Travels With Teo: Linux Netbook Hits the Road

“A couple of months ago the nice ZaReason people sent me their
Teo Ubuntu netbook to review. I was favorably impressed and gave it
a positive review. Then they let me take it on my vacation, so
little Teo traveled 2500 miles with us. This was the ultimate
portability, performance, and battery test. How did Teo do?
Splendidly.

“Ruggedness, Nice Keyboard

“I never did get up the nerve to test the Teo’s toughness. It is
billed as a tough netbook, so in the interests of a thorough review
I should have knocked it around a bit. But I just couldn’t do that.
It feels solid and the fit and finish feel good. I stopped at a
couple of stores to do a quick comparison with other netbooks, and
the Teo compares favorably for overall feel and handling. They all
have sharp bright screens, but few have a keyboard as nice as the
Teo’s. Many of them have flimsy feeling, mushy keyboards with
shallow keys. I can touch-type comfortably on the Teo, but the
others don’t give good tactile cues.

“Battery Life

“The Teo came with the stock Ubuntu 10.04. I never did figure
out how reliable the little Gnome battery meter was. The best
battery life I could get, according to the battery meter, was 6.5
hours. I turned off compositing, and turned on all the
power-savers. I left the screen at full brightness, configured to
dim after a minute of inactivity. Figure 1 should give you an idea
of the relative brightness of the Teo and my Thinkpad T61.”

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