World’s 1st Real Smartbook Review

There’s been a lot of bluster from some big players about the new category of mobile devices called smartbooks. Smartbooks are small netbook/notebook/clamshell form factor devices based around ARM processors rather than x86 processors found in your typical netbook/notebook. We went to Shenzen where we were actually able to buy the new Lanyu LY-EB01 eBook. Read on for our review.

Caveats
We didn’t go down to BestBuy and purchase our Lanyu eBook. We called the company and ordered it and had to pick it up in Shenzen, China. That’s not exactly your typical consumer sales channel but that is how Lanyu is selling the device at the moment and it is available to buy.  

Usually when you’re reading a netbook review for example, the product has been placed with the reviewers by a PR or marketing flack representing the company whose product is being reviewed. They might also provide some literature about the position of the product and its expected performance. We didn’t tell Lanyu why we wanted to buy the device, we just bought it.

About Smartbooks
People are excited about smartbooks because they should bring to market some long sought after features that netbooks and notebooks haven’t quite been able to. Features like really long battery life, instant on, small size and weight, all at a comparatively cheap price. We paid just 666 RMB (US$98) for volumes of 1 for the Lanyu eBook! Before you read on, if you're not sure what a smartbook is, brush up your knowledge with our guide that introduces smartbooks.

Smartbooks are typically going to be based on ARM architecture SOCs. That will likely mean a Windows CE or Google Android operating system and attendant applications. ARM processors tend to run in a variety of SKUs in terms of performance (from about 266MHz ~ 1GHz) and are made by a large number of different manufacturers. ARM and x86 don’t exactly compare directly MHz for MHz so bear that in mind as well.

About Our Reviews
We haven’t done an official review before but we plan to do many. So in attempting to create useful formats for our reviews we’ve take this approach that:

1.    Usability Score (out of 10)
a.    This includes first impressions, build quality, how the hardware device itself handles and feels.
2.    Performance Report (out of 10)
a.    We’re not big fans of benchmarks so here we’ll mainly just be looking at how well the common applications the devices are targeted at fare under our user experience. We’ll also try to provide video at this stage so you can see for yourself.
3.    Conclusions (out of 10)
a.    Value, market position and our general feeling about how successful we think the product will be. Also we can make any adjustments to the score that we feel we need to give the product to achieve its fair rating out of 30. Call it wiggle room if you will.

Lanyu LY-EB01 eBook


First Impressions
The packaging for the Lanyu LY-EB01 eBook is a little confusing but a bit more consumer oriented than I expected. It looks fairly professional but the front cover doesn’t show a product name it just says “7” Notebook” and “Windows CE”. The backside has a few features listed including:  “Battery standby time 1 day, QQ, MSN, Skype, Weight 0.6kg, MP3, MP4, Music play, Movie play, Photo, Game, Wifi, Internet, office, PDF, andE-mail”. In the box you get the device itself, a power cord and a users manual. The users manual is in English and has descriptions of the different bits of hardware on the device (card reader explanation etc) and some brief descriptions of how to set up your wi-fi and play media on the device. We had no trouble whatsoever setting up the wi-fi quickly and easily.

Pulling the eBook out of the box I have to say I was impressed by the build quality of the device. At that price I was expecting something a lot flimsier but it actually feels quite sturdy and the Sony “PSP-like” piano black finish on the cover of the device is quite attractive. Like the PSP its also a fingerprint magnet.

A walk around the device shows a card reader and ear/microphone ports on one side. Along the front a series of indicator lights for power, battery, number lock, caps lock and scroll lock. The opposite side has 2 USB ports and the back of the device has another USB port, an ethernet port and the power connection.

The front screen of the device is surrounded by large, and quite loud (but tinny sounding) speakers. It also has what “looks” like a webcam but seems to actually be the world’s tiniest vanity mirror :).

The mouse pad is interesting. Its quite responsive for zipping around the screen. The left and right click panels beside it are not quite as impressive. They work ok, but are could have been a little wider to make for easier clicking. The mousepad itself can be clicked for a left click effect.

The battery is “non-removable” as in, its screwed into place. I suspect it won’t be long before we do a tear down of the device so when that happens we’ll try and get more information about that side of things. The charger and cord are incredibly small and that is certainly one of the great benefits of the smartbook category.

Getting into the Smartbook
Booting up the device takes 28 seconds while everything initializes. That’s not instant on but certainly a lot faster than my notebook. It also only takes 3 seconds to shut off. Considering it takes 2.5 years for my notebook to shut down that’s quite good as well.

The 800X600 screen of the eBook itself while small actually is quite bright and doesn’t “feel” too small for moving around through the different applications.

Opening a web page though does expose the limitations of the “screen and if you’re buying a smartbook as a replacement for a netbook I think you’ll be a little let down by the Internet experience the device provides. You can’t change the screen resolution and a lot of sites won’t fit within the boundries of the screen meaning you have to use the scroll bars (bottom and right of the screen) to view around a site. A quick visit to youtube.com is the best way to really see the limitations of the IE browser running on Win CE 5.0. In fact Youtube gives you a warning that they will be phasing out support for your browser when you arrive.

On the device packaging Skype and QQ are listed. Neither of those software programs seemed to be on the device out of the box, but after searching around the 1.5GB flash drive that includes a “software package” folder we did manage to find Skype, although it wouldn’t start up and also Opera, which wouldn’t fire up either.

The keyboard is…. small, but that’s a challenge all 7” smartbooks will face. It’s the same challenge that early 8.9” netbooks also had. Will smartbooks evolve into larger devices the same way netbooks have? That will probably depend on the performance of the hardware and also the evolution of Android/Chrome.

Under the hood
The Lanyu eBook was reported to have a 266MHz ARM processor from Anyka when it first appeared on the web. When we checked the properties of the My Computer on the device it shows a AKARM,ARM 920-AKCHIP. The only information we found on the internet about this chip was this page which says it comes from AMD (rather than Anyka as we reported earlier) and that it’s a 533MHz sku. I don’t think that site is particularly reliable so it safe to say we’re not really 100% sure about the processor under the hood. Personally my money is on Anyka.

I would say however that the applications that are included seem quite responsive if not quite “snappy” in terms of general use. We’re going to take a closer look at the devices media playback properties and office performance in tomorrow’s video coverage of the device.

We do know you get a gig and a half of memory with the device. Which will make the card reader slot invaluable. That sounds small, and it is, but there are a couple of benefits to that. No hard drive really drops the weight of the device down. At .6kg this device is incredibly portable and light weight.

There are 3 USB ports as we mentioned and pulling the screenshots off the device to a USB memory stick proved that 1 of those USB ports was completely non-functional. I tried several different brands of memory and none worked.


Part 2