Appearance II & bundle
A selling feature has to be the brilliant, shiny finish. We remarked at how the Voodoo PC's paint job seemed amateur in places. Rock's doesn't. The paint is even, shiny, and gives the laptop a suitably expensive look and feel. Three paint jobs are available; Bad Boy Black Metallic (as per this model), Racing Red, and Piercing Blue Metallic. Dimensions are about par for the power laptop course, coming in at 33cm wide, 29cm deep, and up to 4.4cm high. The 15" screen and general bulkiness pushes up usable weight (chassis + battery) to 4.1kg. Rock's literature contends its 3.7kg, but Clevo, the original manufacturers, agree with my hi-tech kitchen scales. It feels all of that weight, too, and, like other power notebooks, portability comes some way down the list of priorities. 3.5kg is just about acceptable for portability, 4kg+ is not.
The brilliant finish can further be seen on the wristpad section. Rock uses a regular Synaptics touchpad and button setup. Cursor movement is smooth and predictable, but it still plays second fiddle to a dedicated mouse. The keyboard is springier than usual, that is, there's plenty of key travel. A strange thing to say, yet this feels exactly like a laptop keyboard. Logitech's Internet Navigator, for example, has much sturdier keys and harsher travel. A side-effect of using a Pentium 4 3.2GHz processor, under load, and locating it directly below the keyboard is some rather hot typing. You can literally warm your hands up by placing them over the keys. Good for winter, not so good for summer.
Three hot-keys are initialy assigned for e-mail, web browsing, and for opening a user specified application. They can all be re-assigned for customised use.
Rock uses a 15" screen with a native resolution of 1400x1050 (SXGA+). It's colourful and vibrant if viewed from directly infront, but it loses clarity when the viewing angle is much more than 30 degrees. You would think it was a pretty good screen unless you had seen better. Subjectively speaking, Dell's UXGA displays and Sony's Centrino (also 1400x1050) are sharper and less prone to quality loss when the viewing angle was increased. To its credit, the display did output non-native resolutions quite well. Clevo makes reference to the availability of UXGA (1600x1200) and QXGA (2048x1536) panels for this model. Rock, however, doesn't give the potential buyer the choice of choosing anything other than a SXGA+ panel, which is a shame.
One of the pitfalls of using TFT screens. Our sample had a pixel that was stuck on bright green when dark colours were displayed. It doesn't look so bad here, but it was annoying when viewing DVDs.
Just like a regular desktop PC, we'd expect a comprehensive bundle. Rock scores points by having some form of Office-type bundle. Ability Office is easy to use, comprehensive, and cheaper than Microsoft's solution. Windows XP Home obligatory recovery CD is provided, but the main installation CD isn't. Further, there's CDs for Bluetooth and WLAN installation and configuration software, a copy of WinDVD4, Nero's OEM Suite I, Panda Titanium AntiVirus 2004 (full version), and one for the many device drivers. Rock's gaming gesture is in the form of Bad Boys II.
Rock's manual is excellent. It delves into detail in just the right places and answers any question that I could come up with. It's good for novice and experienced users alike, which is the hallmark of any good manual. A laptop bag is also included. It does feel cheap and tacky, though. Overall, a fantastic-looking laptop with almost every conceivable feature and extra. Its weight and loud operating noise does count against it.
