I first clapped eyes on the Medion Akoya the day before I was due to head off
to Tokyo for two weeks.
Having recently been shoulder-damaged to the point of sleeplessness and
massage by carting an Apple MacBook Pro around the giant halls of Gamescom
in Cologne, I was looking for something a little more portable.
Like most netbooks, the Akoya lacks a DVD drive, allowing the makers to slim
down both the casing and the weight. It looked like a promising deal for the
Tokyo Game Show, where a lot more walking aimlessly around large halls lay
in wait. I grabbed it.
Once home, I was relieved to find that my new baby was not panting for breath
using Vista but had XP installed. Connecting to my home wi-fi was a cinch,
although I developed an instant loathing for the Akoya's trackpad which
meant that I'd be carrying a small mouse with me.
I then installed my standard suite of free but reliable software (OpenOffice,
Firefox, Thunderbird), synchronised my Firefox bookmarks using X-Marks, then
got ready to fly.
It was in Japan that I got the first hint of the trouble that lay ahead.
Typing my first email back home, I glanced up at the screen and noticed that
somehow the cursor had travelled up two lines and I was typing in the middle
of a previous sentence.
Next email, this happened again. First word-processing document, it happened
again. Was I brushing the trackpad by mistake?
It took me two hours of self-observation to isolate the problem: the bloody
shift key. As a left hander, I am wont to use the shift key on the right of
a computer keyboard. Whoever designed the Akoya has shrunk this key to the
size of a mouse's eyelid, with the result that my fat fingers were hitting
the up arrow at the same time
Over the course of two weeks, this one flaw nearly drove me gibbering to the
nearest computer store.
Otherwise, the Akoya performed like a good, cheap netbook should. Build
quality is on a par with other budget netbooks, right down to the centre
bulge in the one-piece keyboard, and the power adapter is portable and
convenient in much the same way as a house brick.
I didn't notice any particular performance difference between this machine
running an AMD processor and other similar ones running Intel, but I may
have been too busy swearing at it.
If I were in the market for a netbook for occasional use on travels, this is a
barely acceptable choice, though I would choose one with a smaller screen
for portability, and a better keyboard.
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