Joanna over at Engadget has the first review out on Jolicloud’s Jolibook. The hardware, a design that gets rebadged by a lot of small companies, is decent although the bulging 6-cell battery (slightly wobbly, 4:46 hours runtime) and colorful, busy lid are likely to turn many folks away even if you’re between the ideal 12 – 25 y.o age range that’s the target market for the netbook.
It’s all about the OS, Jolicloud, here. It’s already available (not 1.1 yet) and I’m sure a lot of you have tested it already. It’s all very polished and easily the best Linux distro for netbooks in terms of hardware compatibility, performance and technical support. The HTML5 launcher system does have it’s problems though – websites launch as apps rather than browser tabs, so you lose browser functionality and you can’t install your own apps, or rather you can but they won’t show up in the launcher and you’ll have to access them indirectly though the menu key.
It’s fast too – boots in under 20s, no sign of lag, 720p Flash and local content plays, and everything sails on just 1GB of RAM. That’s partly due to the dual core Atom N550 processor inside and how optimized Jolicloud is.
It’s still out only in the UK and parts of Europe selling for 279 pounds.
Source: Engadget
