Dan’s Tech-n-Stuff Weblog

Another release date for the Everex Cloudbook comes and goes.

Today was the day the $399 UMPC from Everex was to be released but something must have been not quite right and the release date has slipped again. Not by much–just until February 21st–but it has slipped.

Laptop Magazine has managed to get their hands on a Cloudbook and so far they seem to have mixed feelings.

First, the good:

• The desktop is clean and has easy-to-read icons.
• Relatively fast web surfing.
• An SD card from their test camera and their USB flash drive were both automatically recognized.
• Comes with OpenOffice…both good and bad. Nice to have it there but it took roughly 18 seconds to load.
• DVI port works to connect to an external monitor.
• Wireless mouse from Logitech was automatically recognized.

Now, the bad:

• Very cramped keyboard.
• Very, very small touchpad (about the size of your finger) and its awkwardly placed above the keyboard on the right side. The mouse buttons are on the opposite side of the laptop, on the left side above the keyboard.
• Slow boot up time. How slow? It took roughly 1.5 minutes to boot up, which is about a minute longer than it takes the Asus Eee PC to boot.
• Some difficulty connecting to a WiFi network.
• Many windows stretched below the bottom of the screen, making it difficult to get to OK or Close buttons.
• The screen would occasionally look like it was about to freeze or crash though it didn’t.
• Trouble getting Tokbox to work for video chats.
• Unable to run at a resolution higher than 840 x 480, even when connected to an external monitor.

Their test unit seemed to have the wrong OS install, so how representative it is of the retail version isn’t really known since the retail version was delayed.

[Via Engadget]