I know what you’re wondering…now that I’ve apparently somehow “challenged” Laptopmag in my last post. It wasn’t what I intended really. I wasn’t out to disprove everything that they had blogged about. I literally said that I wanted to take all of the things that they did and try it for myself to see what the deal is. I just think that the whole “Cloudbook Blows” determination was a snap judgment and probably not very fair to the reader or to Everex. Along the way, if I can offer some helpful tips or hints to some of the “gotchas” that have been discovered, then I’ll do that. Yeah, I probably came off a little harsh in that post below, but, meh! I have reason to. I spent $400 of my own money and waited 2 months to get a subnotebook…I didn’t need someone else who wasn’t going to be actually using the laptop as their personal one beyond a week or so tell me I made the dumbest decision ever.

Anyway, enough about that. So you want to know about the Cloudbook from a consumer’s point of view? Let’s setup who I am first so you know my background. First, I work for the #1 best place to work in technology as voted by Computerworld Magazine, three years in a row. Quicken Loans is by far one of the top technology companies out there, and our main business isn’t even technology…our product is mortgages. We also made #2 on the Fortune list…only company to beat us was Google! I’m a systems engineer for Quicken Loans working both on Windows Server platforms, and I also specialize in VMware Virtual Infrastructure / ESX. We manage a farm of close to 300 virtual machines running both Windows and Linux servers.

My Unix background goes back to around 1993-ish time frame when I installed my first copy of DEC ULTRIX on a DECstation I had at Oakland University in Rochester, MI. I’ve been a big supporter of Slackware over the years, and now pretty much dabble in most of the major distros thanks to VM’s and VMware Workstation. Because of Slackware, I did have to compile a lot of software from source, and I can compile my own kernel. Usually do for servers at home just so I can tweak it the way I want.

I don’t claim to be a total Linux expert, but I know my way around. Setting up Xwindows, Samba, NFS, and many other services the hard way (with VI and the config file) was the norm for many years. Apps like Webmin and Swat have helped out a lot, but I still love the command line.

I’m a switch-hitter. I love both Windows and Linux pretty much equally. I run Vista 64-bit at work, XP at home, 2003 Server and Slackware Linux for my servers at home, and use PCLinuxOS for my desktops occasionally. I always liked trying to get the two OSes to cooperate and work together using various services from each side. I’ve made Linux boxes act like Windows ones (Samba, Wine, etc.) and Windows boxes act like Linux ones (Unix print services, cygwin, openssh, etc). Its all just good clean OS fun to me.

So now that I’ve bored you with my background…..the Cloudbook…what’s up with it? Well, I’ve typed this entire post so far on it. Let’s take a look at some of Laptopmag’s initial impressions, and I’ll give you my take on them and then some more initial impressions.

• The Pointing Device - Yeah, it’s super tiny. I definitely don’t have small hands/fingers, my thumb is the same width as this thing. It’s very responsive though. Moving your finger from left to right across it will get you probably about 2/3rd of the way across the actual screen. As far as the location? I think it’s fine. Yeah it’s very non-traditional, but I don’t think moving your hands from the keyboard up to the trackpad and back is all that big of a deal. One thing Laptopmag said is that you have to use it two-handed because the left and right buttons are on the other side of the keyboard. I disagree. If you know how to use a track pad effectively, you can single click, and drag using only the trackpad. You really can function most of the time using only the track pad (one-handed). The only time you have to actually use the buttons on the left is if you have to right click. Plus, the buttons have quite an audible “click” to them, using the trackpad to click is much quieter. TIP: This is difficult to master because of the size of the trackpad, but the right edge of it acts as a scroll bar. If you move your finger towards the top right, and drag down in a window that has a scroll bar, the track pad will act as if you used the scroll wheel on a 3-button mouse. It takes some time to get used to it and master it, but it’s a nice little “easter egg”.
• Windows going below the screen - Yes, this does happen. I’m not denying that. And it strikes right at the beginning of your experience with the Cloudbook. How this ever made it past QA at Everex is beyond me. But nonetheless it’s something you have to deal with. Is it horribly bad? Nah! Laptopmag made it sound like you really need to return this thing because of this. Now I know they’re speaking in the sense that you need to remember who this laptop is targeted at (although I tend to disagree with that too). The general public might not figure out, or understand how to use the Alt-Click method to move windows. Hopefully Everex support is able to assist folks that can’t get past this. Also, the Firefox one that has been mentioned is somewhat more troublesome. It can’t be resized or scrolled at all, so the actual “OK” or “Cancel” button that might be present on it is completely inaccessible even if you move the window. Bah, just hit Enter on your keyboard and it’ll go away, and then just turn off the toolbar in Firefox anyway. It takes up too much screen real estate as it is, and really just duplicates links that are available in the dock. Most other windows seem to be ok. The theme makes buttons larger with a jellybean look, which probably is unnecessary. But, I so far haven’t run into any other major “gotcha’s” with windows being horribly inaccessible.

So, that’s all they listed in the initial Laptopmag blog post (I’ll look at the others later), here’s the rest of my initial impressions.

• Cooling Fan - This thing HAS to be possessed. It is constantly speeding up, slowing down, and speeding up again. I suppose in a busy restaurant like Panera Bread or Starbucks you probably wouldn’t notice it. But sitting here in my family room in the leather recliner at almost 1am, I can hear it quite clearly. I have a cooling pad from my Dell that I’m going to try out under it, but so far the fan is pretty fidgety.
• Battery latches - I thought I had a defective Cloudbook at first. The two latches that lock the battery in appear to function differently. One is spring loaded, and the other seems to be more of a manual lock. You have to push it until it “clicks”. Nothing major here, and actually might be a nice feature. Just wasn’t aware that’s how it worked initially.
• Battery Meter - Is there one? I plugged it in and couldn’t tell if it was charging or not. There appears to be in indicator light next to the power button, but it hasn’t lit up yet. I have a feeling that may only light up when the battery is about to go dead. Otherwise, in Gnome the battery applet in the system bar wasn’t there by default. You have to right-click on it, and add the applet to get a visual indicator of what’s going on with power in your Cloudbook. But I don’t think this is anything bad or a fault of Everex…seems like just basic Ubuntu/Gnome stuff to me.
• Kernel - You can find out more detailed info from Mikez’s postings over at the Couldbooker.com forums probably, but yeah there’s some things that could probably have been setup better with the kernel. This appears to just be a basic generic kernel. It even has SMP turned on (symmetric multi-processing). You only need that if you have more than one processor in your system…and we all know the Cloudbook only has one, so no need for SMP. This won’t mean anything to the general user, but tech-savvy folks will probably want to recompile their own kernel, or use one that I believe Mikez is going to release for us.
• Software - I’m actually quite impressed with the software available on the Cloudbook. It’s fairly well-rounded. Seems like there’s more for you than what gOS Rocket beta with Enlightenment had. I think most of the general apps are covered and you should be able to do most daily tasks. Keep in mind that the concept behind this OS and laptop is “cloud computing” so even though it has Openoffice installed, most of your interaction is supposed to be with online services like Google Docs, Gmail, Facebook, etc..etc. You can always add more packages with either the Synaptic package manager, or this “Add/Remove Programs” thingy that Laptopmag had trouble with. Seems to be a more fluffed up version of what Synaptic offers you, but I haven’t really dug into it much yet.
• Design - If you can get over the weirdness of the design (my wife even said it looks like something out of the 80s), the Cloudbook really is built quite well. Parts all seem to fit together well (meaning, there’s not huge gaps between parts, and they don’t feel loose or flimsy). It’s plastic, so obviously won’t feel as solid as a metal shell would. All of the glossy surfaces were protected with a plastic film during shipping (don’t be one of those dorks that leaves that stuff on either, take it off. It looks much better with the glossy surfaces.) I’m not a big fan of the power plug being on the right side, although I don’t see how they could’ve put it on the back. It’s all curved surfaces back there, and the battery takes up most of the rear of the device.
• Video - I need to dig into this one more, but I can confirm that they aren’t using a driver specific to the hardware in the Cloudbook. Xwindows is configured with a VESA driver. It’s a generic video driver which will work and give you higher-than-VGA resolutions with full color, but it’s slow. The Frame Buffer driver is usually the other one I see some distros use. Either one is not going to get you anywhere near top performance, but they will be compatible with pretty much all video hardware out there. I’m pretty sure this may stop your ability to do the dual-screen thing if you plugged in an external monitor.

Other things I noticed are that the CPU appears to be running at full speed based on /proc/cpuinfo, but there’s a posting in the Cloudbooker.com forums that indicates that the kernel may be setup to roll through the boot process at half the CPU speed (600 mhz). You also have to login to the OS. Someone mentioned that this is bad and unacceptable compared to how easy the Asus Eee is to use (no login necessary), but I think it’s far better. It’s more secure. This is more in line with how Microsoft Vista and most popular distros of Linux function normally. You’re logged in as a normal user that has to use “sudo” to perform root functions at the console, or provide your password to perform admin functions in the GUI. I feel much safer with this setup than the auto-login, no-password deal the Eee has with Xandros in simple mode.

Ok, this post is long enough. How about some unboxing pix? The other laptop in the pictures is my Dell Latitude D620 with an extended battery on it. That’s what that goofy wrist rest is on that laptop. Sorry for the old school links. I would’ve done thumbnails, but for some reason Wordpress doesn’t seem to want to allow thumbnails on images above 1-2MB. Most of these are 6.3 megapixel images. Enjoy!

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