Sudden recent developments saw a need for a notebook acquisition. Hitherto I’ve been operating on the iMac and a dying Dell laptop. The 15″ Dell laptop is already in its death throes, the ticking of the hard disk getting louder by the day. A medium spec’d machine (but outdone in every area by today’s midrange netbooks), it’s now into the 4th year and I’m using it for some downloading and disc burning duties.
So there I was needing a notebook to handle presentation, email and other light social media work on the go or on-the-bed surfing. Since I needed one, I might as well get one that’s going to be thrashed by Carbokid 1 and my wife. It would’ve been a simple decision to make had Apple launched its netbook equivalent last week and I’d have snapped it up in a shot. As it stood yesterday, I had only the white Macbook as an option while on the Wintel corner laid too many choices.
Everyone knew that I’m a Mac head but given the need and not wanting to spend more than I should, the Wintel platform held the edge with the Lenovo X100e, HP DM3 and the yet to arrive Lenovo S12. The difference in price between the Macbook and these netbooks are big – between RM1500 to RM1600 – a sum too much for me to justify.
Build quality is pretty good with no give and flex on its chassis.
Fujitsu's infinity logo on the piano finish. It's a fingerprint magnet.
In the end I settled for the Fujitsu P-3010,an 11.6-incher. The specs are better than many netbooks in the market, missing mostly a HDMI port, which actually isn’t a big deal since I don’t have a HD TV. This AMD powered unit runs a little hot and doesn’t have a good battery life though which seems to be a mark of AMD netbooks. But with a 3GB 800 Mhz DDR2 RAM, backlit 1366×768 LED widescreen display, sites load very quickly and I like the colour rendition better than the Asus which I also auditioned. The embedded ATI Radeon graphics chip makes it possible to play the Delta Force game. Its 320GB SATA HD is also larger than most makes. To cap it off, there’s a webcam, 4-in-1 card reader, Bluetooth and a spill resistant full-size keyboard. The keyboard size and feel play an important role since I type very quickly.
The parting of RM2045 concluded the personal debate. But c’mon Apple, make a netbook.
Slim on top. Compared to the dying Dell behemoth
You can read about the P-3010 from the Test Freak and PCMag websites.
Hey Jamie, it seemed like you’ve made a good choice there. Have you tried running Photoshop on it? I had always wondered how these little fellas can handle the duty of image post processing. Anyway, sorry for the netbook by Apple and my advice to you is to forget about it. Didn’t you watch the recent iPad announcement that Mr.S.Jobs mentioned that netbooks were ‘thrash’? If he can say those words I doubt Apple will be making them….unless Jobs is keen on eating his own words.
It’s a nice little computer. So far these are the applications that I’ve tried running on it-
Photoshop Lightroom, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Office. Multitasking seems no issue as well. Haven’t tried any encoding tasks. My only complain is that it runs very hot and the fan is very noisy. I read in a few review sites that netbooks running on AMD processors have this problem ie not optimized for netbook computing. I can live with that since the speed is good (better than my old Dell) and HD space is large.
If I’m a pro photog, the iPad would be a nice accessory to showcase my portfolio to clients. But since I’m not one, I don’t see a use for it.
Originally I would have thought iPad is another fad but if you were to examine closer, it does make sense to own this piece of so called ‘pad’. I had checked my daily computing task and it usually boils down to a lot of emails, spreadsheet and document files. Apart from that, there might be an occasional viewing of 3D Engineering files but after that it is all web browsing. As for the power requirement, it had been served by my company’s notebook while at home I used the same notebook for photo editing. I will be hunting a small form desktop PC to hook to my 24in HD monitor while iPad is for my general emails and web usage. Damn Jobs for not enabling flash on Safari. Now as for the price….it is going to be painful.
Why don’t you consider the Mac Mini for your small form factor desktop? One of my colleagues are using it parked mated to his LCD TV. He uses the wireless keyboard and mouse from his sofa and do all his stuff on his TV. You can’t beat the Mac for multimedia stuff. It’s affordable and will last you way more years than a Wintel machine.
A good idea to have the Mac Mini but I do not want to get locked into a Mac system. Although it can dual boot I would still prefer a Wintel machine for all the data backup reasons. It is easy to convert data from Wintel to Mac but it is painful to do the other way round especially emails in case there is a need to do that! I do some tinkering on hardware as well that is the reason why my preference towards Wintel, especially on the Hard Drive department!