Small notebook shootout - part I - Conclusion
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 05 Apr 2008

Let's start with some additional hardware discussion and work our way up to benchmark discussion and conclusion. First thing that almost everybody notices on a notebook is the screen. The screen is very good - with some problems in terms of viewing angles -  but nevertheless very good. Brightness and contrast levels are really good, it's very sharp I and I don't have any real downsides to it. Some of the older ASUS notebooks (A8 series) used to have a pretty blurry, dark and - in normal light - pretty much unusable displays. This one is really a lot better.

Second thing - and quite a lot of people including myself consider this as the first thing - the keyboard is pretty good, as well. It's not really bendy or flexy, and it's kind of "inside" the notebook which some people like and other people don't. Personally, I'd prefer it it wasn't. Touchpad is very easy to use and pretty precise but personally, I'd much rather have additional mouse. The one supplied with this notebook is quite ok for general usage. Don't expect gaming wonders as this isn't really a notebook for that so why should the mouse be?

In terms of available connections, I'd say you can't go wrong here. VGA, HDMI, USB port, card reader, ExpressCard slot, microphone, speaker/headphones, modem, LAN and additional two USB's on the back should be more then enough for this notebook class. I can't help but notice is the fact that my three-year-old Sony Vaio VGN-T2XP has FireWire port which lets me use my camera anytime I want or need to and - F9Dc doesn't have it. This would definitely be a huge minus in my book, but surely there are people that don't need it.

The one thing that's really inexcusable is jawdroppingly bad battery life. In my DVD-run, the laptop barely managed to do a bit more then two hours which is a pain. Just last week when I was on a Train from Eindhoven to Delft (Netherlands), my 17" MacBook Pro managed to do more then this one with contrast, CPU and sound up to "Are you nuts" levels. I've played around with 13.3 white MacBook (almost four hours) and a lot of other small notebooks up to 13.3" in size and every single one of them beats F9Dc's battery life without breaking a sweat. Also, the way the battery sticks from the back is down right annoying. Make sure that you buy some additional batteries, your favourite relaxing-medication (chocolate) and - while we're at it - don't even think about buying this one with 1GB of memory. Vista will be slower then a turtle doing a marathon run...

Now let's wait for the second and third part article from the series, due tomorrow and on Monday...