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Where Would You Buy A Crusoe Laptop?
Misha asks: "I have been following Transmeta's news briefs for a little while and besides the stock's constant decline, there seems to be some life to the Crusoe. This story indicates that a new Crusoe-based laptop is appearing in China. Does anyone actually own one or an equivalent from some other manufacturer? Could you please post a review? Pros and cons from anyone reading would be appreciated." Unfortunately, it doesn't look like things have changed in the past year. Besides goods from specialty importers like dynamism.com (check out the Bluetooth camera!), the only Transmeta devices widely available in the U.S. seem to be the last few generations of Sony's Picturebook. I'd hoped for a tidal wave of them -- is there any hope of more widespread Crusoe laptop presence? Or are there good sources already?
I saw an one of the Japanese "ultralight" notebook PCs (NEC I believe) at the Microcenter in Cambridge (Boston). Had a 10" screen, ~ 3 lbs and looked cute. The CPU listed was the Transmeta Crusoe. Nifty look & feel, and seemed snappy enough for lightweight work (i.e. standard websurfing, wordprocessing, email etc).
Fujitsu's P-2040 should be available something like this week or next. I have had the opportunity to play with a prerelease prototype, and it's a really sweet machine. At a $1499 list price (don't expect big retail discounts), it is priced to move, too.
Another box that you can get in the U.S. today is the NEC DayLite/UltraLite series, they are fairly expensive ($2499 list) but are extremely light, have *very* good battery life, and the DayLite version has a screen that is viewable in full sunlight, hence the name. Unfortunately the screen is somewhat dull when indoors. It also has some issues running Linux, although the ACPI changes in 2.4.16 improved the situation greatly.
I have one of the Crusoe Picturebooks, and I'm perfectly happy with it. It's light, and runs a lot cooler than the mobile pentiums. Power consumption is good, though not as stupendous as transmeta claimed it would be. I get about 8 hours on the quad battery (which does double the weight of the machine). Other than that, there really isn't anything to report. The picturebook does feature a horribly broken APM compatibility layer, and ACPI on linux ain't working yet, so no power management to speak of. The crusoe's longrun stuff does work under linux though, as does pretty much everything else on the machine (except the winmodem).
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Transmetazone should answer a lot of your questions.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Very nice machine. 10GB disk, 128MB memory, 2.4lbs. I've upgraded to 256MB memory, and am running RedHat 7.1, though not without some adventures. For more info on this and other similar laptops, visit dynamism, or go read the Yahoo groups mailing list Libretto-L1. email me or post questions there for more info.
Pros:
Lightweight
Sufficient CPU power for my tasks (email, word processing, web, Linux / devel system, though compilation is slow...)
gorgeous screen
usable keyboard, though some of my friends find it a touch small. I think it's great.
Cons:
low Linux compatibility (getting sound and pcmcia requires a custom kernel hack, sound is iffy at best after that, screen brightness can't be changed, pcmcia is a bit weird...)
short battery life (2.5 hrs, tops. with windows it'll go up to 3.5 if you reduce screen brightness, which leaves it still perfectly usable. Just can't be done in linux...)
Japanese keyboard and manuals. a minor annoyance, I remapped it as US keyboard because I touch type, and I know there are those who will love the extra keys to bind to things...
There is no accessible bios or bios pw.
Oh, and the full feature list:
firewire, 1 pcmcia slot, winmodem, 2xUSB1.1, ALi sound, up to 256MB memory, up to 40GB disk, screen is 10" 1280x600 widescreen (two side by side xterms anyone?), VGA out. Triple capacity battery available.
Price is currently about $1700 from dynamism, or $1100 if you import it yourself. Others will sell it for closer to $1300 I think. Dynamism is overpriced but great to work with, and they'll sell it without windows.
Happy hunting
According to this article about Crusoe laptops, it seems that Transmeta didn't deliver the chips in time to get them into the laptops:
Sony Corp and Fujitsu Ltd on Wednesday postponed the launch of new personal computers originally planned for later this week, blaming the delayed development of Transmeta Corp's (TMTA) power-efficient chips.
(Reuters)
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