Asus also offers a two-year global warranty and one year of accidental-damage protection, which is especially useful since ultraportable units tend to get carried and jostled a lot, making them more prone to accidents. Speaking of which, there is no shock-absorption feature built in to protect the hard drive, so dropping the UL30A-A1 could be fatal for the unit and your data. It’s too bad that Asus hasn’t provided this additional safeguard, but again, the price is low enough and the warranties are good enough to give potential buyers some peace of mind.
The Dell Inspiron Mini 10v is availabel with either a 3 cell, 24WHr battery or a 6 cell, 56Whr battery. While the 6 cell battery sticks out of the bottom of the unit and adds a bit of weight, it also provides more than twice the run time.
Essentially the high-end products that the Voodoo name gets attached to are harder to scale at the manufacturing capacity that is normal for HP products. But when pressed on the lack of any recent Voodoo and HP co-branding, HP said we can “expect to see the Voodoo and VoodooDNA products come out at about the same pace as they have since the acquisition.” If the three-year history of the deal is a guide, it looks like that means once every year or two.
I was able to get between 6 and 7 hours of run time out of the netbook with WiFi on and the screen brightness set at about 40%. There are certainly a few other netbooks that get better battery life, but I’m still pretty impressed with the Mini 10v’s performance. It comes pretty close to having an all-day battery, assuming you have an 8 hour workday and a decent lunch break.
That may be disappointing to some. But it was clear from the beginning that the acquisition of Voodoo by HP was for high-end cachet, not big gobs of customers. Voodoo was a Calgary, Canada boutique PC maker turning out custom gaming machines. Each computer was built by hand for enthusiasts willing to pay for machines that sometimes started at $5,000 each.
Disaster! While taking pictures this morning for the review, the system quit booting. After multiple attempts, the recovery CD finally did work, but it was quite the hassle. I blame Vista, and think that waiting for Windows 7 (or installing Ubuntu, which would fly on this thing) would be the way to go.
Notebook sales may be growing every year, but a new trend has been developing along side portables. They offer the same performance levels to that of a notebook computer all the way up to a top of the line desktop system but at a fraction of the size. Small form factor (or SFF for short) systems come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they may be the future of where computing in the home is at.
So it made sense when HP opted to use the brand first on the Blackbird gaming PC marketed as a powerful HP desktop for gamers with “Voodoo DNA.” That meant that it was an HP branded product but was built in conjunction with the Voodoo team. Then HP rolled out the Voodoo Envy notebook and Voodoo Omen desktop last year. They were a complete design departure for HP: sleek with interesting materials like carbon fiber, and in the case of the Envy, a $2,000 price tag to match, yet aimed at the same type of audience that might want a MacBook Pro or a Dell Adamo.