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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?
Mate, put down the crackpipe.
VB is nice, but i would *NEVER* concider doing anything large with it, it's nice for an interfacing app or something like that, but kiss it goodbye when you want something serious.
Now, Java is nice, the only problem? Speed. If you can fix that, great, then I *might* concider to merge to Java (but i will never merge to VB! NEVER!)
There are just certain things you can't do in VB (or Java) or some things just prove to be very dificult, take OS development as an example. VB can't be used for this, neither can Java, unless you are running on a chip which can natively run java code, and as far as i know, the most popular CPUs at the moment don't.
If you haven't been able to tell, i'm a hardcore C/C++/Assembler coder, and I have my reasons for using those languages. I've done many things, like demo coding, where speed & size are very strict, and assember/c/c++ fits those requirements easily. When spending time programming my OS, I use those 3 languages too, why? This time i use them for speed and for an other reason, C/C++ are still pretty low level languages, you can still easily get to the hardware (much harder in Java for example), and this is crucial when writing an OS.
I agree, C/C++ might need a cleanup, but please, don't let some crappy language from MicroShit become standard, it's already bad enough we have to live with their OSs and software.
The US versions of the two Crusoe portables I was looking at in my previous Slashdot post about this, the Casio Cassiopiea Fiva MPC-205E and 206E, and the NEC Versa DayLite, are both available online, direct from Casio and the NEC from CDW or PC Connection.
The Transmeta ultralight noteboooks page also has "How to Buy" links for all the listed US-market notebooks.
I've been waiting for a US-available Transmeta-powered laptop for quite a while. Dynamism was one source, but way to expensive. eBay has several Japanese-market laptops for sale all the time (Toshiba L1/L2/L3's) from a guy in Korea (very good reputation though!). I've even seen some of the other Japanese-only Transmeta-powered laptops on eBay from time to time (like the Fujitsu Bibio Loox-T).
The problem is, at 600MHz, the TM5600 just can't quite do full motion DVDs without problems, which is what they promised it could do. There just isn't quite enough horsepower in it. And, the battery life is Good, but not Great. So, all the manufacturers have been waiting for the TM5800 (800MHz) cpus to come out.
In general, the Japanese market is very aggressive with tiny electronic devices like the Sony Picturebooks. But in the US, it's more the bigger screens and CD-RW/DVD drives that sell more units. For this reason, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Sony have several Transmeta-based laptops for sale only in Japan, but not here in the US (yet).
I've been drooling over the Fujitsu P-Series laptop ever since it was put up on their website a few months ago. 3.5lbs, 3+ hours runtime (up to 15 with optional batteries) with an integrated DVD/CD-RW drive. All for $1500 up. The "available by" date has kept creeping later and later though. It originally said in October, then November, then before 2002, and now it says "Will ship in January."
Transmeta is having a few manufacturing problems at the fab, and it's pushing everything back. This also hurts the manufacturers in trusting the company any further.
Also, Transmeta has had a high CEO rollover rate the last few months, causing worry about the internal health/vision of the company.
The other problem is Intel got all worried about it and developed their Ultra Low Voltage chips which are also coming out in laptops over the next few months. Dell is rumored to have an ultra-cool 3lb unit with this chip in it. 700MHz, with the same power usage as Transmeta, same run time, but with the Intel brand name behind it. I bet this will sell very well, especially to the corporate/college student market.
Overall, Transmeta was a good idea, but poorly executed for the laptop market. Intel will squash them in the next 6 months. But, Transmeta, with their code-morphing technology, has a lot of other markets to work with (low-power/small size servers, etc) and their TM6000 chip is supposed to be an all-in-one web-pad solution type chip. Small-footprint laptops is just one possible market for their technology, with a big gorilla hanging around the banana tree.
So, instead of hoping for a Transmeta-based laptop for Christmas, wait a few months and get the best one you can find from the soon-to-be-released chips (with either Transmeta or Intel inside).
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
I watched the unveiling of Transmeta online and was holding off making a laptop purchase for a couple months after waiting to get a Crusoe...but I gave up (and the PictureBooks was not interesting in anyway). Out of sight out of mind.
So, now I'm starting to consider getting a new laptop and passing my current Toshiba 2805 to my dear wife. I have a lot of requirements -- 15" LCD, speed, harddrive, RAM, ... but I honestly could not care less about the processor manufacturer and would NOT buy a laptop just because of the processor.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Maybe you should be asking "Where can I buy a laptop with long battery life?" or "Where can I buy a laptop with really low energy consumption?". Maybe the answer won't be a Crusoe laptop.
Start Running Better Polls
My boss has owned a tiny cruesoe based laptop from NEC for around 6 months now. It runs at 600MHz supposedly (Model number is unknown but it's on the NEC website.)
The build quality is fantastic: the machine is ultra thin and light but with highly important things such as solid hinges and the like. I mean, it's just so damn sexy to look at.
Great screen. Excellent battery life. Good solid components, especially things that count like the keyboard.
I'm primarily going to bitch however. The crusoe never seems to run past 300Mhz when unplugged (iirc correctly, this is deliberate, but a serious pain: booting fairly standard win2000 install takes ages after logging in)
I have found the lack of real ethernet port highly annoying as well: basically several of the ports (eg modem and ethernet) use non-standard interfaces, which means you can't just jack in an RJ-45 connector, you have to cart around silly little "converters". This means they get either lost or broken quickly: He's on his third ethernet convertor (having lost one and broken one: if they get bent too much (eg contactly unplugging and plugging in again) then the wires come loose it seems)
The newer versions have a faster processor, and with some reading of manuals, I could probbaly figure out how to force the processor into full speed mode on batteries.
The laptop itself was bought after reading a review in the UK magazinre PC World (I think), which gave it their best rating (beating the ultralight version of the sony viao). It's used constantly every day and the fact it's so light and yet solid (aside from the damn ethernet port connectors..) means I'd look at getting one myself when I next upgrade. Nice piece of kit.