Review: Medion Rim1000 ultra-mobile PC

Following Samsung's Q1 and Sony's UX1, Medion's new Rim1000 joins the niche market of UPMCs and looks to squeeze in a wide array of features for £799.

At 740g, the Medion is comfortable to hold. The 6.5in TFT touchscreen display is one of the first to be back-lit with LEDs rather than lamp technology, which results in a bright, thin and perfectly uniform display – we were particularly impressed with its vibrant colours.

The bezel is home to a webcam, microphone and a collection of buttons including an arrow-pad, return button and a settings button that opens Vista's Mobility Center panel. There's also a screen resolution toggle that alternates resolutions between 1,024x768 and its native 800x480 in a series of steps.

A touch sensitive thumb-pad in the bottom right corner was our favourite method of navigating. When combined with the two mouse click buttons on the opposite side it offers the kind of ease of use associated with the Playstation Portable. A stand flips out to give it a 25° tilt and makes it even easier to use when sat at a desk.

The touchscreen can be used with a stylus that slots away neatly on the reverse of the unit. However, we found the screen impossible to calibrate correctly – the right half of the screen always had the cursor out of position with where we physically placed it.

Medion has achieved a milestone by making this the cheapest UMPC we've tested to include a Qwerty keyboard, but there were some shocking flaws in its design. A big plastic gap separates the keys, so that the H key sits 5cm from its neighbour the G key - a bizarre waste of space since without this gap the keys could have been made bigger and therefore more usable.

To get at the keyboard, the unit slides apart vertically. However, it's nothing like as smooth as the slide-out operation of the Sony UX1 and a nasty s craping sound is heard when the keys brush against the top of the unit.

Reliability came into question further when, after a week of light usage, the sliding mechanism became loose and uneven so that the right side would slide slightly further than the left.
Part of the plastic gap splitting the Qwerty keyboard in two is filled with Wifi, Bluetooth, webcam and TV tuner buttons - the TV tuner is an optional add-on, although pricing is yet to be confirmed.

Medion has set up Windows Vista Home Premium as the operating system. We think this is a double-edged sword, since while its extensive tablet optimisation is a boon (such as decent handwriting recognition and Windows Journal), performance wasn't so hot. A Via C7-M 770 ULV (ultra low voltage) processor is partly responsible for this poor performance. It's a single core processor with 128KB L2 cache and, although rated at 1GHz, during testing it ticked along at just 600MHz for the majority of the time.

Medion fits 768MB of DDR2 533MHz Ram spread across two slots (one a 512MB and a 256MB), so in theory there's room for more, but it would mean ditching at least one of the modules. The Via Unichrome Pro II GFX onboard graphics chip is allocated 64MB of this Ram. This chip isn't suitable for gaming; nor can it handle any of Vista's Aero interface special effects such as 3D Flip feature.

Another performance issue is that it takes a full two minutes to complete booting into Vista without anti-virus software installed and even to come out of hibernation takes a long 55 seconds.

Although the single mono speaker packs a fair punch for such a small package, the device struggles with video playback. A standard definition, 130Kbits/sec DivX file lost too many frames to be watchable. We did manage to get a low-bitrate Real media video to playback smoothly though.

The Medion certainly struggled in our benchmarks. In PCmark05 it only managed a paltry 490 overall – eclipsed by Samsung's 900 points with the Q1 and its 900MHz Celeron processor.
However, thanks to the low-drain processor and LED backlight, battery life was far superior to both Sony and Samsung UMPCs. With the Wifi turned off, it lasted for a full three hours 19 minutes reading an ebook at one page every 15 seconds with the screen at full brightness.

Turning the display brightness to medium, the Medion still lasted three hours when we hammered it with a DivX video that pushed CPU usage to 100 per cent. Under less strenuous, office-based duties and lower screen brightness you should be able to achieve around four hours.

A standard 30GB hard disk is included, which typical of UMPCs in this price range. The solid state drive present in Sony's UX1 retails for £400, so is an unrealistic expectation to see it in this £800 Medion.

That said, an SSD is faster, cooler and quieter (silent, in fact) than traditional hard drives and would also improve battery life considerably. On the issue of heat, when the Rim1000 was plugged into the mains, the middle-right of the unit became so hot that we couldn't use the keyboard anymore.

The documentation included isn't perfect. During setup we couldn't change the display to its native 800x480 resolution using the usual Display Options dialogue – instead we experimented until we discovered an icon in the taskbar that controlled resolutions.

Medion ticks more boxes by making it one of the most connector-rich UMPCs on the market today. There are two USB2 ports, a VGA port to connect it to an analogue monitor, 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks with external volume control and an SD card reader. The omission of an Ethernet socket is very surprising and the Rim1000 instead relies on 802.11b/g wireless for networking.

On paper the Medion Rim1000 looks exceptional, but we have serious reservations about its build quality. Furthermore, we feel opting for Vista was the wrong decision. Under XP Tablet Edition  the Rim1000 would perform far better, while a Linux option would no doubt appeal to many users.

Despite its decent battery life and quality screen, with the identically-priced Q1 Ultra just around the corner (which includes a 7in 1,024x600 resolution screen, 1GB Ram and an Intel processor) the Medion Rim1000 is difficult to recommend.

Review: Nokia N800 web tablet

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