First Transmeta Notebook

ggrappone writes: "CNet has a story on the first Transmeta notebook." Looks to be the same as the mini Sony VAIO picture book. Runs a 600Mhz Crusoe chip, and they claim substantial battery improvements with no performance hit. But apparently they'll be available in the states soon, so we can see for ourselves.

Comments

Re:I fail to be impresed

[BigDaddyJ]

You can get from 2.5 to 5 hours on that tine little thing. Wow. Amazing. My 1998 Wallstreet G3 gets 3 on one battery and has a 14 inch screen.

Realize a key fact here: the battery on the PictureBook is small. The G3 laptop batteries are likely much larger. If you look at many of the other x86 laptops that are out there (weighing 4.5-7 pounds) they have very decent battery life. I have a Sony 505TX with a quad-capacity battery, weighing about 4.5-5 pounds, that gives me 6+ hours battery life. But it's not 2.2 pounds!

(Interesting note: the quad-capacity battery on the SuperSlims such as my 505TX is the same one as the PictureBook C1XS, and hopefully this unit... and did you see the battery times with the quad on the new unit? Up to 20 hours!)

The battery life on the previous PictureBooks, with any use, quickly dropped to under 2 hours. So, for it, this is a huge improvement. And this is why the Transmeta chip is so useful.

Of course, we'll have to see whether or not the claims pan out to reality.

--bdj