LG X130 Mini-Review

I recently bought a netbook LG X130, and since I couldn’t find much information about it on the internet (apart from “reviews” which were actually just a rephrasing of the original press release), I thought I’ll write down my first impressions.

The netbook closed.

The netbook opened. Note that this is the maximum opening angle.

Featurewise it is pretty much what everyone else is offering right now: Intel Atom N270 @ 1.6 Ghz, 160GB hard disk, 1GB of RAM, Intel 945 Express graphics chipset, Windows XP SP 3, ethernet (10/100), wireless, bluetooth, a few usb ports, cardreader (SD and Memory Stick) and built-in webcam (1.3 megapixels, but just as blurry, noisy and having weird colors as anything else).

The actual selling point (apart form its rather aggressive price tag of 349€ here in Germany) is the battery. It is a 9-cell model claimed to run for “up to 12 hours”. And to put this out first: while 12 hours might be quite unrealistic, you can really get a solid 9 hours out of it with typical use (editing, watching videos, internet), which is really quite amazing and puts the device close to smartphones in terms of how often you have to recharge.

What most brochures don't show: X130 with 9-cell battery pack.

The 9-cell battery pack totals 81 Wh.

What most brochures or pictures don’t tell you, though, is that this stamina comes at a price, namely a really huge battery pack. The battery back not only extends to the back, but also down, meaning that the netbook doesn’t lie flat on the table but is actually tilted. The angle is very close to what you get with ordinary keyboards (without the little stubs extended), so the usability is ok. However, if you expect to be able to stack the netbook between other books, you’ll be disappointed. The netbook also weighs about 1.4 kg with batteries, and a bit less than 1 kg without, which is still quite light, but maybe not as much as you would expect when you see the netbook on display in a store without the batteries.

The tilt of the keyboard is comparable to a normal keyboard.

Another unpleasant surprise was that the screen does not tilt back 180 degress, but more like three fourths of that. The pictures show what this looks like. This restriction is usually not a problem, only when the netbook is really close to my body (for example, on your lap), I sometimes would like to extend it even further back.

Keyboard layout is more or less standard. (And not as curved as it seems... That's only the pincushion distortion of my camera)

Apart from these two points, the netbook is very nice. It is sturdily built, the design is acceptable (although not really that cool, IMHO). The keyboard layout is ok, at least they have put the Control key right in the corner. I had to get used a bit to the “Home” and “End” key being located next to the cursor keys, separate from the page up and page down keys.

Another nice addition is the wireless card. It is based on the ralink chip rt3090 which supports the new “n” flavor with a maximum speed of 150MBit/s (if you’re router supports it, of course). The downside is that the support for it in Linux is not really there, ubuntu 9.04 does not recognize the card. There exist some drivers on the ralink page, but I haven’t yet tried that one out. There exists support for ralink chips in the most recent Linux kernels, but it seems this is for older ralink chipsets only.

I was quite surprise with how fast the system feels and how little energy it consumes (although this certainly holds for all current netbooks). You can run Google Earth full screen (which means 1024 * 600) with an estimated frame rate from 3 to 15 fps which is really quite nice. Even under load, I could only measure about 15W on the wall, more like 6W under light load. That’s about half of what most motherboards consume when they’re turned off… .

So in summary, a very nice netbook with great battery life, but also a quite bulky battery pack.

Pros

• On par with all the other company’s offerings.
• “802.1n” wireless up to 150 MBit/s.
• 9-12 hours of battery life.
• LG didn’t install too much crap, mostly minor tools like customized battery viewer, and Open Office.
• Subjectively, screen very bright at maximum.

Cons

• Battery extends in almost every direction, quite heavy.
• Screen doesn’t tilt back a full 180 degrees.
• Reflective screen.
• No out-of-the-box drivers for the wireless under Linux right now. Update: Linux 2.6.32 ships with drivers for the RT3090 chip in the "staging" section. I managed to get it running with ubuntu 9.10 netbook remix. If I find time, I'll summarize the steps.

Nokia E61i

I own a Nokia E61i since last December and all in all I must say that it has been quite an agreeable experience. It is solidly build, has a small but usable keyboard, real multitasking, a large screen and a really nice browser which even support JavaScript. Recently I found out that it supports the SIP standard for Voice Over IP which integrates very nicely with many "open" commercial offerings. Using a software called JoikuSpot even turns your cell phone into a WiFi HotSpot, giving you almost config-free access to the Internet wherever you are (okay, only for http in the free version).

Maybe the weakest component (and incidentally one of the most important) is the messenger, and I like to elaborate a bit on the small weaknesses and nuisances of that piece of software. Nokia, if you're reading this, I politely ask you to consider fixing these things in the next update! Just do it. Pleeease!

Robustness

Generally, the phone is quite robust software-wise. It almost never locks up, and even if it does, you can usually still kill the program easily (How? Push the "Swirl" button for a few seconds, scroll down to the program and press the backspace key). However if there is one program which hands more often than others, it's the messenger.

Now, you would expect that having unstable connections is really part of the life of a cell phone. After all, it's a mobile device which means that it's position is constantly changing and reception may be quite unstable. Still, whenever the phone tries to connect but really can't, it decides that it's safer to turn off the automatic retrieval. I wonder if just waiting for few minutes wouldn't be a more reasonable alternative.

So if you can connect but something happens during the connect, the mail software also really likes to die in a number of less obvious ways. Sometimes it claims that it is still connected to the mailbox, but actually it isn't. If you start to read emails, they vanish. If you manually close the connection is closed, it sometimes helps but often it doesn't.

All in all, I know that IMAP is a complex protocol, but pleeease couldn't you try to make the error handling a bit more reasonable?

Certificates

The other big nuisance is that automatic retrieval only works when you have the certificate of the server. Now if you're working for a big company (which might be using Exchange anyway), which has paid enough money to get decently trusted certificates, everything's okay, but when you're working at a university, or try to sync emails from your own server, you're out of luck.

The situation might not be entirely bad if there would be some way to install missing certificates easily. For example in the dialog for untrusted certificates. I wonder why they chose not to allow that... .

So how do you get the certificate on the phone? First of all, you have to obtain the certificate. If you're lucky, there is some web page where you can download the certificate. Now you only have to pray that the web server is setting the correct mime type and everything's good.

If not, you have to get the certificate. After some trial-and-error I found that the Internet Explorer (but not Firefox or Thunderbird) allow to safe a certificate to disc. So again if you're lucky, the same certificate is used for secure web connections and you can safe that certificate.

Well, so how do you get the certificate on the phone? Putting the certificate somewhere on the phone using the file explorer won't work, because the phone doesn't recognize certificates in it's own file browser. So either you've to mail it to you (saying one more time that yes, I want to connect to that server), again hoping that the mime types will be set correctly, or you have to put it somewhere on the web from where you can then download it.

To cut a long story short: Nokia, please let us install certificates whenever we encounter an untrusted one.

Hyperlinks

Finally, one last nuisance is that (at least on the E61i, other versions of Symbian might have only one browser for Internet and WAP) if you click on a link in a message, the WAP browser is opened, not the Internet browser. Which really doesn't make any sense.

Nokia, will you help me out?

Update: If you're running Linux, you might try the following "one-liner" to get the certificate from a server

echo "quit" | openssl s_client -connect server-address:server-port |\
 ruby -e 'flag=false; readlines.each {|x| flag ||= (x =~ 
/BEGIN CERT/); if flag then puts x end; flag &&= !(x =~ /END CERT/) }' |\
 openssl x509 -outform DER >cert.der

Replacing "server-address:server-port" with your server information, of course.

Update: Even if you install the server certificate on the phone, it may still be that the signing certificate is unknown. Using the Internet Explorer, you can save all those other certificates as well, and you have to install them all to make the phone accept the server certificate. I haven't yet figured out how to do this with openssl, though... .

Palm cancels Foleo

It seems that palm has canceled the Foleo just a few weeks before its official release. This must have been a very hard decision, after building up all that expectation and being almost ready to ship the product.

I have personally owned Palm PDAs for the last few years. Let's say that overall it was a pleasing experience (including some killer-apps like Kanji Gym), although in terms of stability Palm was always a bit of a nuisance. Maybe the most amazing thing is that I never lost data during the countless soft-resets. Now if I think about it, syncing the Palm has become quite of an issue lately... .

Anyway, if they manage to focus all their efforts on finally releasing the next (hopefully more stable) PalmOS, this might eventually turn out to have been the right decision.

Gadget Wishlist

How about a small GPS-mouse sized device which bridges from bluetooth to wireless. Think about it. Almost every cell phone or PDA has built-in bluetooth, and a web-browser. But very few come with support for wireless.

Please, somebody build this baby and sell it for around 50€!

Christmas Wish List - Part I

Dear Santa,

please convince the powers that be to built a laptop which has hardware supported suspend-to-disk, only that it doesn't use the hard disk but dedicated Flash-RAM. (C'mon how much could that cost?)

And by the way, write an OS which does not behave as if it actually has been woken up from a deep sleep phase. ("Wha...? No, I'm fine... No, really... Sorry, what did you say?")

-Mikio

PS: Okay, ditch that... . I fear flash-ram is just too slow... :(