VPR Notebook BIG BIG Wish List

[Angus]

I was bored last night and thinking about all the stuff I'd like to see on the new VPR notebooks. And then I was pondering whether or not anyone from VPR is bright enough to do a Google search and realize that this is clearly the largest single place for VPR users to converse and I wondered if they read any of our stuff. And so the idea came to make this thread, if for no other reason, than to have a place for people to add to a list of stuff they would like to see added.

The obvious wishes of more CPU, better battery, harddrive, and RAM have been left out. Here's a few other ideas...

1. 15.4" widescreen with 1900 horizontal resolution (1900 is HDTV resolution)

2. Better AC Adapter. If Apple can make theirs wind up and small so can VPR.

3. Bigger mouse buttons and maybe the round button from the lower VPR notebooks

4. Better speakers that are positioned on either side of the keyboard (cause they're not loud enough and poorly positioned)

5. DVI output plus a DVI-VGA dongle

6. 6 pin Firewire 800 (1 6 pin would be more useful than 2 4 pins)

7. Better WiFi (be it B or G)

8. A rear port door instead of the rubber boot

9. Flip-down feet on the rear of the notebook to angle keyboard and help cooling

10. All silver exterior out of a tougher alloy that doesn't cratch so easily

[Chris Shaeffer]

Good idea, Angus.

I agree with your above points. And I really hope vpr continues to refine the widescreen models because I think its a very useable laptop format. Lappy's are getting more than powerful enough to be viable power user and media machines, so the widescreen format is very valuable. And the more manufacturers we have developing the format the more valuable it will become.

So how about some other things geared towards media users?

11. Put the headphone and mic jacks anywhere but the front of the machine. I've already killed my headphone out by bumping the jack.

12. Add a stereo line input. That would REALLY help those of us who use the machine to record audio.

13. Keep the digital I/O through the parallel port, but lower the price of the cable. $250 is not a deal and is the only thing preventing me from using and loving that feature of the laptop. I don't have any respect for audiophile-esque price gouging on consumer level audio.

14. Um..Sonopur? Upsampling is audio trickery. I don't care if you are upsampling to 96bits at 245,987,887Khz- there is no way to sound better than the source material- which is 16bit/44.1Khz. It sounds better because it has higher quality convertors than most consumer computers. Drop the upsampling tom-foolery but KEEP the high quality convertors!

15. Want to sound really good? Upgrade the internal audio signal path to true 24bit. Native 24 bit support would indeed be a first in a consumer computer and launch the vpr line into the realm of prosumer quality digital audio. This probably won't happen as it would be more expensive than their target market mandates, but this is a WISH list. :)

16. Stabalize the hardware components of the widescreen line so that driver upadating is easier- then keep the drivers up to date. Driver updates go a long way towards keeping aging hardware fresh, vpr buyers happy and willing to buy another vpr with the last one becomes truly outdated.

17. Refresh rate control for the S-video out. I can use a T.V. as a monitor with the S-video out, which is really cool! But the refresh rate is locked at 60hz so the screen looks horrible. Maybe I don't know how to route video to the S-video output correctly, but...it there has got to be a way to make it look better or it isn't really useable.

That's it for now. :) I'm sure I'll think of more.

[Angus]

I like those ideas a lot, and you have some really good points about the audio. I would love to see 1 really high-end machine from VPR that handled prosumer and up audio/video in an effort to sort of replace the powerbook in this respect. I think for the rest of people the second tier widescreen would be great. Leave out all the gobs of more targetted media creation features and keep the price more reasonable. But it's hard to see BB doing this since they need to be moving even teh higher price units off the shelves through their retail channel.

In the hopes of creating a more professional media driven notebook I'd love to see the following...

18. Analog video inputs. This is something that would be a real stretch but honestly, I think it would be a great addition even if they included it on that big ass parrallel cable. Capturing analog sources right to DV format without needing an external box would be fantastic.

19. 10/100/1000 Networking. If you're going to be handling huge amounts of audio and video data you might as well have all the network bandwith you can get. I'd also like to see auto-switching network port that didn't require you to use a crossover cable (something macs have had for years) if you direct connect to another puter.

20. Integrated Bluetooth connectivity.

21. DVDRW. This is something that, personally, I can live with or without since I will probably just get an external firewire drive for this anyways. But it would be extremely handy once the price of DVD media comes down a bit and you can encode DV video to DVD in a near real-time way.

[ToddBradley]

I agree with all your suggestion, but I wanted to point out one thing:

13. Keep the digital I/O through the parallel port, but lower the price of the cable. $250 is not a deal and is the only thing preventing me from using and loving that feature of the laptop. I don't have any respect for audiophile-esque price gouging on consumer level audio.

The parallel port "I/O" is really only "O". There's no input through it, just output.

That said, having built-in S/PDIF input would be awesome. And $250 is not a deal. I'm going to try to build a similar cable for what it should cost, if you happen to be interested in one.

http://www.toddbradley.com/ahi_digital_audio.htm

[ToddBradley]

OK, I may take that back. I haven't completed a full test yet, but it may be that the parallel port digital I/O does work both ways. The pins are wired different, at least.

[sonoronos]

22. 1 inch thin
23. glow in the dark keyboard
24. 19" LCD at 1600x900 resolution.