- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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1.0 stars
"Buy this only if you have lots of excess time & money"
Pros: Small, lots of features
Cons: Many features marginal, support non-existent
Summary: I did a fair amount of research before I got mine, and knew there would be a few issues. I had no idea how many I'd encounter, and after several months of use I can say I will never buy an ASUS again, UMPC or not. I suggest that you also look carefully before you buy one! First issue was the junk-ware that drags the machine to it's knees - it literally made the R2H unusable. That's ok, it's fixable. GPS doesn't work well - a key reason I picked this unit. Wifi doesn't work well, it's incredibly weak (that is, not really useable), old drivers, no support. ASUS utilities are very half-baked, but some are required, like the little UI tool to turn the GPS on. Remove that one, and the GPS doesn't work, period. Power mgmt is flakey, even by Windows standards. Battery life isn't terrible, but not nearly as good as many laptops. The mouse and cursor buttons on the front are handy and pretty robust, and so is the case. Sounds is ok, but mono. Disk space, 60gb, is good. However their weird recovery scheme is a problem. There is no command line console option, so there is no way to try and manually recover anything - the only option is to completely rebuild the disk, losing all your work and all customization. A CD/DVD drive is optional, and without it there aren't any good available alternatives. I found this all out the hard way, trying to reformat their default disk setup from 2 partition FAT32 to 1 partition NTFS. I lost several days of work when I needed to use their recovery system to wipe everything in order to make it NTFS. The built-in 100mb ethernet is handy especially since the built-in wifi is so bad, but the enabling of it is a little finicky - it is apparently only enabled if connected at power-on. Bluetooth seems to work fine, but I don't use it that much (I've used it to ActiveSync Outlook to my PDA). The fingerprint reader is nice, but reads inconsistently. The related security software is rather bulky and is required for fingerprint reader use, and is a bit buggy, but better than most of the other ASUS software. Caveat emptor!
