By Sasha Muller on Thursday, 25 October 2007
 OQO’s model e2
is a truly stylish UMPC. The jet-black aluminium frame has a reassuring heft,
which makes the e2 feel expensive from the off. It’s not overly heavy though,
and at just 500g, it’ll sit in a jacket pocket.
Slide the spring-loaded display upwards and a full Qwerty keyboard is revealed.
Well, when we say full, all the letters are present and correct, but a Function
key allows every key to double up with a secondary function. Unfortunately,
this is where the problems begin. It’s not comfortable to sit and type
in a conventional two-handed fashion, particularly as you can’t tilt the
screen towards your typing position, and the small size of the keys makes the
two-thumbed alternative even more fiddly.
Typing in short bursts, entering web addresses or composing brief emails for
example, isn’t too painful an experience, but embark on a whole paragraph
and you’ll find that errant key presses will see you resorting to the Delete
key all too frequently. The barely legible font on the keys themselves is one
of OQO’s less sensible design choices and, when you factor in the entire
absence of a Windows key, you have all the ingredients for mild aggravation.
The cramped keyboard layout isn’t helped by the fact that OQO has squeezed
in a trackpoint that sits under the right thumb and two mouse buttons, which
sit under the left. But although the keyboard is undeniably compromised, the
trackpoint is an unmitigated success — tactile, responsive and eminently
usable even on the move.
Shrinking a fully working PC down and cramming it into a handheld device means
that, inevitably, compromises have to be made along the way. Indeed, the OQO’s
5” display might be a touch limited by its native resolution of 840 x 480,
but the image quality is superb. There’s not a hint of graininess and the
panel is stupendously bright — transfer a few movies onto the ample 60Gb
hard disk and the quality is enough to rival, if not embarrass, even the best
dedicated PMPs. The ambient light sensor that adjusts screen brightness to your
surroundings is a nice touch, too.
Performance, unsurprisingly, lags a good way behind that of a comparably priced
ultra-portables. The ultra-low-voltage VIA
C7-M processor has a single core running at a modest 1.5GHz and while it’s
enough to keep XP Professional operating relatively smoothly, it’s still
way behind Intel’s ULV processors in terms of performance. There’s
enough power for office work, but demand too much of it and everything grinds
to a halt. The e2 is also available with a 1.6GHz processor, but the extra 100MHz
isn’t going to drastically improve performance.
It’s a shame that the keyboard puts such an unsightly blot on the e2’s
copybook as there are elements of great design to be found throughout the e2.
Like all UMPCs,
its low screen resolution can leave option boxes and ‘OK’ buttons
hiding tantalisingly off-screen, but OQO has thought of this. The zoom buttons
beneath the mouse buttons let you use higher resolutions, such as 1000 x 600
and 1280 x 720, for just those moments. Of course, image quality suffers as
a result, but being able to switch resolutions with a tap of a button is infinitely
preferable to battling through Windows’ menus each and every time. Conversely,
the zoom buttons also make it possible to quickly zoom in to make sense of complex
documents. The touchscrollers at the bottom right of the screen are similarly
handy and make light work of navigating huge spreadsheets.
But what’s truly novel about the e2 is that OQO has obviously spent time
thinking about how to actually make it useful. Be in no doubt, you’re paying
a premium for the privilege of owning the first practical UMPC, but despite
that obscene price tag, dodgy keyboard and sluggish performance, the e2 still
sets the benchmark to which all other UMPCs must now aspire.
| Price |
£1,021 |
| Rating |
5 out of 6 |
| Good |
Looks; size; design; trackpoint
|
| Bad |
Small keys; price; performance
|
Buy from
|
Expansys |
Specifications
IA C7-M ULV (1.5GHz), 1Gb RAM, 60Gb hard disk, 5” screen
(800 x 480), 802.11a/b/g, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, Windows XP Professional, Part code
SKU-1030103, Warranty 1 year limited
Size 142 x 84 x 25mm
Weight 500g
Battery Life 2h 57
Recharge time 1h 59
|
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