Hands on with the BenQ Joybook Lite 121 Eco

http://www.netbooknews.com An exclusive first look at the Joybook Lite 121 Eco from BenQ. Its made of 25% recycled materials and come with the option of using a dual drive setup with an SSD and HDD.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Netbook
• News
• netbooknews
• Netbooks
• BenQ
• joybook
• lite
• 121
• eco
• ssd
• hdd
• hybrid
• drive
• recycled

[Portablemonkey]

Also, did they drop the HDMI port? (their original press release stated this)

[minipcpro]

Well, I dunno if that was a mistake in the press release or what, but it doesn't have HDMI, nor is it mentioned on the product page. There seems to be a CPU option between the Z520 or Z530 CPU though, but again, we don't know what will be available where. They're considering launching it in Europe though, which is at least good news.

[vishal3399]

i cant turn on blue tooth in mine, please some one help, i know where the buttons are but its only turning the wlan switch on/off

[ffdxshow]

save the world by supporting this laptop! lol

[frumzion]

Oh yeah, forgot...

The camera is quite good. The microphone is rubbish. Definitely need a mobile headset.

Although mine came with Linux it also came with the BenQ Windows drivers/utilities on DVD - although not very helpful for a machine without a DVD reader or if the only external optical drive you have is for CD.

I think another USB port could and should have been fitted, but 3 seems usual for netbooks. Also a DVI port should replace the VGA port (DVI-VGA adapters are cheap if required).

[frumzion]

Would I buy again, at the same point in time? I don't know. I looked at several 11.6"-12"+ options, including mini notebooks. I tried to avoid the GMA500, but the rest of the spec had the edge for me, including the battery life and quick charge feature that I'm a little disappointed with. The machine took so long to arrive, I was about to cancel my order and buy a Gateway LT31 instead!

[frumzion]

Lastly, getting info out of BenQ, whether directly, through the local distributor, or through a dealer, has proven very painful.

I've been waiting several weeks for the price of the 3.75G HSUPA upgrade option. The distributor has written to me during that time to let me know that they're still trying to get me the info.

[frumzion]

So far, overall, I'm quite impressed with the machine. Build quality seems good. Finish is good, except for a small blemish in the blue lid. Usability is good, especially for a machine this small.

Battery life is a little disappointing, as I haven't managed more than 6.5 hours. Maybe need to fiddle with power settings. (One thing to note is that the Bios is factory set to quick charge, despite the manual stating that it can ruin the battery!)

[frumzion]

That said; my experience with Win XP (Pro/Home) across 4 machines of varying specs has been such that I've experienced many more BSOD than on any other o/s (incl Win 98), especially in the early days of setting up and loading new software. I ran Win 2000 on one machine for nearly 10 years with only 2 or 3 BSOD. And in the 2 yrs of running Vista I've also only experienced 2 or 3 BSOD.

Hopefully this machine will settle down, and hopefully we'll finally get decent drivers for the GMA500 graphics.

[frumzion]

There is however one concern: I have experienced quite a few BSOD, whether this is down to glitches with the graphics driver I don't really know.

This BenQ Joybook Lite U121 Eco has the Intel Atom Z530 Processor, Mobile Polsbo US15W Express Chipset, with the much maligned GMA500 graphics. I gather much maligned because of the GMA500 drivers apparently being poorly developed.

So that leads me to think that the graphics drivers are the most likely source of the BSOD problems.

[frumzion]

In my opinion, the performance is good.

Clean it's probably faster than my main 2 year old notebook, which has the same 2GB RAM that this has, but runs an AMD Turion64x2 @ 2GHz (dual core, so supposedly equivalent of ~3GHz single core) with nvidia graphics running Vista Business.

Plugged into the same wired broadband home network, playing various YouTube videos whether in normal or HD quality, they played very much the same on both computers. If a video stuttered it did so on both machines.

[frumzion]

The keyboard is *almost* full-size, but is quite comfortable to use. The track pad is very good; it is the only track pad I've been able to use that hasn't instantly frustrated me to the point of instantly plugging in an external mouse.

The screen is a reasonable size for me, and certainly workable for doing "proper" work, although I do find the height of 768 pixels to be a significant limitation, including when browsing the Web.