Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: Nice sleek and rugged design, added SD slot and Webcam, good speakers.

Thumbs down: High price, average performance.

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: This one is yet another addition to ultraportable computing devices. I personally am a huge fan of these devices but what is to be seen in this case is whether this one would find universal appeal especially at a time when there is absolutely no dearth of smartphones and netbooks.

Before the launch of the iPhones and the other in the category the UPMC’s were like the hottest thing available in the market. However the only drawback was that at that time these UPMC’s were priced anything between $1500-$2000. This one launched by Viliv has a starting price of $587. But then we get netbooks priced at around $350 so here again its universal appeal is questioned. Anyways let’s move ahead and see what this one has in store for us…

This one is definitely a smasher when it comes to looks. It’s covered with gunmetal gray plastic and is accented with silver and chrome touches. It’s got a rectangular shape and with curved edges.

The buttons are well spaced and are comfortable to use. They are well placed on the case and instead of trackpoint navigation here we have a joystick which can be used to jump between cells or icons on the desktop. Well what is new in the case of this one is the presence of a webcam. I ll come to the functionality of that one later.

In keeping with the slim trend this one measures a sleek 0.88 inch in thickness and weighs 1.6 pounds which is quite lightweight as well. Unlike many of the slim devices on the shelf this one has got a nice rugged feel to it.

It comes along with an actual stylus for navigation purposes and also has an antenna for 3G reception. Also it supports GPS but the GPS software has to be installed in it. This tablet can be easily mounted into a car navigation device.

As per the claims of Viliv, this one can easily be used to browse through different applications. However when I actually got my hands on it, I noticed that browsing through applications using Windows XP is what it supports most of the times. The haptic feedback keys are much better than the ones on its predecessor S5. The virtual keys really made me cringe and I could not help but want to just keep this one aside and get back to my iPhone to get an actual feel of the virtual keyboard.

Compared to the 4.8 inch screen this one has a nice large 7 inch screen with a resolution of 1,024×600 pixels.  At 7 inches the text on the display is pretty much readable and also the images are bright and vibrant. The resolution of most of the netbooks nowadays also adds upto the same figure.

Coming to the quality of the speakers which are mounted on the back of this one, they were pretty much loud and clear. For once, listening to something on the inbuilt speakers actually made me go ‘wow, now that’s something’.

This one has a SD card slot and a webcam. Well the addition of the webcam is a really nice feature but the addition of the SD card slot is what is more essential in the case of a computing device. It makes file transfers a less daunting task. However the Bluetooth and Wi-fi are both controlled by the same settings on the Viliv Cube UI, which means the user, gets either both or none unless the settings are tweaked through the XP’s device menus.

Coming back to the price, as I mentioned earlier this starts at $587 but then again the one you get at this price doesn’t have a lot of features including the 3G modem. But at a price of $1,359 you could easily upgrade this to include Windows Vista along with a 128GB SSD. Well this could get you thinking that probably a Macbook would be a better option.

This one uses the same Atom Z520 processor that was used in S5. Though Z series is a great processor when it comes to low power consumption, it doesn’t add much to the processing capabilities of the Viliv. This one did not perform well in most of our benchmark tests as compared to most of the netbooks. Infact even the S5 was better at performance in most of the cases, not that this one lagged far behind, but the S5 showed better results. It also took a lot of time as compared to the Atom N270 Netbooks when it came to loading flash files and webpages.

Video streaming from Hulu as well as from Youtube did not produce satisfactory results. The videos were grainy and choppy most of the times. Also the touch screen responsiveness was quite below the mark. Talking about the battery life, this one lasted for hardly 4 hours and 8 minutes wherein we made it undergo a few tests like continous video playback and web browsing.

Nitty-gritty: Go ahead get it if you have the money to spend over the UPMC. However compared to most of the other Atom powered gadgets you would be better off getting a nice netbook for a better price.

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