Reviews

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday September 24, 2005

Ashok Zaman, David Flynn

Asus W2V $4999 ***1/2 www.asus.com.au

The sleek black W2V laptop is purpose-built for digital media and entertainment. Its brushed-alloy casing houses a large and very crisp 43cm wide-screen display and powerful hardware. Its size and weight means it is better suited as a semi-permanent fixture in the home or office with serious media inclinations.

The built-in digital TV tuner is its biggest drawcard, with an external antenna that plugs into the side. A quick and simple auto-scan using the TV Settings utility and you're away; the reception is never fantastic, with a fuzzy image consistent across all channels and at times a lag between sight and sound. Fiddling with the antenna can help, but it doesn't alleviate the problem. Despite the image, the novelty of TV integrated into a laptop is difficult to resist.

Asus's answer to Microsoft's Windows Media Center is its Mobile Theatre software. It is an integrated nexus for music, DVD, TV, customised digital image slideshows and video playback. It allows you to record TV and DV straight to the hard disk, though it's lacking in organisational capabilities so you'll have to resort to the familiar routines of Windows Explorer.

Numerous ports are around the front and sides of the unit, including four USB, FireWire, network, S/PDIF (an interface for digital audio) and surround sound, making the W2V ready for the mobile digital home role. With outstanding specs including powerful 3-D graphics and a huge 1GB of memory, the W2V is certainly an investment piece at $4999. If you want a portable desktop replacement with generous media capacity that looks seriously cool, the W2V is worth considering. Ashok Zaman

BigPond Wireless Broadband From $35/month **** www.bigpond.com

Telstra's BigPond Wireless Broadband ups the ante in high-speed surfing sans wires with a service that's more extensive, but more expensive, than its competitors.

By piggybacking on to the advanced EV-DO cellular-phone network, BigPond scores almost blanket coverage of greater Sydney (plus slabs of Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra). This is ideal for anyone living in streets or suburbs bypassed by the ADSL network and stuck with dial-up.

Connections can be made at up to 256kbps or 512kbps (10-20 times the rate of dial-up and equal to entry-level and mid-range ADSL) depending on which plan you take. There are limits on how much you can download: choose between 200MB or 1GB on a 256kbps plan or 400MB or 1GB for the 512kbps - plus additional charges if you exceed your monthly quota.

The standard desktop wireless modem costs $199 and plans range from $35 for the 256kbps/200MB deal to $60 for 512kbps/1GB, with a charge of 15 cents per MB for exceeding your limit.

If you live within the Sydney-only footprint of Unwired's microwave broadband network, you'll find Unwired has cheaper plans with higher download ceilings. For example, a $35 a month plan gets you a 256kbps connection on either network, but Unwired's generous 600MB of downloads outshines BigPond's 200MB.

Where BigPond enjoys an advantage is that laptop customers outside range of the EV-DO network are automatically transferred to the CDMA mobile-phone system. Speeds drop to a ceiling of 100kbps, but at least you've got near- constant connectivity. David Flynn

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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