I did warn everyone when posting my first blog entry that the arrival of the Elonex ONE had a lot of similarities with the launch of the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC microcomputer and other machines from the 1980s. To have three 28 day delays in delivery was not unusual then, and I'm not too surprised that it's starting to look a bit that way again... Apologies if I called "time" too early from the hints I'd been seeing that the ONEt was on the way.
If it's any consolation, I've found a good little website at http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com - the Elonex ONEt (or something very similar) has been on sale in the Netherlands for some time by Trendtac http://www.trendtac.nl/ and the two sites already contain a lot of useful stuff, like a recovery image, a patch to get automatic updates to work, a patch to get to root xterm and a few games.
The Trendtac site is in Dutch so you may want to translate it using http://translate.google.com - the Dutch to English result is at: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.trendtac.nl%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=nl&tl=en
The site does have 320 megabytes of source code to download, released under the Open Source licence, and a cross compiler - so we prospective ONEt owners could take a bit of a lead by getting any programs we need compiled in advance of getting a machine...?
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- United Kingdom
- I've been working with computers for over 35 years from the Sinclair ZX81 with its 1k byte memory to mainframes and servers with umpteen processors and gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of drive space - but I'm still an IT geek who likes playing with small machines - like the Elonex One family...
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I've just had confirmation on 2/9 that my two machine have been posted out to me. Hopefully, Elonex have put enough stamps on the envelope that I don't have to pay for them when they arrive...but you never know with those crazy guys...
Here's the email:
Dear xxxxxx xxxx,
We thought that you might like to know that we shipped a parcel today to:
xxxxxx xxxx
xxxxxxx x xxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
containing :
1 x ElonexONEt White
1 x ElonexONEt Black
So, I'll let you all know when they arrive.
Noticed this on the News part of the Elonex One site:
Elonex ONEt pre-launch deliveries Aug 08
There has been a slight delay to Elonex ONEt deliveries. Deliveries will commence week beginning 1st Sept. We anticipate all back orders are then completed within two weeks. Elonex apologise for the delay to your order. We are doing everything in our power to ensure all deliveries are made as quickly as possible.
I got an email yesterday also saying it had been shipped - but at 1600 it had not arrived. When I called them I was told that a number had been sent to the wrong distribution depot... and they are not sure how long it would take to 'find' them... well I have only been waiting since March!!
I've just phoned up again and been told that they are waiting for things to get released from customs and for the third time in as many weeks I've been told I should get it by next Friday. I'm rapidly running out of patiences with them now.
Receive my OneT yesterday. Very quick video unboxing here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F13kJDcNz10
And some further observations:
1. Both machines appear to have small bubbles in the LCD screen coating. At first, I thought it was a protective cover on the LCD, but it doesn’t appear to be. It’s livable, but annoying and a sign of poor quality all round.
2. The right mouse button isn’t seated properly. With a few hours use it appears to be a little better, but both mouse buttons, to be honest are a little nasty.
3. The mouse pad is actually very good - you can tap it emulate mouse presses too. I think the mouse pad is actually better than on the eeepc701.
4. The keys are tiny, smaller than the 701, if that’s possible. You’ll not be doing a huge amount of touch-typing on this baby.
5. I’ve had the machine on, idling mostly, but doing other bits and bobs for over 3 hours now and it still have 25% battery life left, so that’s looking fine.
6. Word processing, spreadsheets are responsive - certainly appear to be much better than on the original One. I can type in real-time using massive fonts and the rendering is snappy.
7. The wireless internet is very good, actually. I can’t test the bandwidth right now, since most test sites use a version of flash way in advance of this baby. But not bad at all.
8. My Huwei e220 wireless broadband doesn’t work. There’s just no app. on the system to fire it up. I’d really love Elonex to get that working as it would make this baby 100x more useful.
9. My Kingston 2GB thumbdrive works just great.
10. My Transcend 2GB SD card works great too.
11. Bluetooth dongle doesn’t work…no app. for it, you see.
12. I have a few divx .avi files in standard def. None of them play satisfactorally. Some don’t play at all. Looks like I’ll have to go back to playing my old iPaq movies on them.
13. There are no installed games! I had rather hoped there would be stuff here to benefit kids.
14. Webcam doesn’t work on it. Never thought it would, but it was worth a shot.
15. My Dell wireless desktop works just fine. Installed instantly via USB and is nicely responsive.
So, my summary is…that it’s early days for this little nipper. With a bit of tinkering, kernel recompilation etc, it will be entirely possible to do so much more with this unit. I’d like to see it succeed and I hope that Elonex get their finger out to support their customers. I suspect that they won’t and I hope to be proved wrong.
Me? I’ll probably be off-loading both of my units to unsuspecting fools via our local ads paper, for a small profit, with any luck. Or maybe I’ll just sell one and keep the other.
I’m looking forward to hearing everyone else’s story!
[btw - sorry I forgot to mention your site on the vid. I was kind of ad-libbing it all and didn't have a clear plan of what I wanted to say]
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