Picking the perfect PC for your pocket

I DO A LOT OF my writing on a Psion netBook. It's the successor to the Series 5mx: a 190MHz StrongARM-powered subnotebook, running EPOC5, with a 7.7" VGA passive-matrix colour LCD. It's got a superb keyboard and it's small, silent, runs cold, supports modems, Ethernet and Wifi cards, uses standard CF card storage, weighs about 1.2kg and runs for about ten hours on one charge. It's a great little bit of kit. And it came out in mid-1999. They were a fairly ruinous eight-hundred-odd quid then; I got mine on eBay for £170 last year. It's eight years old, and only now are devices anything like it starting to appear.

Much of the credit must go to the One Laptop Per Child project. It's hit a few speed-bumps, but it's getting to the stage of delivering small test batches of its XO-1 machines to interested governments. The price has gone up a bit - it's no longer the $100 laptop, it's now the $175 laptop, but that should fall in time. It's an interesting little machine and shows what you can do if you discard some conventional thinking in contemporary PC design - and it's inspired some interesting new devices which to some degree resemble it.

OLPC's XO-1
The XO-1 is based around an AMD Geode, a system-on-a-chip derived from Cyrix' 5x86 CPU. It's not very quick - only 433MHz - but it not only provides CPU, graphics and motherboard logic, it does all this on about one Watt - about 1/100th of the power draw of a desktop processor. It has a 7.5" dual-mode LCD which can either be used in daylight with no backlight for 1200x900 in monochrome, or backlit to provide about 800x600 in colour. If you've ever tried to use a modern colour laptop in bright sun, you'll appreciate how one of these could be very handy. It may only have 256MB of RAM and a gig of flash, but it sports a VGA-res camera, a dual-antenna low-power Marvell-chipset Wifi adaptor that can continue to act as part of a mesh network even when the main processor's off, an SD card slot, three USB2 ports and stereo speakers and a mic. The keyboard is a water-resistant membrane and you can write on the touchpad. It's clever stuff - you're never going to run Windows on one, but with its special cut-down version of Fedora Linux and radical, largely text-free Sugar GUI, it's a capable little computer. For a laptop, it's very robust - shrouded in rubber, splash-proof and with no moving parts.

So it's small, light at 0.9kg, tough, silent and runs cool on only 2W of power. Quite a desirable little toy, if you're not wedded to Windows. You won't be able to buy an XO-1, but manufacturer Quanta has announced plans to ship a similar device to the retail market.

It's been pipped to the post, though. Tiny lightweight subnotebook-sized devices are starting to appear from several places.

Palm Foleo
First was Palm's Foleo. Like the netBook, it runs an ARM chip - a "Bulverde" XScale at somewhere around 300-600MHz. It has a 10" 1024x600 widescreen, 256MB of Flash, Wifi and Bluetooth and USB. You can expand its storage with CF and SD cards, but it's not a general-purpose media-playing laptop: it's designed as an adjunct to a Treo smartphone, providing users with a bigger screen and keyboard for accessing the Web, email and MS Office and PDF documents. Despite the low-power CPU and no hard drive, it weighs 1.13kg and its battery life is reported to be an unexceptional five hours or so. It's also six hundred bucks, though early buyers get a $100 rebate.

Naturally, Intel wasn't going to let an effort like OLPC go unchallenged. An x86 device with a non-Intel chip that will introduce millions of easily-influenced kids to open source software on cheap low-power machines? Not the marketing message you want if you're a multi-billion dollar business that sells expensive big fast chips to run "industry standard" expensive commercial software. It's responded with the Intel Classmate. Again, it's a ruggedized, no-moving-parts subnotebook, but it's based on more mainstream components: a 900MHz ultra-low-voltage Celeron-M with no secondary cache, a conventional 7" 800x480 LCD, 256MB RAM and an Ethernet port. Attached via USB are Wifi and a 2GB flash drive. It weighs 1.4kg and battery life is only about four hours. It's not much of a notebook, but although it will also be offered with Mandriva Linux, with tweaking, it will run Windows - at least, the Embedded version of XP, or possibly XP Fundamentals.

Again, it's not much of a notebook by modern standards, but it handily beats the OLPC XO-1 and the Foleo. The target price for developing-world schools is about $200 - more than the XO-1, but it offers the chance to use that dangerously seductive de-facto standard software powering businesses around the world.

Asus Eee
At last month's Computex show in Taipei, Asus showed the first consumer product based around the Classmate: its Eee range. The Eee PC resembles a better-specified but less ruggedized Classmate: 512MB RAM, 2-16GB of Flash storage, Ethernet and modem and Wifi. It even has a webcam. The model 701 has a 7" 800x480 screen, and will be followed in 2008 by the 1001 with a 10" 1024x600 or 1280x768 screen. The real draw to the Eee is the anticipated price, though: $200 for the 701 and $300 for the 1001. It's lighter than its rivals at 0.89kg, but that may be because of a small battery - its life is estimated at only three hours.

Part of the special appeal of the Eee is its operating system. It's a special cut-down version of Xandros Linux which can operate in two modes - a simplified beginners' mode and a more normal Windows-like desktop which from the pictures looks like KDE. The benefits of Linux on such a PC are twofold: firstly, done right, it can be fast, capable and responsive even on such a low spec, and secondly, unlike something obscure like EPOC, with Linux you can add extra applications readily, and you get luxuries like Flash and Java and media playback and so on.

So we have two different families of small, relatively lightweight sub-sub-notebooks: one that's really underpowered but has a radical screen and other cool stuff, and Intel's nearly-a-gigahertz offering. But that's a 900MHz chip with no secondary cache, to keep the power and heat down. Those of you who remember the horror of the original Celeron, a cut-down cacheless 300MHz Pentium II, will recall that that having no secondary cache is a Very Bad Thing. The Celeron 300 was hastily withdrawn and replaced with the Celeron 300A with a fairly poxy 128kb of on-chip cache, but even thus handicapped, it was twice as fast. (If you ran it on a 100MHz front-side bus instead of its slothful 66MHz, it became a 450MHz chip and was actually very nippy for the money. With minor hacks you could run two of them in SMP - serious power for under £200.) Since then, though, I've always avoided Celerons and Durons. Sure, they're cheap, but the small L2 cache cripples performance. They're all right in something like a NAS device, but in a PC, I'd rather have last year's model of the fully-equipped version, which usually costs about the same.

Via Nanobook
So if Ultra-Low-Voltage Celery doesn't appeal, what about that ascended master of low-power x86 CPUs, Via? Well, it was at Computex too, touting its Nanobook. It's only a reference design so far, not a product, but it's a bit more like a real notebook: Wifi and Bluetooth and Ethernet, DVI port, card reader, 30GB hard disk, up to a gig of RAM. There's a 7" 800x480 touchscreen, which in the reference design has a weird little USB bay to the right hand side which can hold modules providing a world clock, GPS unit, VOIP phone, wireless broadband or DVB receiver. It only has a 1.2GHz C7-M processor, not the fastest available, but it will run XP or Vista Basic. Despite a rotating hard disk, Via are claiming a weight of just 850g and 4.5 hours of battery life - but like the Foleo, it'll cost around $600.

Summary: the state of the art has gone backwards since 1999
For me, it's the same as always. You wait for ages for something, then three come along at once. And as ever, when you're presented with a choice, none of them are quite what you want. If it got me a Psion-like battery life of ten to twelve hours, I could live with an ARM chip. They offer less performance than x86, but enough to get by. But all the low-power x86 chips around today are tempting: with Linux on x86, you get Flash and Adobe Reader and official Sun Java and so on, which can be harder work to find on a RISC processor.

The Foleo looks limited, but I like the instant on/off. The Nanobook looks too much like a standard subnotebook, just smaller. The Eee won't be quick but the spec is good and the price is amazing.

If Asus can stick to the price and offer this for £100 to £150, I'll probably buy one. It's a fairly irresistable deal. I'd much rather it had the fastest available Via C7 in it, though, rather than Intel's bottom-end crippled Pentium M.

But looking at all of them, I still want more battery life, though. On my Psion, I get a week's use on a single charge.

Which compels another thought. I got a netBook because the old, slow mono Psion 5mx just wasn't up to it any more. The netBook is faster, has a bigger brighter colour screen, masses of storage, Wifi and so on - but the old 5mx was more convenient, fitting in a jacket pocket, running on 2 AA batteries so you needed no charger, and with a screen that was usable from pitch darkness to a sunny day. A netBook-like notebook PC is appealing, but it will still be an ultralightweight notebook PC: rather slow and with only a few hours of life. The netBook itself is a handy little device, but it's not as convenient as the 5mx was.

But what if someone could squeeze the XO-1 into a Psion 5-sized case, giving something with one straight day or more's use on a single charge? I could live with all the limitations. I don't need onboard Ethernet or a modem or a VGA port or any of that - just give it SDIO and CF2 slots, so users can add them later if they need them. All it really needs is USB for wired connectivity, plus Wifi and Bluetooth and IRDA. I also don't need Windows XP or, gods help us, Vista in my pocket. I don't want some Libretto-type miniaturised notebook, complete with rotating media, scorched thighs and desktop OS crammed to fit; I want something streamlined and simple with a decent keyboard that just does enough: writing on the move, mobile Internet connectivity and good PDA functionality that can talk and sync to my mobile phone.

A jacket-pocket-sized x86-compatible which ran for 8-10 hours on a charge? I'd take your arm off, and I bet a lot of others would too.

For now, I'm sticking with my Psion. But ten years after the Series 5 and eight years after the 5mx and netBook, it amazes and saddens me that I still can't get a modern version that even compares to what they did a decade ago. µ