ASUS R70a hands on. Atom Battery life first impressions.

Its all a bit uncoordinated here. One minute everyone is allowed on a stand and the next, it’s cleared out. No-one stopped me from having a good play around with the R70a though. Smaller and much better looking than the R2H/E, its running Vista in typical ultra mobile PC fashion (slow) on a 1.6Ghz CPU that I assume is Atom. If the predictions are right, a 1.6Ghz Atom will be about as fast as a Celeron 900 which inst nearly enough. There’s no aero capability either. Why do they persist in using Vista on UMPCs. Is Microsoft giving it away for free to the OEMs? There’s a 3G modem built-in with a pull-out ribbon aerial, a good bright screen (1024×600) and a touchscreen which seems to be good for inkers. Its certainly not a soft touch screen. GPS appears to be built-in. Battery life: This is the first time i’ve been able to see Menlow/Atom in action and it looks like, at 1.6Ghz with 3G on and brightness at 50%, you’re going to get around 4 hours from what appears to be a 30Wh battery. Lowest drain figures observed through the performance monitor were in the 6watt range which is more than i’d hoped for. In-use battery life looks like it will be in the 3-3.5hr range. A had a short play with the R50 but the battery died on me so I can’t give you any feedback on it yet. I would say that the R70 could make a nice mini-slate for inking but the Vista performance looks like it will be a problem. I’ll post the images as soon as I can upload them on to the server (which seems to be getting hit rather heavily right now.)