Although the Mitac is a nice machine, nothing really startling or innovative smacks the user in the eye at first glimpse, or impresses on first use. Plus it costs a sizable $5350 with no trackball.
It is a standard A4 clamshell design, using an Intel 486SX running at 33MHz, with, in our case, 8M of RAM and a 120M hard disk.
Standard configuration is 4M of RAM expandable up to 20M using a non-standard memory board. Peripheral extras include a 3.5in floppy drive, a docking station bus slot, the usual serial, parallel and external VGA sockets, a removable battery and a spot where you can put either integral trackball or modem. Our model had a trackball. Power is supplied by a 9.6V 2-amp NiCad battery, which can be removed if required. The screen is a passive-matrix VGA
item with 16-colour resolution, measuring 170 by 130mm, driven by a local-bus driver. Keyboard is an 84-key unit based on the normal AT layout, plus a function key for accessing the numeric keypad keys.
On powering up with the loaded DOS 6.0 and Windows, the user is greeted by the fact that the screen is small. Although it is crisp and clear with very little shadowing, using standard lOpt typefaces proved difficult due to their size. Adding to this problem was the fact that special video driver (CHIPS Linear driver 2.0) was installed to drive the local-bus video hardware. This unfortunately removed the option of specifying mouse trails on the screen. As a result, it was always a hunt to find where the cursor was hiding.
The keyboard was okay, but not outstanding. The travel was short, but a reasonably high pressure was required to switch the keys. The status display gave indications on the disks, power and lock keys, but nothing about power status or battery life.
Controls are courtesy of a group of buttons on the space just above the keyboard. Pushbutton on/off switch, digital contrast and brightness keys, and in our case the trackball, are provided.
The screen display controls worked very well and gave a good range of options that coped with most lighting conditions. Unfortunatelv. the trackball/mouse was not so hot; being on the left it did not suit the right-handed user. And because the buttons are recessed, it required a slightly squinty use of the hand to use. It certainly looks neat but the Compaq trackball shows how ergonomics work better than this kind of rectangular ‘looks neat’ design.
The manual claims the 4O2OG/C is rated as lasting for 1.5 hours in normal conditions.
Realistically, you can cut this down to an hour or less for applications with a fair amount of disk access — and most software does use a lot of disk access today — which really isn’t that good. One of the reasons for this could be the speed of the machine. Power management can definitely cut down the battery consumption, but it sometimes reflects in performance, too. The Mitac was no slouch in our tests, and performed especially well in the CAD section thanks to the local-bus hardware. Disk performance was also excellent with the 200M unit in the review machine, but all this grunt paid its dues in terms of the low battery life.
Expansion is not as good as some of the current competition, with either internal modem or a trackball but not both; no PCMCIA slots; and no provision for an extra battery
instead of the floppy. Hard disk upgrades are a dealer option, not user serviceable.
Overall, the latest from Mitac is much of a muchness. With a bigger screen, better trackball, longer battery life and better power management it would be really good. As it is, it is good for CAD use as long as you don’t want to use it much longer than an hour at a time away from the mains.
Specifications: 486SX/33,4M RAM, 120M hard disk, 16-colour VGA screen, DOS 6.0, Windows
