ZaReason Teo Pro Netbook Proves Its Netbook Mettle

It’s been nearly a month since I started testing the Teo Pro netbook, and the verdict is in: well-rounded, well-balanced and girlfriend-approved. What gives this machine such high marks? Read on for the full details …

For a quick refresher, check out the preview article early in March 2011. To recap, however, my ZaReason Teo Pro netbook came equipped with 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive. Of course, like all ZaReason products, it’s running Ubuntu — this one featuring the latest version of Ubuntu 10.10.

First, the good stuff. The Teo Pro is a mobile powerhouse. I’m not sure if that’s because of the 2GB of RAM, or the responsiveness I always see with Linux, but every click felt responsive. Every app loaded quickly. The entire computer boots up in 25 seconds. But what about for nitty-gritty, everyday use? I took user suggestions from my preview story and submitted the Teo Pro to the kind of torture readers wanted me to.

Let’s start with Flash, which runs admirably on this little machine, but users shouldn’t expect to run HD video anytime soon. It stutters badly. If you’re not aching to do 1080p or 720p, both YouTube and Hulu purr along nicely. Flash, as you may know, also chews up your battery.

I put the battery under a torture test to ensure Ubuntu was accurate in predicting the time left. At a full charge, the battery life was listed at 4 hours, 30 minutes. I started up Pandora.com and let it run in the background, and periodically checked the battery meter. To suck up a little extra battery, I set the screen to full brightness when checking the status and changing Pandora stations. Two hours later, Ubuntu accurately pegged the time at 2 hours 30 minutes. Impressive, and the speakers don’t sound half bad, either.

Besides eating battery life, Flash also taxes the CPU. When idle, the machine is completely silent, but running Pandora for two hours made the Teo Pro’s CPU fans spin up loud. That may be a pro or a con, depending on how you look at it. Obviously, noise is never a great thing, but the fans were efficient; unlike my Macbook, the Teo Pro was surprisingly cool to the touch. Neither the keyboard nor the underbelly of the laptop ever became noticeably warm. It doesn’t look as though overheating will be an issue.

On pure technical and hardware merit alone, the Teo Pro is definitely a product worth buying. Aesthetically, however, it has issues.

In the picture to your right, you’ll see what I call “the bar,” which has two functions: it houses the tiny power button and the two LEDs for caps lock and num lock. This is not an efficient use of space — in fact, “the bar” shifts the entire keyboard over to the left by about a half-inch. ZaReason said the keyboard is 93 percent scale compared to a normal keyboard, but if a design engineer spent just a little more time on the layout, “the bar” could have been eliminated and replaced with a full-sized keyboard. The keyboard was a bit too cramped for my taste, but my girlfriend had no problem typing out a few pages of her own work on it.

Next, the touchpad. There’s nothing wrong with the pad itself, but there’s everything wrong with the button. ZaReason opted to go with what looks like a single mouse button, but in reality, it is a “rocker” button. Press the left side for a left click, press the right side for the right click. Don’t press the middle  because it does nothing. Far too often I felt myself reaching for the mouse button, only to have nothing happen. I often had to look down and adjust my fingers left or the right since I couldn’t feel where my finger was on the pad until I pressed down on it. There’s no differentiation or separator to give users’ fingers a clue, and it was frustrating to say the least.

Then there’s the webcam, which ZaReason chose to put on the left side bezel of the screen. Apart from the picture being incredibly grainy and resolution, the location of the webcam is awkward when video-chatting. I never quite felt as though I was looking at the person I was chatting with, and my fellow video-chatter’s view was a three-quarter profile of the left side of my face. I can’t believe it was too difficult to locate it to the top of the screen.

My final criticism is relatively minor. Two of my friends, my girlfriend and I all tried to open the netbook the wrong way. It’s not conclusive, but I think the rubber strip ZaReason used to house the wireless antennas at the top of the screen provides a misleading visual clue that the front is really the back of the netbook, and it should be opened from the opposite side.

Still, all those quirks don’t detract from my opinion that this is a robust netbook worth the $399 price when compared with offerings from Dell and HP. I give it a solid 8.5 out of 10. Keep ’em coming, ZaReason. There’s no reason why the next offering can’t be a home run.

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