Elonex Webbook Reviews and Blog Resource

by atticus ~ September 7, 2008

I hope more reviews of Elonex Webbook are welcomed. PCPro has recently reviewed this free Netbook (if you are willing to sign a mobile contract) from Carphone Warehouse. Rated 3 out of 5, PCPro has the following to say in its review.

Battery life isn’t great, either, though no worse than most rivals. Under light use, the Elonex lasted just over two hours, similar to the MSI Wind and the Acer Aspire one that we tested last month. This compromises the point of having such a very portable PC.

One area where the Elonex trumps other contenders is on price. This class of computers was originally envisaged to sell for under £200, but in reality prices have edged towards £300 and beyond. You can buy this one for £264, or if you’re willing to sign a £25 per month Orange mobile Internet contract with Carphone Warehouse (currently the exclusive suppliers in the UK), you can get the webbook for nothing, not counting the £15 delivery charge. However, the minimum contract is two years, over which you’ll pay £240 more than you would for 3’s comparable Broadband Plus service, at £15 a month. So what the deal is really giving you, rather than a big discount, is two years’ interest free credit.

Only a short while ago, the webbook would have seemed remarkable, but in today’s netbook market it looks average. If you want to spend as little as possible, the Elonex could fit the bill, as long as you don’t expect too much of it.

Another excellent review is written by Dan of Adventures in Open Source who is generally impressed with the Elonex Webbook.

Overall I really like this little machine and in a way it’s opened my eyes as to why the world seems to be going potty for netbooks. I was worried that it wouldn’t be fast enough or wouldn’t be big enough but it works well. So you’re not going to be rendering any large Blender projects on it or running lots of virtual machines but for web surfing, email, multimedia and word processing this can do the job. That’s all most people want to do on a computer anyway. We buy these big super computers with enough processing power to make Shrek 4 and then we open Firefox and maybe a media player, type a letter or something, it’s a sledgehammer to crack a walnut often. I had dismissed some of these UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs) in the past as toys or gimmicks but I was wrong, they have a function and a role to play. Personally I have a nice light and powerful laptop that can do pretty much anything and for my style of computing that works but others have different needs. This machine is aimed at people who want mobile broadband really, 3G connections with a little USB dongle and there is even some brand new open software which has been born out of the project. When they needed some software to make 3G hardwar work with Ubuntu 8.04, Elonex and Canonical turned to Spanish company Warp Networks. They wrote the software in Python and it’s licensed under the GNU General Public License which is amazing. Elonex funded this effort and they deserve huge credit for that. For £250 you get some decent hardware and software in a nice little package and I’d be interested to see how it performs with other Linux distros. I haven’t tried many other netbooks yet but if you’re in the market for one the Webbook seems well worth a look to me. If you’re thinking of signing up for 3G broadband then why not get one free? It’s a cool little machine and I don’t want to give it back…

For users who has problems with the Webbook, take a look at Webbook Blog which contain fixes for some Webbook issues. The blog is created by Alan Lord from The Open Learning Centre who have worked with Elonex and Conical on the Webbook.