling, too: the Radeon card churns through 35.2GB/sec in its 512MB incarnation, with the 7300 GT and 7600 GS offering 10.67GB/sec and 12.8GB/sec respectively. The latest high-end card, the Radeon HD 7970, chews through 264GB/sec – and even modest boards, such as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 550 Ti, handle 98.5GB/sec.

Oh, and our benchmarks? The 7600 GS played Call of Duty 2 at 18fps when run at 1,280 x 1,024. Bless.

Sony VAIO P-series

Sony senior vice president Mike Abary famously said his company would never join the “race to the bottom” when netbooks hit the big time, and he wasn’t joking – Sony’s VAIO P-series cost £1,190 inc VAT for the top-end model.

That money paid for radical design, with a base occupied entirely by the keyboard,  that’s still so small and fiddly that you have to peck at the keys, prod at the trackpoint and squint at the 8in 1,600 x 900 screen. The Z-series Atom was decidedly Z-list, too, thanks to performance that couldn’t match £350 rivals.

Fast forward, and I spot my first iPad: on the Tube, its user oblivious to the envious gawping of fellow travellers. For me, it had a similar effect, heralding the arrival of another exciting, innovative type of product.

That’s not the only parallel between netbooks and tablets but, as far as I can see, others aren’t nearly so positive. The netbook’s story has been a sad one: that initial flurry of excitement withered by staid products, precious little evolution and a stagnant market.

Look beneath the iPad – which is still a premium product – and the tablet market could suffer from many of the same problems.

The signs are already there: the market is flooded with a host of shoddy, near-identical products from established tech brands, no-name newcomers and bandwagon-riding outsiders, and innovation is hard to find.

Look under the hood of almost every tablet and you’ll find similar components, with cheaper models boasting obsolete hardware that’s not good enough to run Angry Birds, let alone the more demanding software currently being churned out by eager developers. Uninspiring design dominates the exterior, with cheap iPhone and iPad ripoffs dominating the market.

Almost all of them run Android and, in almost all cases, they disappoint the user with a litany of problems: build quality is often poor, screens are grainy or, even worse, made with unresponsive resistive technology. Plenty don’t have access to the Android Market, instead using an awful third-party store or making do without any legitimate way to install new software.

It’s a familiar story for those who’ve followed the netbook market: shoddy build quality and screens were found across dozens of devices, and a lack of hardware innovation meant they were also of limited use – and soon overshadowed by low-powered laptops.

There’s still hope for tablets. Apple’s forging its own wildly successful path but, away from iOS, only a handful of manufacturers, such as Sony and Samsung, are forging ahead with innovative products. Microsoft, meanwhile, is placing plenty of stock in Windows 8.

Will that be enough to help tablets avoid the same fate of netbooks? It’s still a growing market – tablets have just overtaken netbook sales for the first time – but there’s a big chance it could head in the wrong direction if more people buy, and are disappointed by, sub-standard products. Perhaps Sony exec Mike Abary was right back in 2008: a “race to the bottom” might seem tempting but, in the long run, it does more harm than good.

The big news about the Toshiba mini NB550D netbook is the processor inside: no Intel Atom here, but AMD’s all new C-50 – a dual-core chip running at 1GHz.

And AMD is very enthusiastic about the platform as a whole, describing the combination of processor, chipset and graphics chip as an APU: accelerated processing unit.

Don’t be fooled into thinking you’re going to get staggering performance. We found the NB550D a little slow at times, with both cores of the processor sometimes fully utilised even when using Word.

The graphics performance is a little more interesting. 720p video played back smoothly as we’d expect, but it’s also capable of playing 1080p video stored locally. I watched a YouTube HD clip it was a lot more jerky, although that could be due to the wireless connection at the event.

As with the Toshiba mini NB520, which we previewed in December, there’s a pair of very nice Harman/Kardon speakers on offer. Toshiba assures us they’re identical units to the ones in the NB520D, and we were once again impressed by the music playback – even in a crowded showroom.

While Toshiba has moved away from the standard netbook configuration by offering an AMD processor, and using 2GB of RAM, the rest of the NB550D follows a familiar pattern.

The 1,024 x 600 screen is bright and easy on the eye, in line with previous Toshiba netbooks. There’s some visible grain if you look closely, but this a better screen than the netbook average.

I was more underwhelmed by the keyboard. It’s usable rather than great, with cramped keys meaning typos happen a little more than I’d like. Although that could just be my poor typing.

Build quality, on first use, seems strong. There are no dreadful flexes to cause concern, and we’d expect this machine to survive life in a bag with few worries.

Design is a subjective matter. I quite liked the honeycombed cover – it’s distinctive without being look-at-me overwhelming – and there’s a good variety of colours to choose from.

From bitter experience, which you can see to your left, I recommend you avoid choosing a colour that clashes with your jumper, though.

The big question, as ever, is pricing. We’ve chased Toshiba UK for a price, and to confirm the specs we can expect in the UK, but there’s no news as yet. Until then we’ll mark the NB550D as a promising machine, and certainly a welcome change from the tablets being released at this CES.

And let’s make no mistake: this is a device you can take anywhere. It’s tiny, measuring just 26.2cm wide and 21mm thick at its fattest point (the rear). And it weighs a miniscule 870g. The benefit of the clamshell design over a slate such as the Apple iPad is obvious too – chuck it in a bag and you don’t need to worry about protecting the screen.

What’s fascinating about the AC100, though, is the choice of Google Android as an operating system. Toshiba isn’t the first to opt for this route: Acer produced the Aspire One D250 last year, which dual-booted Android with Windows 7, but at that point we felt Android wasn’t ready for the big screen.

While our AC100 was a very early sample, with a developer version of the OS, it’s already clear that Toshiba has put a lot more effort into making it work with a 1,024 x 600 resolution.

For instance, press the on-screen shortcut at the bottom right and all the available applications fill the screen. These range from Fring (a VoIP service) to Opera Mobile to EverNote (a note-taking tool) to a YouTube player. Most Android applications should work, although they’re unlikely to take advantage of the screen’s high resolution.

One app that will is the special version of DataViz Documents to Go that will be bundled with the AC100. This brings the ability to edit word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations, although not create new ones. That said, you can convert a Word or Excel document and click Save As, so this restriction is easy to work around. What might persuade you to upgrade to the full version is a lack of a word count and advanced formatting.

There are other nice touches too, including the ability to associate different desktops with the wireless networks you use. So, you can have a home desktop with YouTube and social-networking widgets, and a work desktop with the email client to the fore.

We can also see signs that Toshiba has put effort into making the hardware and software work together. The Escape key doubles up as a Back key, a search key launches the Quick Search tool, while four useful buttons sit at the top-right of the keyboard that allow to you bring up settings, switch between open applications, launch the web browser and switch to the email client.

Another key inclusion sits inside the chassis, with Nvidia’s Tegra processor taking pride of place. This has some similarities with the chip inside the iPad, running at 1GHz and being based on the ARM9 architecture. It proved enough to keep the AC100 feeling nippy, and 512MB of RAM means it’s capable of multitasking without freezing.

Rather ambitiously, Toshiba also includes an HDMI port on the left-hand side of the chassis. An SD card slot and headphone jack also sit on the left of the chassis, with the right home to a single USB port, power connector and a mini-USB port. The latter could be used to synchronise the AC100 with your main PC, just as you would a mobile phone.

These ports are housed in a curious yellow surround, which brings some welcome relief to the dark grey plastic used for the rest of the chassis. If it was any larger, this monotonous finish – despite a hatched, honeycomb effect on the lid – would make the AC100 look rather dull, but being so slim and compact it gets away with it.

Far more importantly, the 10.1in screen itself looks great. We half-expected Toshiba to skimp here and include a sub-standard panel, but in terms of quality it rivals the best netbooks. The keyboard is more mediocre, with bouncy keys that don’t provide much resistance, but the keys themselves are well sized so we had no difficulty typing at speed. The trackpad and mouse keys are big and responsive too.

The final inclusions of note are inside the chassis. It includes 802.11bgn wireless, Bluetooth and some models will integrate mobile broadband. A 1.3-megapixel webcam completes the picture.

So we’re largely impressed by the AC100. If Toshiba can price it right (all we know so far is that it will be “similar” in price to a netbook), then it may carve out a niche in the same way the Apple iPad has – but with the advantage of a more rugged clamshell design and a keyboard.

An awful lot rests on the final software, however, and initially buyers might be disappointed that it comes supplied with Android 2.1. As a result, Flash won’t play, rather denting the AC100’s internet browsing abilities. Toshiba promises an update to Android 2.2 (which will fully support Flash) won’t be too long in coming, and that it will be an over-the-air upgrade.

The AC100 certainly needs this to be a compelling buy, but even in its raw state we’d be fascinated to know what you think: would you buy one? And would it be instead of, or to accompany, a second laptop?

Netbooks aren’t famed for their high-definition video playing prowess, but if you’ve got about $10 and a few minutes going spare, there is a way to enjoy high-definition trailers and videos on your Atom-powered portable.

You’ll need two things: a copy of Media Player Classic Home Cinema, and CoreCodec’s CoreAVC codec which you can purchase for the princely sum of $9.95.

Actually, we lied, you’ll need three things. You’ll also need some HD videos encoded in AVC or h.264 formats too. We downloaded the free animation, Big Buck Bunny, for our testing. We downloaded the 1080P h.264 version - be warned though, it’s a hefty 692MB download, so you may want to go and have a cup of tea or five if your internet connection is on the slow side. Alternatively, any high-definition h.264 movie trailer lurking on the internet will do just fine.

Windows 7 might already have h.264 support built in as standard, but try playing back HD content in Media Player and it’s unwatchably jerky. If you’re on Windows XP you can try watching HD videos with Media Player Classic’s built-in h.264 codec, but it too struggles to keep the video playing back smoothly; the sound drifting out of sync with the on-screen action as the Atom processor struggles to keep up.

Bringing HD home

It doesn’t matter whether your netbook is running Windows XP Home or Windows 7, but first you’ll need to install CoreAVC. You can untick Haali’s Media Splitter during the install process, just the codec itself will do just fine.

Once CoreAVC is installed, go to the CoreCodec directory that’s appeared in your Start menu and select the Configure CoreAVC entry. Set Deblocking to Skip always, Deinterlacing to None and click OK.

The next step is to run Media Player Classic Home Cinema. Select Options from the View dropdown menu and click the External Filters tab. Click the Add Filter… button at the top right of the window and double-click CoreAVC Video Decoder from the list. Make sure the Prefer option is ticked.

Now select Output in the Options menu and make sure that the DirectShow Video is set to EVR. Click OK, and close Media Player Classic to make sure the settings are applied.

Open up the 1080P version of Big Buck Bunny now and, surprise surprise, you’ll find it’s watchable all the way through. There is the odd stutter here and there, and a little visual tearing where the Atom processor can’t quite keep the framerate perfectly smooth, but, crucially, the audio soundtrack doesn’t lose sync anymore. A netbook playing HD video? Well, we never thought we’d see the day.

Admittedly, though, even CoreAVC can’t turn a netbook into an HD devouring media beast. Several of our higher bitrate 1080P videos proved too much for the Atom processor, and more demanding scenes in 720P videos also suffered from a hint of stutter here and there. And, of course, CoreAVC can’t do anything about online HD content from Youtube and iPlayer. But all in all, we’re pretty impressed. HD or no HD, we know which we’d prefer!

And if you’re concerned what HD playback is going to do your netbook’s battery life, you might just be pleasantly surprised. We took one of the latest Pine Trail netbooks lying around the PC Pro office and with screen brightness set to maximum and 802.11n enabled, found that 90 minutes of looping a 720P trailer only sapped about 25% of our battery. Turn off wireless and drop the brightness a little and you’d probably be able to get through 3 or 4 movies before running out of juice: perfect for those boring, long-haul flights.

It certainly represents a further blurring between the lines of ultraportable and netbook, even if its core components are stuck at the feeble end of the scale: the 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 may be all-new and slightly faster than the 1.6GHz N270, but with 1GB of RAM few people will want this as their main laptop.

Despite this, when I played with the MSI Wind U160 at CES Unveiled (shortly after my toying with the MSI X-Slim X420) I found it surprisingly nippy. Indeed, the Windows Experience Index gave it a score of 3.1 for Graphics. That compares to 2.1 for the previous generation of Intel’s Atom processor and graphics chipset.

The golden finish to the keyboard area can’t hide that it still feels plasticky to the touch, though, and things weren’t helped by the fact the pre-production unit on show had been prodded and probed by a number of people: the keyboard was actually coming away at the corner.

As with the MSI X-Slim X420, the trackpad has an unusual finish. But because the nobbles stick out of the trackpad on the Wind U160, as opposed to the dimples of the X420, it’s much more obvious in use. While I’m sure most people will get used to this, others may find the design a little irksome.

Few will complain about battery life. My friendly MSI rep suggested the U160 will last for at least seven hours on a single charge. It adds up to an interesting netbook, although we’ll have to wait until late February before getting the finished article into the PC Pro Labs: this netbook is still so new that it’s not actually entered into production.

On this occasion, it isn’t the hardware I was interested in, but the software. For this is the first netbook PC Pro has seen to include Android as the OS, and the big question is – just how well can an operating system designed to work on a phone work on a full-blown PC?

The answer is, from my initial experiences, not very convincingly. This photo shows all the apps that are bundled as standard, which as you can see won’t stun you. There’s a photo gallery, Mozilla Firefox, a camera app, a horrendously basic music player, email – and that’s pretty much your lot.

Once I’d convinced the Aspire to join the wireless network, browsing was a fairly pleasant experience – so long as you don’t try and do anything rash, such as watch BBC iPlayer (I couldn’t get this to work).

I was impressed by the boot-up times, though, with the netbook living up to Acer’s promise of booting within 30 seconds. Battery life appears pretty poor, though, and I wouldn’t expect it to last much more than two hours.

If you want to move away from Android then you can instantly boot into Windows, but I couldn’t find a way to swap from Windows 7 to Android: there’s nothing built into Acer’s installation of Windows 7 that allows this (although there is a Quick Switch option from Android).

Aside from the software, the Acer Aspire One D520 does have some appeal: it’s slim and light, and definitely has more than a hint of style. The maroon finish here is particularly nice, to my eyes at least.

I’ll now be haranguing Acer so we can get a sample to fully test in the Labs, so look out for a review soon.

The first Ion-based netbooks are beginning to trickle in, so yesterday Nvidia took the opportunity to introduce the technology to us formally. And if there was any doubt as to the focus of the demo, it was quickly made clear by the presence of a gigantic 1080p Sharp Aquos TV with a tiny netbook attached.

The netbook in question was HP’s Mini 311, announced today, and it offers a very similar core spec to others we’ve already seen from the likes of Samsung. The usual 1.6GHz Atom N270 and 2GB of RAM are joined by an 11.6in 1,366 x 768 LED screen and that shiny new Nvidia Ion GPU, which also allows manufacturers to include an HDMI port for hooking up to an HD TV. The Mini 311 is pencilled in for a £349 launch price, which is actually a rather competitive price for its size and spec.

We’ve played with Ion before in an Atom-based nettop and were extremely impressed by the results, but it’s still a bit of an odd experience to see the same intensive video tasks being carried out by a humble netbook, and output on to a monster screen. And just in case we couldn’t tell how impressive it all was, we were shown all of the demos side-by-side with a current Intel netbook.

Better performance

First up was simple playback of a 1080p H.264 video trailer, which unsurprisingly ran in WMP without a stutter on the Ion while its Intel equivalent jerked all over the place. The single-core CPU ran at around 40-60% load throughout. Mainstream gaming is also an option, as Call of Duty 4 running smoothly at a low resolution showed; our rep suggested The Sims 3 and Battlefield Heroes as examples of Ion’s level, so don’t expect Crysis just yet.

Next, demonstrating Windows 7’s drag-and-drop GPU-accelerated conversion via Nvidia’s DirectCompute, a two-and-a-half minute H.264 video trailer (at around 150MB) was dragged to a Sony Walkman media player to begin the transcoding process.

Nvidia claims a five-fold increase in transcoding speed when using the GPU. Accepting that the estimated Windows file-copy times aren’t the most reliable of figures, this test appeared to be even quicker: the Intel device estimated a massive 60 minutes, compared to less than three minutes for the Ion.

Higher quality

And the HP netbook had another trick in store, coming pre-installed with ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theatre 3 software and SimHD plug-in, capable of using the Ion GPU to accelerate the upscaling of video playback. Obviously these netbooks don’t come with DVD drives, but it’ll work with any file on your hard disk.

As for the real-world effect, it was quite clear that it was an upscaled clip rather than native HD quality, but with only a little bit of noise it made a positive difference on such a large TV.

The final, big reveal is unfortunately embargoed for the time-being, but it’ll be a game-changer for watching video online when it arrives. We can’t say anything about it until October, so keep an eye out.

And that was that. Ion is the breakthrough that gives every netbook manufacturer the cue to revamp their product lines, and – after the last few months of the same tired Atom-based clones boring us to tears – it simply can’t come soon enough.

We’ll be getting the first samples in the coming weeks, and they’ll undoubtedly prove the netbook has already evolved. No longer just an Internet device, it’s now a very capable media player too.

Don’t tell Sharp that the MID is dead, though – it’s just introduced a brand-new MID device at this week’s IFA Berlin trade show: the PC-Z1.

Weighing in at just 409g and measuring a mere 161mm and 24mm deep, the PC-Z1 feels feather-light in the hand and surprisingly sturdy: the 5in screen barely flexed, there was no hint of desktop distortion and the rest of the unit felt surprisingly durable.

Sharp dresser?

We’re less keen on its design, though, which is something of an acquired taste. Every sample model Sharp has bought to IFA is finished in an off-white colour that doesn’t go particularly well with the glittery, pink-hued hinges and, while we’re assured that the PC-Z1 will also be available in black, we’ll reserve judgement until we see one of those models in the flesh.

This is one of the first devices we’ve seen using the MID-specific version of Ubuntu 9.04 and, while it looks broadly similar to the desktop versions of the open-source OS, there are links to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube directly on the desktop. Firefox and a cut-down version of OpenOffice 3.0 are included, too.

Inside, Sharp has ignored Intel’s MID-specific Atom Z series in favour of an 800MHz ARM-based Freescale i.MX515 processor, which has a mighty 256kb of L2 cache and a 32kb instruction cache. It’s not the most sensible, choice, though – when we tested the PC-Z1, we found that OpenOffice took almost a minute to open and the rest of the system felt sluggish.

The rest of the specification is weak, too. 512MB of RAM is soldered onto the motherboard, and the 4GB of flash memory results in only 2GB of user storage once Ubuntu has been loaded onto the machine. 802.11b/b wireless and a card reader are also included and, although Freescale’s website boasts that the integrated graphics chip can decode 720p video, we’re not holding our breath.

This meagre specification does mean that the PC-Z1 should have pretty decent battery life, with Sharp claiming up to ten hours before you’ll have to head back to the mains.

Ergonomic Issues

Unfortunately, the Sharp’s keyboard is one of the worst we’ve ever used. The buttons, which are smaller than those on the average netbook, rock from side-to-side when touched, and their diminutive size means that it’s impossible to peck at the keyboard even slowly – and touch-typing is totally out of the question.

The slow components don’t help, either, with many of our button presses taking an age to register or simply not appearing on the screen at all. Typing a couple of sentences took an age, and we’re not sure that we’d manage to finish a whole page – by that time, the PC-Z1 surely would have been flung through the nearest window.

Mouse control is handled by a small Blackberry Storm-style touchpoint that lurks above the right-hand side of the keyboard. It’s not quite as disastrous as the keyboard, but it’s not a total success, either: small movements often went unnoticed and it’s all too easy to slip a finger beyond its parameters and have to re-adjust. The pair of mouse buttons, which sit on the left-hand side, felt about as weak as the keyboard did – and liable to failing sooner rather than later.

The 5in screen offers a surprisingly good resolution of 1,024 x 600 – the equal of many a netbook – but quality, sadly, is lacking. Our brief time with the PC-Z1 revealed a grainy, pale panel that struggled to do web pages justice.

We’ve got bad news if you’re looking to buy one of these unique machines, too – at the moment, Sharp only plans to release the PC-Z1 in Japan, where it’ll be hitting shelves in around two weeks. We’ve been reassured that Sharp is looking to bring the device to Europe, pending customer demand – and, if it does make it to these shores, it’ll cost around €360.

Although, when you can buy an A-Listed netbook for less cash, why on earth would you want to?

]]> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/09/06/first-look-the-new-pc-z1-mid-from-sharp/feed/ 4 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/08/11/first-look-the-virgin-media-freedom-netbook/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/08/11/first-look-the-virgin-media-freedom-netbook/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:49:58 +0000 Mike Jennings http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/?p=6721 While mobile broadband dongles are undoubtedly well-matched with netbooks, most mobile broadband firms offer third-party netbooks with their respective dongle deals: T-Mobile bundles its dongle with an Eee PC 904HD, Vodafone entices customers with a Samsung NC10 and Orange lets prospective buyers choose between HP, Asus, Samsung and Toshiba models.

Virgin Media, meanwhile, is the first mobile broadband company to release its own netbook and, while it’s undoubtedly very similar to Zoostorm’s offering – even sharing the same name, the ambitious “Freedom”, – it’s an interesting move and a good-looking product.

We eased back the lid, for instance, to find an edge-to-edge screen and glossy finish that instantly makes the Freedom look like a far classier affair than plenty of the slightly staid netbooks that we’re used to seeing, and the keyboard feels good, too, offering decent size and travel. We’re not sure if it can yet match up to the charms of the Labs-winning Samsung N110, but it certainly felt comfortable enough to use for extended typing sessions.

The trackpad also felt good, with the pad itself proving nippy and responsive and the pair of buttons – which we always like to see instead of a single rocker – felt light and supremely clicky. Build quality was also solid, with the screen exhibiting no more flex than is to be expected and both keyboard and wrist-rest feeling resilient.

Inside, it’s typical netbook fare, with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM promising to deliver entirely average benchmark results, and the 120GB hard disk providing plenty of storage. The included draft-n wireless is a nice touch but, in a slightly strange move from a mobile broadband company, there’s no in-built SIM slot, which is perhaps a fault in Zoostorm’s design rather than Virgin Media’s.

Instead, the Freedom is bundled with a Virgin Media mobile broadband dongle and, as is now the norm with mobile broadband deals, is offered for free when you sign up to a contract. In this case, deals start from £31 a month and include 10MB broadband and a landline phone, with the more expensive packages – costing £45 and £58 per month respectively – including faster broadband, more generous call packages and Virgin TV.

This raises the usual question, of course, of price: sign up for the cheapest 24-month tariff and you’ll be shelling out £744 over the course of the contract for this “free” netbook and, while this does include the price of the included TV, internet and phone packages, you’ll have to weigh up the pros and cons of the various deals offered by Virgin and its competitors: while T-Mobile doesn’t offer TV or phone access, for instance, its tariffs start at a mere £20 a month.

It’s also worth considering if it’ll be cheaper to just buy a USB dongle on its own and use that with your laptop instead, especially if you don’t necessarily need the extras that are included with Virgin’s various deals.

Our other major concern is battery life. The Freedom comes complete with a 3-cell battery that, it’s quoted, will last for two and a half hours – but, when the £304 Samsung N110 will last for more than eleven hours on a single charge, that’s not good enough. We’ll be sure to give the Freedom a thorough test in the PC Pro Labs but, suffice to say, we’re not expecting great longevity.

It seems to have the fundamentals nailed down pretty well, but there are still several question marks over the Freedom’s pricing structure and battery life. Suffice to say, the full picture will be revealed soon enough in the PC Pro review.