Featherweight notebook battle: CloudBook vs. Eee

Back in October 2007, Taipei-based Asustek Computer proved that less can be more with its two-pound, $400 Eee PC. Since then, other subnotebooks have followed (or are soon to follow) in the Eee’s wake. However, only the Everex CloudBook has dared to take the Eee head-on, matching its weight, screen, and keyboard size as well as its reliance on the Linux operating system, open source applications, and a $400 price tag.

The excitement around the CloudBook’s public unveiling at CES two months ago has deflated — hurt by, among other things, a delayed release; originally due to ship in January, it finally became available in mid-February.

When I first reviewed the Asus Eee, I was rather critical of its shortcomings, including the difficult keyboard, small display, and mediocre battery life. Time has since mellowed my feelings — and I’ve learned to work around the system’s limitations, which were dictated by the machine’s small size and low cost. The question is: Can I similarly forgive the CloudBook’s faults and limitations?

Stats

The CloudBook comes equipped with a 1.2GHz Via C7-M processor and 512MB of DDR2, 533MHz SDRAM. Unlike the Eee, which uses solid-state memory, the CloudBook offers a 30GB hard drive. Like the Eee, it offers a seven-inch, 800-by-480 pixel display. Connections include an Ethernet port, a DVI port, two USB ports, audio line-out/line-in ports, and a four-in-one media card reader. There’s also 802.11g/b Wi-Fi and a 300KB-pixel Webcam. It operates on a four-cell lithium-ion battery that is rated to offer 2.5 to 3 hours of use.

Design

You know how some attractive people don’t photograph well at all? That’s the CloudBook’s problem. None of the pictures I’ve seen (or taken myself), not even the stock photos put out by Everex Systems, do this seriously handsome machine justice.

The CloudBook uses the same dark black plastic shell as the Lenovo ThinkPad. But unlike the ThinkPad, whose splashes of color feel dated, the CloudBook goes the other way, achieving a snazzy black-on-black effect. The pure obsidian case makes the CloudBook’s orange LCD indicator lights even more striking. I also preferred Everex’s cute green-leaf logo. Asus, by contrast, looks like it stole its font from the 1982 movie “Tron.”

The display is separated from the CloudBook’s base by a one-inch gap. This allows you to do two cool things: hold the CloudBook securely with one hand as you type or mouse with the other, and flip the screen a total of 270 degrees (compared with the Eee’s 75-degree range of motion). There are reports Everex is also working on ultraportables that will have a touchscreen. This one doesn’t.

Bottom line

Ebony beats ivory. Edge to the CloudBook.

Heft

With its conventional brick-style power supply, the CloudBook weighs 2.75 pounds. By comparison, my ThinkPad T42 weighs nearly six pounds with charger. The Eee, however, tips my postal scale at just 2.25 pounds because of its smaller iPod-style charger.

Bottom line

Both are petite, but edge to the Eee.

Video quality

Both PCs feature seven-inch, 800-by-480 LCDs that are bright and sharp. Both displays suffer from the same detriment: Their small size makes navigating documents and Web pages, which are coded to be at least 1,024 by 768, a hassle.

I give the edge to the Eee for several reasons. While both machines allow you to tune their brightness through the Fn keys, the Eee pops up with a brightness meter and allows more fine control than the CloudBook. Second, I encountered fewer hiccups playing streaming or downloaded videos on the Eee than on the CloudBook. That’s not surprising — the Eee’s solid-state drive is faster than regular hard drives, and the CloudBook’s hard drive spins at just 4,200 rpm, slower than virtually all other desktop and notebook drives today.

Bottom line

Edge to the Eee.

Storage

One of the biggest differentiators between the two systems is the Eee’s 4GB solid-state drive and the Eee’s conventional 30GB hard drive. It’s size versus speed. With an operating system and applications installed, you have less than 1GB of free space on the Eee but almost 25GB on the CloudBook. (Granted, both the Eee and CloudBook have four-in-one flash memory card readers that, along with the USB slots, augment users’ storage.)

But while the Eee can boot up in just 25 seconds, the CloudBook takes more than three minutes, including the time to enter your username and password. The CloudBook does offer a hibernate mode that takes about a minute to wake up from. Or take file copying — copying a 925MB file from an USB drive to the CloudBook took 95 seconds. Copying the same file to the Eee took 70 seconds, despite the Eee’s slower USB ports.

Bottom line

Depends on your needs, so it’s even.

Keyboard

Buyers need to accept compromises from these extra-small notebooks, and the keyboard is a major place where compromise is necessary. However, though the keyboards and keys are exactly the same size in both units, I was surprised to find myself less error-prone with the CloudBook. I think the CloudBook has greater key depth — in other words, the keys push in more.

However, this was dragged down by the CloudBook’s patchy implementation of the blue Fn keys. I already mentioned the kludginess of adjusting the screen brightness. Worse is adjusting the volume through Fn+F10 and F11. It worked on the speakers but failed to adjust the volume of the headphones.

Bottom line

It’s a draw.

Touch pad

In my Eee review, I described its touchpad as being like the hero of a romantic comedy: sensitive and sturdy.

The CloudBook’s touch pad doesn’t lack those qualities, but at just a quarter the size of the Eee’s touchpad — and located at the top-right corner of the keyboard — it’s hard to use.

The CloudBook’s jet-black exterior also has a tendency to camouflage the track pad and its two buttons — which are awkwardly located at the top-left corner of the machine. This arrangement does let you use the CloudBook while standing, but it’s ultimately less handy for use when sitting down.

Bottom line

The CloudBook track pad is a victim to fashion. Big edge to the Eee.

Processor

The CloudBook would seem to have a big edge as its Via C7-M chip set runs at 1.2GHz, or double the 600MHz of the Eee’s Celeron chip (a still-unfixed BIOS prevents the Eee from attaining its 900GHz potential). Based on my experience opening applications, transferring files, and playing media files, the CloudBook pretty much lags behind the Eee in every task, though the CloudBook’s slower storage is part of the reason.

Bottom line

Edge to the Eee.

Battery/fan

The Eee’s 5,200 mAH Lithium-ion battery is more than twice the capacity of the CloudBook’s 2,200 mAH battery, and even the Eee’s cheaper Surf model has a 4,400 maH battery. However, I found little difference in actual battery life. The CloudBook — even with its fan whining like a hair dryer — got the same 2.5 to 3 hours I get with my Eee. Meanwhile, the Eee takes twice as long to recharge.

The CloudBook’s battery meter is unsatisfactory, however, giving conflicting readings of the remaining charge and shutting off without any pop-up warning when the charge runs low. The tiebreaker was the fan. The Eee may get hot, but the CloudBook’s fan was ubiquitous and louder.

Bottom line

Edge to the Eee.

Wi-Fi

Considering that Everex wanted to hint at cloud computing with the CloudBook name, the poor performance of its Wi-Fi is disappointing. I don’t live in a McMansion by any means, but the CloudBook failed to connect in the majority of my house, areas that the Eee has no trouble with. Also, the CloudBook’s Wi-Fi log-in software had a tendency to lose my saved WEP security key at random times.

Bottom line

Big edge to the Eee.

Upgradeability

In just several months, the Eee has spawned a plethora of cute accessories and not-safe-for-warranty do-it-yourself mods. The CloudBook has only started to match that.

Moreover, those who want to do something as seemingly simple as upgrading the CloudBook’s RAM (it supports up to 2GB) will, according to a conversation I had with Everex’s technical support, need to paw through such fragile components that Everex will void your warranty. Instead, the company plans to offer a service by which you can mail your CloudBook in to have your RAM replaced. The tech had no word on when that would be available or how much that would cost.

Bottom line

Wanna pump up your wee PC? Pick the Eee.

External ports

Although the CloudBook has a pretty good selection of ports, it unfortunately still doesn’t come out better than the Asus Eee for several reasons.

First, the CloudBook has two valuable USB ports to the Eee’s three — not a serious difference but one that can be helpful if you’ve got a lot of USB utilities you want to use. Also, there was a persistent electronic hum through my headphones when I plugged into the CloudBook’s headphone port. And the Eee’s VGA port is plug-and-play, letting me display up to 1,600 by 1,200 flicker-free pixels on an external monitor.

The CloudBook’s external Digital Visual Interface monitor interface is theoretically more powerful than the Eee’s VGA port, but I never got to test this out — my sole attempt resulted in a fatal system crash that corrupted the xorg.conf file (the equivalent to the Windows registry, but for Linux) and rendered the CloudBook inoperable.

Bottom line

The Eee wins here.

Operating system/BIOS

The Eee uses a tweaked version of the unheralded Xandros distribution of Linux. The CloudBook, meanwhile, uses the gOS flavor of the popular Ubuntu distribution of Linux that has garnered raves for its Macintosh-like graphical user interface.

But don’t let that fool you — the Eee’s “easy mode” desktop was smooth and easy to use. Meanwhile, the CloudBook’s gOS felt like it needed a lot more quality assurance testing before it shipped. None of the bugs that I encountered were really acceptable — not minor things like the hiccup-prone microphone volume adjustment, the missing WEP key, the conflicting battery readings, or the desktop windows that were too large for the screen, and not the major one that, after I tried to connect it to an external monitor, rendered my CloudBook unbootable.

And practically unfixable. There is no shortage of information on the Internet about how to install your preferred flavor of Linux or Windows onto a USB flash drive, which can be used to boot your CloudBook (or Eee) or install a replacement or secondary operating system. Unfortunately, about the only Linux distribution I couldn’t find detailed instructions for was CloudBooks’s gOS. And while the Asus Eee comes with a support DVD containing a reinstall of the operating system, the CloudBook doesn’t.

On the positive side, the gOS green-tinged desktop is as attractive as advertised. And the CloudBook did automatically recognize and install drivers for my HP OfficeJet fax/printer. Contrast that with the many hours I spent unsuccessfully trying to get my Eee to print.

Bottom line

No contest — the Eee wins this one. While gOS has its good points, the CloudBook implementation isn’t ready for prime time.

Applications

Both units feature the same basic menus of free, open source applications, including Firefox and OpenOffice 2.3, as well as buttons that load Web apps such as Google Docs, YouTube, and Box.Net. While the apps may load faster on the Eee, you can install many more of them on the CloudBook’s hard drive.

Bottom line

They’re tied.

Tech support

Everex offers free round-the-clock support for its PCs through a call center in the Midwest. I made four calls during the course of my review. It was obvious that they had some knowledge of Linux. But they hadn’t received any CloudBooks themselves, much less been trained explicitly for them.

I haven’t used the Asus tech-support line for the Eee. A colleague did and reported that the support tech was courteous and did his best to be helpful. However, as far as I can tell, most Eee users rely on message boards, such as Eeeuser.com.

Bottom line

Another tie.

The final analysis

If you’re in the market for a $400 subnotebook, there are a few reasons — none of them crucial — why you might choose the CloudBook today over the Eee: Desire for greater storage in order to store multimedia files or install a heftier operating system, such as Windows XP; a deep preference for the color black; a contrarian streak that rebels against the Eee’s trendiness.

But until Everex makes a large public commitment to releasing an updated operating system and/or BIOS fixing the CloudBook, I can only recommend it for experienced Linux users who will view the inevitable hours they spend hacking their CloudBook as recreation, not hassle. Fortunately, most of the CloudBook’s problems are operating-system- or software-related and hence should reasonably easy for Everex and gOS to fix.

While I applaud both the Eee and the CloudBook — as well as the One Laptop Per Child model — for their trailblazing efforts, I think that most consumers will ultimately be much happier spending a teensy bit more money for a slightly bigger machine. That’s why I recommend waiting several months to check out the HP Compaq 2133, the Asus Eee PC 900, the recently announced ECS G10IL, or Everex’s own updates to the CloudBook. All will sport larger nine-inch screens, while the HP and the Everex models will have keyboards larger than today’s Eee or CloudBook. And all will reportedly cost between $500 to $1,000.