Hands-On with Tegra Powered Mobinova elan

Earlier today at Nvidia’s press conference the company unveiled over 10 Tegra-based devices. A number of the smartbooks and mobile internet devices were on display after the press conference, and we grabbed a hold of  best-looking one of the lot: the Mobinova elan.

The Mobinova is a 8.9-inch “smartbook” and weighs a mere 2 pounds. We were particularly attracted to its unique backside. While it appears to have a protruding battery pack, the hump actually slides down and reveals the smartbook’s ports. Pretty neat trick. The Mobinova elan also has a decent-sized keyboard for an 8.9-inch system, but the touchpad was quite small.

But hardware isn’t the real show stealer here, it’s the guts. Powered by the Tegra 650 processor and GPU, the smartbook is running Microsoft Windows CE 6 with Nvidia’s small dock on the bottom of the screen. The dock with animated icons contains the programs that are installed on the system. We launched Windows Media Player and played a 1080p movie trailer, albeit not on a HD screen. Playback was smooth without a single hiccup. See our hands-on video below to view it in action.

We also got to see a bit of the Web surfing in action, though the Internet connection was extremely weak. Launching Firefox took no more than a few seconds, and we were able to navigate to www.laptopmag.com pretty quickly. Wanting to take a look at the full Flash support, we visited YouTube.com. The player appeared, but because of the weak Internet connection, we could not play the clip. According to Nvidia, the smartbook should get 5 to 10 hours of battery life with continuous HD video playback and more than that when just using the Wi-Fi connection.

In our short hands-on experience, the Tegra platform seemed to fulfill most of its promises. While there is no word on pricing yet, the Mobinova elan looks like it will give smartbooks a good name.