[H] Consumer review the AMTek T700

Beside the error of reporting this unit like it was made by VIA, this is one of the best review that I have read about the eo V7110.

...the battery life is unacceptable, the machine gets a little warm, and it could really use a shot in the arm for video acceleration and even CPU power. It’s also WAY too expensive, with competing devices reaching over $1000. Furthermore, as good as the Tablet PC OS and Touch Pack GUI are at this stage, they could definitely take a few hints from the guys who worked on Windows XP Media Center Edition. It would be nice to browse multimedia from inside the program launcher instead of limiting it to, well, launching programs like Media Center to navigate to what you’d like to watch or listen to.

But for a first revision of an ambitious platform, my experience left me hopeful that the UMPC market matures and that all companies involved are able to make these devices faster, cheaper, even more intuitive, and with a longer battery life. Did I mention cheaper? Yeah, let’s start there…

The author of the review mentioned that the CPU utilization while playing movies is too high. I should remind here that the VIA processor does only decode MPEG-2 format and that according to our tests only one video player in the market is fully optimized to use the VIA processor, WinDVD v7.0. The AVI format is not the best format if you are trying to save some battery life in this device because it use only CPU and it does not use at all the Video Chip. If you play the same movie in MPG-2 format or just the VOB file from a ripped DVD you will find a lower CPU use and a little bit more of battery life. I also found a better performance playing movies if you decrease the color dept to 16 Bits instead of the default of 24 Bits and you wont notice too much of video degradation.