This Week at Mobile Tech Manor #37: New and Old Friends

The end of a tumultuous week is at hand and once again I get to share it with you. Mobile Tech Manor was a busy place and I had the good fortune to meet some new friends and see some old ones. There was lots of stormy weather and severe flooding and mobile tech helped me through it all. Come on in and join me and I’ll share my week with you.

Out and About

I had the good fortune to meet up with a few readers and fellow geeks and spend some quality time this week. I met up with Stacey of GigaOM and was happy to see a few local readers stop by to talk gadgets. These meetings are always fun and I brought along a few gadgets to show around.

The Intel Classmate Convertible was a hit and everyone who got hands-on time with it was duly impressed. The build quality is superior and it’s a great tablet for kids. More than one who played with it was impressed with the Intel-developed tablet bits that work as well as the bits in the Tablet Edition.

The little Sony VAIO P blew everyone away when they experienced first-hand how a notebook so small can have such a good keyboard. This thing ended up getting totally covered with smudges as anxious fingers put prints all over the glossy finish.

The hit of the meetup was the little Viliv S5 UMPC and more than one person mentioned how the high-res screen was easier to read than expected and the form factor is as mobile as can be. One guy was taken with the uBoard on-screen keyboard I have installed on the S5 and the usability of same.

It was a great meeting and I enjoyed spending a solid four hours geeking out and talking gadgets. I met some new friends and saw some old friends, which made it a great time for me. I should thank my buddy Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle for not only making an effort to stop by and say hi but for bringing me a copy of his new book. Thanks Dwight!

I should also give a big shout-out to JR and the staff at Coffee Groundz for taking good care of us. JR stopped by to introduce himself and it was great to see a business owner who gets the importance of the local tech scene to his business. I will be back every chance I get for sure.

New Friend

I have a new friend I met through jkOnTheRun and I am thrilled. I have been reading the sci-fi “Sten” series for a few weeks and sharing those books with you. Imagine my surprise when one of the commenters to the column last week turned out to be one of the co-authors of that series, Allan Cole. Allan and I have been corresponding this week and he’s shared some stories about the writing of that series that have made my week. Allan and his partner Chris Bunch also wrote a bunch of TV shows that you might remember as fondly as I do — “Magnum PI,” “Quincey” and “Battlestar Galactica,” to name a few. It’s great to meet someone responsible for some of your favorite books.

Bad Storms and Fun Stuff

Houston was hit by massive flooding as the result of a few days of bad storms. Local creeks overflowed and the flooding was as bad as we saw during Hurricane Ike and even worse in some areas. We lost power for hours but my mobile gear kept me going as usual. Batteries and 3G — doesn’t get any better than that.  :)

This week something nice happened to me I should share. I was invited to join the Faculty Committee of the CMO Council. The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is “dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers across a wide-range of global industries.” It’s an honor to be invited and I am thrilled to be involved with these folks.

I want to share the best video I watched on the web this week. You know I’m a big music fan and while this is a great song to watch performed, the story behind it is fascinating. The creators of the video shot street musicians from all over the world and mixed them together to make a great music video of a good song.  Watch the whole thing and enjoy as I did. It was all recorded and mixed on a laptop, a true example of mobile tech at work.

Just last night my Houston Rockets knocked off the Portland Trailblazers to win the first round of the NBA playoffs and that is thrilling. They were able to break out of the “first round curse” that has plagued them for many years and they now proceed on to the second playoff round. They have the ability to beat anyone they play but they tend to be their own worst enemy at times so I don’t know how far they’ll go, but it’s fun to watch unfold.

Rebuilding the UMPC

One thing that I do a lot, due to being the geek that I am, is rebuild my mobile devices. I try so many different things and it’s not uncommon to end up hosing something up that forces me to rebuild the operating system on a given device. This happened to the Viliv S5 this week and I ended up rebuilding it not once but twice.

The folks at Viliv have made the rebuild process quite simple with a restore partition for that very purpose. This partition is only 5 GB in size and the restore process is simply invoked via the buttons on the device. It can all be done without a keyboard or mouse and takes about 20 minutes, but when done you have a freshly partitioned and reimaged system, just like a brand-new machine. I would strongly recommend you not delete this recovery partition as some folks do to save a little space because it is so handy.

No Origami Experience

While spending so much time with the Viliv S5 it occurred to me that the old Microsoft Origami Experience interface developed for UMPCs would be a good thing to try on the S5. The interface is designed to be “finger friendly” and can turn a UMPC into a nice entertainment gadget. Unfortunately trying it out was not meant to be, as it only runs on UMPCs with Vista. This is unfortunate because not many UMPCs can run Vista very well and most run XP for that reason. It’s a case of not being able to leverage the effort that MS put into the platform, and needlessly IMHO.

E-Books of the Week

I mentioned the “Sten” series and I am getting toward the end of it as I have been thoroughly enjoying the sixth and seventh books of the series. “The Return of the Emperor” saw the reincarnation of the Eternal Emperor and explained the “eternal” part quite nicely.  Vortex has Sten in the stickiest situation he’s faced yet and I can’t wait to see how it turns out. Sadly, there is only one last book after these two to finish up the series that has provided me many hours of enjoyment.  Thanks, Allan, for the wonderful work!

Wrapping Up

That was my week and I enjoyed sharing it with you. It is only appropriate to send out condolences to Kevin Tofel as his father passed away this week. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family, my friend.