Talking about long stints of typing... [LWN.net]

Talking about long stints of typing...

Posted Jan 28, 2008 10:19 UTC (Mon) by NigelK (guest, #42083)
In reply to: Talking about long stints of typing... by oak
Parent article: Toybox: Light-weight Linux box very useful (Computerworld NZ)

For me, the N810 and Eee were in the same bracket - both were being sold at very similar
prices. I wanted something portable that did wifi, web browsing, YouTube, BBC iPlayer,
streamed MP3s, streamed video files, and did it reliably. Form factor was an issue in that it
had to be a lot smaller than a laptop - the Eee fits nicely in my coat pocket.

What put me off the N810 was reliability and Flash video playback. After a couple of years
using the N770, a crashy web browser was no longer acceptable, and Flash video had to be
smooth as silk whilst streaming (otherwise what's the point?).

I'm still gobsmacked that I've now got an uncrippled Linux PC in such a small form-factor at
such a low price. I think it's also more powerful than the two Pentium III boxes I still use
in my home network. Amazing. 

And if you remember that far back, this is cheaper than the Sinclair Spectrum +3, so I'm even
more astounded :)

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Talking about long stints of typing...

Posted Jan 31, 2008 16:32 UTC (Thu) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

> What put me off the N810 was reliability and Flash video playback. After 
a couple of years using the N770, a crashy web browser was no longer 
acceptable, and Flash video had to be smooth as silk whilst streaming 
(otherwise what's the point?)

AFAIK N770 Browser crashing was mostly because 64MB RAM is just not enough 
for www-pages with JavaScript and/or Flash (i.e. crash = Glib used by the 
Gtk widgets and some other components abort()s the process when an alloc 
fails and things built on top of Glib expect allocations always to succeed 
while process is alive, so it cannot be even changed).

My N810 has 128MB of RAM and is much better, the browser seems really 
stable. There are still some sites with JavaScript and/or Flash which can 
consume considerably more than 128MB (it's easy for web designers to do 
that with either JS or Flash), but on N810 they (at least normally) seem 
just to slow everything to crawl instead of browser crashing.  I avoid 
those kind of site as I don't see much point in ruining my browsing 
experience by pages bloated with dozen(s) of ads etc.

Flash video is pretty far from silk smooth, but to me it's usable enough
(10-15fps depending on video and what other active content the page has).

Anyway, the selection is more of a matter of taste, whether one want's 
something that fits better into pocket or something that has more power, 
you cannot have both, at least without seriously crippling how long your 
battery lasts.