Superdave's Soapbox
Retiring My SH8
I've been using Kohjinsha machines for a few years now. I imported an SA1 from Japan nearly as soon as they became available. Two years later I upgraded to an SH8 to take advantage of the dramatic speed improvement of the 800 MHz Intel A110 CPU over the 500 MHz AMD Geode that was used in the SA1.
The SH8 proved to be a great machine in terms of features and capability. However, a month before the 12 month warranty expired, the machine developed a problem where even the slightest movement after it had warmed up would cause an instant lock-up. The only way to recover was to power off and let the machine sit for a couple hours. Not a great "feature" in an ultra-portable machine.
Fortunately the good folks at Conics.net came through and helped me get the machine shipped back to Kohjinsha for repairs. A few weeks later the SH8 came back as good as new, but the experience made me start wondering about the wisdom of relying on a UMPC that needs to travel half way around the world for repairs (especially now that my warranty is up).
When I purchased the SA1, a "netbook" was a discontinued model of Psion PDA. When I got the SH8, the EeePC had made netbooks commonplace, but none had feature sets that could hold a candle to the SH8. A lot has changed in the year since, and now the machines from Acer, Dell, MSI, and HP offer most of what I used in the SH8 at a fraction of the price. In fact the only SH8 feature not commonly found in current netbooks is the convertible touchscreen that allows operation in "tablet" mode. That may be a killer feature for some, but I can count the number of times I've used it in the last year on one hand.
So the SH8 found a new home courtesy of eBay. In its place I'm now using an Acer Aspire One 150. Only slightly larger than the SH8, the AA0 offers a bigger LCD (at the same resolution), a big hard drive, wifi, webcam, and an incredible keyboard. Notably absent is Bluetooth, but that's easily remedied by a thumbnail size USB Bluetooth module. At the price ($349), the AAO actually cost less than what the year old SH8 sold for.
Time will tell how the AAO stacks up in daily use (particularly traveling), but after a few weeks of use, I suspect I'll be quite happy with it. Watch this site for updates.
Categories: CategoryKohjinsha, CategoryAspireone, CategoryNetbook
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