Finally HP has additional six-cell batteries for the Mini-Note for sale now on their site. This isn’t a pre-order or reseller offer, they’re directly from HP. What’s even better is they’re only $129 which means the real three-cell price should be much less whenever they’re finally released. The bad news is the estimated ship date is June 30th, but at least the end is in sight.
Isaiah is finally here, new name and all. VIA has published a press release announcing the Nano family of processors. Initially there will be two “Low Voltage” and three “Ultra Low Voltage” versions of the Nano:
With three processors under 10w TDP, I wouldn’t think it unreasonable to see a sub-notebook with a Nano in it. Even the 1.0Ghz should out perform the 1.6Ghz C7-M while consuming less power. Seeing these numbers really makes me wonder why Richard Brown said that Isaiah “is intended for higher-priced 12″ to 14″ systems” and has no plans to use it in mini notebooks any time soon. I guess that means either it costs too much right now for a sub $500 netbook, they were bluffing for some reason, or he just didn’t know about something he probably should have.
Starting on page 12 of the whitepaper they have different benchmarks showing the Nano schooling the C7-M:
The Nano’s higher performance per watt measurement should help offset the its higher TDP.
For more information see the Nano’s whitepaper and the new pages on Via’s site.
Any ideas on what the first device will be to carry a new Nano chip?
*UPDATE*
Looks like we may have got some bad info on the batteries… In the comments Heather posted her chat log with an HP rep who said these batteries weren’t for the Mini-Note. So who knows at this point… Sorry for any confusion.
Over on the our forums caelum found some part numbers and xboiledeggx looked them up on the HP Parts Store as and they’re listed as “Part is orderable, please call 1-800-227-8164 for availability.”
#482262-001 3-Cell for $207.10
#482263-001 6-Cell for $191.90
I just spoke with an HP rep who gave me this link for the 3-cell battery that lists it as “Part is in stock” instead of call for availability. Not sure what the difference is yet. Unfortunately the battery is $207.10…ouch. She said the 6-cell battery part number was still KU528AA but wasn’t available yet.
News.com has has an interesting article on VIA’s new Isaiah chip. Not a lot of new info, or a release date, but a couple good nuggets of info are in there:
Isaiah will consumer more power than Intel’s Atom processor
Unfortunately we don’t know how much more still. They have not released official numbers on this. At any rate, when choosing your next PC you’ll be stuck between performance and battery life again when choosing between Isaiah and Atom.
“It’s (Isaiah) between two and four times the performance of C7. So, it’ very, very close to (Intel’s) Core 2. Core 2 solo (single core)”
So the Isaiah should be about as fast as a Core 2 Solo chip and, and way faster than the C7. This confirms the benchmarks from the German site eeePCnews.de. Still helpful to know at this point is what the power consumption will be for comparison.
The article infers that VIA may be trying to break into the Desktop market with this chip and it’s partnership with Nvidia. Could we see more “gPC” type machines coming from this?
Lee over at mininoteuser.com has modified the normal Ubuntu distro to work better with the Mini-Note out of the box and called it MinBuntu. Getting the wireless working is a pain in Ubuntu, and you also need to get the VIA Chrome driver installed if you want to enable 3D Acceleration. MinBuntu has both those installed along with the standard updates. Lee did decide to leave out OpenOffice though, but that is easy enough to install on your own if you need it.
Just chatted with two different reps and spoke with another and the 6-cell battery will be available for purchase in June. The part number for the battery is KU528AA, and unfortunately no details on price at this point. All three originally thought it was available, but when I asked for the price they said it wasn’t actually available until June.
I know a lot us are wanting a 3-cell for normal every day use, but none of them knew when the 3-cell would be available for the Mini-Note.
Serving as more confirmation that XP is coming to the Mini-Note one way or another this coming week, HP has what looks to be all the XP driver’s on their site. For us early adopters it makes getting everything installed and working with XP that much easier at any rate.
Now the question is, how soon until Isaiah?
Wikifun happed to see that HP has the official XP drivers up on their site now! Finally no more digging around trying to find what works were. Thanks wikifun!
Update: liliputing.com is reporting that the drivers have been pulled down. (confirmed)
Update: the drivers are back up now
It really is way better with XP on the Mini-Note. YouTube videos play fine, Hulu is almost watchable in small screen, DVDs look great, and 480p QuickTime Trailers are watchable (still dropped frames, but less than Hulu). In general the performance is way better than Vista with XP on it. The one thing I do miss from Vista though is it’s power management let you set throttle the cpu to a certain percentage. I’m still playing with couple 3rd party apps trying to pick the best one.
XP is definitely way better than Vista on the Mini-Note. I’ll have an official review, some videos and updated benchmarks soon.
jkOnTheRun has a video of a video call through Skype on XP. It looks good enough and doesn’t seem to drop any frames or audio. This is a huge improvement over Skype’s performance in Vista which is good news for those of you worried about the VIA C7-M processor. It still a little underpowered, but the processor a decent operating system and it will handle the basic stuff well enough.
Check it out: http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/05/jkontherun-geek.html
Subscribe!