Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from pocket now calm and in this video I'm going to take you through all the software in the HP mini 1151 NR that's on the verizon wireless network we're going to run speed benchmarks talk about battery life talk about the software that comes on the netbook and things like that so let's start off by turning on the netbook and we do that if you saw the hardware video a hardware tour through this button down here and it's kind of commerce emily placed because it's a little difficult to slide it over and let's see how long it takes to come out of hibernate okay so that was quite fast just a few seconds to come out of hibernate okay so here i am on the desktop and the first thing that I did when I got the HP mini out of the box is I disabled all of the visual eye candy that comes in Windows XP this being a netbook you want it to be as light and fast as possible and already with one gigabyte of RAM and the 1.6 gigahertz atom processor it's pretty snappy especially since i'm not running too many background processes but I went into system and I went into the Advanced tab and performance and I unchecked most of these items that's why you get that kind of old school windows 98 look when they're you know there's no visual eye candy turned on so for a browser I'm using google chrome because Google Chrome really gives you the maximum amount of screen space when you're when you're browsing the web because it takes away the status bar on the bottom of the screen and it also is quite lightweight which is good for a netbook which it doesn't have as much power as you know a dual core quad core machine that you may be using now right now I'm connected to the Wi-Fi network in my office here and I'm going to disconnect that and show you what it's like to connect to the verizon evdo network so I'm going to go into the network configuration and I'm going to disable the wireless area network now I should note while I'm doing this the purpose of the evdo connection is not so that you will use this all the time because you're limited in the amount of data that you can use and I'll talk about the pricing plans in a minute it's so that when you don't have Wi-Fi such as you're in the back of a taxi cab or you're at the park or you're just you know on in the back of a car you're a passenger seat or something like that you have internet access so the way that we do this is you have to launch this program first it's called vzaccess manager just kind of unfortunately always have to have this program open in fact if you minima or exit this program the connection won't work so it starts off by saying please wait while powering on the wireless device and this is what you have to go through every time you want to get access via verizon's network and yeah it takes a few minutes which is a little bit annoying but again you're not going to be using this feature as much as as Wi-Fi okay here we are and now i'm going to click get access and i've got limited signal here in the office so the speeds aren't going to be that great but we're going to do some benchmarks and i'll talk about exactly how fast can possibly go so i clicked get access and it's going to take another few few moments here to get the everything working ok now it's showing me the kind of signal that i have so i only have one bar and in a moment i'll be able to click connect and here we go connect and it'll take another 34 seconds and we'll finally be connected to the network there it is it says connected to broadband access revision a so we are connected to verizon's network right now we're not on Wi-Fi so let's see how fast things are we can keep in mind that we are using we're in an area where there isn't great cell phone coverage so let's go to youtube let's see how fast that loads what you're going to notice is things come on the screen very fast it is a pretty fast connection let's go to the the benchmark site speedtest net which was fantastic for measuring your broadband speed and let's see the kind of speeds that we're getting right now in the office over the verizon network so click on that let me scroll down a little bit so i can see the little meter okay so it looks like we're going to max out at about 1.3 mega bits per second which is pretty good and we're going to do the upload speed which is going to be much much slower you don't want to upload YouTube videos or anything like that while on the verizon network and we're getting a paltry point one five megabits per second and I'm actually surprised by how low that is how fast can this go well this afternoon I tested it in an area with great cellular reception and I got actually 1.9 megabits per second down and about 0.5% up which is quite good if i were to tether my 3g phone to my laptop i usually get about 1.1 1.2 megabits per second at best so the fact that the verizon network can get up to 1.9 that is very encouraging and again you're going to be using this connection for casual web browsing you're not going to be using it for downloading from itunes or for uploading movies or anything like that and so it's really quite adequate and even even pretty extraordinary for being able to get this wireless coverage anywhere now what about the effect on battery life well the battery life if you're not using any any wireless is about two and a half hours with this 3-cell battery you can get the six cell battery option on the verizon netbook although it costs an additional one hundred and thirty dollars which probably isn't worth it considering that the netbook is two hundred dollars itself now if you're using Wi-Fi expect to get two hours of battery life if you're using the evdo connection full time expect about an hour and a half it's definitely it definitely uses more battery than does Wi-Fi because it requires more power to get a cellular signal than it does a short-range Wi-Fi signal in terms of pricing you have to pay for data of course on the verizon network it's forty dollars for let's actually go to the website it's forty dollars for the 250 megabyte plan which is really not enough especially if you plan on doing some email attachment downloading and that sort of thing but for the five gigabyte plan it's only twenty dollars more so if you're getting this device you're likely going to want to go with the the higher tier plan so let's go to netbooks and things are very snappy and plans and accessories and here it is the HP mini and here it is the unit cost 199 dollars it's subsidized and you get these choices of plants there is no unlimited plan it seems which makes sense that would be a very big toll on verizon's network if you could you know download and upload an unlimited amount of data so overall I'm quite excited about the verizon HP mini netbook it's their first attempt at a netbook and I think they chose a really fantastic unit with great performance and excellent keyboard and a really nice look to it as well although the outdoor visibility isn't so great because the screen has such a strong shine you can see the reflection of the light right there the evdo speeds are fantastic the only gripe that I have is that it takes a little bit of time to connect to their evdo network and you can only use the vzaccess manager to to connect that said if you are a mobile professional then certainly this device may be indispensable to you so that's it for the verizon wireless HP mini 1151 NR we'll be back with some more coverage on the netbook comparing it to the celio red fly which is a windows mobile hub that allows you to have a netbook like experience but for your windows mobile device for more on windows mobile and mobile technology follow us on twitter at twitter.com slash pocket nail tweets that's it for now