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DEFINITION: Shanzai [San-zai -alt. sp.Shanzhai] 1. mountain fortress/bandit 2. a vendor, who operates a business without observing the traditional rules or practices often resulting in innovative and unusual products or business models.
DEFINITION: Shanzai [San-zai -alt. sp.Shanzhai] 1. mountain fortress/bandit 2. a vendor, who operates a business without observing the traditional rules or practices often resulting in innovative and unusual products or business models.
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 Today we continue our review of the Lanyu eBook smarbook. We take a closer look at the software performance, give you a look at the device on video and wrap things up with our final conclusions on the world’s 1st smartbook review. Performance Report Performance Score =3 out of 10
The Lanyu eBook is one of the first ARM-based consumer devices that attempt to do what a PC does, and where software is concerned, it soon becomes apparent that the adage is true; eschewing x86 means there are obvious draw backs. Win CE Win CE as an OS feels pretty much like Win 98 with a hangover. It’s just not as slick or sophisticated, even when compared to a Windows XP basic install. Right-click drop-down menus are stripped to bare a minimum. Windows are open maximized or not at all. I’m perhaps being a little harsh. Microsoft developed Win CE as a barebones OS for embedded devices, not as a consumer oriented product. There-in lies the rub. The Internet But there are other very basic niggles besides the OS. What about the core usage of this new smartbook device category? Browsing the web. The Internet Explorer that comes bundled with Win CE is so outdated that sites like youtube warn you of impending support failure, implore you to upgrade to something else. And I mean anything else. Good luck getting Firefox, Opera or Chrome running. I mean, man, you are going to miss tabbed browsing! And flash support for youtube videos? That will remain a distant dream until Adobe pulls its finger out and offers us a working ‘flash-lite’ codec. Multimedia savvy web browsing does not yet exist on ARM. Fact. Media Playback Video playback of Microsoft-friendly codecs worked out ok, but come on, you’d expect Windows Media Video to have no problems on a Windows Media Player. You try playing your favorite DivX or Xvid video. Think again. VLC player? Not in this world. You’re pretty much stuck with what Microsoft has given you; the open source world is a distant memory; move on, nothing to see here. Productivity Applications And then there are the office productivity apps. I know Win CE 5.0 is not the latest version, but please. Word on this platform has become nothing more than a simple text editor, (no spell checker, a choice of seven fonts?) Excel is half the man he used to be, and Power Point? Let’s not go there. Again, anybody half familiar with Office XP or above will find these applications to be frustratingly minimal. It’s like stepping back in time. Conclusions Conclusions Adjustment Score =5 out of 10
The good, is that getting our hands on the Lanyu eBook really made it easy to understand just how light and portable these products really could be. Priced at US$98 we were also extremely impressed with the build quality. Yes the speakers were tinny and the keyboard cramped (for a western-sized adult male) but perhaps as an inexpensive OLPC challenger this device might have some potential in terms of form factor. The bad is that it’s an early unit entering the market with the older Win CE 5 software (not even the latest version of Win CE!), and a very low spec in term of MHz processor (266MHz… we think). The product can just about do everything. It can play music and movies, you can create docs, you can easily connect to the internet. But it does all of those things very poorly. Even feature phones like the iPhone completely out perform this device in terms of user experience, and feature phones and netbooks are the competition for this device. Those are mature products that do their jobs well and attractively which is what users want and are used to. Final Score 7+3+5=15 out of 30
Lanyu eBook Video Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!  Final, Final Conclusions With much higher spec’d processors on the market and newer operating systems (Android anyone?) it would be really interesting to see just how well a smartbook could really perform.
We’ve given the Lanyu eBook a 15/30 score which is just about right as we see this early entry into the smartbook segment as about half way there. Bigger players, with higher performance product offerings and probably most important, better channels to consumer markets will have a much great chance of success than Lanyu’s eBook. Part 1 Related articles |
Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!
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Seen this model here, and not impressed about it. Simply said. seen 30 or more different Windows tablet models in Singapore, Shang...
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All good points. It will be interesting to see what enrolls in this battle
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