battery website

It’s substantial but surprisingly light. Easy to grip. Beautiful. Rigid. Starkly designed. The glass is a little rubbery but it could be my sweaty hands. And it’s fasssstttt.

Apple didn’t really sell this point, but it’s the single biggest benefit of the iPad: speed. It feels at least a generation faster than the iPhone 3GS. Lags and waits are gone, and the OS and apps respond just as quickly as you’d hope. Rotating between portrait and landscape modes, especially, is where this new horsepower manifests in the OS.

Build
Imagine, if you will, a super light unibody MacBook Pro that’s smaller, thinner and way, way, way lighter. Or, from a slightly different perspective, think about a bigger iPhone that’s been built with unibody construction. The iPad really does feel like some amalgamation of these two product lines from Apple. And, in the hands, it feels great—not too heavy at all.

The screen looked nice, and it’s able to display even small text crisply. Touch responds like a dream.

But one point of the build seems odd. It’s the Home button. In portrait mode, hitting the Home button is far less natural than on an iPhone because your thumbs naturally rest in the middle of each side of the case (not the bottom). A Kindle-like side Home button may not have been a horrible idea, even if it broke up the stoic minimalism of the case a bit.

iBooks
It’s an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn’t seem to strains the eyes—but time will tell on that.

Keyboard
Typing in portrait is better than anticipated but still quite a stretch for our average-sized hands, which means that letters like F G and H will take a moderate conditioning for some. What about in landscape mode, sitting flat on the table? Well this is problematic too, as the iPad sort of wobbles. The back is not perfectly flat, meaning your typing surface is never perfectly flat, so the virtual keyboard becomes that much more difficult to use.

Pictures
Pinch, zoom, whatever—like we said, it’s fast—the photo app is faster than iPhoto performs on an aging Core2Duo laptop.

Apps
Apps can play in their native resolution, or be 2x uprezzed for the screen. How does it look? An ATV game we tried actually looked pretty good—limited more by its base polygon count than the scaling process itself. Bottom line: it’s about as elegant solution as Apple could have offered, even if that graphics won’t be razor sharp.

Browsing
Over Wi-Fi, Gizmodo loaded quickly. The 9.7-inch screen is an excellent size for reading the site. You can pinch zoom, but you won’t need to. Of course, on such a pretty web browsing experience, not having Flash makes the big, empty video boxes in the middle of a page is pretty disappointing. Put differently, the fatal flaw of Apple’s mobile browser has never been more apparent.

Dell recently issued a BIOS fix for its Studio 17 with Core i7, designed to solve a serious crashing issue. However, after the release of Intel’s new Core i5 processor and a number of vocal user complaints about its Core i7 product, the company has made the lower-powered and priced Core i5 the Studio 17’s default CPU choice. Though, as of this posting, we did not see a Core i7 option on Dell.com, a rep assured us that the Core i7 model, labeled the Dell Studio 1747 has not been discontinued and will return to the site within days.

When we reviewed the Dell Studio 17 with Intel’s Core i7 processor (aka Dell Studio 1747) in November, we gave the notebook a 4-star rating due to its blazing performance and relatively affordable price. However, we noted two major problems we experienced with our review unit. First, the initial system we received stopped booting (and made several beeping noises) just after testing had been completed and, second, we noticed that the exterior of the chassis got hot, with the underside of the system registering a troubling 112-degrees Fahrenheit after just 15 minutes of playing a Hulu video.

We returned the first unit to Dell, which repaired it and sent it back to us a couple of days later, saying that the first issue we encountered was an isolated incident. The repaired unit worked, but we did experience experience a couple of mysterious blue screen crashes the first time we tried to play Hulu videos on it, though these seemed to disappear on subsequent tests. After we informed Dell about the uncomfortably hot temperatures, they sent us a second review unit to test. This second unit  did not break or crash, but was just as hot as the original.

Readers Respond

Without having tested an entire assembly line of Dell Studio 17s with Core i7, it was impossible for us to tell if the one defective review unit we received was a fluke or a harbinger of trouble. However, after the product began shipping, we began receiving negative reports from many users, claiming that their Dell Studio 1747s (with Core i7) had died after a few days or hours of use.

A number of users also posted on forums that their Dell Studio 1747s slowed down after intense use. For example, a French-speaking user posted this experiment, which claims that after running two CPU-intensive programs, Prime 95 and Furmark, the CPU speed dropped from 1.6 to 1.06-GHz. Notebookcheck.com, a professional review site, did not see a clock speed drop but did see their test notebook’s 3DMark06 scores drop significantly after 12 hours of intense use. We did not test our review unit for performance throttling before we had to return it to Dell.

Dell’s BIOS Update

Recently, Dell  issued a BIOS update that fixes what they call the “7 beeps problem,” the same issue that bricked our first review unit. Dell advises that, if you own a Dell Studio 1747 that is working properly, you should install the BIOS update to insure you never get the 7 beeps problem. If your Dell Studio 1747 has already stopped booting, you can call Dell support or try re-seating the CMOS battery to bring the system back to life.

Whether the new BIOS update (termed the A04 BIOS) makes the system cooler or resolves its alleged performance issues remains to be seen. If you have a Dell Studio 1747, please let us know if the BIOS update has improved your system by posting in the comments below.

Own another Dell notebook or netbook? Sound off here on what you think of the brand.

Like other netbook makers, Acer is refreshing its line with the new Intel Atom N450 processor (Pine Trail), which promises similar performance but greater endurance. Also like its competitors, Acer has tweaked the design, adding a keyboard with the same style as its larger notebooks and trimming down the chassis. But most significantly, it’s also trimmed the price: though our review model came in at $349, the Aspire One 532h starts at $299, a hundred bucks less than competing brands. But does price trump all, even in the commodified netbook market?

Design

The 532h is a bit of a departure from Acer’s previous 10.1-inch netbooks, the Aspire One D150 and D250. In fact, it looks more like Acer’s 11.6-inch netbook, the Aspire One 751h. Instead of a solid color, the lid of the Onyx Blue 532h fades from a dark metallic blue to black. Other color options included Garnet Red and Silver Matrix. This treatment makes the netbook look much more refined. However, the glossy finish, which is also found beneath the keyboard, picks up fingerprints quickly. There’s now a lot less room at the top of the deck; the keyboard is shoved right up to the top, and the power button is crammed in by the left hinge.

Like the Toshiba mini NB305-N410, Acer saw fit to change the design of the six-cell battery on the 532h. No longer does it jut out the back; it’s now tucked in underneath, shaving three quarters of an inch off the footprint. The area beneath the display and between the hinges has a sharp edge as opposed to the smoother curves of the D250. At 10.2 x 7.3 x 1.0 inches and 2.8 pounds, the 532h is about the same size, shape, and weight as most 10-inch netbooks.

Heat

After playing a Hulu video at full screen for 15 minutes, the touchpad on the 532h registered 92 degrees Fahrenheit, the space between the G and H keys was 91 degrees, and the middle of the underside reached 97 degrees. While we don’t consider any this heat to be troublesome, the temperature of 110 degrees in the left front corner was a cause for concern.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Instead of a traditional keyboard as on its older netbooks, the 532h has Acer’s FineTip keyboard, which is completely flat on top, and has a slight space between each key. Also, it’s larger than when compared to older netbooks: whereas on the D250 there was approximately half an inch of space on either side of the keyboard, on the 532h there’s less than a quarter of an inch unused. While it looks identical to the layout on the 11.6-inch 751h, the 532’s keyboard is smaller and the keys have a shallow pitch to them, which made typing somewhat more difficult. We much prefer the keyboards on the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE-P (Seashell) and the Toshiba mini NB305, which have island-style layouts and more space between the keys.

We’re also pleased to see that the touchpad on the 532h is much larger than on previous Acer netbooks. At 2.6 x 1.4 inches, it’s positively spacious compared to the previous generation—though still not as large as that on the Toshiba mini NB305. The multitouch-enabled touchpad is covered with a number of tiny dots that distinguish it from the glossy deck, making it practically friction-free. While we wish the metallic blue mouse button beneath was split into two, it’s sufficiently large and has a nice response.

Aliph announced the latest version of its noise-cancelling Jawbone headset today, and, unlike last time, it promises more than just better-than-ever call quality. The headset rocks a new design, the first major change in its looks we’ve seen in two years, as well as voice prompts for things such as caller ID and telling the user how many hours of battery life remain.

Although the headset has one overarching shape– shorter and chunkier, kind of like the original Jawbone– it comes in six different colors and textures, each of which has a cute name– and a corresponding voice. However, users can cherry pick which voice they want using MyTALK, a new Web interface also announced today.

Equally important: Aliph also dropped the price to a more reasonable $99.99. Its Jawbone headset, up until now, has always cost $129, making it the most expensive earpiece on the market, even among a growing field of premium noise-cancelling models.

It happens every day. You hit the power button on your laptop and you wait. First it seems like nothing is happening. The screen is black, but your power light is on and you hear low whirring noises. Then you see the logo of the laptop manufacturer and some text. You continue to wait as the screen goes black again, and then you hear more mysterious whirring noises. Finally, you see the Windows logo that tells you your operating system is still booting.

This slow and confusing preboot period occurs when the system’s BIOS (basic input/output system) performs a POST (power on self test) and can last for 10 seconds or more, dramatically increasing overall start times. On our tests over the past couple of years, notebook start times took an average of 55 to 66 seconds, across all the major Windows and Mac systems we tested.

Even so called “instant-on” operating systems like DeviceVM’s Splashtop and Google’s upcoming Chrome OS cannot begin loading until the BIOS has completed its POST.

“In the ’90s, people were complaining that BIOSes took a minute [to POST]. So there was a big push from Microsoft and the BIOS makers to start getting down to 10 or 15 seconds,” said Brian Richardson, senior technical marketing engineer at American Megatrends, a leading BIOS vendor. “Now people are used to turning on the TiVo that instantly has that program from last night, and they want that experience on their computers.”

Fortunately, the push for faster start-ups continues. BIOS manufacturers and notebook vendors are hard at work cutting the POST time down to a second or less.

UEFI BIOS Technology Promises Improvements

The POST process takes so long because the BIOS has to perform some critical tasks simultaneously. First, it must test to see if there have been any changes in the hardware configuration since the last boot. If there is a different amount of RAM or a different The storage device that holds your OS, programs, and data.
Learn Morehard drive, the BIOS has to pass that information along to the operating system. Next, the BIOS must test all relevant system devices, including the keyboard, screen, and USB ports.

After the POST process, the BIOS relays a detailed description of each component to the OS. It doesn’t help that most of today’s notebooks employ the same 16-bit legacy BIOS technology that computers have been using for years.

Long POST times and even longer Windows boots could become a thing of the past thanks to the new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) standard. “UEFI is designed to get all the BIOS vendors and hardware manufacturers to decide what they would take from the old BIOS specs, then decide what they would leave out,” Richardson explained.

Last September, BIOS-maker Phoenix Technologies demonstrated a Lenovo ThinkPad T400s that posted in 1.4 seconds and booted Windows 7 ($75.99) in an additional 10 seconds. That’s a 32-second time savings over the Editors’ Choice-winning T400s model we tested in June 2009. The test system had been specially modified with a custom BIOS for demonstration purposes, but it indicates the timing of things to come.

Leaner Booting Means Faster POST Times

These tweaks yield faster speeds by making the BIOS more intelligent. If a task serves no purpose, it gets cut from the POST process. For example, the BIOS can be programmed to detect if there are devices plugged into a USB port. If so, it will load the USB software. If not, it will skip that process.

UEFI BIOSes achieve faster boots by initializing multiple system devices simultaneously, according to Steve Jones, Phoenix Technologies’ vice president and chief scientist of core systems. “There’s time spent doing things like blinking the keyboard LED, testing the keyboard controller, or sending an initialize command to the disk drive and waiting for it to become ready,” he said. “And while the keyboard is initializing or the disk is waiting to respond, we can do some other initializations at the same time.”

Still, a lot of the burden of decreasing boot times is going to fall on component manufacturers. “I don’t do the video initialization,” said American Megatrend’s Richardson. “I hand it off to a piece of code known as an option ROM, and that is provided by the manufacturer of the video hardware,” Nevertheless, Richardson says his company works closely with component makers (such as the leading Graphics chips are responsible for processing all images sent to your computer?s display.
Learn Moregraphics card producers) to speed up initialization times.

While UEFI-based BIOSes are available on a few laptops today, including the Apple MacBook ($730.00), MSI Wind, and Sony SR Series, none of these systems have a 1- or 2-second POST time. Richardson predicts that within the next year “you’re going to see companies that have like 2- to 3-second [POSTs].”

Notebook Makers Look to Speed Their Boots

A number of vendors have taken steps to make their notebooks boot faster, even if they don’t have highly optimized BIOSes. To coincide with the launch of Windows 7, Lenovo introduced its Enhanced Experience program, which promised to boot the company’s consumer and ThinkPad notebooks up to 33 and 56 percent faster than they did with Vista. As of press time, Lenovo had yet to install a UEFI BIOS on any of its notebooks. However, the company has already cut boot times by tweaking its legacy BIOSes and by using faster-loading drivers and applications in Windows. These changes apply to all of its current Windows 7 notebooks.

“We’ve got our hooks into every component of boot,” said Lenovo software performance architect John Mese. “We look at how the driver behaves at boot, shut down, and resume.”

When a wireless card driver was taking 4 seconds to load, Lenovo contacted the card’s manufacturer and helped them rewrite the driver to lower its load time to a mere 200 milliseconds, knocking 3.8 seconds off of the boot time. Lenovo has been working hard to make its own software utilities load faster. In some cases, Mese said, it’s been better to delay loading part of a utility until the system has finished booting. When it comes to the ThinkVantage Power Manager under Windows 7, for example, portions of it won’t load until “the desktop has fully painted and the CPU has quiesced.”

ASUS is another manufacturer that is speeding its boot times by delaying utility loads. Its new Fast Boot utility allows users to selectively delay the loading of tray icons and startup services; enabling Fast Boot on the ASUS UL80 ($849.00) we previously reviewed shaved about 15 percent (57 seconds to 50 seconds) off of its boot time.

Sleep Mode vs Fast Booting

All of these efforts to improve boot times beg the question: Why boot at all? Users can cut their start times dramatically on any of today’s notebooks by using suspend/resume. When the system is asleep, the RAM is still powered and the operating system, programs, and data remain in active memory. Opening the lid or hitting a button allows a notebook to resume where it left off, usually within just a few seconds.

However, if you don’t plan on using the notebook again for several hours (or days), you’ll drain battery power in sleep mode. And because some notebooks do a poor job of resuming from sleep, many consumers don’t trust that everything will work properly once you lift that notebook lid.

“Many users choose not to use [sleep] simply because when they press the On button to resume, the machine might bring back Windows, but without a desktop, or with the Wi-Fi radio in a state that does not allow a reconnection,” said Phoenix Technologies’ Jones. “We pay for the performance with instability. Perhaps booting will become so quick and simple that [sleep] will become unnecessary.”

Another reason vendors are focusing on the speed of cold boots is that consumers don’t regularly use sleep now. “We’re talking about the average user, and all they know is that they press a button, and then stare at the screen, waiting for this thing to complete so they can start using the computer,” said ASUS marketing director Vivian Lien. “Giving them the ability to boot faster is a better experience overall.”

Whether the computer is waking from sleep, resuming from hibernation, or powering up from a cold boot, one thing is clear: We won’t have to wait long for an end to long waits.