I got my email earlier today confirming that the Elonex One T+ had been dispatched. Looking forward to getting it and posting up a review.
I’m planning to continue this blog as a long-term test once it arrives. This laptop range has been firmly marketed towards kids, so we’ll see how it fares in the hands of a 4-year-old!
There have been quite a few comments added to the last post from people who have got their laptops, so please take a look at what they think to them.
With respect to comments, I’m not always able to check this blog every day and have also been away for a few days recently, so comments may have waited for a while to get moderated (apologies if this relates to you and please bear with me). I also got a couple of comments which contained direct email addresses which I couldn’t anonymise, so I’ve not posted these – hope this is OK.
As promised, there’s a quick youtube unboxing here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F13kJDcNz10
I actually opened the box earlier in the day, when I didn’t have time to film it, and realised that it would have to be charged for 8 hours before use. So I charged it and did it after that. It took seemingly hours to upload the video and yes, my aged router gave up the ghost at 99%, sigh. So I re-uploaded it at work this morning – but sadly someone else on youtube beat me to it.
I have a few additions and reiterations to my initial review.
1. Both machines appear to have small bubbles in the LCD screen coating. At first, I thought it was a protective cover on the LCD, but it doesn’t appear to be. It’s livable, but annoying and a sign of poor quality all round.
2. The right mouse button isn’t seated properly. With a few hours use it appears to be a little better, but both mouse buttons, to be honest are a little nasty.
3. The mouse pad is actually very good – you can tap it emulate mouse presses too. I think the mouse pad is actually better than on the eeepc701.
4. The keys are tiny, smaller than the 701, if that’s possible. You’ll not be doing a huge amount of touch-typing on this baby.
5. I’ve had the machine on, idling mostly, but doing other bits and bobs for over 3 hours now and it still have 25% battery life left, so that’s looking fine.
6. Word processing, spreadsheets are responsive – certainly appear to be much better than on the original One. I can type in real-time using massive fonts and the rendering is snappy.
7. The wireless internet is very good, actually. I can’t test the bandwidth right now, since most test sites use a version of flash way in advance of this baby. But not bad at all.
8. My Huwei e220 wireless broadband doesn’t work. There’s just no app. on the system to fire it up. I’d really love Elonex to get that working as it would make this baby 100x more useful.
9. My Kingston 2GB thumbdrive works just great.
10. My Transcend 2GB SD card works great too.
11. Bluetooth dongle doesn’t work…no app. for it, you see.
12. I have a few divx .avi files in standard def. None of them play satisfactorally. Some don’t play at all. Looks like I’ll have to go back to playing my old iPaq movies on them.
13. There are no installed games! I had rather hoped there would be stuff here to benefit kids.
14. Webcam doesn’t work on it. Never thought it would, but it was worth a shot.
15. My Dell wireless desktop works just fine. Installed instantly via USB and is nicely responsive.
So, my summary is…that it’s early days for this little nipper. With a bit of tinkering, kernel recompilation etc, it will be entirely possible to do so much more with this unit. I’d like to see it succeed and I hope that Elonex get their finger out to support their customers. I suspect that they won’t and I hope to be proved wrong.
Me? I’ll probably be off-loading both of my units to unsuspecting fools via our local ads paper, for a small profit, with any luck. Or maybe I’ll just sell one and keep the other.
I’m looking forward to hearing everyone else’s story!
[btw - sorry I forgot to mention your site on the vid. I was kind of ad-libbing it all and didn't have a clear plan of what I wanted to say]
Great video and thanks for the review above.
Having used the CnM Minibook in Maplin, and checked out your YouTube video, I’d agree that for little over a 100 quid we’re getting value for money.
“1. Both machines appear to have small bubbles in the LCD screen coating. At first, I thought it was a protective cover on the LCD, but it doesn’t appear to be. It’s livable, but annoying and a sign of poor quality all round.”
I had the same. There is a screen protector and it was pretty hard to get off.
I was going to mention it in my video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4bY_sgIX20 but I had to cut it to 10 mins for youtube. I very slightly abraded the corner of the screen with my nail as I got the film off.
Alun
Alantube
That was very brave of you. There doesn’t appear to be a way for me to get my finger nail under the errant corner to peel it up, but it’s good to know that it’s removable.
Typing the reply on the OneT right now!
Hi Guys, I need help and elonex are shut over the weekend. I have selected the alternate (children’s theme). The problem is now I can’t do anything except what’s on the taskbar!
Any suggestions much appreciated
JK