time is right to tell amazing stories. today we welcome a very unusual device. here it is. at first glance, it may seem a portable game console. no way! t is called asus r50a – and, in fact, it is a junior relative of asus r2h. if you remember nothing about it or know nothing at all, you may follow the link and re-watch this video. so, in 2009, umpc enters the age of decline and sadness, as netbooks and smartphones etc prevail on the market.
remember that lg prada (lg ke850) can be considered the first modern smartphone with its capacitive touch display and other smartphone-related things. much later apple released its phone, but that’s been a couple of months later. so, we’ve had smartphones, netbooks and everything else except internet tablets. at that moment asus released new umpc. what was it like? let’s see. at that time, flexibility in application was the main concept to be regarded. for example, devices with wireless networks and on-board camera were produced. concerning device’s appearance, we may see that nowadays customers would rather pay more attention to how fashionable they look with the device than to its practical values.
this is the way to explain popularity of certain brands and their products. so, let’s turn back to the deceptive look of this device and see why it may make an impression of game console. have a look at the picture and you may notice lots of details similar to those the game console may have. the first game console by sony was out in 2004 thus, i say, a team of development engineers and designers got inspired by this device. however, when starting, operating system opens a wide horizon of opportunities to operate the device and, this way, the game console appearance is no longer matters. the device is designed in black with some gray insets and it looks quite impressive. being glossy plastic, it becomes dirty from handling very fast.
let’s turn to its external parts. centrally, as usual, we can see a screen. quite rich horizontally, i say. its diagonal pattern is 5.6’’. its resolution is much of a decent - 1024x600. to tell the truth, my first netbook had 10’’ screen with the same resolution. the dimensions are 199ñ…98ñ…28 mm. on the left there are 6 buttons: left and right mouse button (optic), context menu recall, media centre recall, user change button, sleep mode button. microphone is below.
on the right there are several items: front camera (0.3 mpx), underneath - trackpoint, fingerprint sensor, 4-position joystick and a set of leds indicating the state of battery, hard disk, wireless networks, gps and so on. trackpoint is quite massive and easy in use. it was designed to be operated by thumb, and i’d call its responsiveness, smoothness, etc. the best in comparison to other umpcs in my collection. trackpoint itself is made of plastics instead of rubber as in laptops, that’s why its life span is much higher. joystick fulfills the same functions as arrows on the usual keyboard. in its centre there is a button emulating [enter] i.e. input button.
on the front side we can also see two labels. asus and r50a umpc. well, before i forget, i have to tell you a few words about the suite. i’ve got and interesting story to share. vendor package contained: umpc, battery, set of documents, 4 cds with os, maps and software; a clean cloth, a transportation cover, psu, external optical drive with psu and usb cable, ear phone usb → audio output adapter connector, ear phone usb headset, d-sub adapter connector, flip-out keyboard with usb cable, a stylus pen, a cord wrist strap. yeah, guys, there is no standard 3.5 jack,
so, listening to music will be quite problematic after native headset breaks/gets lost. this is the reason why the adapter connector was included in a suite. and if you don’t have it, you’d better find it or lose your heart. even though there are dynamic speakers on the board, they are nothing. so, now funny stories about the suite. when i bought the device, its battery was dead, and there were nothing of that rich suite but cover, battery charger and cord wrist strap. how to reanimate a battery you may watch here. after a couple of days in use, i found a piece of stylus-pen in the body and after 2 hours of torture i was lucky to extract it. so, i’ve got stylus now.
and a cover, here it is, a soft one, i say. all in all, i got quite a good device. although, it’s hard to deal with it having no external keyboard, as it detects very few of usb keyboards. and it’s not the thing to be pleased with. but let’s take a more detailed look of the device. let’s start from the left side. on the left, there is mini usb a port (i’ve already told you about it) it’s needed to connect flip-out keyboard. also we can see micro sd slot and external tv-antenna input. on the bottom left, there is a mounting lug. let’s move to the right side.
on the right, there is a 2.0 usb port, d-sub which can be connected with the necessary adaptor to display images, and battery lock. there was a cap, but it’s been broken out. let’s move to the upper side. what do we see? on the upper side, there are gps-transmitter output, vent holes, headset jack (mini-usb), power adaptor hole and camera on button, which is easy to press with your index finger, and hold button (to avoid accidental triggering in a bag or in a cover). i have a question to you, my dear admirers of unremovable phone batteries. wouldn’t you like to discharge the battery before you use the device for a second, would you?
let’s move to the lower side. well, here we have one more couple of vent holes. and in fact, there is nothing more. on the reverse side we can see a label with company logo and main camera lens in a massive frame. the back cover pattern is a bit unusual to me, and reminds watermelon somehow, if we take a distant look at it. well, it’s time to pass to the contents in fact, it is kind of ordinary, if we speak about netbooks but tablets. so, the cpu - intel atom z520 (1.33 ghz, 533 mhz fsb, 512 kbyte l2). on the board, there is 1024 mbyte of ddr2-533 ram, which doesn’t run fast.
but it’s not my cup of tea to judge. graphics card - intel gma500, as usual, runs using some resource of ram. surprisingly, the shop-delivered device contained a real ssd you’ve probably know that it’s like a fancy memory card) in this case it has 32 gb storage capacity which is a bit unusual for 2009. on the other hand, ssd increases general operating speed of the device, and it makes asus good. as for wireless navigation, we have 802.11b/g wi-fi (unfortunately, ‘n’ standard is not available, as it was to come in september 2009), 2.0 bluetooth and gps. not so bad.
2600 mah battery is quite good at work. feel free to run the device. its weight is 0.52 kg. no way to compare it to heavy laptops. let’s see how much the battery is starving. well, we have 70% and that’s enough for 1.5 hour. not so bad, really. windows vista home premium is used as a default os, but, as i’m not fond of vista, i’ve installed another operating system. now we have here ubuntu 14.04. for your reference: ubuntu is a linux distribution developed by canonical ltd. it’s free, user-friendly and much of its software is available out of the box.
according to many users, to operate ubuntu you don’t have to be a computer nerd. ubuntu is also said to be easy for many housewives all over the world. let me show you what this device contains and how all that stuff runs on 6-year-old umpc. in a nutshell, there is almost everything you need. and if not, you may install it from ubuntu software centre with a couple of clicks. libreoffice is used here as an office suite. libreoffice is an openoffice descendant. i’ll run it now. it consists of word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program, database management program,
application for creating and editing mathematical formulae and graphics editor - libre office draw. let’s open writer and type something. to see what i’m typing let’s make the font size larger – to 16. well, this is the way it works. to demonstrate how multimedia works i can give you an example of sound and video. you can see that video works a bit slow and that’s because of wrong container. let’s try to play a sound, as it may look better this is vivaldi. this is the way multimedia works.
i’d like to say a few words about desktop environments. you can see gnome-shell now. let’s see what it contains. on the top we can see, let me put it roughly, calendar and clock. on the right, we can see system settings, very fast one. from here we can get to ubuntu control centre. here we can control sound, networks etc. also we can change keyboard layout here. in the upper left corner, we have quick key to control board and desktop selection. there are several desktops and they can self-generate if needed.
here you may choose any application you want to run. you can see everything works properly, but a bit slow sometimes. now you can enjoy this beautiful shell in operation, and then i’ll switch to more rapid desktop environment. the only problem of gnome-shell is that on-screen keyboard is being blocked by apps search line and password form. let me show. to type something, for example, in the search line , you have to use on-screen keyboard, but i cannot do it, as the keyboard is on the background. and when you need to get root, the password form is always on top. let’s watch how camera works.
well, now let’s have a look at the final picture. quite well for 2009. that’s 2 mpx, so you’d better not dream for more. there is a widespread myth that games do not run on linux. there are some of them including those ported from windows and linux-oriented ones. for example, ‘hedgewars’. now i am going to show you this game. let’s switch to less demanding environment. here’s lxde desktop environment, which may look more familiar to windows users – because of this - kind of ‘start’ button. everything is adjustable, so you can tweak desktop environment for yourself. in fact, ‘hedgewars’ is a clone of famous game ‘worms’.
as for strategy game, i may recall ‘warzone 2100’, which is quite a common example for this type of games. yep, it runs a bit slow, but i think we can tweak it or we cannot… forget it! so, we have 3-d map, unit-making house and house-making units, for instance, these ones. now i’m ordering a plant, and here is a unit to build it. that’s war units. an equivalent of oil or oil itself (i don’t remember yet) is used here as a fossil fuel. what’s more, there are some scientific buildings, new features appear and so on and so forth. but let’s turn to umpc. there is a fingerprint sensor, but i wasn’t able to make it work properly like in the previous device.
by the way, fingerprint sensor is very useful for linux desktop environments, as for every root operation password is needed. there is a special utility running on linux and it’s called ‘fingerprint’. here you may choose a finger and record the data using sensor, after that you may use your finger to log in. more than that, there are some image and video editors. i won’t show you how video editor runs, as this device lacks efficiency to provide stable work for this application. to edit images we have gimp, which is an equivalent of your favorite ‘photoshop’. here you may draw, edit layers. also there is a vector graphics pack ‘inkspace’ , which allows editing graphical primitives and creating vector images.
as for video editors, i should say that all of my videos are made with the help of open source software called ‘kdenlive’. well, i’ve forgotten to mention the price. in 2009 this device cost $1000. let’s sum up. asus r50a is smart, mobile and quite efficient, long-running and easy in use. designed nicely, it makes only good impression, as for me, the only pill to swallow is the price. for more drawbacks, i may recall strangely chosen ports and windows vista. however, the 2nd problem is easy to solve, as you see. the 1st one is to tolerate. i could have expressed my complaint that we have no external keyboard here, but i wouldn’t do it. so, if you liked this video, please, subscribe, share with friends.
remember to visit kirill leifer’s channel where he tells interesting stories about old and rare devices. see you! bonus – ubuntu software centre installation.
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