Intel Classmate PC review

The 7-inch display, again like the Asus Eee, has a resolution of 800x480--which means there's not a lot of screen real estate to spare. Text and icons were readable, but at 800 pixels wide, many Web pages are too wide for the screen and require horizontal scrolling. The thick bezel makes the screen look even smaller, but we understand the need to build in a protective buffer for the display. Unlike the Eee, there's no Webcam or speakers next to the display (small, tinny speakers sit right above the keyboard).

Ports and connections are spare on the Classmate. You get two USB ports, an Ethernet jack, headphone and mic jacks, and that's about it. On a low-cost specialized system like this, we don't mind not having FireWire or even a VGA output. At first we thought the Classmate lacked an SD card slot (as found on the Asus Eee) to augment the meager built-in flash hard drive, but there actually is one on the back panel, hidden behind the leather cover.

While most of the standard benchmark tests we use wouldn't run on the Classmate, thanks to its 2GB hard drive, we did manage to run our iTunes encoding test. The Classmate's 900MHz Intel Celeron M CPU was only slightly slower on that test than the Fujitsu LifeBook U810, a UMPC that uses Intel's newer Ultra Low Power A110 CPU, specifically designed for smaller PCs--but a laptop with a standard Core 2 Duo CPU will still run the same test about three times as fast. In anecdotal testing, it was surprising to see Windows XP run so smoothly on a system with only 256MB of RAM. Surfing the Web was a breeze, but opening multiple Web pages and office documents at the same time finally slowed the system down a bit.

We were not able to run our normal DVD playback battery test on the Intel Classmate PC, but in informal testing, we were able to use the system for about 3 hours while running a light mix of tasks--Web browsing, working on a Word document, and playing MP3 files--which was in line with Intel's battery life claims. That sounds fine for a portable laptop, especially an inexpensive one like this, but we wonder if that's long enough for the schoolchildren who are the Classmate's intended audience, and who may not always have easy access to electricity.