Everex CloudBook CE1200V Netbook review
It seems my idea of doing retro reviews on old, crappy hardware that no one really cares about except to laugh at has already been done. This review of the Everex netbook, which must be somewhere around a year after the netbook was originally released, goes into the gory details of how big a failure it is. Of course, if you’ve read any of the reviews that have been around for a while now you’d know this is the case. That doesn’t make it less enjoyable to read, however.
Aside from having an awful trackpad (it’s not stated, but I wonder if the reviewer thinks it’s worse than Eee PC 701’s trackpad), the Everex CloudBook also has a ridiculously slow hard drive. It’s like they took one of those Seagate pocket hard drives that operates at about 12 rpm and shoved that inside. In fairness, it’s faster than 12 rpm (obviously), but not much more. Then again, it is a netbook running a VIA C7, so it’s not exactly coming to the party with the biggest and baddest hardware available. A noble offering, this is not.
The horrors don’t end there, however. The reviewer also laments the choice of gOS. In fairness, gOS was designed to be a pretty lightweight operating system, and when you’re trying to run on a C7 with half a gig of RAM, you don’t want Windows XP. Still, the reviewer compares its appearance to Apple’s OS X (I can see the relation with the pseudo-Stacks effect), but says it doesn’t have the same ease. Well, of course not.
But let’s also be fair: linux, as a desktop environment for the average user, has made the cliched leaps and bounds in the last few years. Ubuntu, of course, is a large reason why, but inexpensive netbooks with customized interfaces hasn’t hurt. Almost every netbook on the market right now has an option for linux, and in most cases, they’re completely viable and good choices. The Eee PC has a good linux environment, the Acer Aspire One has a good linux environment, the Dell Mininote (I can’t stop calling it that, but I suppose it’s really the Dell Inspiron 910) has a good linux environment, and the list goes on. I’m not making the case that linux is going to make some sort of great surge because of being on a netbook, but as a whole, it’s certainly going to pick up some market share.
So what was the point of all of this? Oh, yeah, we were mocking the Everex CloudBook. Sorry about that. Read the rest at about.com.
