WiBrain B1E UMPC Reviews
November 25th, 2007 | by Fitri |
A price of $ 699 and offer a variety of options makes a useful contribution, WiBrain B1E avoids two pitfalls that commonly beset UMPC - high price and low usability. Its price is the cheapest UMPC we looked at is $ 300 less than the Fujitsu LifeBook U810 and a fraction of the cost of the OQO Model 02 or the Sony VAIO UX390 which approach or exceed the $ 2000 mark. The WiBrain B1E is also the best UMPC we tested in terms of the ease with which it lets you navigate through Windows, serving a touchpad, a split keyboard, and a touch screen. Unfortunately, it’s also the slowest UMPC we tested, and its battery life is poor. Still, Windows XP found generally receptive, and you are not buying a UMPC for its raw power. Despite its disappointing performance and potentially noisy fan (below), the WiBrain B1E UMPC remains our favorite so far, simply because it is easier to use and can be done for a sane price.
Measuring 7.5 inches wide by 3.2 inches deep by 1.1 inches thick and weighing 1.2 pounds, WiBrain B1E feels overstuffed as a Sony PSP (again, it is light on the end UMPC of scale that ranges from 1 to 2 pounds). With the accompanying controls a large display screen, you own and operate the WiBrain as you would Sony portable game system. The 50 keyboard is split text input about as comfortable as any keyboard allows thumb. The keys feel firm and solid provide tactile feedback, and four keys are carefully placed on both sides: Function, Alt, Ctrl and Shift.
Below the keyboard are useful navigation keys on the left and a touch pad on the right. The buttons on the lower left corner - to the left and right mouse buttons, page up and page down button, and four arrow keys along with a volume rocker - do by pointing and clicking on Windows feel very natural when used with 1.1×1. 2-inch touch pad. The touch pad features horizontal and vertical scrolling, and it has proved so useful that we were keeping the needle hidden in his house under WiBrain. (Assets touchscreen works with your fingertips, too, but the small icons make it a challenge for the least greedy of us.) Also, the parties are using the scale of the touch screen least at ease than usual with both hands, in cooperation with the touch pad and mouse buttons. When using the stylus, I found a balance between WiBrain in my left hand while operating the pen above or below the screen.
While WiBrain enjoys an intelligent layout that makes the least frustrating UMPC we used, it is far from the sleekest research - perhaps that honour goes to the OQO model 2. Some may describe the overall design that clumsy, but I am more than willing to share a bit in the department expects to increase functionality. One aspect of the design that does disturb this review, however, is the WiBrain cooling fan. Just running Windows caused to rotate the fan rpm levels which creates a loud noise and distraction. I reviewed a prototype of the gadget import site Dynamism and was told by my friend here that the fan was set at its highest level and the finished product will be shipped with an application that will control the fan speed. Yet, we do not know how many times the cooling fan on the final product will run at full throttle and how it will be very still spinning at a slower rpm.
The WiBrain has a 4.8-inch screen with a native resolution of 1024×600, the two are roughly the average for a UMPC. By comparison, the Fujitsu LifeBook U810 and the Vulcan FlipStart feature slightly larger 5.6-inch displays, while the Sony Vaio VGN-UX390N has a smaller 4.5-inch screen. The OQO Model 02 is the closest to the WiBrain in screen size of 5 inches, but it has a 800×480 resolution. The screen WiBrain looks crisp and bright, with icons and text that were small but not unreadable. To give you an idea of the piece it offers, it will display 17 rows and 15 columns in an Excel spreadsheet.
The WiBrain features typical UMPC sparse allocation of ports and connections. You can find a single USB 2.0 and Wi-Fi on / off on the right side with headphones, microphone, and AC jacks and a hold switch on the left. A 24-pin connector on the bottom edge can be used with the included VGA adapter to connect to an external display, and the port also allows you to connect to a WiBrain $ 179 optional dock that provides an optical drive, four USB 2 , 0, VGA and Ethernet connections, and a card reader. Along the top edge of WiBrain is a flip-up Web cam. Includes wireless connectivity 802.11b / g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but, unfortunately, a cellular modem is absent, a significant drawback to such a portable device.
The WiBrainB1E uses a low-voltage and low-power processor 1.2GHz VIA C7M and has only 512 MB of memory, which severely limits its performance on CNET Labs benchmarks. The OQO Model 02 uses a faster processor and VIA C7M double the memory as WiBrain, which has enabled it to outpace the WiBrain to the test, but both models based on Intel UMPC trailed by healthy margins. During hands on testing, however, the responsiveness WiBrain felt when running Microsoft Office applications and surf the Internet. (There is a second WiBrain model, WiBrain B1H $ 849, which doubles the RAM and hard drive capacity.)
We have been waiting to find a UMPC that offers anything resembling a full workload. After testing the WiBrain, we are always looking for the mythical beast. The Sony VAIO UX390N UMPC is the battery life-bearer, thanks to its solid-state drive, it ran for 3 hours, 32 minutes. The WiBrain lasted 2 hours and 35 minutes on our DVD battery drain test, a clumsy certainly for UMPCs (we connect to a USB drive). I found this figure to be fairly accurate, however, during my hands on testing, WiBrain will be about 2.5 hours before running out of juice.
The WiBrain B1 is backed by a one-year warranty, which is increased with the dynamism of the Rescue Service Fedex. If your WiBrain has a problem that can not fix the dynamism itself in the United States, it will pay to ship the product to and from the foreign manufacturer.