New Zaurus Successor?

[kahm]

Thanks for all the reviews and cool photo's - the Kohjinsha looks fantastic.....but..... am I missing something? The price for this processor looks a bit high? The last few days I have been bidding on ebay for used laptops and I can get a much more powerful processor and better screen for less money.

What would be the advantage of the Kohjinsha over say a FUJITSU P5010D - just sold for $645 -

Brand:Fujitsu,  Hard Drive Capacity: 60 GB, Screen Size: 11 inches, Processor Type: 
Intel Pentium M, Centrino, Operating System: Windows XP Home,   Primary Drive: 
CD-RW/DVD Combo, Processor Speed: 900 MHz, Condition:Used, Memory (RAM): 512 MB
The size and battery life is almost the same...

The Libretto U100 regularly sell for $1000  -  again  - I am not trying to be rude, but am I missing something?

Thanks in advance for your help.
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Whoa there, partner. Check your ruler again. There is no comparison in size between the Fujitsu and the Libretto/Kojinsha.

Fujitsu - Libretto/Kohjinsha (Which is near enough to the Libretto)
3.85lbs - 2.2lbs
10.3"w - 8.1"w
7.8"d - 6.5"d
1.6"h - 1.5"h

That's like saying a Civic and a Smart Car are almost the same size because they're both sub-compacts.  

There's a whole universe of difference in portability between an 11" laptop and a 7" one. If 11" is small enough for you - consider yourself lucky. My libretto was the first real "laptop" that I consider small enough and useful enough to haul around on a daily basis, and I've spent a lot of time and money looking. (Previous "small" laptops that I've owned and used - Fujitsu Stylistic 1000, Toshiba Libretto 50M, Toshiba Libretto 110CT, Toshiba Portege 310CDT, Panasonic Toughbook CF-M34 mkI)

The Kohjinsha is interesting because it provides 100% of the portability of the Libretto at a third of the (new) cost, and half the average eBay cost, while still providing 90% of the functionality. (It lacks the PC card slot, fingerprint reader, firewire port, and has a lower screen resolution, in addition to being slower. OTOH, it has tablet mode, which is much nicer for couch surfing than the Libby, and a better keyboard)

It also runs cooler, and is infinitely quieter than the Libby.

Personally, I would place it half way between the Libretto - an ultra portable but full featured laptop, and the Zaurus - A PDA that wishes it were a laptop. It fills the niche that Microsoft is trying to put it's poorly concieved UMPC/Origami machines in, and does it with style.

(OOH! Looking up the Fujitsu 5010 found me the 1510D - Same weight as the libby, 1" wider, but has a tablet mode and a touch screen! /me wants!!)

[maximusz]

Thanks for your input Kham,
I would agree that there is a great advantage to the low noise and lack of heat generated by the Kohjinsha, but the processor seems sooo slow to me.... I currently have a IBM T22 with Kubuntu installed (P3 900 Mhz, 384megs ram), and I find this a bit on the slow side.  My fear is that I would have a super portable device with the Kohjinsha but would have to wait constantly.

Are there any reviews that have posted benchmarks to give a good comparison for the speed? I have read reviews comparing the Kohjinsha to a P3 500mhz to P3 300 mmx.

It would be interesting to see the speed difference from WinXP and Puppy on this system.......

Thanks for you help,

[adf]

Thanks for your input Kham,
I would agree that there is a great advantage to the low noise and lack of heat generated by the Kohjinsha, but the processor seems sooo slow to me.... I currently have a IBM T22 with Kubuntu installed (P3 900 Mhz, 384megs ram), and I find this a bit on the slow side.  My fear is that I would have a super portable device with the Kohjinsha but would have to wait constantly.

Are there any reviews that have posted benchmarks to give a good comparison for the speed? I have read reviews comparing the Kohjinsha to a P3 500mhz to P3 300 mmx.

It would be interesting to see the speed difference from WinXP and Puppy on this system.......

Thanks for you help,
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just my .02 usd, but with a lighter machine, maybe using lighter software than is included with kubuntu would be the way to go?  A quick look at the packages in things like psaXrom Damn small linux and GPE  would give you a good idea here, then just set it all up in your fav distro (doing it ground up in debian or gentoo or slack would probably be easier than cutting down ubuntu)

[Da_Blitz]

i am planning on turning it into a linux box thats mostly cmd line so low heat and noise is more important that cpu speed

if i can get good FB support then i can still use mplayer to watch moives so i am happy, perhaps even X on a FB to graphically surf the net (links is nice but its lacking some things)

[kahm]

Thanks for your input Kham,
I would agree that there is a great advantage to the low noise and lack of heat generated by the Kohjinsha, but the processor seems sooo slow to me.... I currently have a IBM T22 with Kubuntu installed (P3 900 Mhz, 384megs ram), and I find this a bit on the slow side.  My fear is that I would have a super portable device with the Kohjinsha but would have to wait constantly.

Are there any reviews that have posted benchmarks to give a good comparison for the speed? I have read reviews comparing the Kohjinsha to a P3 500mhz to P3 300 mmx.

It would be interesting to see the speed difference from WinXP and Puppy on this system.......

Thanks for you help,
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I have three words for you: Memory, Memory, Memory. Oh, and HD. THe IO on this thing is much faster than P3's that they're comparing the processor speed to, and that makes all the difference in the world. Plus, the 1gb maximum PC2700DDR ram means that the K will feel much faster than your P3900 with 384mb of PC133. This thing runs windows very, very well, and it only in very obviously CPU limited tasks that you notice you have a slow processor at all (HD/Large res Video, etc) Most standard tasks are IO or memory limited and those kinds of things run just fine on the K.

[maximusz]

I hope your right Kham, if the increased memory and better HD increase the speed that much, I am getting very tempted to convert to the dark side (or should I say "K side")

I was reading an aritcle on the Roan Digital Vega, this uses the AMD LX800 processor chip and it claims that "The CS5536 companion chip has some hardware 2D acceleration built-in and this helps speed up Windows beyond what would be expected of a 500Mhz PII class processor. It also helps video processing which runs right up to 2mbps for advanced video codes such as Divx, Xvid and WMV9 before frame drop becomes apparent"

I would assume that this would also be true for the K as well?
Here is the article on the Vega

http://www.carrypad.com/content/view/35/9/1/1/

THanks for your help in making this tough decision.

[maximusz]

This guy has a fully loaded K = 80gig HD and 1 GiG of ram.
http://www.handtops.com/blog/104/0/Kohjins...y_new_baby.html

he provides some benchmarks and copmarisons to other machines.....the performance is a bit dispapointing.....

Just as a summary, this baby is about 1/10th speed of an Intel Core Duo 1.66GHz machine (32-bit).
Khoji results at the end. Timing results are "how many per 5s interval +/- measuring errors, so allow 10/20% variance".

PERF3: 27 October 2002 14:21 v8.0.9a, AMD 750Mhz, Linux 2.4.19
1) loop Time: 5.01 545,000/sec

Mac OS X 10.1.5 PPC G3/500MHz gcc 2.95.2
PERF3: 5 December 2002 09:45 v8.0.9c
1) loop Time: 4.91 230,000/sec

Intel P4 2.53GHz Linux 2.4.20
PERF3: 29 July 2003 23:14 v8.1.2b
1) loop Time: 5.01 1,475,000/sec

Intel P3 1.2GHz, WinXP, CL .NET 7.00
PERF3: 19 April 2004 21:08 v9.0.3a
1) loop Time: 4.99 805,000/sec

Intel P3 1.2GHz, WinXP, CL 2003 7.10
PERF3: 19 April 2004 21:06 v9.0.3a
1) loop Time: 5.00 940,000/sec

Sun Ultra-10 440MHz solaris-10-sparc64
PERF3: 25 March 2006 09:37 v9.1.5a
1) loop Time: 4.99 170,000/sec

Sun Ultra-10 440MHz solaris-10-sparc64
PERF3: 25 March 2006 09:39 v9.1.5a
1) loop Time: 5.12 155,000/sec

Linux 2.6.16.5 Intel Core Duo 1.66GHz 32 bit gcc-4.0.3
PERF3: 10 December 2006 14:05 v9.2.1c
1) loop Time: 4.97 1,030,000/sec

Khojinsa Windows XP - AMD Geode 500Mhz Visual Studio 2005 Express
PERF3: 10 December 2006 14:11 v9.2.1c
1) loop Time: 5.05 175,000/sec


He does clearly specify in the blog that
"I rarely notice the cpu speed issue, and the extra RAM avoids a few disk accesses."

This confuses me a little..... the P3 1.2 machine is approx 4.6X faster then the Khojinsa, but he rarely notices the cpu speed issue?

I have to get my hands on this to test it out myself.............

What is the community's thoughts?

[Ling]

Intel P4 2.53GHz Linux 2.4.20
PERF3: 29 July 2003 23:14 v8.1.2b
1) loop Time: 5.01 1,475,000/sec

Intel P3 1.2GHz, WinXP, CL .NET 7.00
PERF3: 19 April 2004 21:08 v9.0.3a
1) loop Time: 4.99 805,000/sec

Intel P3 1.2GHz, WinXP, CL 2003 7.10
PERF3: 19 April 2004 21:06 v9.0.3a
1) loop Time: 5.00 940,000/sec

________________________________

Is this saying that a P4 was slower than a P3 with half the clock speed? Looks like some Linux FUD or am I reading this wrong?

[ljonesj]

okay if you want to run ubuntu or its direvative kubuntu try xubuntu it is a lite weight gui and you can use it with kubuntu and ubuntu desktop software if you install those gui's but not to use them

[cycle_55]

I think that it would be much more useful to talk about performance per watt than try and compare it to some power hungry processors. For me a Z for mobile use and a K for everything else especially hooked to a 19 lcd for drawing will do perfectly for me. Of course this is all just my humble opinion.  

[kopsis]

Synthetic benchmarks are just that ... synthetic. Most test components and not the whole system, so they may or may not reflect real-world performance. My experience has been that though the K is no speed demon, it's plenty fast enough for most application software.

Case in point, a couple weeks ago I needed to do final editing and format clean-up on a 100+ page MS Word document containing 11 sub documents, some of which contained a dozen or more graphics. Word on the Mac was doing things that broke the formatting when the doc went back to Windows, so I hooked my display and keyboard up to the K and spent the next day and a half using it to do all my final edits. Repagination was a little slow and paging through the graphics heavy sections sometimes required waiting a second or two for graphics to load, but in general it was perfectly usable.

Another example, as part of my holiday R&R I've been playing Battle for Wesnoth on the K over the course of the last few days. Map scrolling isn't quite as smooth as it is on my dual-G5 PowerMac, but I certainly don't see the 10x to 20x slowdown that CPU benchmarks alone would suggest. The game is perfectly playable, and the fact that I can plop down in the La-Z-Boy and play for hours without scorching my lap or having to drag out an AC adapter is mighty appealing

[maximusz]

Thanks for your input Dave, that is the kind of real world experience that I was looking for.
Reading up on most other mini laptops (liberetto and fujitsu) models of the same size , the biggest user complaint is the heat generated and how it can become uncomfortable. This is where the K should shine.....

Thanks for a great blog site Dave, please keep us updated on your thoughts on the K after a month or two of use.

[fpp]

I'm with Dave and Kahm on this one.

General-purpose benchmarks are mostly useless on this kind of device -- unless you're going to use it ONLY to calculate more decimals of PI, or break encryption keys, or encode mpeg4... which would be a mistake :-)

The only meaningful information is about tasks you will actually carry out on the machine : browsing, word processing, viewing pictures and video, etc, both as measurements (launch times) and general qualitative feedback (usability), as Kopsis did on his blog.

I must thank Dave here because his blog helped overcome my last hesitations, and I have also been playing with my KJS for a few days now. I fully agree with his conclusions : this device is much more usable and capable than one would suspect from the spec sheet and comparisons with past ultramobiles.

My unit came directly from Japan so I had to install my localized Windows XP myself. The hardest part was booting up the Japanese OS first and finishing the first-boot installation and registration. If you think you know Windows by heart from A to Z after all that time, just try it once in Japanese (or any other language that has no As and no Zs :-)...
All the drivers for the specific hardware of the SA1 are under one directory, and internationalized or at least in English, so no problem here. To play it safe I installed the new XP in the second (D:) partition in case I needed something from the first, but I haven't used the first one since.
The only glitch I found is that of course you need to set the SA1 to boot from an external USB CD-ROM drive, in the BIOS setup. But once XP completes the initial installation and reboots, it cannot find the CD anymore and is unable to finish copying files. On a hunch I disabled the boot-from-CD option and rebooted, and it continued just fine... I don't know if this is due to the external CD-ROM I was using, to my Windows CD, or a bug in the KJS BIOS.
Also, instead of the vanilla install disk, I used a customized version with all service packs and critical updates included, and many tweaks to reduce memory and resource consumption. The result is very pleasing : as Dave said, XP runs surprisingly well on this setup, boots fast and feels positively snappy.

The screen is really great, bright and crisp. Along with the SD card reader it makes a fantastic photo viewer (my wife was sold on the first slideshow :-). Although it has the same 800*480 definition as the Nokia 770 Internet tablet, being almost twice as large it can use smaller fonts and fit more information for a given eyesight.
Ever since Windows95 I have kept my taskbar vertical, at the right side of the screen, instead of the default horizontal at bottom. It really pays here !

Web surfing is nice on the 770, it is great on the SA1, mainly because I can use a real Firefox with all the extensions I'm addicted to. Fast, too.

I haven't gotten around to installing OpenOffice yet, but with the VGA-out I'm sure the next presentation at work will be a hit :-)

Autonomy is great, even with Wifi on. I'm just wondering if we'll still be able to procure replacement batteries in a couple of years when we need them :-)

Haven't used tablet mode much yet, but probably good for watching movies...

As Dave noted, the keyboard is the one real weak point. However, as I've always been a lousy typist and will likely remain one, I'm probably less affected by this than you touch-typing divas out there :-)

Lastly, I'll second Kahm's warning about comparisons with older machines, which I've verified first-hand. I also have an old (4+-years) Samsung NV5000 (identical to the Q10). It was an 1.2kg, 12" ultraportable icon in its heyday. This one has a 900Mhz PIII (slower on batteries due to Intel SpeedStep), a 6GB disk and was upgraded to 392 MB RAM.
And sure enough, the KJS feels MUCH faster and snappier to use ! Not to mention the USB2 ports and card readers...


PS for Dave : on your blog you mention that some Firefox/TB dialogs don't fit in the screen, vertically, and you need to move them around with the keyboard shortcuts to get at the lower buttons. Have you tried Fn-F1 ? On my unit it switches to a 800x600 view. The picture is somewhat blurred because it is vertically compressed to 480px, but it's enough to let you click on OK or Cancel :-)

[kopsis]

PS for Dave : on your blog you mention that some Firefox/TB dialogs don't fit in the screen, vertically, and you need to move them around with the keyboard shortcuts to get at the lower buttons. Have you tried Fn-F1 ? On my unit it switches to a 800x600 view. The picture is somewhat blurred because it is vertically compressed to 480px, but it's enough to let you click on OK or Cancel :-)
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Actually it's Fn-ESC  But yes, that's a good tip that I discovered that after I wrote my article. You're right that the 800x600 is a bit fuzzy for text, but the screen scaling modes are actually quite usable in Battle for Wesnoth  (and probably other games that don't need Direct3D). It works as a sort of poor-man's anti-aliasing

[Snappy]

PS for Dave : on your blog you mention that some Firefox/TB dialogs don't fit in the screen, vertically, and you need to move them around with the keyboard shortcuts to get at the lower buttons. Have you tried Fn-F1 ? On my unit it switches to a 800x600 view. The picture is somewhat blurred because it is vertically compressed to 480px, but it's enough to let you click on OK or Cancel :-)
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Actually it's Fn-ESC  But yes, that's a good tip that I discovered that after I wrote my article. You're right that the 800x600 is a bit fuzzy for text, but the screen scaling modes are actually quite usable in Battle for Wesnoth  (and probably other games that don't need Direct3D). It works as a sort of poor-man's anti-aliasing
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Neat! For web browsing, I think Opera also supports dynamic scaling. fyi, I use FF personally and no, I don't have a SA.  

btw, OT, for Battle for Wesnoth ... in the hardest level setting, one of the stage is quite impassable ... anyone completed the 2nd campaign?

For the uninstructed, BfW is a RTS game set in a backdrop much like Warcraft.