Putting the KDE Slimbook through its paces

Slashdot it! Delicious Share on Facebook Tweet! Digg!

Under the Hood

The Slimbook has an aluminum case measuring 33x22x1.8cm and weighs 1.36kg. The backlit keyboard offers a variety of English or European layouts. Data is stored on a 120GB mSATA-SSD, which can be upgraded to a 250GB or 500GB model for an extra charge.

The matte 13.3-inch IPS LED display will display full HD video (1920x1080), providing a pixel density of 166 PPI. Screen brightness is a respectable 355 cd/m2. You can connect the Slimbook to the outside world via WLAN with the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3160. Alternatively, the Intel Dual Band 726 5N or Wireless-AC 7265 are available, which also provide Bluetooth 4.0.

The Slimbook has two USB 3.0 ports, a mini HDMI port, and a slot for SD and MMC cards. The hardware specification also includes a front-facing 1MP webcam. The lithium-ion battery has a nominal power of 6800mAH, but the manufacturer hasn't said how long this should last. Some online reports claim the device has a rather unrealistic run time of up to 12 hours. In our tests, the battery lasted an average of seven hours.

Elegant

After unboxing and handling the Slimbook for the first time, it's clear the device fits snugly into your hands and is nothing less than elegant. The aluminum lid is decorated with the combined logo of Slimbook and KDE (Figure 3). On closer inspection, it turns out the casing is quite familiar, sharing its basic structure with last year's Tuxedo InfinityBook and the Schenker S306.

Figure 3: There's a combined KDE/Slimbook logo on the center of the lid.

Along with our test equipment, beside the notebook and the charging cable itself, we received a USB Ralink MT7601U wireless dongle, which can provide better throughput for older routers than the preinstalled Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3160 WLAN chip.

After booting the KDE Slimbook, the first step is to complete the dialog-driven OEM installation. Setup includes creating a user account and setting up WiFi amongst other things. Despite being told we could use wireless right away, we found WLAN only worked after rebooting the Slimbook. However, it then worked properly via the network manager over further restarts, as well as when waking from sleep.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF

Pages: 6

Price $0.99
(incl. VAT)

Buy Ubuntu User

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content