Portable One MX

15 FEBRUARY 2005

MX Laptop by Portable One

When referring to laptops, most people think of common brands such as Dell, Gateway, or Toshiba. Have you heard of the company Portable One? Probably not. Most people have probably not heard of the company Portable One when talking about laptops because you generally don't see other consumers have them. This is related to the idea of why you don't see that many consumers have IBM laptops as well. That's because the customers who buy these laptops are generally corporate or even military users. In general, these laptops are much more expensive than your typical consumer laptop.

Today, I will be reviewing the Portable One MX. When I first went to Portable One's website to look at pictures and specifications of the product, I immediately knew that this was no ordinary laptop. Its sleek design while having high end performance features definitely make this a unique laptop on its own.

A Little Bit of History

Since many of you have probably not heard of the company Portable One, I decided to ask Ivan Gospich at Portable One to provide some background. Here's what he had to say:

"It all started with IBM ThinkPad's in the mid 90's, by 98/99 we were the largest ThinkPad dealer on the west coast and we started getting a huge amount of DOA's, mostly IBM TP 600 Series, so we started asking lots of questions and researching how and where IBM made their ThinkPad's and found out that LG made most of them and final assembly took place in Mexico etc, so we started looking for companies that actually made their own products, we thought Toshiba did and they did not either and nowadays each line of Toshiba's is from a different ODM in Asia. We finally came across Fujitsu & Panasonic, both Panasonic & Fujitsu made their units and their manufacturing plants were both in Osaka, so we stopped offering all products that were not made by the vendor we were selling, terrible business decision at first, and just offered the 2 lines of products and became Fujitsu's largest integration center in North America.

The past couple of years all mobile computing manufacturers/vendors have become extremely competitive for US market share and our two partners started having models made by other ODM's too to save monies and be more competitive, unfortunately sacrificing quality. And since their marketing and channel development personnel were ignoring some of our design requests we started looking for solutions that our main partners were not offering and/or make a better solution altogether for our customers."

After hearing this response from Ivan, it probably explained the resemblance in features and style with an IBM laptop, which is a good thing.

Packaging/Contents

When I received the package, it came in a very simple yet professional looking box. It gave me the feeling that there was something special inside. When you order and purchase a laptop from Portable One, the laptop is configured to your desired specifications. I've read on some forums that their customer service is top notch, if not among the best. I heard that you specifically make a request for Portable One to make sure that there are no dead pixels on the laptop screen or even test the memory to make sure it is fully working. All configured laptops go through an enormous point testing process to ensure that the laptop arrives at your without any problems.

When opening the box, everything was neatly in place. There are separate sections of the box which contain the laptop as well as the accessories.

The first cardboard container was thin, but large. It contained all the extra accessories as well as software which you might need over time.

One of the first things I pulled out of the bux were two sets of Klear Screen wipes. In the Pocket PC world, this is a top choice when cleaning the screen of your Pocket PC, even before you place a screen protector on it. It was a good choice for Portable One to include these.

In addition, there is a user manual and the necessary software. The user manual is thin, but it describes all the basic functionality that you can expect with the laptop. The software included are drivers for the laptop, Nero, Power DVD, and 3Com Bluetooth drivers. There is also Vcom's System Suite 5. This software suite is an all-in-one software package that includes antivirus protection, firewall protection, and utilities in performing simple maintenance tasks on your computer. Of course, this software includes a licensed CD of Microsoft's Windows XP with Service Pack 2. The software package with the laptop is generally complete. I despise how some computer manufacturers just keep on throwing in useless additional software to make you think that you're getting an even better deal. It is not the case for Portable One.

As you can expect, the laptop includes an AC adapter and battery pack. I was satisfied that the AC adapter was fairly small and very light. The battery pack is also fairly light for a battery.

Lastly, a telephone cable is provided so you don't need to find one if for some reason you need to use the modem on the laptop. The black plastic bracket actually fills up an empty PCMCIA slot and is ireally nothing but a placeholder so it doesn't leave the slot wide open.

A Closer Look/Using the Portable One MX


At initial glance, the Portable One MX have a very simple yet stylish design. The majority of the laptop is covered with a black carbon fiber. The edges of the laptop have a nice silver finish. When I received the laptop, the top had a clear sheet of plastic covering it. I removed it. During my testing, I noticed that the oils from my hands and fingers did start to contaminate the surface. When looking closely, I was able to see small smears of oils probably from the hands. Don't worry though, it can't been seen at a distance. If the top does start to have more smears than you'd like, then just clean it with a slightly damp cloth.

At first glance at the back of the laptop, there's not much to look at except the modem and network ports, two USB ports, and what looks like to be the heat exhaust at the corner. There is a flap that blends into the back to reveal addition ports. Although the flap is thin and flimsy, it is interesting how it uses magnetism to keep the flap closed in place. When opening the flap, you will see an addition 2 USB ports, a VGA port, and a printer port.

On one side of the laptop, there is a DVD reader which is also able to burn CD's as well. Right next to the DVD-ROM drive is a headphone port, line in port, and the AC port. I like how the AC port is located on the side, because otherwise, I find it a bit of an annoyance in reaching all the way to the back of the laptop to provide it power.

The other side of the laptop has a single PCMCIA slot, infrared port, Firewire port, and a locking hole for laptop security. This laptop included a Bluetooth PCMCIA card already in the slot.

When opening the thin cover of the laptop, the display, keyboard, as well as the touch sensitive mouse are seen. The general layout is what you would expect from a laptop. You have a power button right at the top center. There are the usual status indicator lights such as power, battery, hard-drive use, etc. The touch sensitive mouse is right below the keyboard.

The keyboard has the usual layout that is expected. The only slight differences is the bunching of the del, home, insert, pg up, pg down buttons around the right edge of the keyboard. Although the placement is different from a full-size standard keyboard, you still shouldn't have much problem getting used to them. There are the typical function at the top right of the laptop which are indicated in blue. You activate them by pressing and holding the function button and pressing the desired key. These control important functions such as the brightness of the display, volume, numlock, scroll lock, and allowing you to switch the screen to another source if you have another monitor connected to the laptop.

There are addition buttons which allow you to perform quick tasks such viewing your email or browsing the web. As you can see, these buttons blend in with the color of the laptop making them hard to see. You will simply have to remember which button does what. The buttons could have had white pictures instead, but it might disrupt the overall professional look of the laptop.

The touch sensitive mouse is a bit of a mixed bag. Having an old IBM notebook, I have grown to love the TrackPoint mouse on the notebook, therefore, I generally find the touch sensitive mouse on notebooks annoying and cumbersome to use. Using the touch sensitive mouse on the MX notebook made it slightly easier for me to use. At its default sensitivity, it is fairly sensitive so the mouse cursor generally moves easily with my control. Then I started to notice some issues. The mouse is a bit too sensitive. There were frequent occasions where just the slightest touch and my mouse cursor would immediately jump somewhere else or to another open running program. By reconfiguring the mouse, I was able to improve its usability by making it less sensitive. I still miss Trackpoint on IBM notebooks. Below the touch pad are the left and right mouse buttons with a two button scroll placed right in between them. Some ergonomics can be used for these buttons. I found that these buttons do get uncomfortable with lengthy use because the buttons are simply flat. That means it requires slightly more force to push down on the buttons with your thumb on its side.

Just Another Slim Laptop?

So far, I have described to you how the laptop generally looks as well as its physical features. But one might wonder how this laptop is any different from other notebooks. The main difference is the quality and selection of parts for the laptop. According to Ivan Gospich at Portable One, the laptop encasing is made by Asus, the motherboard manufacturer leader.

Another great feature about this laptop is the screen. This screen is actually made by Samsung, not some unknown generic brand. I have to admit that the screen on this laptop is among the best that I've seen. It uses a an SXGA screen that accommodates extremely small pixels that make images on the display look extremely clear. The brightness of the screen can also be commended. At its brightest setting, it is still a marvel to look at.

While we're on the subject of quality, let me also mention that at least 50% of the parts in this laptop are made in approved countries since the US Military is a major customer. Lastly, the memory used in the machines are either made in Germany or Switzerland. As you can, just from these facts alone, there are some high quality parts in this laptop.

Specifications

These are the specifications of the laptop. When comparing these specifications with the default specification, you can tell that this review unit has a higher specification. This laptop typically comes with a 1.8Ghz Intel Centrino M Dothan Processor. In addition, the only other difference is that this review unit has 2GB of DDR400 RAM instead of the default 512. These differences in specification should still not affect our general idea of how this laptop performs. In fact, the default specifications are still plenty sufficient.

If you take a look at the specifications below, you can get a good idea of how these features differ from a consumer laptop. In fact, I pretended to shop online for a consumer laptop to see if I could find a laptop similar in terms of size, weight, and performance. I had an enormous amount of trouble finding one. Most of the thin laptops simply could not match the specifications of this laptop. Even if I was able to find one that was equal or better than this laptop, they were surprisingly enormous and bulky.

In my opinion, the choice of parts for this laptop couldn't have been a better combination. One of the main bottlenecks in laptops today is the hard drive speed. This is immediately remedied with a full 7200 RPM hard drive in this laptop which you rarely see in slim laptops. When the hard drive is paired with the fast DDR400 memory and a Centrino processor, you theoretically should get some amazing performance.

2.0 Ghz Intel Centrino M Dothan Processor
60GB 7200 RPM hard drive
2GB DDR400 PC3200 SODIMM
14.1" SXGA display (1400 x 1050 resolution)
Intel Extreme Graphics 2
Modular Combination DVD/CDRW drive
4 USB 2.0 ports and IEEE 1394 FireWire port
56k modem and 10/100Mbps LAN
3Com XJack Bluetooth PCMCIA card
integrated Intel PRO wireless a+b/g wireless LAN
copper moulded heat sink with heat pipes including Arctic Silver 5
1 year warranty
Windows XP Professional w SP2
12.16" W x 10" L x 1.14" H
4.9lbs including battery and optical drive

Battery Life

This is my first experience with a Centrino type notebook. I can truly say that it does do its job in maximizing the performance while using very little power. On a different laptop using a Pentium 4 processor or even a Pentium III, it simply can't compare with the battery life of a Centrino notebook. When doing daily tasks such as doing word processing, viewing web pages, checking email, etc, I was able to get 4 to5 hours usage on the laptop. When doing more processor intensive tasks such as circuit simulation or watching a movie, I was able to get a good two hours or more. For such a slim laptop, I was expecting much less battery life, but with the help of Centrino technology, it saves the day.

A Beautiful Display

I have to admit that when looking at the display of the Portable One MX, you can expect to see a detailed looking display. It is more than sufficient for doing tasks such as web browsing, working with applications, and reading email. When playing DVD's in full screen, I was impressed by the detail and picture quality. It was a bit of a different story when streaming movies off the Internet where the picture size is much smaller. When going to Ifilm.com to see the Grayson trailer at a stream rate of 200K, I found the trailer a bit hard to see. It wasn't the viewing angle. Even at full brightness, the trailer was a bit darker than I had expected, therefore, making it difficult to see the dark scenes. It would help if the screen had an even higher constrast ratio. This shows the slight discrepancy between the a notebook display and a LCD display for a desktop. Nevertheless, when compared with other laptops, the screen is still top notch.

Performance

One of the major bottlenecks in laptop performance is the hard drive. Typically, notebooks have slower moving hard drives. This notebook uses a full 7200 RPM hard drive. I did a test with HDTach to determine the hard drive performance in the laptop. The laptop performed at a respectable sequential read of 93MB/s. This is not too far off from the Hitachi 7K400 internal desktop hard drive reviewed previously which had a read speed of 125.9 MB/s. It is quite impressive how far the technology in laptops has gone.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed using this laptop. Most laptops that are slim simply cannot match their looks. The Portable One MX is otherwise. It manages to balance performance and mobility in a notebook as well as style. With the quality parts in this laptop, you can be assured that you have something unique in your hands. The MX notebook did have some minor issues such as the overly sensitive touch pad as well as ergonomic issues with the mouse buttons, but it did not affect my overall positive experience. At the default price of $1899, this is quite expensive for a laptop for a consumer, which is why this is ideal for mobile professionals or corporate users. With the price you pay, you will get a set of premium features and quality that rivials the similar IBM Thinkpad nobteooks. If Portable One can provide a laptop geared more toward consumers at a more affordable price, I have no doubt that they will be able to compete with the big common consumer brand names.

Reviewed by ronald@digitalreviews.net

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