title: Reality check: the state of portable computing link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/reality-check-the-state-of-portable-computing/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 515 created: 2008/05/31 19:38:03 created_gmt: 2008/05/31 19:38:03 comment_status: open post_name: reality-check-the-state-of-portable-computing status: publish post_type: post

Reality check: the state of portable computing

We have a few different portable computing devices here at the house. Besides the 3 year-old Dell Inspiron 1200 there’s the OLPC XO, some Nintendo DS’s and a Wii. Oh yes, and a pair of not-networkable Palm Zire 31’s. This tally doesn’t include the various laptops I’ve brought home from work over the years — my currently assigned machine is an old Thinkpad T42.

The top issues I’ve had with almost every mobile device I’ve used over the years have been inadequate CPU speed and RAM. For the smaller devices like the DS, the XO and the X24 that I had from work some time ago, is insufficient screen real estate.

Let’s take that last one first. The sad fact is that most web pages seem to be designed for viewing with 20” or better screens set at 1280×1280 resolution. Never mind that most laptops on the market today, no matter what size, come with a webpage-unfriendly widescreen. As a result, anything smaller than a 14” screen is going to be uncomfortable work with (that assessment is based on actual experience with 12” and 13” panel machines — it was not pleasant). The 7” screen on the XO and Asus eeePC, no matter how good the LCD technology, make these devices almost useless for extended web browsing.

But that’s OK, because neither the XO nor the eeePC come with a fast enough CPU or sufficient RAM to make them any good for anything other than browsing text-only web pages. Both fail miserably when confronted with any kind of intensive Flash-rendered graphics or playing back multimedia content. This is the most significant shortcoming of what are otherwise wonderful engineering efforts. When a 5 year-old Pentium M with 1 Gb RAM and a hard disk can outrun a state-of-the-art 512 Mb RAM and 4 Gb solid-state drive eeePC, you know there’s a problem someplace.

The irony is that you can got out an buy a pretty decent laptop with a Celeron CPU, 1 Gb RAM and pretty big hard disk for the same $399 price as an eeePC 4G. The 15.4” normal (not wide) screen on these may not be as cute, but it’s certainly going to be much more useful over the long haul. If you go up into the $499 - $599 range where Asus’s next generation eeePC with 1 Gb RAM and 8 Gb SSD will be, then you can actually get something with a fast, real dual core, CPU. Unless you have some really pressing need for “ultraportability”, it’s hard to cost-justify going with something like the eeePC (note that I actually now consider 2 Gb the absolute minimum amount of RAM required for normal laptop use — for desktop replacements make that 4 Gb along with a 64-bit O/S that can use it).

The XO is an amazing machine. with both hardware and software that shows it to have been a labor of love by the engineers who worked on it. But the hardware constraints they faced in their failed effort to bring it in at $100 (the real cost today is around $200 a copy) were, and are, unrealistic. I give AMD, Quanta and the whole technical team at OLPC a great deal of credit for the effort — but in the end limitations on CPU speed and RAM caused them to fall short of the mark. OLPC’s protestations to the contrary have only served to lead commercial competitors like Asus and Intel to foist their own inadequately appointed machines on consumers.

Of course none of this means that I’ve changed my basic position that, at least for the foreseeable future, you still need a real desktop machine to do any kind of real work. A laptop with 1 Gb or more RAM and around 2 GHz CPU is great as a remote terminal or web browser, but running any kind of enterprise or even home software is going to be a painful experience with those kinds of resources (if it works at all). The need to address power consumption and heating issues in portable devices always leads to compromises that result in a performance deficit when compared to like desktop hardware.

The good news is that for $600 (maybe excluding the 4 Gb RAM you’ll want) you can go out and get a pretty kick-butt dual core desktop computer nowadays, as long as you stay away from the greedy name brands.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo