ASUS N10JC: the Netbook Goes Corporate
by Jarred Walton on December 24, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
LCD Quality
We've already praised the LCD quite a bit during our subjective evaluation, but we also ran our standard hardware tests as well. As usual, we test with ColorEyes Display Pro with two colorimeters, the DTP-94 and the i1 Display2. Results below are for the best performance out of these two colorimeters -- in most cases the DTP-94 leads by a small margin.
Color accuracy is very good for a laptop; the N10JC places at the top of the color accuracy charts for tested laptops. Color gamut unfortunately is only middle of the road -- and we're still waiting for a laptop that can manage anything above 80% color gamut. What's really impressive to us as the brightness level, reaching nearly 300 nits! Now you're probably thinking, "Fine, but what does that do to battery life?" That's what was really surprising: power draw only increases by ~2W, and battery life dropped by less than 20 minutes. We know plenty of people that don't like reflective screens, but other than working in very bright light (i.e. outdoors in the sunshine) the high maximum brightness can generally overcome any reflections. And if you're working indoors, you can still easily turn down the display brightness to a more comfortable level.
We would still love to see a high color gamut LCD in a laptop -- and something other than a TN panel would be awesome -- but outside of that the display on the N10JC is about as good as it gets. We also noted that vertical viewing angles were much better than any of the other TN panel laptops we have around. Hopefully we can start to see other laptops with similar quality displays, only with higher resolution, larger LCD panels.
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ATWindsor - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
Please continue to test the displays of laptops. This is very good information, and often not tested by other sites.Clauzii - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
I'd like to see the ASUS with the Mac battery. That should bring a whole day of interrupted usage to the table. Besdides that, I think I'd prefer a dual core Atom and no discrete GPU, since the dualcore Atoms CAN decode movies well.Oh, and a Merry Christmas from Denmark :)
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
Glaedelige jul til dig ogsaa! I don't think dual-core Atom would do all that well with H.264 1080P, but it might manage. I suppose the real question is whether it would be more power efficient than the 9300M or not. No one seems to be doing Atom dual-core laptops yet (though I'm sure they're out there -- just no one has offered to send one for review). As for the Mac batteries, they're actually *smaller* than the ASUS battery in terms of capacity; OS X just seems to do better at optimizing for power as far as I can tell.therealnickdanger - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
But would you be kind enough to maybe test a couple old games like Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, Halo, WoW, UT2004? Merry Christmas, AT!JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
Given the performance in UT3 and CoH, I'd expect pretty reasonable frame rates in the games you mention - maybe not at high detail, but medium shouldn't be a problem. Let me see if I can dig out HL2 and give it a run for old time's sake....therealnickdanger - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
Fair enough. Thanks for considering it! ;-)Penti - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
A XP Home laptop is not a business version, why not test the Vista Business version? Would be more interesting to see how the VB N10J-A2 fair.A VB laptop with XP Pro downgrade rights is the only thing fitting into the corporate world. What your reviewing is still a consumer laptop. With just 1GB of ram to add on top of that. Certainly the 800 dollars N10J-A2 would be more difficult to justify. And only then you can talk corporate.
ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
I thought the XP Home thing was mandated by Microsoft for netbooks. As in Microsoft will only continue selling XP in it's Home form for netbooks which only have 1GB of RAM. ASUS can't put XP Pro in since it's no longer directly available and I would guess using Vista Business by default would increase the price and of course reduce performance.strikeback03 - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
As of September, our campus computer store was still selling licenses for XP Pro to use with our Volume License media.I haven't needed one since then, but businesses with volume licenses can probably upgrade if needed.ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
That's kind of different. XP is still available for smaller OEMs, but I'm pretty sure that XP isn't available for big name companies like ASUS anymore unless they stick with the netbook restrictions.