I have had a bad impression about mobile phones photography capabilities since the 2005 when the first so-called camera phones have started to emerge. The low-res, blurry, with a shifted and terrible wrong colors images that was coming out of the tiny greasy holes on the back of the mobile phones were the mockery of the sole idea of the digital photography.

Now, with the mobile camera modules like the one in the Apple iPhone 3GS, I must admit that the mobile photography at least as much acceptable as a lomography. Though, it’s still a pain to look at such photos without a postprocessing on a bigger computer. May be the future smartphones with high-res displays and the gigahertz of CPU and GPU power like in modern iPhone 4 will allow to postprocess photos on the go. It’s a software problem, after all.

There are two products in this niche available on a local market by the end of Jan, 2010: Lenovo S12 nVidia Ion and HP mini 311. Fortunately, the choice was very simple because HP mini 311 came with Window XP preinstalled but mostly due to its $70 more expensive price tag. That’s why this review is titled:

Lenovo S12 nVidia Ion

When the Lenovo S12 is sitting alone on the desk you will hardly tell it from a normal adult notebook. If there is nothing to compare it with Lenovo S12 looks just like your average 12″ – 13″ Macbook. It has a descent (for a netbook) 12.1″ LED LCD and a full sized keyboard. All two things that differ Lenovo S12 Ion from a notebook and gives it a right to be called a netbook are hidden beneath its wonderful keyboard.

The first thing is the Atom N270 CPU. Not the newest one, not the fastest (well, it is slow one actually), single core. It works and nothing more. Thanks to nVidia Ion your apps have a GPU share some load. And the second thing is S12 price tag – it’s just four times cheaper than the average Macbook.

The bright and crystal clear LED back-lit 12.1″ LCD screen has 1280*800 pixels resolution which makes things not so tiny as on the more common nowadays 1360*768 pixels 11.6″ LCDs but still brings plenty of space for almost any task. You can browse web and edit webpages (just don’t forget to press ctrl++ to save your eyesight). You can work with spreadsheets and presentations without any clutter. You can manage your photos and develop some RAW files on the go.

Typing is as easy as on a full size 15″ laptops. Did I mentioned that Lenovo S12 keyboard is very good? Yeah, it is. Also S12 netbook is quite thin – less than 2cm open – which makes typing even more comfortable. Lenovo S12 Ion is the coolest laptop I’ve ever seen. I mean if you put your palms on its keyboard you won’t say it’s really warmer than a table it rests on. The only part that’s getting a little hot after a couple hours of work is one the netbook’s back where the wireless card and a memory expansion slot are located. Definitely, WiFi adapter is the hottest part.

As you can see on a picture above, the port selection of the Lenovo S12 nVidia Ion is on par with the other netbooks and lightweight notebooks on the market and includes HDMI port – nice feature because nVidia Ion is great for HD video. On the other side of S12 you’ll find two more USB ports, SD card reader and an awesome WiFi on|off lever.

nVidia Ion

What makes Lenovo S12 and other netbooks with nVidia Ion graphics special is their ability to remain cheap, lightweight and energy efficient while being able to run pretty heavy applications like modern 3D games. Lenovo S12 nVidia Ion is running World of Warcraft pretty smooth on S12 native 1280*800 screen resolution with 25-35 frames per second. More on the World of Warcraft performance on nVidia Ion in the next post.

Lenovo S12 Battery Life

When it comes to battery life, Lenovo S12 promises at least two hours without any powersaving mode one – with the screen is shining bright, nVidia Ion is grinding numbers and Wi-Fi module is pinging them back and forth.

If you’ll try to save some power… e.g. dim the screen a little bit and try not to use GPU so hard, you will find that it will last for a little more than three hours. Not much for web surfing but quite ok for a connected typewriter mode, when you are typing something in Google Docs or working with spreadsheets.

There is another one mode. It’s called “turn of almost anything”. In this mode your Lenovo S12 won’t use nVidia Ion, no sounds, no Wi-Fi, LCD brightness will be set to minimum. Actually, reading is the only activity I can imagine with such settings, but it will last for almost five hours – enough for a pretty long ride.

The universality of this charger works pretty simple. All you need is a charger base that is universal and an “optionally required” plate that is designed to fit your particular type of batteries. It makes chances to find needed charger in the next door retail outlet much fattier because it’s easier for retailer to keep in stock a pile of cheap and relatively small plates for almost any camera brand than a designated chargers.

For example, you can grab a Delkin universal charger at Amazon and pick any of a dozen+ plates to fit your DSLR or EVIL or camcorder battery. And if you have two or more different types of LiIon batteries to work with, you can save some space in you luggage by bringing just one charger and a different plates for you stuff.

Speaking of connectivity, it has EDGE and it’s tolerable when you are browsing mobile optimized pages. I like the idea that I can use this phone as a modem in some situations but I really don’t want to.

Built-in browser has a very nice interface and works pretty good for small pages, but when you point it somewhere where the pages are a very little bit more complicated it returns “insufficient memory” error.

Fortunately, the Java apps are running pretty fast and Opera Mini works just well.

Buit-in e-mail client is ok, and works good with gmail account. The only drawback is it’s morbid obsession to encode anything in base64.

Twitter and other similar web apps are running good in either Opera Mini or built-in browser. 2.4″ LCD is ok to read some RSS feeds in Google Reader on the go. The fonts are smooth, good looking and easy to read.

What about the main feature on LG GW300 – its QWERTY keyboard – it is great, comfortable and very helpful. No matter what do you want to use it for: txting, managing a phonebook, writing down a shopping list or random thoughts – everything is much more emm… natural with it.

The battery of LG GW300 could be better, but everything comes with a price – bigger battery would make LG GW300 significantly heavier. Anyway, you can buy a bunch of USB-MicroUSB cables and put one in the every computer u use during a day, at home, at the office, etc. so you can charge the battery anytime and anywhere.

What I like more in LG GW300:

• Wonderful QWERTY keyboard.
• Pretty nice display and overall quite ok interface.
• 3.5mm headphones jack.
• A lot of useful fields in phonebook records.
• Useful memo and secure memo apps.
• Size and weight. It’s comfortable.
• Descent built quality.

What I do not like about LG GW300:

• Built-in camera is a joke (but it’s understandable).
• You barely can customize anything.
• Base64 encoding in e-mail.
• You cannot view ToDo from a calendar. Neither can’t you setup reminders for ToDo items.
• The mediaplayer database rebuilds after any changes and it takes a lot of time. It’s easier to access your music through file system.
• Battery life is the same as of more feature rich smartphones.

A couple of days ago I forgot to check the pockets of my jeans before laundry. The weather was slushy all Autumn so I set up my washing machine for super wash at 90 Celsius with an extra rinsing. Two and a half hours later I took out perfectly clean jeans and discovered my keys and my flash drive in the machine’s drum.

A cheap 2Gb flash drive was working fine for me for more than two years. It was branded like A-data MyFlash, but I have never seen another A-data products anywhere. So I left it on a table to dry up and on a next day tried to stick it into USB port. And it worked! I have made a full backup with no errors.

Fortunately, we have the other brands in this segment: Motorola, LG and Samsung. The first two are too bulky, in my taste. And Samsung have rolled out three new low-end models a month before: E1070, E1100 and E1125. Last two models haven’t hit the shelves yet, but the first one is already available for about US$39.

I have bought Samsung E1070 and played with it for a week for now. What’s good:

• The size. It’s quite fatty with its 15mm but short and narrow comparing to the other modern mobiles. Fits well in my Wolverine jeans lighter pocket.
• 100 memory slots for text messages.
• Nice and handy phone book (200 memory slots).
• Five alarm clocks you can program to go off on a given days of week.
• Nice battery life. Haven’t tested it “scientifically” but I think E1070 could work for a week between charges easily.
• Pretty compact supplied charger.

What’s wrong? Well, Samsung E1070 is cheap, budget, low-end. Nothing wrong, actually.

Either Samsung or retailers have set the screen brightness to 100% to make the T190 pop on the store shelf and I was very surprised when I had to lower it all the way down to 55% to make the image comfortable (and still very bright and vivid).

The thing I like most is its power indicator. It’s so subtle and unobtrusive that you can easily think it’s just an element of the LCD’s decoration. The best LED placement idea I’ve ever seen.

Logitech MX400 (left one, wired) and MX620 (right one, wireless) are undoubtedly the best computer mice in the modern history. The best design for the average sized hands. Unfortunately, MX400 lacks MX620′s excellent scroll wheel and a quite usefull auxiliary button, but the ergonomics and pointing accuracy are still here.

Toshiba Satellite A series notebooks are the all-purpose (considering internet/office applications) and inexpensive 15.4″ less than 3 kilograms machines with integrated graphics and a great screen. A300 lacks of modern fancy design and a plastic looks a bit cheap, but despite of that, overall built quality is very good.

It comes with the Windows Vista Home Premium preinstalled and a load of freeware and shareware. I think you would like to clean the start-up menu just after the first boot to make the beast run more faster.

Pro

• Excellent 15.4″ 1280*800 screen. One of the best for its price.
• Built quality.
• Nice and pretty powerful configuration, except for the integrated graphics.
• Hardware WiFi turn on/off lever.
• Good keyboard layout.

Contra

• A load of unneeded software that clutter your system tray and slow boot-up time.
• The cover with the lock. Most of Toshiba Satellites’ competitors got rid of them in the late 2007.
• No SD card reader on some models.
• Headfones/mic ports on the front side.

Nice mouse but doesn’t fit my average hand. Should be bigger to be comfortable enough.

Pro

• Great idea.

Contra

• Comfortability is highly depends on one’s palm size. A little less than average size fits well.
• Wired and bulky transmitter. Not the USB-stick type.
• Ridiculously short working range.
• Auxiliary buttons not so easily accessible.
• A bit cheap mats for a $100 mouse.
• Price (see above).