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Rory Cellan-Jones

Duel of the skinny laptops

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 7 Feb 08, 17:41 GMT

Darren Waters and I are in a slimming contest 鈥 comparing two new laptops which are sold on the basis of their weight rather than their power.
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Darren is looking at the Asus U1E and I've got a MacBook Air.

If it鈥檚 about provoking the envy of your friends and colleagues, then I鈥檓 the clear winner. Ever since I removed the MacBook Air from the wrapping, I鈥檝e been getting plenty of ooohs and aaahs 鈥 both in the flesh and online 鈥 from people who鈥檝e lusted after Apple鈥檚 ultra-slim laptop since Steve Jobs pulled it out of a jiffy bag last month.

But I鈥檝e an uneasy feeling that this new model could prove to be beautiful but dumb.

To pack everything in to such a slim casing, Apple has had to chuck a lot overboard 鈥 Ethernet and firewire ports, an optical drive, and a removable battery. For me the Firewire is the big loss. Last time I got a new computer, I simply hooked it up to the old one via a Firewire cable and sucked out the entire contents.

So how when you get a brand new MacBook Air, are you to install new software or migrate your data from your old machine? Easy, says Apple, we now live in a wireless world - just use your home wi-fi to beam it all across to your new machine.

Oh, that it was that easy - I spent several hours trying without success to migrate.

First, it became clear that I needed to upload new software onto my old computer to perform the transfer. Then I sat and watched while both machines just hung around thinking about it. After half an hour or so - with no data transferred - my patience ran out. So I Googled 鈥淢acBook Air migration issue鈥 and came across a lot of people with exactly the same problem, including these testers at .

Their advice? Give up, and get an Ethernet adapter. I didn鈥檛 have time for that, so I opted to use a synchronisation program which allows me to share my calendar and contacts across different computers, and I e-mailed my browser bookmarks to the new machine.

Since then, things have gone a little more smoothly - but the first few hours of a new relationship are all-important and my slim new friend and I have got off to a rocky start.

Darren Waters

Light laptop showdown

  • Darren Waters
  • 7 Feb 08, 17:20 GMT

The release of the MacBook Air has thrown a wider spotlight on the ultra light laptop market. Lots of people pointed out to us that Apple had done nothing particularly innovative with its MacBook Air, and said companies like Sony and Asus had been releasing similar products for years with little fanfare.

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My colleague Rory Cellan-Jones want to put this new category of laptop to the test so we've managed to acquire a MacBook Air and an Asus U1E.

We'll be blogging our findings in the coming week. To kick things off, we're both posting our first impressions. Here are Rory's.

I'm in possession of the Asus, which runs Vista Business. As a design object the Asus can't match the MacBook Air's sleek looks but it isn't too shabby and feels well-built and just about sturdy enough to survive being knocked about in a rucksack.

I'm impressed with the connector options - plenty of USB ports, Ethernet and a mini Firewire port.

It has a built-in web cam and fingerprint sensor - which I couldn't get to work.

The model I have comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 1Ghz. And to be honest so far the machine seems to be a little underpowered.

Even opening a fresh Word document takes an age. And resuming Windows from sleep when the lid has been down takes as long as my personal laptop takes to boot from cold.

We'll be going head to head in detail next week. If you're a U1E user, I'd love to hear your views.

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