Perhaps seeing the mainstream appeal of low-cost mini-notebooks, Intel has gone back to the drawing board and redesigned the Classmate to appeal to what the company calls 'mature' markets — which means the US and other Western countries. The new version adds a more traditional touchpad and keyboard, a webcam, a 30GB 1.8in. hard drive and it increases the screen size from 7in. to 9in., while keeping the same compact footprint — made possible because Intel designed the original computer with copious plastic padding between the components and the outer edge of the machine.
Intel is creating the basic reference design, while OEMs in different regions will manufacture the systems — which should sell the computers for about $400 (£200) each, depending on the software and hardware configuration. It'll most likely appear first as the 2go PC when Computer Technology Link, a US notebook vendor, releases it later this spring.
Although Intel designed it for children between the ages of 6 to 12 years, the new, significantly slicker-looking Classmate wouldn't look out of place in a coffee shop or airplane. We'd be happy to use one as a secondary or travel computer, although a Windows-powered Eee PC might be even more attractive.
Compared to the original, this Classmate PC looks less like a toy and more like a traditional notebook, even as it keeps a somewhat thick, plastic chassis with slightly rounded corners. The new Classmate also keeps the removable snap-on leather cover, which doubles as a convenient carry handle. The rugged design makes it about 500g heavier than the Eee PC, but it also feels significantly sturdier.
The keyboard is about the same size as on the original Classmate and is designed for those with smaller fingers. However, the keys have been rearranged into a more traditional layout, correcting a few niggling problems with the older version — such as a missing right-shift key. The touchpad is now a traditional rectangular surface, instead of the visually interesting but hard-to-use round version on the older Classmate. Intel has also added a webcam, positioned above the screen, in this revision, which is a cool extra for such an inexpensive system.
The Classmate comes with preloaded education software, which is essentially identical to the versions we saw last year. The students run the client software, while a teacher with a full-size notebook runs the host software. From the host, the teacher can monitor the students' work, send text messages directly to the Classmate PCs, transfer work on one student's screen to all the other systems on the local network, or even remotely 'silence' the Classmates by turning off their screens.
A new 9in. display replaces the original 7in. one, but we were disappointed to find the same low 800 by 480 resolution. Text was readable, but there's little spare screen space and web pages can easily expand past the edge of the screen. We would have liked to see higher screen resolution to go with the bigger screen.
The Classmate's ports and connections are understandably sparse, but you still get multiple USB ports, an SD card slot, Ethernet and headphone and mic jacks — more than Apple managed to work into the MacBook Air, for example. Intel replaced the previous model's solid-state hard drive (2GB in the sample unit we reviewed) with a more practical 30GB 1.8in. hard drive, which trades storage space for some battery life and ruggedness.
The Classmate's 900MHz Intel Celeron M CPU isn't built for speed, and like the first Classmate or the Eee PC, it wouldn't run most of our benchmark tests. Still, the Windows XP operating system, Office, basic web browsers and media players worked reasonably well, with some stuttering and slowdown when multitasking. We're eagerly awaiting Intel's new generation of Atom CPUs, which are specifically designed for devices such as this, and will hopefully provide a closer experience to full-size notebooks.
In our video playback battery drain test, the Classmate ran for 4 hours 13 minutes — clearly not enough for a full day at school, and we don't recall any classroom we've ever been in having enough outlets for everyone to plug in. In anecdotal use, we got closer to 5 hours, and with careful power management, that should be enough for academic use, and is better than most mainstream consumer notebooks.
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