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(More customer reviews)Is it junk or is it not? I took a chance on this product because it seemed to me that most of the negative reviews associated with it were not based on product quality (though who knows how long it will last), but on how the product failed to live up to the purchaser's expectations. And it is those expectations that I think are misplaced.
I bought this at CVS for $100+tax; MY expectations were that it could replace my Palm TX, which got a cracked screen in a mishap. The Palm TX was a handheld PDA with pretty similar specs - in terms of processing power, ROM memory, CF slot, etc. It was no speed demon on the internet - luckily, most sites would call up a page optimized for mobile devices. So you avoided most of the fancy stuff that bloats web pages down (or, depending on your POV, adds rich and exciting content). I think what helps foster unrealistic expectations is that this Sylvania unit looks like a laptop, not a handheld PDA. So people come to it with expectations that it will perform like a laptop. Instead, it runs Windows CE 6, which, I understand, was an OS designed for PDAs, handheld PCs, etc. So it is against THAT class of device that this product should be judged. So far, I am impressed with what you get for the money, and I'm having a bit of nostalgia in terms of configuring things. It's not that hard, but if you never had a Win98 computer, you may be spoiled in the sense that you've never had to go under the hood and change a few settings. I'm no expert - there are many settings that I don't understand at all - but I did remember enough to get it going.
I did consider a modern netbook (I have a regular laptop and desktop too), but I decided to take a chance on this first. Here's why. I learned that my 2.5 year old laptop had a processor that was something like 3-5 times as fast (depending on benchmark) as a new netbook. Yes, you pay for it in battery time, but the real problem is that netbooks try to do everything a full blown laptop can do - including accessing full-blown websites that are, day by day, getting weighed down more and more by Flash and other "enhancements" that just cripple the rendering time on a netbook. What I liked about my palm TX was that it didn't even try to load a regular website, for the most part. It did the "lightweight" mobile versions instead (even then, not really fast). I realized that the problem of netbooks is that they were trying to do too much. It was like putting a Honda Fit engine in a schoolbus and going to pick up 50 kids in a hilly subdivision. This Sylvania thing should do OK if you treat it more like a 65 hp classic Beetle driving on the flat roads of central Ohio.
With that, let's take a brief look at the good, bad, and the ugly.
The good:
Screen is quite good and large - again, compared to PDAs. Compared to a laptop it's tiny.
size and weight is amazingly small.
Keyboard arrows have inverted T, a layout I much prefer.
3 USB ports; I've heard that two are USB 1.1, one is 2.0. Have not tried them.
CF card slot. Not sure if this will be limited to 2 GB, but it would not surprise me, as that was the limit on my TX, I think. I have a card from it and have used it - it works.
Touchpad pretty good, though the buttons are stiff.
Has headphone and microphone jacks. I've used the headphones for earbuds, and sound is much improved over the built in speakers. My regular laptop has weak speakers too, so not a big deal.
Keyboard is small (as you would expect) but pretty good. I used to have a Psion 5mx and it reminds me of that, though it is about 1" wider than the Psion. The left shift button is not quite as big as I'd like, though. For some reason, the caps lock above it is bigger.
Windows CE uses reasonably familiar methods of arranging icons, launching programs, etc.
The bad:
Documentation is sparse. Just enough to tell you to fully charge it before use, and to label the features.
Windows CE is not quite as easy to customize - nor, probably, as capable of it. . For instance, you can copy/paste new programs (see below) into the "program files" but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll show up in the start menu programs list. Come to think of it, I'm having the same trouble with Windows 7, too!
If you update the OS using the patch on the digitalgadgets.com website, you'll lose some features and gain others. For instance, I noticed that Wordpad disappeared - and all the office apps were just viewers. Wordpad appeared to be replaced with a basic text editor named Ke or something in alpha release. But I came out ahead (see below). Another downside was that instead of connecting to a lightweight google search page, it connects to the full blown one now, which I did not want. And I cannot find the lightweight search page anymore using my desktop PC. It appears Google is only supporting such for mobile phones now. But supposedly this OS update fixes a "memory leak" and hotkeys, etc. I just didn't know they'd change the programs that were pre-installed.
Not expandable or upgradeable - but then again, neither was my TX. Compare it to a handheld.
Case is a fingerprint magnet - OK, this part you can compare to regular laptops.
Battery indicator was kind of unhelpful. I got maybe 2.5 hours out of the first charge of the 1800 mAh battery, with a good deal of that on WiFi and installing/copying/pasting. But I don't recall the indicator going anything like linearly to low. It kind of abruptly warned me power was low and it would shut down in 60 seconds, so I'd better save my work. Better than nothing, but still, not great.
As best I can tell, there's no email client. You have to use webmail (and I have - gmail works - though gmail chat does not). There are some chat programs though - one called Pigeon, which apparently is not Pidgin.
The ugly:
The tomato-soup-red color is just awful. I am trying to think of a way to decorate the outside or "skin" it.
One thing I thought might help on this computer is to use Linux - it tends to have lower overhead than windows, but again, this is not full blown windows, so Linux could actually be a greater burden than Win CE. But in the process of looking into that, I came across "Bento Linux" - someone is working on a distribution for this system, and helpfully posted links to a "Mega Pack" of programs that he (or she) found to work with Windows CE. These included browsers, game emulators, utilities, media players, games, and even spreadsheets and word processors. I found two that appeared to be close cousins of Word and Excel - even able to read/write to "Office 97" formats. Not too shabby. Beware of the game Doom, though - it's a DOS port that only appears to work on CE. You can't exit it without forcing a shutdown of the machine (I didn't know how and could not alt-tab or ctrl-alt-del out of it, but holding the power button for 5 seconds did it).
So perhaps the $100 laptop has arrived ... but it's a PDA in netbook clothes. In some ways, better (keyboard, USB, ethernet jack, larger screen, productivity programs, clamshell design to protect that large screen) but in other ways, worse (can't find a PIM or calendar that imports modern file formats, though even among contemporaries, such importing is hit-or-miss; also, it's an older OS that is not really being developed any more). On balance, I think it is good replacement for the TX, if it has reasonable durability. But make no mistake - it's slower than a laptop, it's slower than a netbook. It's a PDA in netbook form - not unlike the original Asus EEE, frankly. For $100, it's a trip down memory lane (lack of memory lane?), eminently packable, and, if I can dig up some more freeware CE programs, quite capable of fully replacing my Palm TX as my computing travel companion.
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