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Right. Let's have a look at the actual machine, shall we? Since it's got a little sticker on it saying "Windows Vista™ BASIC" it gets tarred with the same brush as the atrocious operating system.
It's an HP 6710b. I will mostly be comparing it with my own three-year-old iBook G4.
The physical impression is that it's thick, noisy and probably was put together by Fisher-Price. The iBook probably is a bit heavier (I haven't checked), but it's a lot more solid-feeling. This thing feels like it'd break in half if you grabbed it too hard. I really don't want to imagine what would happen if I did something wildly unlikely like accidentally dropping it while putting it in my backpack.
It's got a bucketload of connectors spread randomly around the edges. The placement isn't too bad, unless that if you, say, connect a mouse to the USB socket on the upper right side, the USB cable will most of the time block the DVD tray from extending. A lot of the connectors are marked with little symbols around the keyboard, to make it easier to find them. Not all of them, though, and the choice is a bit... odd. I don't know about you people, but I sure use the headphone connector more often than I use the FireWIre one. Maybe the thought is that you learn where the common ones are, so you only need symbols for the unusual ones.
The area around the keyboard also has a few touch-sensitive areas. A trackpad, of course, which isn't too bad (except that it has the drifting mouse pointer problem). There are spots for volume control and something that brings up a dialog box titled "Presentation Settings". I haven't investigated what it actually does. And there's the fingerprint sensor. Which is nifty. Logging in by fingerprint is neat. Unlocking by fingerprint could have been neat, if it didn't need several mouseclicks or keypresses first. Unfortunately, they've placed the sensor right next to where I want to rest the outer edge of my right hand wle typing. Which means that a bunch of times each day a little dialog pops up, steals focus from whatever I was doing and tells me to drag my finger across the sensor more slowly.
Altogether, using this machine has made me appreciate my iBook a whole lot more.
It's an HP 6710b. I will mostly be comparing it with my own three-year-old iBook G4.
The physical impression is that it's thick, noisy and probably was put together by Fisher-Price. The iBook probably is a bit heavier (I haven't checked), but it's a lot more solid-feeling. This thing feels like it'd break in half if you grabbed it too hard. I really don't want to imagine what would happen if I did something wildly unlikely like accidentally dropping it while putting it in my backpack.
It's got a bucketload of connectors spread randomly around the edges. The placement isn't too bad, unless that if you, say, connect a mouse to the USB socket on the upper right side, the USB cable will most of the time block the DVD tray from extending. A lot of the connectors are marked with little symbols around the keyboard, to make it easier to find them. Not all of them, though, and the choice is a bit... odd. I don't know about you people, but I sure use the headphone connector more often than I use the FireWIre one. Maybe the thought is that you learn where the common ones are, so you only need symbols for the unusual ones.
The area around the keyboard also has a few touch-sensitive areas. A trackpad, of course, which isn't too bad (except that it has the drifting mouse pointer problem). There are spots for volume control and something that brings up a dialog box titled "Presentation Settings". I haven't investigated what it actually does. And there's the fingerprint sensor. Which is nifty. Logging in by fingerprint is neat. Unlocking by fingerprint could have been neat, if it didn't need several mouseclicks or keypresses first. Unfortunately, they've placed the sensor right next to where I want to rest the outer edge of my right hand wle typing. Which means that a bunch of times each day a little dialog pops up, steals focus from whatever I was doing and tells me to drag my finger across the sensor more slowly.
Altogether, using this machine has made me appreciate my iBook a whole lot more.
