Review: Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Mini UI3520

NETBOOKS are ten a penny these days, so to stand out they really need to be good or have a unique selling point (USP).

Sony took an interesting approach with their P Series by making them shockingly expensive - you can get a powerful desktop PC for less than the £800-odd quid the Sony will cost you.

Dell and others seem to be leading the charge toward equipping their mini marvels with built-in 3G broadband.

So what is the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Mini's USP? Hmmm, tough one that.

The coloured, clip-on covers? No, they don't really do it - the burgundy clip-on on my review unit fell off at the slightest provocation.

The slightly retro, glossy white and black styling? Nice, but hardly unique.

The Silent Mode, which allows you to throttle down the ubiquitous Intel Atom N270 processor and thereby reduce fan noise? Actually, I ran it at full pelt and didn't even notice any fan noise, so that's a 'no' too.

The truth is, the Amilo Mini doesn't have a USP - it's yet another Atom-based netbook and, as such, it shares the strengths and weaknesses of most of its brethren.

The keyboard is horribly cramped and responds to your presses with a hideous clackety-click. You need to be extremely accurate to hit the Space bar and Enter key, and while the touchpad is OK, the left and right mouse-click buttons take a lot of getting used to.

The 8.9inch, 1024x600 resolution, non-glare display is plenty bright enough, but colours aren't as rich as on the Dell Inspiron Mini.

But where the Amilo Mini does very well is in the speed stakes: It benefits from having 1GB of RAM, so the pre-installed Windows XP Home and programs run surprisingly quickly for a machine with only a 1.6GHz processor.

Specs-wise the Amilo Mini is good - a 60GB HDD (£279.99 inc VAT - the 80GB version is £289.99 inc VAT); 4-in-1 card reader, USBx2, 1.3megapixel webcam, VGA display slot, PC Express card slot, Bluetooth, Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics, wireless and ethernet networking.

The sound from the Mini's two small speakers, sited just above the keyboard, is not brilliant but is passable for occasional use.

The Atheros wireless detected and connected to my home broadband network without any difficulties and wired networking is equally trouble-free.

And that's about it really: The Amilo Mini is solidly built, with a decent screen, a ghastly keyboard and all the usual netbook bells and whistles.

There's no Linux OS option with the Amilo Mini but, mischievous red devil that I am, I tried it with Ubuntu 8.10 running off a USB pendrive.

Performance was exceptionally fast but unfortunately, so was the Synaptics touchpad which bordered on the unusable without a fair degree of tweaking.

Ubuntu also had problems with the Atheros wi-fi chipset - I had to go hunting on the Ubuntu forums for a solution and only after considerable fiddling did I manage to get the Mini temporarily connected wirelessly.

Disappointingly, I had similar problems with my Huawei 3G mobile broadband dongle (using the 3 network) in the Mini's other USB slot - this normally works fine with Ubuntu-based distros but Network Manager failed to detect it as usual.

Wired ethernet (see picture right) worked fine, however, as did the Mini's sound and screen resolution; so, not bad but still some work to be done if you plan on wiping XP and replacing it with a Linux distribution.

So, to conclude, if you don't plan on writing any long reports on it, it could do you a turn and at these prices represents a reasonable, if unspectacular, investment.

Visit www.fujitsu-siemens.co.uk/, or to buy the Amilo Mini go to www.fujitsu-siemens-shop.co.uk/

Review: Granular 1.0

IS it OK to be superficial sometimes?

The reason I ask is that I was drawn to Granular 1.0, a Linux distribution based on PCLinuxOS, by its snazzy little logo (see right), which made me think of the Far East and ninja throwing stars. Hey... I never said I was deep!

The Granular project hails from India and the development team is led by Punjab-based computer engineering student Anurag Bhandari.

An old friend of this blog, Doctor Saleem Khan, conducted an interview last year with Anurag which is well worth a read to get a good feel for Granular - you can find it here.

Granular comes as an installable 699MB live CD (get version 1.0 here) and with both KDE 3.5.10 and Enlightenment 0.16.999 as your desktop environment options.

The release notes for 1.0 promise "solid stability, out-of-the-box usefulness, great multimedia experience, support for running Windows software, and all of this & much more" and, having used it both as a live CD and an installed system, I have to say those claims are not too far off the mark.

Of course, you would have to be going some to make a mess of any distro based on PCLOS, which has a great reputation for hardware detection and system stability, even if it has been a long, long wait for a new version.

The key features in Granular 1.0 are:

New Granular 1.0 repository
Custom 2.6.26.8 kernel
Major packages include Firefox 3.0.4, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, KOffice 1.6.3, CompizFusion 0.7.6, Gimp 2.6.3, Wine 1.0.1
Out-of-the-box support for audio and video files in Xine and MPlayer
Multimedia plugins for Firefox are now pre-installed (xine-plugin)
Support for read/write to NTFS partitions via ntfs-3g
ATi and NVIDIA official drivers included
Video Installation Tool included to help you install your video drivers
Configuring printers and managing printing made more easy

In live CD mode it does what all such distributions do, with a broad range of applications available to cover just about any task. What interested me, however, was if Granular would run on an ancient Compaq machine I have been forced to call into service as a test PC.

With its 700MHz AMD Duron processor and Nvidia V6 Vanta graphics, 17inch CRT display, no ethernet connection and just 512MB of RAM this old machine really struggles with most KDE-based distros, so how would it cope with Granular 1.0?

The answer, one surprisingly rapid install later, was extremely well. That install, by the way, is as streamlined as they come - double click on the desktop icon, Mandriva's DrakLive installer launches, asks you where you want to put the OS and then puts it there.

The only other question you're asked is where you want to put GRUB (in the Master Boot Record, in my case). Your root/user configuration is done post-install. It's really all quite painless and there's certainly nothing in here to trouble even the greenest Linux newcomer.

A quick word here about the look of Granular: The default KDE desktop sports a silver/grey theme which personally I find quite bland but, obviously, such cosmetic issues are easily addressed, as is the top-of-screen placement of the KDE start menu and panel (I prefer it at the bottom of the screen).I mentioned the old Compaq doesn't have ethernet, so for this review I was hoping it would be able to handle a Sitecom USB wi-fi adaptor: I needn't have worried because Granular's Network Centre had detected it and the Sitecom, in turn, detected my home wireless network.

With my encryption key entered, I had internet access and all it took was a minute, tops. The Compaq is situated at the other side of the house from my router, so the connection was very weak. Still, a major bonus to have wi-fi running.

I also had full sound from the off, with ALSA handling my onboard sound with no need for manual intervention. A word of praise here, too, for the lovely startup/shutdown audio selected by the developers.. very stylish indeed.

Granular comes with a Kicker menu - the side-scrolling version favoured by the SUSE developers and others. It's not my favourite - I'm more of a KDE traditionalist - but I can live with it. What I noticed, however, is that the Granular menus contain a fair amount of duplication.

For example, Applications>Granular links to a lot of options which are also present in both the Granular Control Centre (for hardware configuration and found in System>Configuration>Configure Your Computer) and the KDE Control Centre. This duplication is going to confuse new usrs and possibly requires a re-think by the Granular team in the interests of usability.And while I'm on the subject of menus, I think the developers need to look at the icons they've chosen for the 'Office' section - there are a lot of OpenOffice.org icons in there and they all point to KOffice applications - bit cheeky, that!

While trawling through the menus I noticed a couple of useful utilities, one for creating a live CD and one for live USB systems - this latter one I shall be investigating in greater detail at some time in the future, as live USB systems seem to be the way forward thanks to the explosion of CD drive-less netbooks.

Another useful tool is the Video Installation Tool, which offers a number of ATi and Nvidia driver options. I chose the 71xx driver for my old Vanta card, it went online, grabbed the necessary, installed it and told me to reboot. And, er, that's it - it works really well.Also on the plus side, Granular contains a desktop link to a handy start guide in which the functions of all the major applications and utilities are outlined.One of the Granular team's initial promises was that their distribution would handle multimedia out of the box. They're right - it did. My reviews-special USB memory stick was detected without a problem and from it I was able to play MP3s (in Amarok) and an AVI movie (in the awesome Kaffeine), while my commercial DVD of The Bourne Ultimatum played perfectly in SMPlayer.Granular handles online multimedia equally well, with Apple movie trailers, BBC radio streams and YouTube videos all playing without a problem via Firefox browser plugins.

So, it's pretty much all positives so far and, to be honest, that's just about the way things stay; so would I recommend Granular 1.0?

Well, yes and kind of no. The 'yes' is because it does what it says it will do and does it very well indeed - simple installation, great hardware detection, easy configuration, multimedia-friendly, a good choice of applications (plus Synaptic for adding more from the Granular repository).

On the downside, the menu is a bit messy, the desktop appearance is drab and, this being the big point, it doesn't really do anything that its parent distro, PCLinuxOS, cannot do - and there's a new, 2009 version of PCLOS due sometime soon.

While I am very pleasantly surprised by Granular 1.0, I'm not sufficiently impressed to have it replace my current distributions of choice - CrunchBang Linux and Linux Mint.

If, however, you have never tried a Linux distribution - and therefore have nothing to compare Granular with apart from, perhaps, Microsoft Windows - then this distribution will fit your needs extremely well.

Review: Apple MacBook Pro and 24" LED Cinema Display

I HAVE been using Apple computers every day of my working life for nigh-on 20 years; my newspaper office hums with the heat from hundreds of Apple machines of every generation.

It is this long relationship which means I seldom see Apple computers as anything other than tools for getting a job done.

That attitude shifted slightly with the arrival of the super-slim but limited MacBook Air, but it shifted a lot more with the unboxing of my 15.4inch MacBook Pro review unit.

Before it was out-punched by the new 17inch MacBook Pro, unveiled during the same week as the Consumer Electronics Show 2009 in Las Vegas, this 15.4inch machine was Apple's top-of-the-range portable.

And it brought me as close as I have ever come to seeing an Apple device as something more than just a mere work tool.

This machine is a thing of beauty, with its seamless, aluminium unibody construction, its gentle, slender curves, its sheer presence.Moreover, the MacBook Pro is everything that the style-statement MacBook Air is not: It's a genuinely useful, genuinely capable, powerhouse of a machine.

It isn't just the unibody construction of the 5.5lb MacBook Pro that is different - the entire internal architecture has been restructured so that it now contains a dual Nvidia graphics solution.

The integrated GeForce 9400M graphics take care of your routine, daily computing needs like surfing, office tasks, emailing etc.

But when you become more demanding - for example, when editing video or large image files - the GeForce 9600M discrete graphics chip, with 512MB of GDDR3 RAM, kicks in.

It's a compelling combination which, when married to a bright, rich LED display, a maximum 4GB of RAM and Intel Core 2 Duo processors running up to 2.8GHz, makes the Pro a stick-on buy for graphics/multimedia professionals.

Connectivity is well catered for: Unlike the new 17inch MacBook Pro, the 15.4inch still has a Firewire slot, plus Gigabit wired ethernet and wi-fi (the Pro's AirPort Extreme 802.11n found and connected to my home broadband network quickly and flawlessly), an Express Card/34 slot, Bluetooth and two USB ports.There's one other slot on the left side of the Pro, a Mini DisplayPort for use with the new 24inch LED Cinema Display, which I'll come to later.

The usual slot-loading, DVD-burning SuperDrive takes up the bulk of the right side of the Pro and it played my commercial DVDs without a hitch, just as I expected it to.

Given the pro nature of this machine, storage is crucial and there's a range of serial ATA hard disk drives available capable of taking 250-320GB of data (plus, you can add a 128GB solid state drive as an optional extra, but here you're pushing this purchase into very expensive territory).

That's the vital statistics taken care of: What's the MacBook Pro like to use? Well, it's a beauty.

That 15.4inch, 1440x900 resolution, LED-backlit, glossy widescreen display is as good as it gets, no matter whose name is on the lid: It's big, bright and colourful enough for me to be able to watch a DVD movie on it from across a modest-sized lounge.

I had some initial concerns about the shallow, individually-spaced keys on the Pro's handily backlit keyboard, mainly to do with the lack of depth in the tactile feedback, but more prolonged use proved me wrong.

Where I wasn't wrong, however, was with the multi-touch, scratch-proof glass trackpad.

I like being able to use finger gestures to manipulate files and images, and in theory I like the idea of being able to press anywhere on the pad to instigate a mouse-click, but what I definitely do not like is the actual feel and sound you get when actually doing it - it seems to somehow cheapen the MacBook Pro experience.

It's okay for occasional mobile use but, were I to buy a MacBook Pro (see current UK prices at the end of this article), I would also invest in the wireless Mighty Mouse for use on my desk.

I mentioned earlier the Pro has a Mini DisplayPort: It's to connect the laptop to Apple's 24inch LED Cinema Display, which also came with my laptop.

Bearing all the usual Apple styling hallmarks - slender, sleek, clean lines - the display is a fine piece of design.

But at a hefty £635 for what is, to all intents and purposes, a (very) glorified monitor, I would be struggling to recommend it as a worthwhile accessory. For that price you could get a much larger HDTV and Blu-ray player.Don't get me wrong, it is a lovely piece of kit - it adds three extra USB ports, stereo speakers and another iSight webcam (there's one on the MacBook Pro, of course) - which when combined with the Pro makes for an impressive desktop package, but it pushes your outlay well over £2,000.

Personally I would be happy to 'live with' the MacBook Pro's 15.4inch display.

The MacBook Pro range starts from £1,369, the 15.4inch machine I reviewed costs from £1,712 and you will pay from £1,949 for the new 17inch MacBook Pro.

Products are available in an Apple Store or online at: store.apple.com/uk or for stocklist call 0800 048 0408 (in the UK only).

Objects Of Desire #1 - Palm Pre smartphone

MY name is Steven and I'm a gadgetaholic.

There, I've confessed, and I'm feeling better already. And the current object of my unfathomable desire? The Palm Pre smartphone, unveiled last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Who'da thunk it, eh? Palm, one-time kings of the PDA world coming out with what looks like being the first really serious contender to Apple's all-conquering iPhone.

I'm guessing that anyone who invested in a T-Mobile G1, the first mobile phone to use Google's Android platform, might just be working out how to kick their own backsides 'round about now... the curse of the early adopter, eh!

Look at the subtle, curved sliding design of the Pre - it's truly a thing of beauty.And it's certainly no slouch in the hardware department, either. Here's a quick run-down:

3.1in, 320 x 480 multi-touch screen
Touch-sensitive area extends below the display to provide a virtual centre button
Qwerty keyboard
A TI OMAP processor
8Gb of storage
3-megapixel camera with flash
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS and EVDO (in the US)

And then there's the operating system which seems to have universally impressed anyone lucky enough to have a) been in Vegas and b) got their hands on one.

Palm WebOS has clearly been designed to compete with the look and feel of the iPhone. A slick application carousel provides a neat way to manage the operating system’s multi-tasking capabilities.

Here, courtesy of The Register website, is some amazing footage of what WebOS can do:

To add to the chatter about Pre, Palm introduced an optional Touchstone wireless charging dock. This holds the Pre in place with magnets and uses inductive coupling to charge the battery and sync data with a computer.

Oh heck, all of a sudden my Nokia N96 is starting to feel like a lump of 20th century technology that's wearing a hole in my pocket.