The good: Bright LED screen; good battery life; generous set of connectivity ports; portable form factor; inexpensive UMPC.

The bad: Small keyboard has poor tactile feel; protruding battery design increases footprint; generates quite a bit of heat after extended use.

The bottom line: Possibly one of the cheapest UMPCs outside Japan, the Kohjinsha SA1 offers a generous array of connectivity ports with the right mix of performance and battery life. It could have been the perfect mobile companion if more thought was given to the keyboard design.

Read full review of the Kohjinsha SA1 touchscreen edition »

By Darius Chang, CNET Asia
Oct 2, 2007

When the Kkohjinsha SA1 was first brought out of Japan to Singapore by local distributor PA Mart, it caused quite a stir. Most UMPCs like the Samsung Q1, Asus R2H and Fujitsu LifeBook U1010 were hitting the S$2,000 (US$1,443.11) mark and beyond, but the Kohjinsha SA1 could be obtained at half that price. Even the highly regarded Roan Digital Everun demanded a few hundred dollars more.

The first generation of the SA1 series did not have a touchscreen and an abysmal keyboard. Our review unit is the newer touchscreen variety and the keyboard has been upgraded from abysmal to terrible. But we take our hats off for its connectivity, which the Kohjinsha has oodles of. As an aside, some online stores are taking orders for the newer SH1 which runs off a 800MHz Intel processor and Windows Vista operating system. Though its clockspeed is faster than the 500MHz AMD Geode chip in the SA1, some reports said the OS response is sluggish though the keyboard has been greatly improved.

Design
The initial impression of the 7-inch Kohjinsha SA1 was how similar in size it was to the Fujitsu LifeBook P1610, though the latter has a larger 10.6-inch display. This disparity is due to the ridiculously large border around the SA1's display. Like the LifeBook, the Kohjinsha is a convertible tablet PC which uses a touchscreen rather than an active digitizer display. Hence, users familiar with larger tablet PCs may miss functions such as right-clicking with the stylus and the erasing feature. Though a stylus is included in the package, there is no slot on the machine to put it in and it has to be carried externally. Not a big issue as we can easily use a fingernail for cursor control.

There are two variants--the black model comes with a 40GB harddisk for S$1,049 (US$756.91), while the 100GB white edition sells at S$1,199 (US$865.14). Weighing under 1kg, it needs just 218 x 163mm of desk space and has a thickness of 25.4mm. To give you an idea of just how portable this package is, some users have found that they can use a Bree paper organizer as a pouch for this UMPC (the included slipcase is crap. Ditch it). The protruding battery at the back turned us off a little, but after a while we found it was actually a good place to keep a grip on the machine while typing one-handed.

The Kohjinsha has quite a number of dedicated controls, most of them used to replicate a mouse. Beside the screen, there is a directional stick as well as discrete buttons for clicking and scrolling. We found the brightness controls useful, especially when we were transiting from daylight to shade. Instead of keys, the SA1 goes with a volume jog dial that can be clicked to mute the speakers. The indicator lights show charging, battery, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi status.

Features
At this time, LED-backlit screens tend to be found on high-end machines and offer brighter, more even lighting while reducing power consumption. Hence, we were pleasantly surprised that the Kohjinsha SA1 uses this technology on its 7-inch LCD. Even at the lowest setting, it is usable under indoor lights, while the brightest mode makes the UMPC readable outdoors. The underlying graphics engine is not fantastic for 3D rendering, though it can be set to share between 8MB and 254MB of system memory.

Though it is a convertible tablet PC, we found it strange that the rotate feature was disabled. We did not really expect the auto-rotate function in the Everun, but having the option for a portrait view is a must for a tablet PC.

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Kohjinsha SA1 touchscreen edition (AMD Geode LX800 processor 500MHz; 512MB RAM)

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