The M400 comes with stereo speakers, placed at the rear of the notebook just below each corner of the LCD. There is no doubt the speakers are plenty loud, but of course lack any bass or midrange quality. Those who want to watch movies frequently will still want to invest in a decent set of headphones, and maybe even an external sound card like the Creative Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA.
Sunlight-readability is rapidly becoming a major selling point in the rugged notebook sector. That makes sense as most rugged and semi-rugged notebooks will likely see outdoor duty, and it is just as important in business-rugged notebooks that may well be used outdoors at times. While most standard transmissive LCD displays wash out in daylight battery,the Getac 9213’s does not. The picture below was taken on a very bright California summer day at about 10AM. The computer is sitting in partial shade and the picture is completely unedited.
So the GoBook MR-1 display is second-to-none indoors and even outdoors in the shade and remains readable in direct sunlight. But what if you run into a situation where the text is simply too small to read comfortably? Well, they thought of that and added “Zoom,” a software utility that toggles back and forth between native and magnified display. There is a special “zoom” button with a little magnifying glass on it. It sits next to the Windows button. “Zoom” affects only the window you’re working on, a smart choice.
You are also supposed to be able to increase or decrease the magnification level by continuing to hold the Zoom key and then use the jog dial to zoom in and out until a comfortable zoom level has been reached. The jog dial, however, is one function that the original FlipStart device has, but we have not been able to find on the GoBook MR-1.
The Acer Aspire 8935G (bottom) is clearly the bigger of the two with its huge 18.4-inch Full HD Acer CineCrystal LED display. Other notable specs include the Core 2 Duo processor, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 graphics, 4x Blu-ray Disc writer, Crystal Eye web cam, 802.11n Wi-Fi, fingerprint scanner, and a backlit keyboard. The 8-cell battery should provide quite a bit of juice, but be prepared to lug around 10.1 pounds of computing. Acer has not yet announced pricing and availability for the Aspire 8935G.
As far as the performance specifications go, the upcoming laptop (which will likely be launched around the time that Windows 7 will arrive) has been featured with the 1.6GHz Core i7 720QM processor, coupled with 4GB of DDR3 memory and a high-performance GeForce GTX 260M graphics card, boasting 1GB of graphics memory. The laptop also sports two 500GB hard disk drives, an 8x DVD writer, an 8-in-1 media card reader, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi and a 2MP webcam. Preloaded with Windows 7, the upcoming portable gaming rig will also come with Express Gate.
Dell’s Pandya says, “Netbooks are trending toward 5% of the market now. They won’t get into the double digits.” Outside K-12 education and some healthcare applications those numbers will probably remain true for the next year or two.
With standard laptop displays, most users are concerned about brightness, clarity, and viewing angle. While these attributes are important, a relatively poor screen generally doesn’t make or break the notebook. However with a tablet PC the display is of uptmost importance. If you first unpackage and turn on your M400 anywhere except a brightly lit room, the first thing you will notice is how bright the screen is. The maximum brightness setting is overpowering in most settings, which bodes well for the display’s performance outdoors.