As part of a training event with Deutsche Welle in Ukraine this week we  visited a local newspapers offices. The small team at Molbuk.ua, Molodyi Bukovinetz, are approaching the question of print vs online with limited resources in a country where honest reporting is becoming more and more important.

I’m testing a Point of View Mobii Wintab 800W budget Windows 8 tablet and it’s been a tough, slow process. The Wintab 800W is built on Intel’s low-cost reference platform that you’re going to see in a lot of $99 Windows tablet offers this quarter so what you see here applies to many other models. The issue is that with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage you simply can’t approach them as Windows PCs. Working in the desktop means running out of RAM and disk space quickly. Even Chrome is […]

After a weekend of testing the new $200 Acer E11 Windows laptop (first impressions and video here) I’ve completed my first-take on the subject of Chromebooks vs modern netbooks. Windows netbooks, or at least the new-wave of netbooks, remain the more flexible option but they don’t ‘kill’ Chromebooks. The Chromebook’s efficient, secure and manageable nature has massive appeal to the education and small-business market and Windows remains too heavyweight and too expensive / time-consuming for a ‘low-cost’ solution. It’s in the consumer space though that Windows continues to have the […]

I bought an Acer E11 Windows laptop. It’s pretty much an Acer C3 Chromebook running Windows. Same N2840 CPU. Same 2GB of RAM. Same 32GB eMMC SSD. Same weight and sizing. Over the last two days I’ve tested it hard and now have my first set of thoughts about the Windows vs Chromebook experience. I’ll go deeper into this topic over time and add videos and long-term thoughts as my experience grows but I wanted to get thoughts out there as soon as possible to help people in the run up […]

The Acer Aspire E11 (ES1 in some areas) is one of a new-wave of 200-euro / dollar Windows netbooks entering the market as both a response to low-cost Chromebooks and  part of a continuing drive to cut the cost of entry-level laptops. It’s made possible by a low-cost Intel System on Chip and tight motherboard integration, low-cost storage and the removal of the fan. Just 32GB of SSD storage is offered so there are some limits to how you can use the ES1. Look at it as a cloud-computer though (100GB of free […]

A few weeks ago Intel posted 2 videos featuring Chromebooks and they appear to be part of a bigger campaign to push ARM out of the market. Clearly Intel thinks that there’s something big worth fighting for here. The videos lead to a set of 15 Intel-commissioned reports from Principled Technologies that are all available to the public and listed below.

I’ve been testing Windows TabletPCs with 1GB RAM recently. It’s a truly poor experience if you plan to use all the features on a Windows PC. With 2GB RAM you can hit limits and start seeing swap usage rise and performance hit the floor. The performance degradation isn’t ‘graceful’ at all. Chromebooks face similar issues of RAM availability but in my tests with 2GB RAM I see it matching Chromebook usage scenarios well and don’t see performance degrading as quickly as it does on a Windows PC. If you’re switching […]