ASUS R2H Hands-on. Its loaded (in more ways than one.)

Thanks to Ian, a friend of mine who bought an R2H, I’ve just had a few hours ‘hands-on’ with the Asus R2H. But first…..

Oh come on. Its Friday night and its been a busy week. Cheers!

Back to the ASUS R2H. After something like 7 months waiting, I finally got to see one for real. And it looks great. Really. I have no hesitation in saying that I think this the most attractive ultra mobile PC so far. While the other UMPCs styling is OK, the ASUS has obviously had some design thought gone into it and it stands out. Well done to the design team at ASUS.

The accessory pack is superb too. (I’m talking about the German model  R2H-BH039T here)  In the box you get the R2H, a foldaway keyboard (with mini-retractable USB connector), a mini mouse (USB) a case, a stand (there’s no kick-stand on the R2H) and the software pack which includes MS Autoroute 2006 (A European map version of Streets and Trips.  Shame that its not version 2007 which was released yesterday.)

Speaking of software, I now know why people have been complaining about the speed of the R2H. Its absolutely loaded with 3rd party software. Overloaded. Try this test. Close down all your windows and then run task manager and click the box ‘Show processes from all users’ as an admin user.

If you’ve got a normal Windows XP machine, you’ll have something like 35 applications running. Maybe 40. If you’ve cleaned it up like mine, it will be less than 30. The R2H I looked at had over 60 processes running! Of the 768MB memory installed, over 500MB was taken up by background app’s. That’s crazy. Just watching the CPU meter in a quiescent state I was seeing anything from 25% to 75% utilisation. That’s not the way to build an image for a low-power PC ASUS. Top marks have to go to TabletKiosk because both the v7110 and u7210 I’ve used had around 30 processes running. My mum always told me to go for the quiet, clean type. She’ll be happy that I bought an i7210.

WebCam works, Bluetooth works, WiFi works and GPS is present (we didn’t have time to test that out.)  Battery life is tight on this device as it only seems to have a 24w/h battery. (Q1 has higher capacity batteries.) I saw a drain of about 11.5W with the WiFi on (screen about 30%) which seems about right. With the WiFi off, it dropped to about 10W which gives you an average 2 hours and a max (usable) of around 2:20. 

I was surprised to see Notebook Hardware Control show the CPU clockrate vary. The processor in the R2H is a Celeron and has no speed stepping but maybe Notebook Hardware Control is able to set the CPU clock divider (which goes from 6 to 10 x 100Mhz on these chips.) I’ll have to double-check this when I get more time with the R2H.

There’s no excessive heat build-up in normal use although like all UMPCs, it gets warm. The synaptics pointer is excellent, better than the one on the eo i7210 in my opinion, and those flat mouse buttons have a definite ‘click’ to them. The only problem is that they have no physical characteristic so you don’t know if you’re finger is on them or not without looking. I guess you’ll get used to that so it shouldn’t be a problem. The multiway cursor pad on the left hand side of the device has a two-stage click but I didn’t have time to investigate why.

All in all, I think that if you clean this ultra mobile PC up, there’s no reason why it won’t perform like the rest of the UMPCs. And when its clean and tidy, I’ll take it home to my Mum.

After the R2H fondling, it was time for a ultra mobile PC group session. Here you see the R2H, the i7210 and the Pepperpad 3 together. Take a look in the gallery for more comparison photos.

And finally, lets make it clear which ultra mobile PC is showing the way forward at the moment. It may be 7 months late to the party but take look at the lowest-price results from one of the price comparison engines in Germany (13 Oct 2006.)  Remember that the Q1b is due for release in the next few days in the U.S. and I suspect soon after in the EU so there is another round of price positioning to go through before Christmas, but if you were choosing a ultra mobile PC this week in Europe, I don’t think you’d need to dither over the decision.

(Prices from Geizhals.at show the cheapest ‘miscellaneous’ notebook PCs.)

In two weeks time, it could be a different story though. Bring on the Samsung Q1b for more ultra mobile PC price fighting. Matt Propst has ordered one and it should be dispatched on Monday apparently. Looking forward to the battery life test.

Thanks to Ian for the time with the R2H and good luck with the swimming competition tomorrow.

ASUS R2H marketing photos, full specifications and news links are available.

Tip: R2H owners should make sure they have the latest driver for the fingerprint reader. According to reports, its much much improved.

Regards.

Steve / Chippy