Elonex One T+ £99 PC, First Impressions

You may recall me mentioning the Elonex One PC back in February, a pocket PC that would sell for the astonishingly low price of £99. Well, at that time no samples were available but I was intrigued enough to send off my £10 deposit, on the promise that it would be delivered in July. Needless to say it never arrived and not only did the delivery date slip, in the meantime Elonex produced an upgraded design, called One t+ (almost certainly a rebadged CNM Minibook), which they offered to those who placed orders, at no extra cost. – the One T+ now costs £120 online. (The original One, with its quirky ‘upside down’ design always looked a bit suspect…) To cut a long story short, involving several unanswered emails and even more delayed delivery dates, mine has just been delivered.

First impressions? Well, it’s a bit smaller than I had imagined, but the 800 x 480, 7-inch screen is bright and sharp and the keyboard is not too bad at all, it’s certainly okay for emailing and browsing. The embedded Linux Linos OS is fairly slow to boot, mine takes over a minute before it’s useable (the Eee PC is up and running in around 30 seconds) once its going it is very easy to use, though it is quite sluggish and it doesn’t like to have more than a couple of programs running at the ame time, though plugging in a USB mouse seemed to liven it up.

The tabbed desktop display is well thought out and Wireless connectivity is quick and simple. The bundled software includes cut down versions of Bon Echo browser and Sylpheed email client, it has the Pidgin IM, AbiWord word processor and a small suite of Open Source office applications, photo viewer, MP3 player and a fair selection of tools and customisation options. Nevertheless it falls some way short of what’s available for the Eee PC, though to be fair it’s very early days and if it takes off third-party software should become available. I haven’t had much luck poking around inside Linux but given time I am sure it can be cracked.

Good points include 3 USB sockets an SD memory card reader, a LAN socket and around 4 hours running time on the battery. Points are deducted for the low speaker volume, lack of any security features – not even a logon password. There are no external display options and here’s a weird one, there’s a spelling mistake in one of the dialogue boxes (‘Bettery Level’). I couldn’t update the Flash Player so it is incapable of playing YouTube videos and it wouldn’t have anything to do with my mobile broadband dongle. There’s many more niggles but I’m getting a bit picky now, just remember the price… It’s not a competitor for the Eee but it does look like it will be a handy little thing to have when you need to travel light and for the money, so overall, not too bad but plenty of room for improvement. a web site with software and hacks for this machine has just appeared at: http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/