Viewsonic VNB102 Viewbook or how I broke two of my top buying rules

I broke two of my own rules today when I got myself a new ultra cheap netbook. It’s a viewbook actually or at least that’s what Viewsonic is calling their VNB102. But whatever Marketing is naming it, it’s a plain netbook that’s hardly exciting enough to write home about. Yet I’m writing about it here as it made me break my two top buying rules.

My first rule is that when buying new tech stuff, I take the care to research the item carefully – to get as much user input on it. Well, in the case of the Viewsonic VNB102 I went straight ahead and bought it without even checking the full specs. Cause it was so damn cheap.


My second buying rule is that I should always try and buy stuff from brands that have a wider user base as it’s always easier to find help online when you have a problem later on. And with a wider user base there are always a bunch of tutorials flying around about how you can mod your device to make it better. Anyways, I totally neglected that when I went for the VNB102 as that’s Viewsonic’s first netbook. Why I did that? Cause it was so damn cheap.

Since Viewsonic announced their VNB102 only two days ago, there are hardly any live photos of the device online, so I decided I’ll go ahead and post some along with my first impressions. Not that I believe anyone will research the thing seriously, but it’s a nice netbook in its own right and it deserves a proper presence on the net.
 
The only thing missing in it are the available battery options. The Viewsonic VNB102 will ship in either 3-cell (2200 mAh) or 6-cell (4200 mAh) Li-Ion battery. The 3-cell battery is supposed to give you 2-3 hours of uptime, while the heavier 6-cell battery should double that. So far I don’t have any real life impression on the battery performance. I haven’t even charged it a single time yet.


The Viewsonic VNB102 packs a 10.1-inch LCD display with the common resolution of 1024×600 pixels. A thing you won’t find the manual is that the screen is actually glossy. I prefer glossy screens actually, so it came as a bonus for me.

Several interesting points

The retail contents are quite modest – there’s no carrying pouch, no disc with drivers (you don’t need any under Win7) or a recovery disc. But there’s a recovery partition on the hard drive that you can hopefully use to restore the OS to its sparkling new state if you mess things up. I guess I’ll be deleting that partition as ASAP.

The user manual goes ahead to point out a couple of interesting points. First off, the 160GB HDD supposedly has a shock-proof design. Since it’s not an SSD, i guess the only way they might have achieved that is with a free-fall sensor. But they don’t mention one on their specs sheet, so I wouldn’t count on the manual being correct.

And secondly, the RAM (1GB by default) is not user upgradeable as it’s obviously soldered directly to the motherboard. Well, as you’ll see it’s not. You can upgrade your Viewsonic VNB102 to up to 2GB and it won’t void your warranty. It’s just that you have to throw away your old SO-DIMM (that’s the RAM stick) as there’s only one slot.

VNB102 has its drawbacks too

A downer that you won’t notice at first sight is that the touchpad doesn’t have any gesture support – no two-finger scrolling, pinching, swiping or whatever. I guess I’ll find a way to add that via some third-party application, but it’s not there by default – at least not under the genuine Windows 7 Starter edition it came with. There’s simply no trackpad management software preinstalled.

And secondly, you can’t adjust the amount of RAM allocated to the VGA in the BIOS.

And finally…

Well, that’s about it. Enjoy the shots of the Viewsonic VNB102 and let me know in the comments if you have any questions about it.