Raon Vega

Design and Ergonomics

When we say it has similar size to the Sony PSP, we weren’t kidding. In fact, the PSP is actually wider than the Vega. It’s slightly taller than the PSP and thicker, though not by much, than the PSP. Measuring in at 6.3 x 3.1 x 1.1 inches, the Vega feels good in hand. At 1.06 lbs, it will take a long time before you feel the fatigue. It’s a bit longer than the OQO but shorter (the OQ measures 4.9 x 3.4 x .9 inches and weighs 14 ounces). The unit comes in smooth white with black cover the front and it looks modern with an “Asian flare”. Most of the ports are on the left side of the Vega including two USB (an A and a B) ports, mic in and headphone out jack and the charging port. There is only one port on top of the unit which is an additional USB (A) port. The VGA port lives on the left side of the Vega along with button lock switch, reset button and power button. The reset button is a little too “conveniently” accessible and there is no slot to store the stylus though you do get a lanyard. There are no buttons or ports on the bottom of the unit. Half of the thickness on the Vega comes from the extended battery (the compact battery is smaller). Two latches secure the battery to the unit. You will also find the stereo speakers on the front up top which sound quite decent when you play music through them.

Side views

Unlike the OQO and Sony VAIO UX series approach, the Raon Vega doesn’t come with a built-in keyboard. You will either need a USB keyboard or use the on-screen soft keyboard as input methods on the Vega. To make things easier without the Tablet Edition’s utilities, the Vega provides Raon’s own handwriting recognition software to help make better use of the stylus as input method for notes, email and Word files, but it’s not very handy for entering text in non-text centric applications such as web browser fields. While Samsung seems to have taken the simple hardware button control approach, the Raon Vegas has a large number of controls and input buttons that seem to take the skills of a NASA engineer to understand and memory of a maestro to remember. Of course, if you can use an external USB keyboard and mouse, you will bypass these buttons and go about your business as usual. But if your heart is set on not carrying one more peripheral in your bag, you should take some time to get acquainted to the buttons layout and controls. With some patience and the help of the stylus and the round cursor control to the left of the display, you should get used to using the Vega eventually.

Top view

The Vegas provides 3 USB ports, but no flash memory slots nor PC card slot. Although 3 USB ports sounds like plenty, one is a mini USB port intended for syncing the Vega to a desktop Windows PC and one of the standard USB A ports is occupied by the WiFi adapter. So if you want to use WiFi, an external keyboard and a USB flash drive or USB CD drive, you’ll need to get a hub (powered hub recommended). The Vega doesn’t come with a CD/DVD drive, but it works with standard external CD/DVD drive via USB connection.

Horsepower and Performance

While most handheld Windows XP and UMPC machines run on 900MHz to 1.2GHz processors, the Vega takes the low road. The Vega has a 500MHz AMD Geode LX processor that’s designed as lower power, single board computer form factor x86-based processor. Despite the low CPU speed, running Windows XP, MS Office applications, browsing the web and doing email did not faze the Vega. Windows XP starts at a reasonable speed (52 seconds with a fresh machine), applications load reasonably fast and there’s no noticeable delay loading web pages, opening files and application menus. Application installations are slow on the Vega compared to a standard notebook (the 1.8” isn’t fast compared to standard 2.5” notebook drives) and you wouldn’t want to run demanding applications like Photoshop, but it does well with standard business apps. The machine has 128MB of L2 cache and 512 megs of 400MHz DDR RAM. For the intended tasks (web browser, office works and music), the processor and memory on the Vega are certainly adequate. It can also drive an external drive monitor, keyboard and mouse for desktop use.

Though we didn’t expect the Vega to be a speed demon, we put it through PCMark05 to see how it would fare. As expected, many of the benchmark tests couldn’t properly finish thanks to the device’s novel architecture.  The Vega scored 287 in the CPU benchmark, which is dreadfully low number, especially if you are a gamer. But with the Vega’s resolution, 16 meg graphics processor and 500MHz CPU, one does not buy it for gaming. The unit runs quite hot compared to UMPCs and the Sony Vaio UX280P but it’s cooler than the toasty OQO.

The Vega has a 30 GB Toshiba 1.8” drive that runs at 4200 rpm. The drive should suffice if you work mainly with office files, emails and etc. and you can connect external USB hard drives and USB thumb drives if you need more storage.

Display and Multimedia

The Raon Vega has a 4.3” display, same size as the Sony PSP and smaller than the OQO’s 5” display, and it has a default resolution is 800 x 480 (same as UMPCs). The screen is quite bright and has accurate colors. The viewing angle is very wide which means it’s great for showing off photos or slides while you are surrounded by a group of people. The default resolution is the best setting for the Vega: even though windows and dialogs sometimes extend off screen, menus and fonts are much easier to see. You can crank up the resolution on the Vega but be prepared to work with very tiny text and buttons. While the 800 x 480 resolution yielded the best balance, it has the UMPC problem: menus, dialog boxes and windows may not fit on screen. The result is you can’t see or press the “OK” and “Cancel” buttons. If you can’t live with this flaw, you can change the Vega’s resolution to 800 x 600 and squint as needed. Be aware however, there isn’t an easy way to change back to 800 x 480 however. If you have very good eyesight, we’d recommend setting the resolution at 800 x 600. One caveat: once we’d set the display to 800 x 600, 800 x 480 disappeared as an option. We had to delete the driver, reboot then re-install it to get it back to the default resolution.

Size comparison: Motorola RAZR, Vega and Sony PSP

Another setting change one should not make lightly is changing the display orientation. While Windows Tablet Edition makes switching screen orientation a breeze, Windows XP doesn’t deal with this gracefully, at least not on the Vega. You can change the orientation in the Display settings, but if you rely on the stylus, as we’ve come to, then you will be surprised to see your stylus is wildly out of calibration with the screen once the orientation is changed and there isn’t an easy way to re-calibrate it again. You can however use the round d-pad to control the cursor in this state.

Unlike UMPCs that runs Windows Tablet Edition, the Vega runs Windows XP which lacks customizations and some utilities (such as Windows Journal and the floating virtual keyboard) that are good for pen-based computers. The Vega’s touch screen supports stylus (any stylus) and your finger, unlike the special EMR pens and active digitizers used on most Tablet PCs. It has an on-screen keyboard and a handwriting recognition software to support using the stylus as input.

Playing music is a breeze on the Vega. You can download music from your desktop via the USB cable, load songs to USB drive or visit Internet radio stations to play music on the Vega using Windows Media Player. The front facing stereo speakers are decent for music and they’re surprisingly loud. The Vega package includes a pair of excellent Cresyn earbud headphones and the sound through them is great. Video playback is better than on PDAs. We tested a feature film ripped at 964 kbps on the Vega and it played it well with no noticeable frame drops or loss of sync. Then we threw a much more challenging test movie at the Vega, a 1450 kbps encoded WMV which no PDA, not even 624MHz Pocket PCs could play decently. The Vega handled it well, with only a few frame drops over the course of 5 minutes. The Vega’s 16MB of video memory doesn’t afford much for gaming (if your gaming titles include F.E.A.R or Battlefield), but Solitaire games play just fine.

Networking

There isn’t a lot to talk about in the wireless networking department for the Vega as it doesn’t come with any cellular data option (as does the Sony UX), integrated Bluetooth or Ethernet port. What it does have is a WiFi USB adapter that looks like a USB flash memory drive. You can plug in the adapter to use 802.11b/g (the driver is pre-installed and also supplied on a CD). Speed and reliability are both good using the USB WiFi adapter.

Battery Life

Raon Digital offers two Lithium-Ion battery options for the Vega: the enhanced pack battery which is 3300 mAh and the compact pack battery which is only 1100 mAh in capacity. The Vega that Dynamism sells has the enhanced pack which is a very wise choice given the Vega’s meager run times. The Vega comes with a nice battery application called Vega PM that allows you to see much more info than just the percentage of juice remaining. It provides battery calibration, alarm settings for the low battery warning, volume control and more. The battery life is short compared to the Samsung Q1 which has only a 2600 mAh battery. In two hours it loses half of its charge when playing Internet Radio music via the built-in speakers (with WiFi on and browser running) and screen off. Standby time isn’t that much better, using about 50% of its charge in 2.5 hours. Battery life is surprisingly short given the low speed CPU, lack of cellular and Bluetooth radios and more beefy graphics processor. Dynamism does sell the enhanced battery pack as an optional accessory. If you plan on using the device away from A/C for long, it’s wise to get yourself a spare battery.

Back of the Raon Vega