Design and features
ViewSonic, typically known for entry-level monitors, has made its way into the laptop market, riding on the coat-tails of the netbook phenomenon.
The VNB101 is an attractive enough little laptop, with a piano black lid and insides, although you can also opt for red and gold should the fancy take you. Uncommonly, ViewSonic has chosen to move a lot of its ports to the back — while there's a USB port on the left and right, and headphone and microphone jacks on the left, the rear gains the lion's share of ports, with VGA, 100Mb Ethernet, SD/MS/MMC card reader and a power jack all lining up where the battery would usually be. The 25Wh battery itself can be found under the laptop, as a pop-out component.
The extremely thick bezel around the screen serves to make it look smaller than it is, but the 10.1-inch, 1024x600 screen still manages to look decent, if a little deeply set, with a 0.3 megapixel camera sitting on top. ViewSonic has managed a 92 per cent sized keyboard, a quite attractive proposition — although it doesn't match Samsung's 100 per cent effort on the N120.
The touchpad is larger than we're used to on netbooks, which is largely appreciated, although we're not sold on the high friction surface it uses. Where ViewSonic earns significant penalties, is that, just like MSI, it's fallen prey to using the incredibly bad Sentelic touchpad. Though, it's been better than MSI because it includes drivers, but not being able to scroll by swiping is a reasonably bad usability crime — multiplied by the fact that scrolling is achieved by tapping in the top or bottom right corners, which is often misinterpreted as a click — which leads to all sorts of fun when browsing websites.
Internally is the usual mess of specs — an Atom N280 1.6GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 160GB mechanical hard drive, 802.11b/g wireless and Bluetooth support. There's not much here to set it apart from the plethora of other notebooks in this fashion, so ViewSonic has decided to offer a little more on the software front.
Upon boot-up a Linux-based operating system is offered, which allows you to do light tasks such as use Skype, browse the internet and get on instant messenger, much like Asus' ExpressGate. Unlike ExpressGate, however, this loads by default every time instead of requiring a key to be pressed, and also offers the options of booting Windows or loading into the BIOS.
Primarily, the VNB101 runs on Windows XP Home, and includes a Trend Micro Security trial — and that's it. No eBay icons, no Internet Explorer toolbar, no pointless home-grown tools. ViewSonic's first foray into laptops is refreshingly clean of cruft.
Extras are also sparse — with manuals and the ironic inclusion of recovery CDs being the order of the day, along with a red neoprene sleeve for keeping your laptop scratch-free.
Performance
Being a netbook, performance isn't its primary call — the score of 88 in 3DMark06 being spectacularly dismal but not unexpected, while the PCMark05 score of 1556 reveals the netbook for what it is — a casual use laptop that's good for web browsing, Microsoft Office, and watching the occasional DVD-quality movie.
Battery life was far from impressive, at two hours, 22 minutes and 15 seconds, the small lithium-polymer battery being laid to waste by the likes of Samsung's N120 and Asus' Eee PC 1000HE or 1005HA-H, all of which can be found for around the same price as the ViewSonic. And with the battery moved to the bottom it precludes installing larger capacity batteries too.
The netbook market is so tight, you need some sort of competitive advantage to stand above the crowd. ViewSonic brings a standard netbook with two negatives instead — poor battery life and a bad touchpad.
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