shattering your small cosmos

I have a confession to make

After six years as a die-hard Mac user at home with a first-generation MacBook and my PC tower running as a Hackintosh, I recently converted to the “Dark Side” (Windows 7) and left my aging MacBook behind with the acquisition of a Dell Inspiron Duo convertible netbook/tablet. I had also, while I had a job, completely rebuilt my PC tower with a new case, motherboard, an Intel i3 CPU, 4 gigs of RAM, a proper nVIDIA video board with 1 gig of RAM separate from the system’s memory, and a two-terabyte hard drive for recording TV shows and capturing the video I shoot on my HD pocket camera and DV camcorder.

There were a few reasons for going the “iDuo” route instead of an iPad, the primary one being that I was planning on financing the purchase in an effort to start rebuilding my personal credit after the bankruptcy that consumed the first part of last year, and Dell (instead of Apple) was the only vendor to extend me any credit. That, plus the company I was working for had an employee discount program with Dell, so for the price of the specs on the consumer web site, I got a larger hard drive (320GB instead of 250GB at the time; the models on the web site now have 320GB standard) and next-day shipping.

The other reason was that, while I do like the very slim form factor of the iPad and the Android tablets, trying to type quickly on a touchscreen is downright frustrating (especially if you’re trained like me to type by touch without having to look at the keyboard all the time), and having the option to flip the iDuo open from a tablet form factor to a regular netbook with real keys is incredibly nice. It was also refreshing to discover that Windows 7 actually does have some touch support built into the operating system (like “flicks,” on-screen keyboards, and touch response). And the thinner these devices get, the more I’m afraid I’m going to break something very expensive; the iDuo is a much more substantial device because of its convertible form factor. Want a tablet? Flip the screen, close the lid and you’ve got one. Want the physical keyboard? Open the lid, flip the screen back over, and you’ve got a mighty powerful netbook that could just replace your regular working laptop, as it did mine. This also means that the lid in netbook “mode” serves as protection for your touchscreen when it’s closed, keeping your touchscreen from being damaged in your bag. The keyboard is only slightly under full-size; I was able to touch-type quickly on it without all that much of a problem, while the 80%-sized keyboard on my previous netbook (Sylvania’s gNetbook, which was essentially a rebranded CloudBook ) made touch-typing an impossible task, having to resort to two-fingered hunt-and-peck.

The major thing setting apart the Duo from other netbooks is that this thing, for a netbook, is powerful—this machine could actually become your regular laptop. It sports a dual-core, 64-bit Atom N550 CPU, 2 gigs of RAM (instead of most netbooks’ just-enough-for-Windows-7 1GB) along with a speedy Intel NM10 video processor that supports all the Aero bells and whistles and Windows Media Center on its typically-sized-for-netbooks 10.1-inch, 16-by-9 widescreen (so I can lay in bed to watch the TV shows I recorded in Windows Media Center on the tower. Over my wireless-N home network. In full HD). If I wanted to I could put 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate on this machine (however, the 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium it comes with is just fine, so I haven’t bothered with the Anytime Upgrade). Did I also mention this thing came with Win7 Home Premium and not Starter or—tragedy of tragedies—Windows XP? Also included is Microsoft’s Touch Pack for Windows 7, which offers some applications also found on Microsoft Surface (their table-top oriented OS), but the more graphics-intensive apps from that pack (Garden Pond and Lagoon), while installed, will not run (it gives a pop-up that the video processor is unsupported and then exits), and the games, while playable, need just a little more power than what’s offered by an Atom processor to take away the occasional lag in responsiveness. The Duo also incorporates an accelerometer/magnetometer, not just for protecting the hard drive in the event a user drops the device (the case itself has a rubberized feel, so keeping a good grip on it isn’t an issue), but also for detecting whether you’re holding the tablet in portrait or landscape and automatically changing the video orientation accordingly. Note, though, that Windows does this by flipping the x and y resolution, requiring the video driver to reset at the new resolution in the same way it would if you changed the screen resolution on your desktop, so when rotating the device you’ll get a second or two of black screen while the video reconfigures itself.

Both the touchscreen and the trackpad are multi-touch and offer the use of “flick-style” gestures on the touchscreen (built into Windows 7 as the “Pen and Touch” Control Panel item) and also multi-finger touch gestures for both the touchscreen and the trackpad in both tablet and netbook form factors. The flick gestures for the touchscreen are customizable to set up an OS function or key combination to be executed when flicking in one of eight directions—for example, set up a flick to the “northeast” to send a Ctrl+D to Outlook to delete an email that I’m reading in full-screen instead of having to open Outlook’s ribbon and tap the Delete icon. That said, though, the gestures are not customizable on a per-application basis (I can’t set up a set of gestures just for Outlook or some other application where they’d come in handy only for that single program, nor can I create individual gesture profiles that I could save and reload when needed); here’s hoping that Microsoft provides an update to their “Pen and Touch” Control Panel item in the near future to allow for this.

Dell also included some additional software, developed by ArcSoft and designed for use on the Duo and its desktop “cousin”, the Inspiron One 2305. It’s called Stage and for lack of a better description it’s like “Front Row” on the Mac, but it’s for a touch form factor and offers a single starting point for browsing and viewing video (VideoStage), pictures (PhotoStage), music and online radio streaming (MusicStage), and ebooks (BookStage) (it’s a front end; the applications themselves are separate programs and can be opened without opening the Stage interface itself). The PhotoStage application, in addition to accessing your own local photo library, also lets you connect to Facebook and Flickr to browse and view your friends’ pictures and video on those services. The BookStage program, however, is inferior compared to Barnes & Noble’s Nook for PC or Amazon’s Kindle for PC; I ultimately ended up uninstalling BookStage and going with Nook for PC. BookStage is a rebranded version of the Blio eBook reader, which only supports Windows’ XPS format (it claims to support ePUB, but its ePUB support is limited to downloading from Google Books inside the application; BookStage converts the Google Books ePUB into XPS before opening it, so its ePub claims in its marketing materials are rather misleading; you cannot directly open ePUB books in the program; it’ll fail). I also found the VideoStage application took unusually long to load and run and eventually switched to Windows Media Center, Media Player, or Microsoft’s Zune application for watching video.

In a related note, Flickr has come out with a Silverlight-based front-end designed specifically for Windows 7 touchscreen devices (with the Duo in mind; they actually gave away the Duo in a drawing for the app’s release) and for Windows Phone, but I couldn’t get it running on my Duo without numerous application crashes and errors. Flickr claims they haven’t encounted such problems either in their testing (also on a Duo) or from others, so I’m assuming that it’s probably something being caused by a conflict with another application I’ve installed on the Duo after-market, and I’ve found PhotoStage to actually be more usable for my purposes.

For an extra hundred bucks, you can order the Inspiron Duo Audio Station that has built-in JBL stereo speakers and subwoofer, two USB ports, ethernet, and a built-in 7-in-1 card reader. Dell also provides a special application already installed on the Duo (called “duo Station”) that basically turns the Duo into an expensive desktop alarm clock when docked in the Audio Station (if the Duo isn’t in the Audio Station, running the application will simply pop up a message that the Duo is not docked and then close). The USB ports will come in handy to hook up a full-sized keyboard and mouse and use the Duo like a much smaller version of the aforementioned Inspiron One.

Downsides

• While the video processor on the iDuo is more than powerful to drive a decent PowerPoint slide show, look elsewhere or get a USB video device to show a PowerPoint on the big screen if your projector is not wireless. The Duo has no video-out ports, and neither does the Audio Station.

• Same if you want to use an ethernet connection. The Duo has no ethernet ports (the optional Audio Station does have one, though, for docked use).

• Same if you want to connect a microphone to it. In fact, the only ports on the iDuo are two USB ports and a stereo headphone out. Plan on using a USB or Bluetooth headset for communication applications.

  • On the bright side, the Duo comes with Bluetooth 3.0 and 802.11a/b/g/n standard, so no worries there about speed. You should download the update from Dell for the Bluetooth device, though, to resolve a problem with the Bluetooth disappearing from the system on a seemingly regular basis; the update also provides enhances to both the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi combo interface that didn’t seem to be present in the driver that shipped in the machine from the factory.

  • The Duo also includes a SIM card slot, located under a cover that one would think a battery is located (see my note later in this review about the battery; this cover is actually called the “label cover” in the service manual as the Windows license label is also under the same cover), but on my model it looks like the slot has been blocked with a piece of plastic and there doesn’t appear to be any contacts for the SIM card itself. Additionally, there is no mention anywhere on the Duo’s web site or in the literature that comes with the netbook that it supports GPRS/3G/4G data with a wireless carrier, but some online forums suggest that the SIM card may have been a move of foresight on Dell’s part by incorporating it into the original case design in anticipation of coming out with a newer model that does support 3G so they won’t have to go through the expense of redesigning the case molds again.

  • The machine comes with Skype preinstalled, but Skype shows a warning icon when making calls that the machine isn’t fast/powerful enough to handle it. However, it seems to work just fine in spite of the warning. The new phone calling built into Gmail’s web site (my primary method of calling since I can’t afford a cell phone without a job) also works without any issues.

• Battery life. Given it’s a netbook, battery life compared to, say, an iPad, is pathetic (two to four hours). The battery is also not user-replaceable (but if you’ve been using a more recent MacBook, iPhone, or iPad, you’re already used to having that “problem”). There’s a removable cover on the bottom of the Duo that one would think houses the battery, but it only houses the above-mentioned SIM card slot and Windows license label; the battery is actually located under the palmrest. Dell does provide a service manual online, so it’s not exactly rocket science to be able to open the machine and replace parts yourself if the need arises. The Duo’s external power supply is conveniently small, light, and easy to take along.

• Unlike nearly every other netbook I’ve seen and used, there is no card reader on the Duo (they put in the optional Audio Station instead). This is a massive fail on Dell’s part to have to carry around a USB card reader. If you want a card reader, carry a USB one or buy the Audio Station.

• Given that it’s a full-fledged netbook convertible, it’s bulkier and heavier compared to iPads, etc. It’s well over twice the weight of an iPad 2 at 3.35 pounds and just over an inch thick (as measured by me) compared to the iPad 2’s 0.35 inch. But that also means that, unlike the iPad, it’s more solid and much more rugged. The surface of the Duo also has a rubber-like feel to it so one can keep a good grip on it.

Positives

• With the Duo you have a convertible tablet/netbook device that has a complete operating system that can run the same software you use on your desktop.

• While the iPad’s largest configuration is still 64 GB last I checked, you’ve got a roomy 320GB SATA hard disk in the Duo, and a tech-savvy person could open the thing up and swap it out for a still larger drive (say, 500GB).

Overall impressions

As I wrote at the beginning of this review, this is the device that finally converted me from a Mac user to a full-time Windows user, as Apple has yet to produce a full-blown tablet computer (yes, they have the iPad, but it’s incredibly watered down OS compared to having a machine with the complete OS X on it, and shipping your MacBook to the various third-party companies that convert them to tablets involves substantial expense and being without your machine while they convert it). Not only has this device become my regular mobile device (replacing the MacBook) such that I can do just about everything on my desktop on the road (and if I need to do something more powerful, I can use Windows Live Mesh or Hamachi VPN and Remote Desktop Connection to access my desktop at home from the road), it also has become my portable entertainment device, being able to use Windows Media Center to access TV and movies recorded on the home PC over the network and watch it all in high definition without having to pay for extra services like MobileMe.

This is a very formidable entry into the convertible market by Dell, much better than other convertibles I’ve seen from companies like Toshiba and Lenovo. I would have liked to have seen things like a built-in card reader and a video output, but those are things that I’ll get over.