Kohjinsha SA1 UMPC. First impressions.

Is that small enough for you m’lady?

Kohjinsha SA1 unboxing.

Kohjinsha SA1 specifications and resources.

Kohjinsha SA1 gallery.

I’ve been jotting down notes as I go with the Kohji. Here’s the first 24 hours notes.

Build quality average. Keyboard feels cheap. Mouse pad too. Swivel screen is sturdy. Plastics look a little cheap.

Why the convertible format / swivel screen? A ‘Tablet’ mode is nice but not really useful without a touch screen. You could use this mode for book reading or video watching I guess but not much else. Looks impressive though!

Battery life – Excellent. I’ve just finished running at test. At 50% screen, No WiFi/BT, watching a 2mbps video (cpu average 70% util, playing from HDD) it shut down at 3hrs 22mins with 5 mins (3%) left on the battery. Pretty darn good. Thats an average 8.3W drain.

Battery capacity is high (for a 3-cell battery) at 28 W/hr.

SD slot performance very good. Both SD and CF devices appear to be PCI devices (rather than USB devices.) SD transfer rate with a cheap 1Gb Extrememory premium card: 6.6Mbps. This would make a great mini laptop for digital photographers and photo journalists.

External display goes up to 1280×1024. Quality was good. No extended screen though. Its either monitor or notebook. Not both. Good for Powerpoint presentations or for connecting to a projector.

Keyboard seems OK but each key has an area on the left side where it is less responsive. You have to be sure to press a little harder than normal. This could be better. More testing needed here.

No fan noise. (fanless)

Very slight HDD noise (near-silent!)

No heat build up. Much cooler than Pepper Pad 3 or Vega (both Geode devices with no fans)

40GB drive is partitioned 50:50. Not optimal for me. Its a 2.5″ drive. 160GB drives should be possible if you want to void the warranty.

Bed and Sofa surfing in two hands is possible. You can thumb the keyboard with it fully open. Its not too heavy. Not as good as the Pepper Pad though.

Video performance with Xvid is very good. It passed my 2Mbps Xvid/AC3 test. That’s more than enough for that little screen. With WMV things seem to be a bit different. The performance is very poor. Even a 512kbps WMV9 video is too much. Strangely enough, producing the video with Movie Maker was painless. 9 minutes to encode a 2 min video is very slow but OK for clips. Here’s the video of Xvid performance:

Speakers adequate. Much better than v7110, i7210. Not as good as PepperPad.

Looks great. Better than Pepper Pad, v7110, i7200s.

Speed of XP is OK. Amazing for such a low-end processor. About the same as the Vega (as expected.) There are some background tasks running that need to be cleared up maybe. Pepper Pad is slightly quicker to get browsing with though.

Screen brightness very good. LED backlit. Good viewing angle. Not quite as good as Vega viewing angle but still very good.

User upgradeable RAM is a good idea. 512MB is probably optimal though.

Hardware buttons for Wifi and BT. Always good.

Mouse pointer is OK. Some might have to get used to LHS mouse pointer. Has tap-to-select function.

My Wife loves the look of it. I think a lot of women will like this device. Any women reading? What do you think?

I keep wondering about the price. $1k is a lot of money. Even $750 (the Japanese local price) is quite high. If it was a Via C7-M 1Ghz in there, it would be, well, more comfortable because you’d have at least some Direct 3D support. Many people won’t be able to justify it so it leaves only business, niche and rich customers. Digital photographers, frequent flyers and train commuters and maybe a few middle aged round-the-world trippers.  

WiFi quality is good. Better than the i7210 so far.

I’m finding myself using the 800×600 mode rather than the native 800×480. On the Vega this res. was to high on the 4″ screen.

In comparison with the Vega, the big question is – would you swap a touchscreen and some portability for a keyboard, Wifi and Bluetooth?

Skype. Works fine. I don’t expect video to work but voice using the built in mic and speakers was OK.

itunes V7.2.0.16 works. This is good news as on the Vega, it crashed. Others had reported that this newer version works on the Vega so I assume they’ve fixed the bug. You can’t view the albums covers in the video and films sections though (this part has a 3D graphics requirement I think.)

Still to test: Linux, Audio quality (first impressions are good,) Streets and Trips/Autoroute and lots lots more. Of course!

Thanks again to Dynamism.com for getting this over the pond in super-quick time. 

Steve / Chippy