Jolibook Netbook Gets Reviewed

Rhyming in an article title is allowed if it’s about the Jolibook. Looking at that lid you can’t but think about cartoons and drawing in school. Actually, the demographic for this netbook is not too far off this group, as it’s intended to serve people between 15 and 25 (my guess is 15 and 18). It’s all fun and games with the Jolibook, but is it a good netbook and will it get you through the day? Engadget.com reviewed this Jolicloud OS based netbook, so let’s take a closer look at this funky thing.

If you go beneath the extravagant case, you find a pretty standard netbook. It would have been nice to have the keys also colored and maybe the theme of the lid to continue on the keyboard. Instead, you have a black keyboard, like all bulky netbooks out there. Specs wise, you’re in familiar territory too: it has a 10 inch, 1024 x 600 display, Intel Atom N550 processor, 1 GB of RAM and a 250 GB HDD. You have a chiclet keyboard resembling those of ASUS netbooks and the keys have enough space between them to avoid (too many) typos. The touchpad has small bumps like (again) ASUS touchpads and while is comfortable for the finger, there are some errors with the cursor occasionally moving hectically across the screen.

The OS is Jolicloud 1.1 (built on Ubuntu and HTML 5) and what sets it apart from Windows 7 Starter is the lack of the desktop centric UI. Instead you have all the apps you need on a home screen, also named App Launcher. You can change or add apps on this screen to suit your style and the OS comes preloaded with stuff like Gmail, Chromium, Twitter, OpenOffice and Skype. Another essential feature of Jolicloud is the social stream, which basically means that you set up a “Joliaccount” that keeps your settings and options on a server and you can connect to it from everywhere. Also, it works like some sort of Facebook for OS, meaning that you can connect with other people using Jolicloud, find out what apps they use, what changes they’ve made to their settings and stuff like that. Yes, you can stalk on OS. The apps you launch will often open as a web page and not as another tab in the browser. Using Jolicloud is switching between apps and considering that most apps have a social component, you’ll be connected to others most of the time. Of course, there are some offline apps, like text editors and media players you can use when not connected.

Jolicloud is an OS designed to work smoothly on low end configurations and older machines. Thus, the Jolibook is a pretty fast netbook to work with. Apps load quickly and multitasking with text editors, browsing the web and listening to some tracks works like a charm. For video playback you’ll have to stick with 720p, as 1080p is unwatchable (but that’s something you would expect from a N550 CPU). Although the battery is very large and is not quite fitting the design imposed by the lid, the power you get from it is not that great. On a video rundown test, Jolibook ticked in at 4 hours and 46 minutes, almost two hours less than other netbooks in its class.

If you used Jolicloud OS on other netbooks, then you should go for the Jolibook. It is practically the sole major advantage you get by buying it. And you can always get another netbook and install the free Jolicloud OS. It costs $443 and for that money you can do a little better on the netbook market. But in the end, the question is all about how Joli you are at heart.

[netbooklive.net]