The Viliv S5 3G model has been in my hands for just under a day, and I have been trying to work through a couple of things that are not making sense to me. This has delayed my ability to provide impressions of the new UMPC and to offer comparisons of this model with the SSD with the original S5 with the standard HDD. I am trying to work through these issues, and I suspect I will require Viliv’s assistance, as something is not making sense at this point.
One thing can be stated with certainty: A solid-state drive (SSD) should be faster than a typical hard disk drive (HDD). How much faster will depend on the specs of the SSD used, but it should be faster due to no moving parts like the spinning disk equivalent. I have run a lot of benchmarks on the two models in my possession, and while the HDD benchmark results are not surprising (SSD around 3 times faster than HDD) I have been confused as to why the S5 3G device has been performing so much slower than the original model. I have been impressed with the performance of the original S5 Premium from day one, hence my purchase of it, but this S5 3G model is much slower.
I am seeing unexplained lags in executing simple tasks, and things like opening Firefox seem to take forever on the 3G model. This shouldn’t be the case, so I have run many iterations of CrystalMark benchmarks to compare. Here are examples of typical results from those benchmark runs:

L-R: 3G model iter; 3G model iter. 2; S5 Premium (original model)
I included two iterations from the new 3G model (on the left) to show how they are very consistent. They each compare with the benchmark on the far right, which is from the original S5 Premium model with the HDD. As expected, the HDD benchmark is much quicker on the SSD model, but the ALU, FPU and MEM benchmarks don’t make sense, as they show the 3G model is much slower than the original model. This is not consistent with what I expect, and Viliv is trying to figure out why this is. Until we can get an explanation, I’m going to set the 3G model aside for a bit.
The second issue has been resolved, Viliv changed the way the soft keyboard is invoked, which prevented me from turning it off. This prevented me from using the uBoard keyboard I prefer. They worked with me and found a way for me to turn off their own keyboard, and I am happily uBoarding once again.
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