Hey this is a request for help. I ordered a efika smartbook 3g just over 5 business days ago, but I've had no DHL tracking code and I can't seem to contact genesi europe through either email (I emailed the email shown in paypal a day ago, and the one on site several hours ago). It might just be that my emails are getting spamboxed or something. I can't find a phone no for them either.

If I could just get a little information as to status of order I've gotta say I love what your company is doing. Providing a device that is competitive, alternative and not locked down to android or some other ridiculous OS. If I didn't buy a smartbook I would have probably bought a pandaboard and tried to build a custom setup, but this is much cooler. This is the last piece of my puzzle, I've got a backpack, backup battery and one way ticket to nowhere for a while.

I can PM paypal transaction details or anything you might need. Just need some tips on how to get an update as to whether the order is delayed or it's not showing up on system or something. I'm not really sure what best contact avenue is right now.

Thanks for your time.

UPDATE... my emails did end up in genesi europe's spam folder. They obviously just found them and replied. Sorry for making this thread. Was getting worried there for a moment. I will probably write a short review when it arrives, to tack on the end of this now redundant thread.

It arrived.



What's my honest thoughts? It's actually pretty awesome. It's fairly fast under normal use, installing applications slows it down a lot. My top two criteria are low power, and reliability. I'm sick of laptops under-performing and being unreliable. I had to stop using my last laptop because it squealing at me as if the hard disk was ready to break. I've seen so many laptops have overheating issues and other things. The smartbook looks pretty well built and logically there isn't a huge amount to break as it has no moving parts. It's also light as anything, you do feel much more free to move with it.

Genesi definitely excite me as a company. To me they feel like a smaller company who can cater to the needs of a developer a lot more. This smartbook though is definitely great to use right out of the box for anyone. You don't need to know anything special to use it. I've seen people on this forum have issues with the smarttop because it only has a pixel clock of 133mhz I think. That's not something most people are aware of with these low power chips. The smartbook has none of those potential issues, it's a standalone unit that sets itself up when you first turn it on. Only thing they could have made clearer is that there is a button on the side that disables wifi and 3g. Like somewhere prominent when you buy it, or on the main site. Because that seriously confused me for a couple of minutes when it I loaded it up and it said you have no devices for networking.

And the most important thing is battery life, using a laptop puts you under pressure if you're out and about to turn it on use it and then turn it off again. Or it will turn itself off with a flat battery after minimal usage. Then you spend the rest of your day with no computer until you find a socket. I've left this efika smartbook just sitting there and the battery icon hasn't moved from showing full yet after half hour to an hour. My laptop would be showing signs of battery drain already.

Onto the very exciting part, the CPU. This is purely from a geek standpoint, but I've always wanted to mess around with an ARM cpu. I was pretty happy to find out the smartbook has a neon simd unit built in as well. I'd actually like to see one of these on my desktop as I mess around with machine learning and transferring data to process onto the graphics card is a pain, and it doesn't give you access to the onboard RAM. Obviously on a x86 cpu you have sse2 but as far as I'm aware the neon simd has more registers.

This simd unit has been shown to speed up well written programs by up to 7 times, maybe a touch more on occasion. And less if you use the default compilation settings. If applications are compiled right and designed for this machine you could definitely get more speed out of it.



The retractable mouse in picture above makes all the difference. You cannot drag with the builtin track pad, unless you are God. It's not something I care about though because none of them are any good, even the top end laptops.

All in all, this should make a big change in my life... as it will give me the opportunity to not be tied down to a desktop and do a whole lot more from anywhere I feel like. I think it might just be the geek in me but the netbook gives me that "this is very cool" feeling in my stomach. So yeah, one of the more exciting devices I own.

Update: Can't live without. Period. Super super mobile device. With a backup battery & mini power supply in my backpack is amazing because of the low wattage.

Only small issue is it needs another 512mb RAM to be truly comfortable. Hopefully in a couple years genesi has a more powerful model for same wattage. It can run everything I've thrown at it, and I've done a ton of c++ compiling, whilst browsing the web, whilst having a bunch of text editors open. Currently trying to configure cross-compilation for windows so I can compile .exe's on the move. Which is why I'd quite like a bit more RAM :D.