More impressions of the Powerbook

I really like my new Powerbook. The hardware and software live up to all the hype. However, it is not without its flaws. Today I’ll cover the powerbook from a software and hardware perspective.

Software
Coming from the PC world, most software that is “built-in” to the PC smacks of cheese-wiz software that is unusable or unstable. First I want to review a few applications from the iLife suite that come with OS X.

iPhoto
iPhoto is a great photo management and enhancement tool. The PC “equivalent” would be the Picasa software program (a clear ripoff of the iPhoto user interface). Creating slideshows on iPhoto was a breeze. After our college and career camping trip, we took about 200 photos from 3 different digital cameras. In order to play a slideshow, all I had to do was create a folder including the pictures I wanted to display and click on the play button on the bottom of the screen. A popup window shows up asking me what kind of transition effect to use and another tab item asking me what music to play the slide show to. The nice thing about the iLife suite is that it is tightly integrated. So under the music libraries, I can actually see my iTunes playllists that I’ve created so searching for songs was a breeze. Once the transition and music have been selected I just click on Play and viola the slideshow begins in fullscreen.

iMovie
For Memorial weekend, we went down to Long Beach and spent 2 nights in Catalina Island. Having my Powerbook inspired me to shoot video again with my Sony handicam. I shot about 30 minutes worth of video from the boat ride, tours, downtown, and beach play. In order to get the video from the DV, I imported via Firewire onto my Powerbook using iMovie. iMovie does the standard timesplicing of every recording and lays out the video clips nicely in your iMovie clip palette. Next step was to select which video clips I wanted to put into my movie which was a matter of drag and drop. Selecting transitions between clips was the next step and finally a nice title on the screen.

The Powerbook was able to render my 20minute video with all transistions in about 5 minutes. Once the movie was complete it was time to put it into a DVD using iDVD.

iDVD
The iDVD program is one of my favorite iLife tools. It has a lot of built-in templates to create your DVD menus and again with the tight integration of the iLife suite selecting the movie into iDVD was a snap. Once the video is added to the iDVD app, you are prompted to select a primary menu theme where you can put a small clip of video to play as your menu options are displayed.

iDVD has a nice option to also create menus for your iPhoto slideshow. Adding a slideshow gives you a different set of DVD menu templates. These templates have dropzones where you can drop photo stills and the template of your choice will automatically animate the menu.

Once your movie and/or slideshow have been added, the final step is actually burning the DVD. I just popped in a cheap (Fry’s bought) 4x DVD and in about 10 minutes my DVD movie was ready to be viewed.

I’ve successfully created DVD movies/slideshows for a babyshower, our Catalina vacation, and a slideshow from the birth of my niece Allison. Using iDVD/iPhoto to create slideshows has become such a breeze that I was able to create the slideshow in the time it took for my niece’s dad to take a shower at our house!

The iLife suite was very intuitive to use and easy to learn. What I originally thought to be “cheesy” software ended up being a well-made suite for powerful video and photo editing. I didn’t have to purchase expensive Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Premiere, the iMovie and iDVD packages really work as advertised and are very easy to use.

Hardware
The 15-inch Powerbook is one sleek and clean machine! The powerbook is “jack-packed” meaning there are a lot of available ports for scalability. The slot-loading DVD Superdrive works flawlessly as mentioned above in creating DVDs and a great space-saver.

Keyboard
The keyboard is butter smooth (even smoother than my IBM T21 Thinkpad). The ambient light feature of the newer Powerbooks is one of my favorite features. The keyboard has light sensors that detect when there has been a decrease in ambient light, automatically causing the keys to light up for low light conditions. This feature is the second-generation attempt by the Apple team on the Powerbooks and I believe they’ve perfected this keyboard trick. In prior versions of the Powerbook, the keyboard would partially light up the keys, whereas the 2005 G4 Powerbooks have each key laser etched to light up each key.

Trackpad
In my opinion the new trackpad trick on these newer Powerbooks are a clear design win. The Apple team designed the trackpad to detect two fingers which will cause page scrolling and backward and forward browsing. Instead of dragging the mouse on the scrollbar, using two fingers up or down will cause the page to scroll! Very clever and after a few days becomes second nature to the regular user. Also for web browsing, using two fingers on the trackpad going left will cause the browser’s back button to be invoked and two fingers going to the right will cause the forward button function. This “small” feature was a very natural extension of the Apple hardware design.

Display
The screen on the Powerbook is crystal clear. I would normally go on and on about this screen, but I must admit the new XBrite screens on the Sony laptops are even clearer and more crisp. I’m not sure what the battery mileage are on the Sony XBrite screens are compared to Apple’s XVGA screens but from a pure display perspective, Sony wins this battle.

Battery life
The Powerbooks are not known for their marathon batteries. On mine I can get about 3.5 hours of surfing the net, listening to iTunes, and writing documents. The power savings options in System Preferences make it very easy for the user to configure providing three out-of-the-box settings of: Better battery life; Normal; and Better performance. There is a Custom optiton that allows the user to configure how long before the display will go to sleep, how long before powering down the hard-drive, and how long before the entire Powerbook goes into sleep mode.

When I have the Better battery life option selected, the Powerbook is bearably warm. However when I choose Better performance, the Powerbook gets too hot to keep on your lap. A definite negative.

Wireless
The Powerbook has a built-in WiFi atennae giving you 802.11b/g capability out of the box. It supports a majority of the encryption options to keep you safe from wire snoopers. However, I must admit the signal reception is somewhat weak compared to D-link PC-card on IBM Thinkpad. The attennae is located on the monitor display to keep it discreet, but the reception is much weaker than most WiFi PC-cards.

Performance
I’ll leave all the benchmarks and number crunching to all other reviewers. From a usability perspective, the OS 10.4 (Tiger) on the Powerbook is very snappy. Compared to previous laptops I’ve owned and used for work in the past this has been the fastest by far. I’ve used Compaq 1.6 Ghz Pentium M laptops; IBM Thinkpad T42 1.7Ghz Pentium M notebooks; and Dell Inspiron 3800 (OK apples and oranges against a 700Mhz Pentium notebook). What I do find very impressive is the tight integration of the Apple hardware and software. OS X Tiger, according to the Apple zealots, has outperformed all previous OS X releases. Apple has managed to increase the performance of their OS with each release compared to Microsoft which has slowed down the OS with each of their releases.

At 1.67Ghz, 512MB of RAM, 128Mb of Video RAM, 80GB 5400 HD this powerbook is very capable of exceeds my current usage — which is good for portable computing since as we all know expanding portables are limited compared to desktops.

Conclusion
Overall, the hardware is very impressive and has a lot of potential. I have yet to use the Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, Bluetooth, and Firewire 800 ports. The built-in software is definitely solid and no evidence of cheese-wiz so far.