Acer 1410 Impressions

So my Acer 1410 came in the mail 2 days ago from JR.com and I've been playing around with it for the past few days. Here are my impressions so far.

It is a compact notebook with the following specs:

- Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 1.4 ghz

- 11.6" HD LED screen

- 2 GB DDR2 memory

- 250 GB HDD

- Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics

- 6 cell 4400 mAh battery

- 3 lbs flat

I picked up the Acer 1410 after shopping around in Taiwan with the intention of buying a small netbook. However, when I was in Taiwan I discovered that there were 11.6" netbooks such as the Acer 751h and other offerings from Dell, etc. Unfortunately all the 11.6" netbooks were paired with Intel Z520 processors, which are supposedly slower than the typical Intel Atom N270/N280 offerings. The 10" netbook market was the biggest in Taiwan and there weren't too many adopters of the 11.6" offerings as of yet, but I expect them to be the next best thing within a year. I found out that there was an Acer model with a Core 2 Solo coming out to the U.S. so I held off buying a netbook in Taiwan, which were actually quite expensive there anyways (usually $100 more than the U.S. price, which is a lot considering netbooks costing $400 on average in the states).

The Acer 1410 isn't actually considered a netbook, but rather a traditional notebook, but I went with it anyways for the bigger and higher resolution screen and discrete graphics that were capable of playing HD video through hardware acceleration (which is something none of the Intel Atom variations can do). It also comes with fairly reasonable battery life (supposedly 6 hours). While note quite as astonishing as the 10 hour claims from Asus netbooks (such as the 1005HA), I am willing to give up some battery life for a snappier system capable of playing HD video.

So far the 1410 has been good to me and the build quality seems great. I don't feel like it is going to fall apart in my hands or the keys on the keyboard are going to snap off. Though it is shipped with Vista, it also comes with a free upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium, which is a nice touch. From what I have read Windows 7 should run a lot faster than the bloated Windows Vista.

Here are some more pics and some of the pro/cons I have noted:

Pros:

- Good keyboard size (practically the same size as a standard keyboard)

- Gorgeous 11.6" screen with 1,366x768 resolution

- Snappy performance with the Core 2 Solo on most applications

- Able to watch HD video with hardware acceleration

- Draft N WiFi with gigabit ethernet

- More than enough space (250 GB)

- HDMI video out for the big screen :)

Cons:

- U.S. version getting a 4400 mAh versus the 5600 mAh version in Europe

- Single core isn't too great at multi-tasking

- No bluetooth (though I probably won't need it)

With that said, for $449 ($380-ish for me after rebate) shipped, the Acer 1410 is a nice machine for my portable needs. I don't like to carry my 15.4" Macbook Pro everywhere since it is pretty heavy, so that is where the 1410 comes in.

Updates: Jet lag, District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Snow Leopard

It has been a few days since I got back from Taiwan so I've been trying to work off the jet lag while editing over a thousand pictures taken during my time there. I'll make more updates to my blog soon enough with things on Taiwan once I finish editing and uploading the pictures I want on Flickr.

This week has gone by pretty quickly so I'm just going to share some thoughts I had this week. While I was in Taiwan I could not find a showing of District 9, Peter Jackson's new movie about aliens from space trapped in camps on Earth. Therefore when I got back one of the first things that I did was go watch District 9 with some friends. From watching the trailer, my first impressions was that it was going to be a movie about humans going to war with the aliens taking residence in South Africa. Another B-rated action flick perhaps? But by the time I exited the movie theatre I was quite blown away by the movie. At first it started off slow, kind of like Cloverfield, with the camera interviewing a bunch of people, except the main character was really annoying and reminded me of Steve Carrell from The Office. But as the movie progressed, the more human aspects of the film began to show and the need to survive really changed the character to someone different. Anyways I would highly recommend the movie for anyone to watch. There is a decent amount of gore though (just a heads up).

Another movie I watched this week was Inglourious Basterds. This movie was unique in it's own way. If you are going to expect a WWII action/shooter movie (like Saving Private Ryan), then you will be sorely disappointed. Granted there are scenes of action, but most of the movie's guts are in the dialogue. The dialogue is funny and witty, though long at times. Brad Pitt puts up a hilarious yet terrible accent while Christoph Waltz plays probably the most interesting Nazi I have seen in a movie (in a good way). Anyways it is also another recommended movie, though if I had one choice between District 9 or Inglourious, it'd probably lean more towards District 9.

So yesterday I picked up a copy of OSX Snow Leopard for my computer and just wanted to comment on the new refinements to an already impressive operating system. The installation took no more than an hour and I get some hard drive space back as advertised. I think the installation freed up about 10 GB of hard drive space.

After installation, I noticed that overall the operating system looks the same. Most of the refinements such as Grand Central Dispatch (which helps improve the performance of multi-core CPUs), OpenCL (utilizing GPU to help improve performance), and native 64-bit OS are invisible to daily use at the moment, though I suspect that once program developers tap into the potential in the future, applications will run much faster. One of the programs I use the most is Adobe Lightroom, which runs at the same speed. I have not tested other programs like Photoshop or Final Cut, but I'm fairly certain most things will run the same since they were not optimized yet to take advantage of the new technologies.

Safari 4, the built-in web browser, runs dramatically faster than on Leopard. Things like the Top Sites tab, Java loading, and loading websites just seem snappier overall. Sites like Gmail load at least 2x faster than with Safari 4 on Leopard. Quicktime player also got an overhaul and the refinements look sweet. The player automatically hides the borders and controls once you move your mouse away from the movie when it is playing. This helps to clean up the look of the player and is a nice subtle way to improve overall experience. The new Expose is also pretty cool and arranges things in a more clean outline than before.

Overall the refinements are worth the $29 price tag. I'm really hoping that developers tap into the new technologies such as OpenCL to improve performance in the future.

First Impression: Fuji Finepix F70EXR

Besides having fun in Taiwan, I was also looking to purchase a point and shoot digital camera to replace my aging Canon Powershot S50. My SLR with it's variety of lenses tends to be too heavy sometimes to be carrying all day, especially if I'm just hanging out with friends and have no need to take crazy pictures. While my Powershot has done the job for the past 5 years or so, it is clearly dated.

Fortunately my cousin was able to let me test out the Fuji Finepix F70EXR for a brief moment. I actually did not know the tech specs but here are some of the more notable ones from what I have researched:

- 1/2" CCD sensor

- 10 MP resolution

- 10x optical zoom

- wide angle to telephoto: 27-270mm (35mm equivalent)

- 2.7" LCD screen

- ISO up to 12800

- VGA video recording (640x480)

From what I could tell, the build quality was quite excellent. I believe it has a metal frame construction with some kind of thick paint or lacquer or something so the build was quite solid and would hold up to some mild abuse. The camera itself was also thin and small enough to fit inside your pockets (unlike my S50 brick).

For myself, image quality comes first and from what I could see there are certainly interesting features on this camera that help to improve image quality. Surely any P&S can easily do ISO 100 - 400 with minimal effort, however, with companies pushing higher MP count on smaller sensors, noise becomes pretty evident on anything higher than ISO 400 for most P&S. While 1/2" CCD sensor size certainly isn't the biggest I've heard of on a P&S it is still quite large compared to most P&S cameras out there, which definitely helps with the noise.

With that said, I think the low noise performance on the F70EXR was quite acceptable up to ISO 1600. I would definitely not use anything past ISO 1600 even though it claims to hit ISO 12800. Though certainly not glamorous at ISO 1600, the picture is still great and if only used for web applications (blogs, flickr, etc) then it is certainly more than acceptable when scaled down from 10 MP. I think that this might be the first P&S camera that I've handled that performs decent in low light situations.

The F70EXR also has some unique shooting functions called "PRO SHOT" and "PRO LOW LIGHT" I believe. PRO SHOT is a function where when the camera is focused on a certain object, say a cup of coffee in a coffee shop, it will add more "blur" to the background. Given that the maximum aperture is f/3.3 on the widest focal length, I guess this function helps to add to the "brokeh" that so many people love. I have not seen a blown up image to see how well the blur is, but the camera certainly does it in hardware since it does it on the spot. Another unique function I found out was the PRO LOW LIGHT, which I thought was more or less a HDR function on the camera. Basically it snaps a few pictures of the current scene and blends them together in hardware, similar to what photogs would be doing on their computers in Photoshop to create a HDR image. I have to say that it does indeed bring out more details and contrast in pictures, but I'll let a more dedicated reviewer with the images on hand do a more detailed examination.

Overall, the camera seems pretty solid after only brief moment of testing. It has good low light performance (relative to other P&S) and offers unique functions to make pictures more glamorous. For me 10MP is way more than enough and the 10x optical zoom is a plus. My only negative would be the lack of HD video recording that is found on basically all recent P&S cameras from other makes like Canon and Panasonic. Also I'm pretty sure that the image stabilization on the camera is imaged based rather than optical, which might be a concern as well.

Anyways, I will be looking forward to P&S camera shopping in Taiwan and hopefully I'll be able to pick something up to replace my aging and painfully slow Canon Powershot S50. The Fuji Finepix F70EXR is definitely on the list of possible buys, though I certainly want to look for something like the Canon SD780IS or possibly a Panasonic DMC-LX3 / ZS3, etc.