Amilo Xi 1554 -- My impressions

Hi all,

I've been on the hunt for a desktop replacement notebook for the past 2 weeks. I have scoured the net and the local outlets comparing pretty much every 17" notebook that is available here. Today I went to look at the Amilo Xi 1554 and I thought I'd post my impressions.

Before I continue, I should say that until seeing the Amilo my choice was resting in between an HP Pavilion dv9200t and an Acer Aspire 9810 (huge!). All the other notebooks I've looked at did not appeal to me. I am primarily comparing the Amilo with the Pavilion.

Onto the Amilo. The reasons I wanted to see this notebook were for its WUXGA screen and delightful price tag. I'm not a big ATI fan and that was an immediate turn off for me when looking at the spec. The Amilo I saw was fresh out of a sealed box.

Upon opening it my first gasp was at the keyboard. FS have designed some serious flaws into this notebook with the key layout they've chosen. The biggest problem is the right shift, forward slash, full stop, and backslash keys. They're all shrunk down in size to make room for the rest of the keyboard. I'm a Unix Sysadmin/programmer and live half my life at a shell prompt. The size and placement of the above mentioned keys makes a Unix shell a right royal pain in the rear to use which makes this notebook a dead fish for me. I battled to type those keys without hitting two at a time and pulling my hair out at all the corrections I had to make. Here's the next major flaw of the keyboard - the Fn key is in the bottom left corner where Ctrl should be! I'm sure one could get used to it, but why should one have to? Stupid stupid stupid. Other than those two major flaws, I found the keys to be relatively hard to press compared to other notebooks. So you not only need delicate and small fingers to use all the keys on this keyboard, you also need heavy fingers. It's bad - worse than the keyboards on the HP Compaq business notebooks.

Moving along, we booted the machine up and went through the Vista installation. The screen is beautiful. Really beautiful I thought. I am mainly referring to the resolution of it as that's all I had the chance to experience. The 1920x1200 screen area is really the best feature of this notebook IMHO. If I could rip the screen off it and put it onto the Pavilion, I would have my dream notebook.

Straight after installation the mouse was jerky, and doing so in sync with hard drive usage. I went into device manager and enabled the hard drive's faster performance option and it fixed things right up. We played some of the included Vista music files while running a few other bundled apps and there were no problems with the sound.

Sadly the keyboard is not the only problem with this notebook. The materials used are pretty cheap too. The build seems solid, but comparing the materials used to that of the Pavilion is like comparing the interior of a luxury German car to that of a budget Japanese car. The Amilo won't turn any heads that's for sure, and I suspect it will become gross after a year or two of heavy use.

I will not be getting the Amilo. I am deciding between the Pavilion and the Acer. Over here we can't even get the Pavilion with the WSXGA screen. Only the WXGA+ (1440x900) screen is available here and the notebook costs slightly more than the Amilo. Despite that I still prefer it to the Amilo. The Pavilion is absolutely gorgeous to look at and use, is solidly built, has a FAR better keyboard and touch pad, and uses a GeForce 7600 which I prefer. The Amilo's keyboard is the real show stopper for me - I guess if you're mainly surfing, emailing, and gaming it is fine. If I lived in the USA where the Pavilion is available with a WSXGA screen, I would have already bought it.

So that's my impression. I hope it helps others' decisions. My bud took some photos of the Amilo and Pavilion keyboards in the store - if I get hold of the photos I'll post them here later for everyone to see.


Regards,
Aragon

 

Here are two keyboard photos taken with a cell phone camera. The Pavilion photo is stitched together from two photos, hence the small break near the middle.

 

Hi, thanks for the info but could you just clear something up for me?

Did you go somewhere just to take a look at the laptop or did you buy it?
Either way, do you know where I can get one? I'm also in Cape Town.
I heard that Makro was gonna stock them sometime but I'm running out of patience cuz I've been on the verge of getting the Xi1546 model from them for a long time now..

Tx

 

Hi Mayer,

I went to Makro to look at one. The Ottery branch just got them in on Friday. Give Terrence there a call - he will know about it.


Regards,
Aragon

 

well this put a kill on my xi 1554...i do have to agree with you though about the keyboard although i have to disagree with you about the buttons being hard to press but ones things for sure the Fn button is definitly in the wrong place...the s/w or driver issues are mild problems which only take a matter of minutes to sort out..I know people prefer NVIDIA to ATI (maybe its because im an ATI fan) but i wouldt gun down the mobility x1900 before you tried it and until the drivers are made for it...i wouldnt say the materials are cheap...its more that hp notebooks are superior compared to a lot of notebooks when it comes to build...im happy with my notebook...
with all notebooks there is always gonna be problems with it here and there...im writing a review so hopefully it will give people a better insight to the laptop...hopefully end of next week it will be done...

 

I don't think the keyboard design is that bad. I do agree that some of the buttons are in awkward places, and the sizes are small, but I really like the keyboard on my notebook. Its the same keyboard, and practically the same notebook, except for the graphics card. I don't think there all that heavy either, and after a few weeks of use, you will get used to them. I think you should also note that practically the same keybaord is used in Toshiba P100, and not too many complaints have arisen there.

The Mobility X1900 will run circles around the Go 7600, and after some driver maturity, it will get better. I disagree on the materials being cheap. They are sturdy enough to help keep the notebook strong and rigid, and comparing them to HP, which has recently ramped up on the look and fell of their notebooks, is a little unfair. Very few notebook manufacturers come close to the HP in terms of "feel".

 

Im right behind you ... all keyboards take getting use to...and its a matter preference but like zero said the performance of the graphics card will improve as the drivers mature...at this moment there are no official drivers in all honestly i jus think that FSC at this moment probably forced the drivers into it the way i did for the lastest drivers (the drivers for vista didnt even support openGL!)....and the build well im happy with that too..