syali@sybil.cs.Buffalo.EDU (Sy Ali) (04/04/91)
Hi Folks,
Heres my review. Sorry it took so long but I've been busy. I got mucho
requests for it, so I'm posting this.
Cons:
Limited storage (1 or 2meg), block size is 4K.
Keyboard is not full-travel, sometimes hard to tell if key pressed.
Screen impossible to read when scrolling.
Limited DOS 3.3 in ROM.
Short battery life (2hrs).
Keyboard layout nonstandard.
640K Ram
NEC V30 processor (9.54/4Mhz).
AC adaptor bulky (1.5lbs) and unwieldy.
Battery rated for 2hrs.
Only one low battery light (goes on when battery low).
No disk ($199 extra, 1.5lb, 3.5" 1.44M/720K).
No parallel port (must get adaptor or disk drive).
Manuals are designed for a business user (somewhat useless).
Pros:
Seems solidly built.
Base unit very light (4.4lb) and portable (real laptop).
Builtin 2400 baud modem.
Screen OK (except when scrolling), CGA, 7 shades of grey.
No moving parts to wear out.
Adjustable contrast.
Quiet keyboard (good for typing at meetings).
Claim battery is special that won't have "memory" problems.
Comes with all cables, null modem (etc) and LapLink.
Seems good for me, as I wanted a light portable laptop for note-taking
and entry on the go (classes and meetings). Thus, I'm not a power user.
I have access to numerous powerful machines at school and will use it
primarily as my "thesis" machine.
I ended getting the 1MG machine and a 3.5" disk so my final cost
was $914 (cost + shipping). If you are really going to be transferring
large stuff frequently (from the laptop to a real machine) I recommend you
get the disk as LapLink is rather slow. I can read the disks on SPARCS
using mtools.
Now, for that price you can get a T1000SE (or a machine with a HD),
so you have to decide what features are important to you. For me it's
a good machine. It runs all software I tried (a lot of small PCMAG
utilities), although the latest version of FILEC caused problems.
Biggest problem I have with it is the small (1MG) HD. This fills up real
fast, especially as the block size is 4K. For small COM files you gotta
use XEQ! Additionly you want to LZEXE or PKLITE your files. I have
all my utilities and STEVIE (vi) & MG (emacs) installed and working fine,
with about 300K left on the HD. Microsoft Works (2.0) came with it, but thats
a joke as it is HUGE (anybody wanna buy a copy of Microsoft Works 2.0?).
They wanted $199 for the extra meg which I thought was a bit much.
This is DEFINITELY not a machine for users of large applications.
On the plus side, the silicon HD is fast and quiet.
As I said, they rate the battery life as 2hrs and its clearly less if
you're using the modem. You can maximize battery life by slowing down
the speed & dimming the backlighting. They claim it takes about 10 hrs to
recharge (seems about right), so I plug it in around outlets and
overnight. I've yet to push it to the limit so I'm not sure what the "real"
battery life is (I'm always around outlets). Oh, and they claim their
battery won't memory. The silicon HD has a separate battery that will
keep the contents for a week (thus you must recharge once a week).
BTW, the disk drive WON'T work unless the laptop is plugged into an AC outlet!
Well thats all I can think of now. If you have any questions, email me.
BTW, is anyone out there interested in an UltraLite mailing list, if
so email me.
Cheers, Sy.
--
Internet: syali@cs.buffalo.edu UUCP: syali@sunybcs.uucp
Bitnet: syali%cs.buffalo.edu@ubvm.bitnet
Syed Ali, Dept. of CS, 226 Bell Hall, SUNY@Buffalo, Buffalo NY 14260.
``It's not what you do; it's who sees you do it!''brian@king.csd.mot.com (04/05/91)
I got an UltraLite from DAK a couple of weeks ago. Here's my review.
I won't repeat what was already discussed by Sy Ali's review in this
newsgroup.
First, I should mention what I wanted to use the unit for. I wanted a very
lightweight computer which I could fit in a briefcase and still have room
for archaic items like pens and paper. My plan was to use it for note taking,
memo writing, remote login via a terminal emulator, electronic mail, and
personal management (calendar, appointments, to-do lists, and general
organization of personal projects and data). It needed to do all of this
quietly enough to be used in meetings or on airplanes, and without AC power
for as much as four hours. I was willing to spend about $1000 +/-.
What I got was the 2MB unit, the 3.5" external disk, and Lotus Agenda on
a ROM card. I also got two extra battery packs so that I can get up to
six hours before seeing an AC outlet. Everything arrived OK except Agenda.
DAK sent me 1-2-3 by mistake. With tax, license, and dealer prep, the price
ended up growing to about $1400.
I agree with Sy's "cons" except:
- I consider "no disk" to be a "pro" in that it's quiet and there are
no moving parts to worry about.
- "No parallel port" isn't a problem because I don't lug a printer around
with me.
- Application ROM cards can only be used one at a time, they are a bit pricey,
they are unlikely to be updated along with disked versions, and they
are probably abbreviated versions of the disked product. (See also
under "pros", below).
- Cables and AC power brick have unwieldly EMI/RFI blobs in the cables.
- The AC power brick is positioned near the laptop end of the power cord
instead of the AC plug end, which seems strange and unfortunate. Probably
an EMI/RFI concern.
- I don't think that there is a socket for a math coprocessor.
I also agree with Sy's "pros", with the following comments:
- I am not used to using an LCD screen, and was worried that I'd hate it.
Aside from scrolling smear, I find that the UltraLite screen is very usable.
- Application ROM cards provide fast program loading. I believe that
they actually execute out of the 640K memory and not directly from
the ROM's themselves.
- Silicon disk provides very fast program loading, especially compared to
diskette-based laptops.
- Sy says its a "real laptop" -- actually, it's a notebook. It's almost
a bit too small to use on a real lap. :-)
I hate COMMAND.COM, so I installed portions of the MKS Toolkit. I configured
it to boot to init.exe and then spawn a getty-like login.exe program.
With no floppy to boot from, this actually provides some security!
MKS's Korn shell is a delight, of course, and MKS vi works quite well.
I've gotten used to using ^F and ^B instead of ^U and ^D because of the
scrolling smear.
I installed some of the basic MKS utilities like cat, cd, mkdir, ... ,
and I compressed the less frequently-used ones and aliased them through a
ksh script which uncompresses them for execution. That saved me quite
a bit of disk space.
Using MKS's cpio with a compress option, I can back up a full 2MB disk onto
a single 1.44MB floppy, albeit rather slowly.
I installed UUPC so I can use the UltraLite to send and receive mail. Works
great! I've registered it as a Usenet node. Not enough disk space for a
newsfeed, though. :-)
I've been using Procomm Plus as a terminal emulator, but it seems to have
a rather large footprint on the UltraLite's small disk, so I'm looking for
a smaller VT100 terminal emulator with kermit and xmodem protocols.
A TSR which can do background file transfers would be really great.
Any suggestions?
As Sy mentioned, the small disk is a problem. Like any disk, be it 360K,
1.2MB, 20MB, or 600MB, it's nearly full already. I guess the data expands
to fill the available disk space, yes? I think that managing disk space
will be a continuous challenge on the UltraLite.
In general, I'm quite happy with the unit. I'm willing to answer questions,
and Sy and I were considering setting up a mailing list for UltraLite
owners or potential owners. If you're interested, send me mail.
--
-Brian Smithson
Motorola Inc., Computer Group, Commercial Systems Division
10700 N. De Anza Boulevard, Cupertino, CA 95014 USA, (408)366-4104
brian@csd.mot.com, {apple | pyramid}!motcsd!brian