I recently got a Aopen 1557GLS. This review is probably going to be rather brief and I will pretty much compare my laptop to the Dells that I work with. As a Dell Student Rep for a University I market Dell computers especially the latitude D505 and the Inspiron 5150. I wont have pictures because I have no hosting, but I do have plenty if anyone is interested.
I got the computer in two boxes. It was tightly packaged in a computer case box with many peanuts, inside was a box ambigiously called "notebook". After opening this up and removing the securely bent cardboard around it I had my first look at the Aopen 1557gls.
The notebook seemed rather large at first, but when I started working with it it became very tiny. The machine looks rather professional, without being drab or boring. I like the mix of hard silver plastic with curved transistions to light black plastic on the lid and bottom. The Keyboard is black/navy at first glance. At second glance close up in the light it is translucent blue. My boss managing at the computer store took one look and asked me if the keyboard was backlit--no its not, but it could be with some glow wire perhaps. The screen seems large in comparison to the D505 with a similar 15 inch screen size. This is because the black bezel on the side is very thin and straight. Also compared to the d505, the latch is both annoying and in my opinion a stronger better design. The d505 has a push in plastic thing, and the locking plastic part of the latch sits right on the top of the screen. My aopen has a tiny metal nib with a slot that is in the middle of the top bezel and fits into a cooresponding slot below the touchpad. The frustrating part is the button to release is under the armrest, so you have to use two hands to open it. You push with one hand, and lift the lid with the other.
The bottom of the unit has easy access to both memory slots under one panel. This panel holds the screws inside when you lift it out and has plastic snaps on the side to keep the panel flush. Both sodimm sticks fit in very easily, though I didn't like the 1gb maximum limit. I also failed to boot using corsair valueselect pc3200, the people at Myaopen where I bought this told me that they only use Apacer pc3200, and that I should find a pc2700 stick and it would boot up--they were both helpful and right
The hard disk slot is very poorly designed. You basically have to wedge the hd in as far as you can go in the cramped bay diagonally, and then shove it in and lever it with a screwdriver against the bay end to seat on the IDE pins.
The battery is a sanyo li-ion 8 cell I think. It has a sculpted bottom so it fits right into part of the exterior of the laptop.
On the top of the laptop, there is a tiny plastic bar under the screen. This is the worst part of the laptop. It holds the jukebox controls ( for playing cds without booting the computer up ) and the speakers. It is attached to the laptop with many firmly seated plastic snap hooks. These snap hooks are very hard to pry open and you must pry it against the laptop frame itself. I ended up scratching a little of the inside of the bar in trying to release this plastic bar.
The plastic bar must be removed to access the heatspreader and the CPU slot. The CPU heatsink can only be accessed by taking the plastic bar off, and then taking the fan off so the heat spreader with the attached copper heatsink can come loose.
In assembly I had some trouble taking the bar off so I slid the keyboard in when I got it open and left it open till I was absolutely sure I wouldnt have to open the top bar again. I then slammed it down so the hooks could firmly seat and the entire laptop was secured.
The screen is 1400x1050. The viewing angles are very good side to side and good from looking down on it. Looking vertically from below the screen isnt as good. Compared to the Dell d505 and the inspiron 5150 my screen was clearly superior. Especially the inspiron 5150 screen seemed faded and washed out. The resolution is perfectly usable and worth having the extra resolution. My unit had no bad pixels whatsoever.
The Panasonic slot loading unit was my choice of component. It doesnt look awful at all. The bottom of the unit has a curved bezel, the panasonic just is pushed flat to the case and is sunken flush square. It doesnt look bad, and in my opinion it is better since the cds ejected dont stick out too much. It is a perfect fit but is only secured by one screw. I didnt find a screwhole in the burner unit, so the unit is flush in the bay held only by the friction of the atapi cable. I think I will get a screw from home depot, coat the end with rubber cement and just screw it in the screwhole till it gently contacts with the device to give it some more staying friction.
The power brick adapter isn't very well designed. Although small and light, the brick has no really intuitive way of wrapping the included cables around it.
My Specs are
512mb pc2700 sodimm 2x256
1.6 pentium M Banias
Toshiba 5400rpm 40gig with 16mb of cache
Dell Truemobile 1450 a/b/g wireless card
9700 radeon mobility 128mb
Panasonic Slot loading DVD multi burner with RAM support
3dmark03 v340: 2856 ---------------------- (pretty much on par with a Dell inspiron 8600 with the 9600 128mb card and compal cl 56) Catalyst 4.8 drivers with the installation hack.
Pros:
Cheap: $300-1450 No OS, some parts sourced from Ebay
High quality: It feels very solid. The latch is secure and not plasticy like the latitude series. Hard plastic and metal are used. The price doesnt reflect the overall feel of quality in parts and layout. The screen doesn't warp or waver when the back of the unit is touched or pressed.
Design: The design is current and modern with subdued but modern silver palmrest, black plastic and a blue keyboard. The unit is thin and light for me, around 6.6 lbs. At the university computer store, I was burning it in and updating all my device drivers on windows update. I had the machine on the showroom floor next to a gateway convertable tablet and a D800. I would leave the thing on while ghosting myself a backup DVD and leave for a while to talk to people and I would come back and see people messing with my computer! The design really stands out in comparison to the brown tan plastic of the latitudes or the blue and grey of the inspirons. My laptop stole many looks on the showroom floor as I spent a few hours ghosting and updating my laptop on wifi. Its thin design is really attractive and yet it has angular sides in comparison to the swoopy rounded plastics of the Latitudes.
Cons:
Construction: The plastic bar under the monitor is a pain to get out and can be very crucial if broken. It is flimsy and when I was twisting it to get the fittings off, I was worried about it breaking. The harddrive bay is cramped and forces you to really jam the harddrive in without having much leverage. There is a large printer port in the back, which could be more useful as additional USB ports. Since the notebook is barebones, it comes with a funky plastic indention for a brand sticker on the lid. The indention looks ugly because that is where the injection mold mark for the plastic is. I covered the area with a small vice city metallic sticker. The trackpointer is noisy initially and the keyboard ribbon retention clip is hard to seat properly. The quicklaunch buttons are good ideas on the right of the keyboard, especially the wifi enabling button. The buttons themselves are very, ugly round and cheap looking and distract from the overall design.
Boots Very Slow: The unit by default settings boots very very slow. I think I will turn off the boot menu to try to speed things up.
The three in one reader does not read memorystick PRO format media cards.
Thats it for the review, other than the lack of completecare, I would definately buy this over again. If anyone has any questions feel free to post, and Ill answer them specifically.
Design 8/10: For silver, black combination
Construction 6/10: For poorly designed hd bay and hard to remove plastic sound bar
General Utility 9/10: For 3 USB 2.0 ports, firewire, a 3-1 reader: regular non-pro memory sticks, mmc, and sd cards, printer port, ir and svideo.
Performance 10/10: For expandability to the fastest Dothan processors, and solid videocard. Plays games well for 3 hours.
Overall 9/10 and I would buy it again
.
I got the computer in two boxes. It was tightly packaged in a computer case box with many peanuts, inside was a box ambigiously called "notebook". After opening this up and removing the securely bent cardboard around it I had my first look at the Aopen 1557gls.
The notebook seemed rather large at first, but when I started working with it it became very tiny. The machine looks rather professional, without being drab or boring. I like the mix of hard silver plastic with curved transistions to light black plastic on the lid and bottom. The Keyboard is black/navy at first glance. At second glance close up in the light it is translucent blue. My boss managing at the computer store took one look and asked me if the keyboard was backlit--no its not, but it could be with some glow wire perhaps. The screen seems large in comparison to the D505 with a similar 15 inch screen size. This is because the black bezel on the side is very thin and straight. Also compared to the d505, the latch is both annoying and in my opinion a stronger better design. The d505 has a push in plastic thing, and the locking plastic part of the latch sits right on the top of the screen. My aopen has a tiny metal nib with a slot that is in the middle of the top bezel and fits into a cooresponding slot below the touchpad. The frustrating part is the button to release is under the armrest, so you have to use two hands to open it. You push with one hand, and lift the lid with the other.
The bottom of the unit has easy access to both memory slots under one panel. This panel holds the screws inside when you lift it out and has plastic snaps on the side to keep the panel flush. Both sodimm sticks fit in very easily, though I didn't like the 1gb maximum limit. I also failed to boot using corsair valueselect pc3200, the people at Myaopen where I bought this told me that they only use Apacer pc3200, and that I should find a pc2700 stick and it would boot up--they were both helpful and right
The hard disk slot is very poorly designed. You basically have to wedge the hd in as far as you can go in the cramped bay diagonally, and then shove it in and lever it with a screwdriver against the bay end to seat on the IDE pins.
The battery is a sanyo li-ion 8 cell I think. It has a sculpted bottom so it fits right into part of the exterior of the laptop.
On the top of the laptop, there is a tiny plastic bar under the screen. This is the worst part of the laptop. It holds the jukebox controls ( for playing cds without booting the computer up ) and the speakers. It is attached to the laptop with many firmly seated plastic snap hooks. These snap hooks are very hard to pry open and you must pry it against the laptop frame itself. I ended up scratching a little of the inside of the bar in trying to release this plastic bar.
The plastic bar must be removed to access the heatspreader and the CPU slot. The CPU heatsink can only be accessed by taking the plastic bar off, and then taking the fan off so the heat spreader with the attached copper heatsink can come loose.
In assembly I had some trouble taking the bar off so I slid the keyboard in when I got it open and left it open till I was absolutely sure I wouldnt have to open the top bar again. I then slammed it down so the hooks could firmly seat and the entire laptop was secured.
The screen is 1400x1050. The viewing angles are very good side to side and good from looking down on it. Looking vertically from below the screen isnt as good. Compared to the Dell d505 and the inspiron 5150 my screen was clearly superior. Especially the inspiron 5150 screen seemed faded and washed out. The resolution is perfectly usable and worth having the extra resolution. My unit had no bad pixels whatsoever.
The Panasonic slot loading unit was my choice of component. It doesnt look awful at all. The bottom of the unit has a curved bezel, the panasonic just is pushed flat to the case and is sunken flush square. It doesnt look bad, and in my opinion it is better since the cds ejected dont stick out too much. It is a perfect fit but is only secured by one screw. I didnt find a screwhole in the burner unit, so the unit is flush in the bay held only by the friction of the atapi cable. I think I will get a screw from home depot, coat the end with rubber cement and just screw it in the screwhole till it gently contacts with the device to give it some more staying friction.
The power brick adapter isn't very well designed. Although small and light, the brick has no really intuitive way of wrapping the included cables around it.
My Specs are
512mb pc2700 sodimm 2x256
1.6 pentium M Banias
Toshiba 5400rpm 40gig with 16mb of cache
Dell Truemobile 1450 a/b/g wireless card
9700 radeon mobility 128mb
Panasonic Slot loading DVD multi burner with RAM support
3dmark03 v340: 2856 ---------------------- (pretty much on par with a Dell inspiron 8600 with the 9600 128mb card and compal cl 56) Catalyst 4.8 drivers with the installation hack.
Pros:
Cheap: $300-1450 No OS, some parts sourced from Ebay
High quality: It feels very solid. The latch is secure and not plasticy like the latitude series. Hard plastic and metal are used. The price doesnt reflect the overall feel of quality in parts and layout. The screen doesn't warp or waver when the back of the unit is touched or pressed.
Design: The design is current and modern with subdued but modern silver palmrest, black plastic and a blue keyboard. The unit is thin and light for me, around 6.6 lbs. At the university computer store, I was burning it in and updating all my device drivers on windows update. I had the machine on the showroom floor next to a gateway convertable tablet and a D800. I would leave the thing on while ghosting myself a backup DVD and leave for a while to talk to people and I would come back and see people messing with my computer! The design really stands out in comparison to the brown tan plastic of the latitudes or the blue and grey of the inspirons. My laptop stole many looks on the showroom floor as I spent a few hours ghosting and updating my laptop on wifi. Its thin design is really attractive and yet it has angular sides in comparison to the swoopy rounded plastics of the Latitudes.
Cons:
Construction: The plastic bar under the monitor is a pain to get out and can be very crucial if broken. It is flimsy and when I was twisting it to get the fittings off, I was worried about it breaking. The harddrive bay is cramped and forces you to really jam the harddrive in without having much leverage. There is a large printer port in the back, which could be more useful as additional USB ports. Since the notebook is barebones, it comes with a funky plastic indention for a brand sticker on the lid. The indention looks ugly because that is where the injection mold mark for the plastic is. I covered the area with a small vice city metallic sticker. The trackpointer is noisy initially and the keyboard ribbon retention clip is hard to seat properly. The quicklaunch buttons are good ideas on the right of the keyboard, especially the wifi enabling button. The buttons themselves are very, ugly round and cheap looking and distract from the overall design.
Boots Very Slow: The unit by default settings boots very very slow. I think I will turn off the boot menu to try to speed things up.
The three in one reader does not read memorystick PRO format media cards.
Thats it for the review, other than the lack of completecare, I would definately buy this over again. If anyone has any questions feel free to post, and Ill answer them specifically.
Design 8/10: For silver, black combination
Construction 6/10: For poorly designed hd bay and hard to remove plastic sound bar
General Utility 9/10: For 3 USB 2.0 ports, firewire, a 3-1 reader: regular non-pro memory sticks, mmc, and sd cards, printer port, ir and svideo.
Performance 10/10: For expandability to the fastest Dothan processors, and solid videocard. Plays games well for 3 hours.
Overall 9/10 and I would buy it again
.
