LG X130 Mini-Review
I recently bought a netbook LG X130, and since I couldn’t find much information about it on the internet (apart from “reviews” which were actually just a rephrasing of the original press release), I thought I’ll write down my first impressions.
The netbook closed.
The netbook opened. Note that this is the maximum opening angle.
Featurewise it is pretty much what everyone else is offering right now: Intel Atom N270 @ 1.6 Ghz, 160GB hard disk, 1GB of RAM, Intel 945 Express graphics chipset, Windows XP SP 3, ethernet (10/100), wireless, bluetooth, a few usb ports, cardreader (SD and Memory Stick) and built-in webcam (1.3 megapixels, but just as blurry, noisy and having weird colors as anything else).
The actual selling point (apart form its rather aggressive price tag of 349€ here in Germany) is the battery. It is a 9-cell model claimed to run for “up to 12 hours”. And to put this out first: while 12 hours might be quite unrealistic, you can really get a solid 9 hours out of it with typical use (editing, watching videos, internet), which is really quite amazing and puts the device close to smartphones in terms of how often you have to recharge.
What most brochures don’t show: X130 with 9-cell battery pack.
The 9-cell battery pack totals 81 Wh.
What most brochures or pictures don’t tell you, though, is that this stamina comes at a price, namely a really huge battery pack. The battery back not only extends to the back, but also down, meaning that the netbook doesn’t lie flat on the table but is actually tilted. The angle is very close to what you get with ordinary keyboards (without the little stubs extended), so the usability is ok. However, if you expect to be able to stack the netbook between other books, you’ll be disappointed. The netbook also weighs about 1.4 kg with batteries, and a bit less than 1 kg without, which is still quite light, but maybe not as much as you would expect when you see the netbook on display in a store without the batteries.
The tilt of the keyboard is comparable to a normal keyboard.
Another unpleasant surprise was that the screen does not tilt back 180 degress, but more like three fourths of that. The pictures show what this looks like. This restriction is usually not a problem, only when the netbook is really close to my body (for example, on your lap), I sometimes would like to extend it even further back.
Keyboard layout is more or less standard. (And not as curved as it seems… That’s only the pincushion distortion of my camera)
Apart from these two points, the netbook is very nice. It is sturdily built, the design is acceptable (although not really that cool, IMHO). The keyboard layout is ok, at least they have put the Control key right in the corner. I had to get used a bit to the “Home” and “End” key being located next to the cursor keys, separate from the page up and page down keys.
Another nice addition is the wireless card. It is based on the ralink chip rt3090 which supports the new “n” flavor with a maximum speed of 150MBit/s (if you’re router supports it, of course). The downside is that the support for it in Linux is not really there, ubuntu 9.04 does not recognize the card. There exist some drivers on the ralink page, but I haven’t yet tried that one out. There exists support for ralink chips in the most recent Linux kernels, but it seems this is for older ralink chipsets only.
I was quite surprise with how fast the system feels and how little energy it consumes (although this certainly holds for all current netbooks). You can run Google Earth full screen (which means 1024 * 600) with an estimated frame rate from 3 to 15 fps which is really quite nice. Even under load, I could only measure about 15W on the wall, more like 6W under light load. That’s about half of what most motherboards consume when they’re turned off… .
So in summary, a very nice netbook with great battery life, but also a quite bulky battery pack.
Pros
- On par with all the other company’s offerings.
- “802.1n” wireless up to 150 MBit/s.
- 9-12 hours of battery life.
- LG didn’t install too much crap, mostly minor tools like customized battery viewer, and Open Office.
- Subjectively, screen very bright at maximum.
Cons
- Battery extends in almost every direction, quite heavy.
- Screen doesn’t tilt back a full 180 degrees.
- Reflective screen.
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No out-of-the-box drivers for the wireless under Linux right now.Update: Linux 2.6.32 ships with drivers for the RT3090 chip in the “staging” section. I managed to get it running with ubuntu 9.10 netbook remix. If I find time, I’ll summarize the steps.
Twimpact Work In Progress
Twimpact has been running smoothly in its small niche of the internet, and we’re currently trying to improve the way retweets are crawled and analyzed. The problem is that people often add some comment to the end of the original message, and also edit the original message such that it’s not that straightforward to really know whether you have a new tweet or not.
There are also some more bugs, which will be fixed soon. For example, apparently, we weren’t handling underscores in user names correctly such that “RT @nfl_games” became a retweet of the user “nfl” with the message “games”, which has been retweeted more than 1800 times.
We currently also don’t filter out users who retweet a tweet repeatedly or who retweet their own tweets, leading to all kinds of retweet bots and retweet-spam networks being high up in our retweet trends. While that may not be so informative, it is still interesting to see what kind of business ideas people come up with around the twitter platform.
For example, dannywhitehouse apparently has a service called twitter-bomb which I guess does all kinds of nasty things which are certainly not covered by twitter’s Terms of Service, but who still managed to amass more than thirteen thousand followers.
In any, case we’ll be rolling out the improvements soon, maybe this week, so stay tuned! The only problem we’ll run into is that we have to reprocess all the tweets already in our database 8-O
Twimpact!
For the last one and a half months, Matthias Jugel and I have been working on a site which computes impact scores for twitter users based on how often their tweets become retweeted.
The project was really lots of fun so far. The first time we got the thing up and running was around the time of the Iranian elections and suddenly seeing all those tweets in real-time gave a feeling of directly tapping into the twitterverse.
The winner twimpact wise is clearly mashable with a twimpact score of 89 right now and over ten thousand retweeted messages. Other top users include: news cites like breakingnews, cnnbrk, and smashingmag, or celebrities with many, many followers like aplusk (Ashton Kutcher), or iamdiddy (Puff Diddy).
On the entry page you can see a live view of what has been retweeted most in the last hour. It’s quite interesting to see what is popping up there. For example, surprisingly, there are many competitions of the form “retweet this and win a laptop” like this one which has been retweeted over 1300 times. Another kind of retweet is the inspirational message from users like deepak_chopra which people like to pass on. But apart from that you have of course current news, interesting links and so on. These are mostly technology and web related, which reflects the user base of twitter quite well, I think.
So go ahead and compute your twimpact score, or just sit back and look at what people are currently retweeting.