Personal affairs

I don’t often get into personal things in this column but a bittersweet event played a large role in how I’ve spent my time. As I tweeted last weekend, my adult stepson told his mom and I that he has a drug addiction problem.  It was quite surprising to us, but he admits he has been addicted to prescription drugs for several years.  Last Sunday, he checked himself into a rehabilitation program in Houston. Needless to say, the week was very unusual for us all here at home.

As I mentioned on Twitter, we find it very positive that he has recognized the problem and is taking steps to seek help.  At the same time, it’s hard to know that your child, no matter how old, is going through a terrible time. I would like to thank the many people who expressed their good wishes for him on Twitter, it truly does help in this difficult time. Those wishing to follow me on Twitter, by the way, can do so by following @jkendrick.

Of pen and slate

This week I spent a lot of time using the ThinkPad tablet PC.  I found myself using the pen quite a bit, and I must admit it was refreshing to get back to inking on the slate.  I have been using the ThinkPad x200 quite a bit, but primarily in either laptop mode or in slate mode via touch. This week I spent a fair bit of time inking, and it felt darn good. My renewed interest in inking was timely due to the information that Apple had filed a patent for handwriting recognition (HWR) technology. I am not familiar with Apple’s claims, but I can tell you that the Microsoft handwriting recognition in Windows 7 is outstanding.

Apple will have a long road to travel to catch up to the Windows 7 handwriting recognition, of that I am certain. HWR is a tremendously complex technical problem, and I can state with confidence that the Microsoft solution is very solid. What Apple will realize, if they intend to pursue HWR for their upcoming tablet, is that HWR is a multi-faceted problem to solve. It’s complicated enough trying to interpret ink strokes with a pen, as each one of us writes uniquely. The strokes have to be converted into text, which adds to the complexity of the problem. On top of that, and an area where the Windows solution excels, the system interface must provide an intuitive method for inputting the ink, grabbling it and interfacing it with whatever program might need the ink input. The Tablet Input Panel (TIP) is an elegant solution to the latter, and Apple better be thinking along those lines.

Free speech

All of the time with the tablet this week got me thinking about speech recognition. It was a natural progression, as originally the Windows speech reco was only present on Tablet PCs. Windows Vista incorporated it into the OS, and quite well I might add, although most users overlooked it entirely. I realized that I had not checked to see if the speech stuff was in Windows 7, and was happy to find it still there.

I am happy to report that the reco in Windows 7 is the same as it was in Vista, and that it is still pretty darn good. Getting started with speech in Win 7 is easy to do, it’s found in the Control Panel. Once the microphone setup is done everything works well. You can control the OS entirely by voice if desired, which is explained thoroughly through the speech tutorial.

The real strength of speech reco lies in dictation, and this entire column has been entered via speech. The reco is robust enough that while it is better to use a proper headset with microphone, I did this using the internal microphone of the MacBook. Yes, I said MacBook. I was very satisfied to see that the speech stuff worked well in Windows 7, even running under Parallels Desktop on the Mac. I had to take no extra steps to use it, just started it under Windows 7 and got busy. The reco engine is quite accurate, and dictating a long article such as this was fun and easy. I highly recommend that Windows 7 users give speech a try no matter what system you’re running. You will likely find it incredibly useful and have a good time using it.

Browser update

Apple updated the Safari browser this week, so that meant I had to give it a try again. I’ve mentioned my frequent bouts of browser infidelity, and I jumped from Firefox to Safari again this week. It’s not just that I am fickle about my browser, it’s that I spend all day every day inside the browser doing my work. I am always checking to see which browser is faster, as even small speed gains make a huge difference to me over the course of an average work day.

I was surprised to find that the new version of Safari is slightly faster at most tasks than Firefox. I have been using Safari for a couple of days exclusively now and am pleased with the speed gain. I suppose I will be until Firefox is updated again, then I’ll likely switch back, as I love my Firefox.

I wish that Apple would include an option in Safari to open multiple sites at once. There are ways to do this manually, but I’d like to open the same web sites at start time automatically.

Pixi for free?

Palm hasn’t even launched the Pixi yet and it is already having big price reductions. This can’t be good for Palm, a company not in the best of shape financially. The Pixi was already going to be much cheaper than the Pre at launch, yet word appeared just yesterday that Walmart is offering the Pixi for $30 with a new contract on Sprint, and the phone is not out yet. That’s a price drop of 70 percent over the low Palm price. That doesn’t bode well for Palm or the Pixi, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it offered free soon.

Random musings

I ran across a few things this week that made me stop and think. Apple opened a new retail store and invited the press in for a “preview”. What’s that all about? Previewing what is just another store in the chain? The fact that opening a new store is worthy of being a press event is amusing, but even more amazing is that a bunch of the press actually attended the preview. Give me a break, it’s a freaking store, not a breaking news story.

I have been saying that the line between feature phones and smartphones was blurring, and I overheard something this week that proved it. I heard someone say that “I don’t need the Internet on my phone, I just need email, Twitter and Facebook.” Think about that statement for a moment. This was obviously stated by a non-techie, someone who just wants a phone. Not a super phone, not a smartphone, or even a feature phone. Just a phone, and it has to do those three things, in addition to make phone calls and probably texting.

That was a significant moment for me, realizing that “regular” people are now beginning to feel that “email, Twitter and Facebook” are phone functions. Not the Internet, the phone. That is a major shift in perceptions of phones of the consumer, and it leads me to believe that soon all phones will have to be “smart”. It’s a game changer.

e-Books of the week

This week I continued the kick I’ve been on lately and read an old Stephen King book — Rose Madder. It is a good story, well told as all of King’s stories tend to be. I’ve also been following my friend Jeff Kirvin’s mad dash to write his novels. He’s sharing his “mad novelist” thoughts on his blog, and he’s tweeting about his progress all the time. Continued good luck to Jeff, and if you wish to follow a true mad novelist, check in with his work from time to time. I’ve read his past work and find it to be quite good, so I’m looking forward to his new work.

That’s a wrap

That was my week, and as always I enjoy sharing it with you. Tune in next week for the next Mobile Tech Manor column, same bat time, same bat channel.

Software stuff

One of the writing projects I am working on required me to refer to some material that I have in eReader format. I wasn’t aware of it but there is a Mac version of eReader Pro so I installed it on the MacBook. I usually only run eReader on my phones, or occasionally on a slate PC. The Mac version provided the best way for me to refer to the material while working on my project and it was good to find this version existed. I must say it’s a “no-frills” version and lacks a lot of features found on the phone versions, but it was better than nothing.

Another program I use heavily was updated this week and I jumped on the upgrade. Parallels Desktop 5 brought tighter integration with both Snow Leopard and Windows 7. I’ve only used it for a day but I am impressed with the improvement over PD4. This new version fully supports the Win7 Aero interface, and while that might seem to be just a visual improvement, it actually adds functionality. Aero Peek works well, and even the Flip 3D function works.

The most impressive addition is in the performance boost that I’m seeing on the MacBook while running Windows 7. It appears that PD5 uses the integrated video memory better than the old version, and that makes Windows 7 run as fast on the Mac as it does on other “real” Windows notebooks that I use. The Crystal window mode is flat-out awesome, bringing Windows 7 seamlessly to the OS X desktop. It’s downright freaky to see Internet Explorer running on the Mac desktop, complete with the gray Mac theme.

Clearing the decks

The holidays are rushing at us already, and it’s the time of year I take a look at all the gear in Mobile Tech Manor and think about getting rid of some of it. It’s my way to get holiday gift-giving cash, while making room for the cool gear I’ll no doubt buy next year. It was harder this year than in years past to decide what to part with, but I finally settled on selling a couple of gadgets.

First up, I am selling the Viliv S5 UMPC. It is the nice 5-inch UMPC that runs Windows XP and is a quite capable handheld system. This is the S5 that has appeared on the site numerous times, and it is in perfect condition. I am selling the S5 and all of the accessories that came with it:

• Viliv S5 UMPC- Windows XP, 1 GB RAM, 60 GB HDD, 5-inch touchscreen
• 2nd battery (~5 hours life each battery)
• Battery charger w/ 2nd power adapter
• Carrying case w/ integrated stand
• Car kit- car charger, mounting bracket

The other gadget I am going to part with is the HP Mini 1000 netbook. This was originally the Mini Mi version with Linux, but I have installed Windows 7 on it. I do not have the Linux restore media, but I think it can be downloaded if desired. I also have purchased an extended battery for it so the whole kit is:

• HP Mini 1000- Windows 7, 10-inch screen, 1 GB RAM, 16GB SSD, 4 GB SD memory for extra storage, standard battery, power adapter
• Extended battery

If you are interested in either of these systems, drop me an email (click on my cartoon head in the sidebar) and make an offer. I will give someone a decent deal on each of them, but please, only serious offers.

Verizon Droid

The Droid only showed up late yesterday so I need to spend more time with it before sharing any real details. My first impressions:

Pros

• Great screen
• Solid build quality
• Android 2.0
• Google Maps Navigation

Cons

• Physical keyboard- better than none but not great
• Weight- a little heavier than expected
• Short power cable- can barely reach from floor to edge of desk
• Camera operation is slow

I’ll have much more detail and some video to share shortly, so this will have to do for now.

e-Book of the week

I didn’t have a lot of free time for reading, sadly, but I did read an early novel by Stephen King. Roadwork is the story that involves road expansion, imminent domain and the madness it triggers in one man. It is a good story, albeit disturbing to experience, which shows it to be well written.

Wrap-up

That’s all the time I have so I hope you get something to take away from this account. Until next week, take care of yourself.

I am writing this on Thursday evening, sitting in front of the big screen with game 2 of the World Series going. I may be stationary in the comfy chair, but I am making full use of mobile gear to do so.

This week has been unusual due to the weather we’ve had in the Houston area. It has rained every day, with frequent torrential downpours. The TV weather folks have reported 2 – 5 inches of rain in the area every day this week, along with the street flooding that always brings. The nearly constant rain has kept it dreary in the Manor. I know my friends in the Seattle area are used to constant rain, but I don’t know how you tolerate it given how it’s been here this week.

Right now there is a horrendous thunderstorm overhead as I write this, with lightning flashing in a strobe-like fashion. I am expecting a power outage so I’m on the notebook, using the MiFi for connectivity. If the power goes out, I will not be totally in the dark. I’ll have the laptop display for light, and still be online with the 3G from the MiFi. Mobile tech is often a great backup system, even in the home.

Gadgetry

There weren’t any new gadgets that appeared in the Manor this week, but a couple of gadgets got a new lease on life due to firmware upgrades. The MiFi I am using now had a firmware upgrade that I applied this week. Novatel released the upgrade for both the Verizon model that I have and also the Sprint model.

The MiFi is an unusual gadget as it is almost always used over Wi-Fi. That’s the beauty of the MiFi but it has one drawback in that users are not notified when an upgrade is available. That notification is only given when the MiFi is plugged into a computer via USB, and that’s not something most users ever do.

You have to plug in to make the upgrade, though, so I first plugged the MiFi into the MacBook. The MiFi works with the Mac using the Verizon Access Manager (VAM) program, just like it does with Windows PCs. Unfortunately, upgrades to the MiFi cannot be done from a Mac, so owners with only a Mac are out of luck when it comes to upgrades. That’s not acceptable, especially since there is a Mac version of the VAM. There’s no good reason that this version can do everything except apply upgrades.

Once I verified the upgrade wouldn’t work on the Mac version of the VAM, I decided to cheat a little. I plugged the MiFi into the MacBook while running Windows 7 under Parallels Desktop. I fired up the Windows version of the VAM under Windows 7, and upon connection the program told me a firmware upgrade was available. I told it to proceed, and it downloaded the upgrade and started the install procedure.

That’s as far as it got, as during the upgrade process the MiFi is power cycled a couple of times. This would break the USB connection which was being made through the virtual machine, and Parallels was having trouble reconnecting the MiFi fast enough to continue the upgrade process. I futzed around with this for a while and then gave up.

I moved the MiFi connection over to a ThinkPad notebook running Windows 7, and the process went as smooth as butter. The upgrade was downloaded, the MiFi’s firmware was wiped and replaced with the new version, and the device was reactivated on the Verizon network. It then updated the PRL, the table that defines the 3G coverage.

Once the process was complete, I tested the ability to connect to the 3G network and that worked just fine. The update fixed international roaming stuff, and the main fix that affected me was the MiFi no longer hibernates while it is plugged into a power source. It originally would do so if dormant for a few minutes, making it take a bit to reconnect when activity dictated. Now it will just stay connected if it’s plugged in, as it should.

The other gizmo that got an upgrade is the BlackBerry Storm. This is the original Storm from Verizon, and the firmware upgrade brought the OS to version 5.0. What a difference the new OS version makes! It literally has given new life to the Storm in so many different ways.

Most noticeably, the overall performance of the Storm is greatly improved. Everything happens instantly, from menu popups to screen autorotation. The onscreen keyboard is vastly better too, and while I was fine with the way the keyboards worked originally, I really like it now. There are a lot of other little improvements, too many to list here. I’m sure there are some i haven’t discovered yet.

This update was a true delight. It brought a tremendous improvement to the device, but it may end up shooting RIM and Verizon in the foot. The update to the Storm coincided with the release of the new Storm 2. The Storm 2 is only an incremental hardware upgrade, most noticeably the addition of Wi-Fi to the phone. Otherwise it is a minor hardware update. The primary change in the Storm 2 is the bump to the OS to version 5.0.

I have seen a number of video reviews of the Storm 2 this week, and from what I’ve seen my older Storm now works just as well as the Storm 2 due to the new OS. There is absolutely no reason (other than the Wi-Fi) to upgrade to the Storm 2, as far as I can see. RIM should have made a bigger improvement to the hardware in my view.

Software changes

The Storm upgrade led me to finally try the new BlackBerry Desktop Software for the Mac. This is the program used to control connecting a BlackBerry to the Mac for maintenance, syncing and for upgrading the OS. The Mac version was only recently released by RIM, and I tried it for the first time during this upgrade.

I am impressed with the BDS, and I think RIM has done a good job with it. It’s about time they released this Mac version, but at least they got it right when they got around to it. Using the program I was easily able to perform the OS upgrade. I also backed up the phone to the Mac for safety purposes.

Turning web pages into apps

I tried something this week I’ve been meaning to try but had not gotten around to. The Prism add-on for Firefox makes it possible to save any web site and run it like an app. It’s designed to turn a web page into a standalone program for ease of use.

I added Prism to Firefox on the MacBook with one thought in mind, to turn Google Voice into an app. A simple menu selection created a Google Voice application that in effect turned GV into a program in its own right. The program window is optimized for GV and I can leave it running on the desktop, or minimized to the dock, without having it affect my main Firefox window.

This is important because I like to have GV running all the time and I have occasionally closed Firefox out of habit, only to remember that GV thus closed too. Now I have a GV program all its own, and I even have the icon sitting in the OS X dock for instant access anytime I need it.

e-Books of the week

This week was a non-fiction reading week, something very unusual for me. Normally I like my fictional stories, but the two e-books of the week were books I wanted to read for educational purposes.

I mentioned last week that I had started On Writing, Stephen King’s practical guide for the fiction writer. I finished it this week, and it is no question the best practical guide for writing I have read. His advice is so straightforward, and something every writer should give a good read.

Something I wasn’t prepared for in On Writing turned out to be pretty cool. While I’ve read the book before, I had never read the afterword King included in the book. In the afterword King recounted the near fatal auto accident he experienced, along with his recovery process. What I realized as I read this account was that it was similar in style to my chronicle of my own life-changing health episode. It was rather cool to find that similarity in style. Of course, I am biased and may have imagined the whole similarity.

The other e-book I read this week was an inspirational book by Mark McEwan. McEwan was a weatherman and co-anchor on the CBS Early Show for 15 years before he was let go by the network. He then moved to local TV news in Orlando, where he had a major stroke. After the Stroke is his account of having the stroke, and the arduous rehabilitation process. It’s a good story to read, and one of particular interest to me given my own experience having a stroke. I enjoyed this book a lot.

Wrap-up

That was my week, and now that I’ve shared it with you that means you’re as smart as me. That’s an old saying my Dad used to say when he was with us, and I still find it amusing. Until next week, take care.

“Upgrading” to Windows XP

The buzz this week was definitely Windows 7, with the official launch yesterday. It was a non-event for me personally as I’ve been running it for months. I like Windows 7, even though the creeping crud I’m seeing more and more on different installations is really bothering me.

It bothered me for the last time on the Viliv S5 UMPC. I have run Windows 7 on the S5 for a few months and in the beginning I was very impressed with how well it ran. The system started out very fast and I was happier with Windows 7 than I had been with XP. Then the crud appeared, and lately the S5 has been slowing down like it was running through a mud slide.

Last weekend it hit rock bottom, getting very sluggish doing normal things. Windows Update downloaded 5 updates, nothing major, and the update procedure was the last straw. The S5 downloaded the 5 updates without problem, and the update process hit the “Installing x of 5″ part. The system sat there with “Installing 1 of 5″ on the screen for 20 minutes, so long that I thought it was stuck. I was about to give up on the update when the screen changed to “Installing 2 of 5″ so I let it go. After 30 minutes staring at this unchanging screen I was done with the whole Windows 7 thing.

The Viliv S5 has a great system restore that reimages the system back to factory condition from a hidden partition on the hard drive. I fired that up at boot and in 20 minutes I was back to a virgin Windows XP system. The difference running XP is amazing, given how sluggish the system had become under Windows 7. I am happily UMPCing once again with the S5, and I attribute that solely to Windows XP.

I like working with Windows 7 better than XP, the interface is so much better. But, I have seen performance under Windows 7 deteriorate over time on every system I have used, and this situation with the S5 is just more of the same.

Remember the Milk sync issue

I love using Remember the Milk (RTM) for my task management, it is the most versatile method I have tried. I use it on three different phones and many different notebooks with no problems. This week I did notice something about the iPhone version that gave me pause for a bit.

RTM is based in the cloud, and what has made it invaluable to my work is the instant nature of the updating. I can add a task, or mark a task complete on a notebook, and the change is instantly reflected on all of the phones and computers. That is important because I am always grabbing a gadget when I run out the door and I rely on my task information to be accurate no matter what gadget I bring.

One night I was going over my tasks on the iPhone, and I added a few new tasks. I also was able to mark three tasks as complete, one of my favorite things to do. I then went about my business but later I noticed that the tasks I marked complete were still showing as active on the Mac. I went to the RTM site and sure enough they were not marked as complete. I grabbed the iPhone to see if perhaps I hadn’t really marked them as complete but no, they were completed there.

That was strange and I’ve never had that happen before. I triggered a manual sync on the iPhone RTM app, and instantly the tasks were updated everywhere. It seems that the iPhone version of RTM, which I believe was updated not long ago, now requires manual syncs to get the server updated with tasks marked complete. I have verified this and that is not good, I have to make sure to remember to do a manual sync every time I use RTM on the iPhone. I hope they fix that soon.

Geektool

I have been experimenting a lot with the free utility Geektool on the MacBook and I am really impressed with the things that it can do. It’s hard to explain what it does, as it does so much. Basically it lets you put “things” on the desktop, with real-time updating. The first thing I did was put simple things on the desktop, system time and date. Geektool gives total control over the behavior of items put on the desktop; you can put them wherever you want and use any font and color to control the display.

You can put “files” on the desktop, meaning scripts can execute that do complex things. I have my RTM tasks displaying on the desktop, which is done by embedding a Python script that pulls the RTM feed from RSS. The system time and date are simple Linux commands. Literally anything that can be executed on the Mac in a Terminal session can be embedded on the desktop.

I have only scratched the surface of what Geektool can do and I intend to keep playing with it. I can envision great things being done that turn the desktop into another useful aspect of the system. It is simply awesome.

Things I’m wondering about

I get a lot of shipments at Mobile Tech Manor. Almost every week sees some gadget arrive, and the FedEx guy is a frequent visitor. Most of these gadgets arrive requiring no signature, as the companies that send evaluation units don’t want to cause trouble for me in case I’m not home when the shipment arrives. The FedEx guy leaves it on the front step and I get it when I return.

This works fine and is the best way for shipments to work but the FedEx guy told me this week he’s not going to leave packages on the step anymore. He’s come to realize that I am receiving all sorts of laptops and phones, as the shippers are often Lenovo, HP or some other big company. He told me that he is not comfortable leaving packages with expensive goods in them, as he believes the companies shipping such goods are screwing up by not requiring a signature.

I explained that they ship that way because it is more convenient for me in the event I am not home. He explained that that’s not a good enough reason for him, and that he has the authority with FedEx to override the shipper’s wishes on each delivery. Based on that, he will no longer leave packages on the step in the event I am not home. He intends to handle all shipments as if a signature is required, and thus protect both me and the shipper.

I appreciate his concern, it’s nice to find a company rep who is conscientious, but I find it hard to believe that he can override the shipper’s instructions. It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out in the future. Sometimes it is vital that I receive a package by a certain time due to embargoes, and this has the potential to delay my receiving a gadget by a day or two.

Another thing I have been wondering about this week is Bluetooth. This technology has been around for years, and I don’t understand why it is still wonky. The objective is you pair one Bluetooth-enabled device with another, after which both devices work together with no effort. Turn them on, they see each other and connect.

The reality is very different. I can use a Bluetooth headset with a given phone for weeks, and then one day the phone can no longer see the headset. A manual connection must be made so they will work again. Nothing has changed on either device, nor with how I am using them. They work fine together, and then the next time they don’t. I will never understand how this fails, and it’s not that unusual.

e-Books of the week

It was a Stephen King week, and I read an old King novel first. The Long Walk is a novel King wrote early in his career under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, and it is typical King. The story is bizarre, 100 teenagers enter a contest to walk non-stop until only one remains in the competition. The winner gets to choose any prize of his dreams, and the losers get shot after three warnings for not maintaining 4 mph. The story covers the entire competition, from the fresh start and through the madness that affects all competitors given the stress. It is one of the best novels that King has written, and that’s saying a lot.

I enjoyed the story so much that I decided it was time to revisit King’s On Writing. It’s been a good five years since I’ve read On Writing, and I still find it to be one of the best books for writers. King lays out what works for him, and without wasting a single word. It is a must-read for all writers, fiction or nonfiction.

Wrap-up

That’s my week and as always I enjoyed sharing it with you. I love to hear feedback about these weekly columns so if you have anything on your mind drop a comment. If there is something you’d like me to think about for future columns by all means share that too. Until next week, take care.

I sent a cool gadget back where it came from, and already miss it a great deal. I noticed my “go-to” mobile device had changed. I also started having an uneasy feeling about Windows 7, as I have noticed some things that bother me about how it works on mobile computers. Come on in and I’ll share my week with you.

Creeping crud

I have been using Windows 7 since the early beta days. I lived through a number of beta version updates, and watched the OS get better and better each time. I grabbed the official RTM version when it was first released, and have used the “gold” version of Windows 7 on quite a few computers in Mobile Tech Manor. I really like Win7, and find it easily the best version of Windows yet. I have been especially impressed with how well it works on mobile computers, notebooks, netbooks and UMPCs, something earlier versions didn’t always do.

Win 7 handles mobile scenarios better than either XP or Vista did prior. It seems to sleep and wake up much faster on every computer I’ve used it on, and even hibernation has worked well when I’ve tried it. I don’t usually use hibernation but I’ve used it to try it out on a few computers.

Users of Windows prior to Win 7 are no doubt familiar with the “creeping crud” phenomenon. Windows XP and Vista start running slower over time, until eventually the system gets so slow something has to give. The crud can be especially pronounced on notebooks, with systems eventually getting extremely unreliable at sleep and resume.

I have seen mobile computers start taking much longer to go to sleep or wake up with older versions of Windows after enough time passes. I have been told that it is a result of the Windows registry getting bloated to the point that it interferes with basic operation. The only effective solution is to wipe the system clean and reinstall Windows. Not a good solution, but the one that works consistently.

I have been impressed with how smoothly Win 7 runs on every computer I’ve tried. Things happen quickly and as expected. The systems just work. I have been keeping a keen eye on every system with Windows 7, given my experience with older versions over time as I have described.

I am now approaching a few months with Win 7 on some computers, and I am getting increasingly nervous as they are starting to exhibit symptoms of the crud. I am seeing systems occasionally take much longer to go to sleep or wake up, with no ascertainable reason. A notebook will sleep and resume perfectly dozens of times, and then for no apparent reason will take up to 30 seconds or longer to sleep or wake up.

It doesn’t happen often, but the fact it happens at all scares me a great deal. What I am seeing is exactly what I would see with older Windows versions in the early stages of the creeping crud. Everything runs fine like clockwork, and then gradually things start happening and slowing down. If the crud I am seeing in Windows 7 progresses like it did in older versions, it is going to be more of the same. That scares the hell out of me.

I am also seeing that on lower-end computers, like netbooks and UMPCs, the first time I open a folder in Windows Explorer it can take an inordinately long time for the folder’s contents to display. The system just seems to hang for what feels like a very long time, with nothing seeming to happen. The rest of the PC is running fine while this happens, it’s just the Explorer windows like the file manager folders. This is just the first time an Explorer window is opened, after that all folders open and work fine. It’s like the system has to cache everything once, and that process is so slow. This sometimes happens on PCs with decent components, but it always happens on netbooks and the like.

Don’t misunderstand one thing, I really, really like Windows 7. It is the best Windows yet, and the usability improvements are awesome. I grab a Win 7 system over XP or Vista every single time I have a choice. I am, however, getting a very uneasy feeling based on actual observations over time as I’ve indicated. I know that some will jump in with the standard explanation that it’s the vendor’s hardware, or the drivers at fault. That may very well be but the fact is it is business as usual. If it is going to be as difficult for vendors to keep their components or drivers running consistently under Win 7 as it was under XP and Vista, then it’s business as usual.

My “go-to” computer

I have a lot of different computers in Mobile Tech Manor, and the stable is always in flux with new ones coming in and others going out. I rotate all of the notebooks that I evaluate to give each one a fair shake, but over time there is always one that becomes the one I grab when I’m heading out the door. The “go-to” computer. It is always a notebook that is highly portable and that performs well in many different circumstances.

The go-to computer currently is the Lenovo ThinkPad x200 Tablet PC. The x200 is as small as can be, and that makes it very portable. It is also a good performer, and handles everything I throw at it. It is a good pound lighter than the 13-inch MacBook, and is much smaller. The 12-inch screen is a good size to fit the small package, and yet displays at the same resolution as the bigger MacBook (1280×800).

The x200 has become the one I almost always grab as I head out the door. It fits in the smallest bags from the collection I use, and I have no compromises to make when bringing it. I find no downside for having brought it, and that is huge for me.

It also has extra abilities that no other notebook in the Manor has — the rotating screen chief among them. There are many times that it makes more sense to put the x200 in slate mode and work away. That’s the mode where the other special ability comes into play — the touchscreen.

Windows 7 does multitouch very well, and that is very evident on the x200. It is natural to sit comfortably with the x200 in slate mode, interacting with the PC strictly via touch. It is such a good way to work that I often grab the x200 around the house. I can’t express how nice it is to sit in the big comfy chair, touching the screen to make things happen. This computer is not only the go-to computer when I hit the road, it’s often the go-to PC for working at home too.

Kicking out the Hero

This week I returned the HTC Hero to the folks at HTC. I am thankful they sent it to me to evaluate, and to share that experience with you. The Hero is an awesome smartphone, and I already miss it a great deal. I can’t think of anything it couldn’t handle for the few weeks I used it, the mark of a good tool.

Coolest thing on the web

I don’t often get into cool stuff on the web but I was blown away by one thing I simply must share. It is sort of mobile tech — it’s the Python from WaterCar. It is a very cool car built around Corvette parts, and it is totally amphibious. From speeding on the highway to 60 knots on the water. That is simply awesome, if you’ve got $200,000. It is the way to have a mid-life crisis on land AND sea.

e-Books of the week

I had a good week with e-books, from the latest in one of my favorite series, to an unpublished novel written by a friend. The former was Evidence by Jonathan Kellerman. This is the latest novel featuring Alex Delaware, and it was as good as the rest of the series. It was great to hang with Alex and Milo once again. These books don’t come often enough for me.

The unpublished novel I am enjoying a great deal. It is a good science fiction story, and I found an unexpected way to read it. It was sent to me in DOCX format, and that presented a problem at first. I don’t have Microsoft Office installed on a single computer in Mobile Tech Manor, believe it or not. I didn’t have OpenOffice installed on any of the handheld computers I would normally use to read an e-book, either.

So what did I discover was the easiest way to read this e-book in DOCX format?  WordPad. Yes, that old text editor that is slightly better than Notepad. I didn’t realize that WordPad could handle the newer DOCX format, but it does and it’s been the easiest way to read this e-book. I learned something new this week, one of my true joys.

Wrap-up

You have shared my week at Mobile Tech Manor, I hope you found it time well spent. Until next week, same bat time, same bat channel.

The spill

Last weekend I took it upon myself to prove something that had been haunting me for almost a year. I am referring to the inability to run my MacBook with 4 GB of memory, due to consistent problems every time I tried. I bought the MacBook last year with 2 GB of memory, with the intention of bumping up to 4 GB when time permitted. That failed attempt was well documented, and I gave up feeling that the only reason I couldn’t run more than 3 GB of memory in the MacBook was due to some weird problem with OS X.

Apple never acknowledged an official problem with the extra memory, so I was left running 3 GB for months. Kevin convinced me to try the 4 GB again since I had installed Snow Leopard recently. It made sense to at least try it, although I admit I didn’t hold out much hope it would work. Wrong. The 4 GB has now been running in the MacBook for a week, with nary an incident like before. It leads me to believe that Leopard was not truly handling 64-bit addressing consistently. The 3 GB was handled properly, which is maybe due to 32-bit addressing, and since the 4 GB is now working perhaps it is a 64-bit issue. Bear in mind that this is the same 4 GB memory sticks that were failing consistently before. The only difference between then and now is Snow Leopard.

While this experiment had a (so far) happy ending, it didn’t start off very well. I had just unplugged the MacBook from all the peripherals and the power plug, and was just getting ready to open it up for the memory swap when the unthinkable happened. I knocked a full cup of coffee over on the desk. Coffee went everywhere, covering everything in sight and even dripping down onto the floor.

You wouldn’t believe how fast I moved, I didn’t believe it myself and I was there. I moved everything I could out of the way and started cleaning up immediately to minimize the damage. It was such a mess that it took me over 30 minutes just to clean up the spill. I had to move everything off the desk, including the 24-inch display, and carefully dry and clean it all. The incident gave me the best reason ever for using the Lapworks stand with the MacBook. It kept the computer high and dry and totally unaffected.

It took a good while to get all the cables dry but I carefully cleaned them up and then let them dry before plugging anything back in. Happily, nothing exhibited any ill effects from the dunking. I dodged a big bullet, that is without question. I have to admit I felt sick all day after this, just thinking what might have been. Liquids and gear have no place near each other, that’s for darn sure.

A good case for integrated 3G

I have been consistent with my outlook on integrated 3G. I swap devices so often that it doesn’t make sense for me to get it on my notebooks. An external solution such as a USB model or better the MiFi makes more sense given my situation. I do believe that getting a notebook/ netbook with integrated 3G is a good fit for some folks, if their needs are better met with it.

A friend of mine is an occupational therapist (OT) who works in 5 – 6 homes making house calls with patients each day. OTs are practitioners who work with folks needing either physical therapy, or more intense therapy such as recovering stroke victims. Stroke or serious accident victims often have to be retrained to do things such as walk, or feed themselves, just to name a couple of activities. OTs are the ones who teach them how to do those things again. It’s important work and requires very careful assessment of the patient, determining a treatment plan and then tracking the treatment as it unfolds.

My friend takes the organization and reporting requirements of this treatment very seriously, as she must. She has always used technology to aid in this task, and until recently that consisted of a Windows Mobile smartphone. She would see a patient, and then tap in her session notes on the phone. At the end of the day she would spend one to two additional hours collating these impromptu notes into the formal reports she must submit for the patient’s insurance provider, and to track the progress for each patient.

She came to me a week ago and explained all this to me and expressed the belief that there must be a better way to collect this information and file these reports. Her work days were long enough with adding the report time at the end of each one.

I listened to her problem and a simple solution hit me. What she needed was a netbook with integrated 3G. Such a setup would provide her with enough battery life for the entire day, accounting for the fact that she would only need to use it after each patient session, not during. With a connected netbook she could enter her session notes straight into the report forms, and then send them in to the appropriate office(s). Do the task once, and then she would be done.

She took on the task of equipping herself prior to approaching me about the problem. She bought an EEE PC at Best Buy but it wasn’t working too well. She had correctly determined that portability was an important criteria for her work, and she had picked up the 8.9-inch netbook. She was having a lot of trouble using it partially due to the keyboard, which was too small for comfortable typing. Bear in mind she had to enter her session report on the run, often in her SUV, and the little netbook was just too small to allow her to quickly do her thing and move on to the next patient. She was still spending a lot of time at the end of each day, finalizing the reports she rushed through due to circumstances, and then sending them in to the proper authority.

She came by and asked for any recommendation I could make to help her out. I realized that what she needed was a highly portable notebook, with 3G connectivity. She needed the smallest netbook she could find that still provided a good typing experience, first, and with good wireless broadband secondly. Those were her two big requirements.

I sat her down with my HP Mini 1000 netbook, and we quickly determined that it was exactly what she needed. The Mini 1000 is the smallest netbook on the market with a 10-inch screen and a near full keyboard. She took to the Mini like a duck to water, and she got excited thinking about how it could impact her work. She asked me where she could get one right away to get working the best way possible.

I sent her to the local Verizon store, and she bought a Mini 1151 on a subsidy for signing up for the 3G data plan. I had cautioned her to get the 5 GB plan, as it was a legitimate business expense for her and she didn’t need the exposure to potential overage charges. She got a good deal for the Mini with the subsidy, and the Verizon rep had her set up and working properly before leaving the store.

She has been using the Mini almost all week, and she is ecstatic over the difference it has made on her work day. She sees the patient, types in the final report in her car, files it over the 3G connection and then moves on to the next patient. When she does this for the final patient each day, her work is done. She can’t say enough about how great this mobile technology has improved her work, and thus her life.

Rating the phones

I am constantly asked how I rate the various smartphones I own and use. It’s a natural question to ask someone in my position, but an incredibly difficult one to answer properly. How good a given phone is totally depends on the needs of the user. We’re all different, and our needs vary tremendously. That said, here is a “one line” rating of the phones I use regularly.

• Palm Pre — Most fun. A joy to use in every way.
• HTC Hero — Most useful. Only had it a week yet it has proven its usefulness already.
• BlackBerry Storm — Best email. Hands down, the most efficient phone for working with email.
• T-Mobile G1 — OK phone. It’s dated already, and I pick it up less frequently than I did before.
• iPhone — Good phone. That’s a lame description, but the iPhone does everything well. It’s still my main e-book reader, strictly due to software. This is the Gen2 iPhone, not the 3GS.

I am also asked which one of these would I buy today. You guys love to ask tough questions, I can tell you that with certainty. I bought every one of these phones with the exception of the Hero, that is only here for a brief evaluation period. That said, since you won’t let me keep skating over this question, if I owned none of these and had to buy one, it would be the HTC Hero. It is state-of-the-art hardware, the good Android platform, and HTC has customized the phone in a super way. There, I’ve said it out loud, sort of.

The Nobel Prize for chemistry

You don’t expect to read about the Nobel Prize here, but this week it touched us albeit from a distance. Surj Patel is a great guy working for GigaOM, someone I truly respect given my contact with him. He is understandably excited as his father-in-law won the Nobel Prize for chemistry this past week. This is so truly awesome it is beyond description. I am amazed just knowing someone who is close to someone who actually won a Nobel Prize. Congratulations to Surj and his entire family, they must be so very proud.

e-Book of the Week

Last week I confessed I like the ABC show Castle, and a commenter pointed out that the main character (Richard Castle) actually had a novel published. It turns out it is the novel that the Castle character is working on as part of the TV show plot, and is a clever marketing ploy. Like I said, I like the show so I had to get the book. Heat Wave is the story of detective Nikki Heat and her interaction with Rook, a famous journalist. Sounds like the TV show, Castle, doesn’t it? Hey, they never said they were clever, just good marketers. I am a sucker so I picked up Heat Wave, and I admit I enjoyed reading it. It was a very strange experience, though, for while reading the novel I kept picturing the TV show characters. It kept turning my head around, that’s for sure.

Wrap up

That’s the way my week went down and I enjoyed sharing it with you. Next week will be another busy week, no doubt, full of mobile tech and fun gadgets. I will for sure be sharing about the new Dell technology — Latitude ON. They put an ARM processor in a conventional notebook to provide a secondary computing environment that is battery friendly. Don’t miss the next column as you never know what else might happen. Peace.

It’s all about the keyboard

I use so many different notebooks that I never have a chance to get used to a given one to the point that I feel “at home.” You know that feeling, having a good keyboard that you’ve used so much it fits you like a glove. Or like those old pair of jeans you just can’t throw out. To have that feeling about a keyboard you have to use it and it alone for a good while.

That’s not the nature of what I do; I evaluate so many notebooks and netbooks that I usually don’t get comfortable with the keyboard. I use one for a good while, start feeling proficient with it, and then I move on to the next device. That means a whole new keyboard to get used to, and believe me even two notebooks of the same model can often feel totally different in the typing department.

I switched around among four notebooks this week. That’s why I’m thinking about keyboards so much. Three of the devices had full-sized keyboards but one of them, the HP Mini 1000 netbook, had one that was only 92 percent of full size. It’s a great keyboard in every way; I am comfortable typing on the HP. It’s just that the slight size difference has an impact when switching between the Mini 1000 and the other notebooks. The impact is especially noticeable when going the other way — from a full keyboard to the scaled down version. It’s not bad, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not that comfortable feeling I enjoy.

The other three notebooks I used this week were the MacBook, the ThinkPad T400s and the ThinkPad x200. The three devices are all different sizes, from the 13-inch Mac to the 14-inch T400s. The x200 is in the middle with its 12-inch rotating screen. The MacBook is my desktop replacement system, it sits on my desk with a big screen plugged in to produce a full desktop experience. I really like the keyboard on the MacBook, it’s has nice chiclet-style keys. I can type extremely fast on this keyboard, and I like using it.

What I found this week is while I enjoy using the Mac’s keyboard, it’s not nearly as comfortable as the ThinkPad keyboards. The other two notebooks both have those famous ThinkPad keyboards, and there is a reason they have such a good reputation. They are comfortable. There’s that term again, and it definitely applies to these keyboards. I found I could switch back and forth between the two ThinkPads and when my fingers hit the keys it just felt right. Maybe it’s the perfect spacing between the keys, and perhaps the tilt of the keyboards that plays a role. I know one thing for certain, the ThinkPad keys have the perfect sculpted caps that just feel right.

I can type fast on the MacBook as I’ve indicated, but I can go even faster on the ThinkPads. I make fewer mistakes, too. I found I could sit down with either one of the ThinkPads and get right to work; I didn’t have to look at the keys to get started. I just plopped my hands on the keyboard, felt the keys beneath my fingers, and started typing like a Nascar driver on the track. It’s all about the keyboard(s).

Touch stuff

Keyboards aside, switching between the T400s and the x200 this week was a lot of fun. The x200 couldn’t be smaller and lighter, and it was a great notebook to carry out of the office. The T400s with that big, wide screen, was as thin and light as could in spite of its bigger size, and I found it to also be highly mobile. They both worked very well for me, and I enjoyed using either one for a given work session. They both have touch screens, too, although they are very different.

The T400s has a capacitive digitizer from N-Trig, the company that makes the touch screen used in the Dell XT. It supports four-point multitouch, and it’s pretty cool to use. It’s a standard notebook form, though, and that makes the touchscreen less useful, at least for me.

The x200 uses a 2-point Wacom digitizer, and it’s a lot more useful with the screen rotated into slate mode. The x200 touch screen feels more accurate to me than the T400s, although I couldn’t put my finger on why. OK, that’s a bad pun. One thing a bit disturbing about the touch implementation on the x200 is how sometimes holding it by the bezel can trigger a touch event. I sometimes find that I’m touching something on the upper part of the screen, and the x200 is sensing my forearm on the lower bezel. I may need to play with the sensitivity settings, I can probably prevent that. We can all benefit from good sensitivity training, right?

I did get clarification from Lenovo on one thing that had been bugging me about the x200. I have covered the inability to use the x200 in portrait slate mode with the battery on the left side. This would be my preferred orientation for using the x200, but the screen won’t stay in this orientation. It appeared to be a deliberate action on Lenovo’s part, and information they gave show it is intentional.

The x200 has a little wedge sticking out of the top of the screen on the right. This wedge looks like an antenna of sorts, and according to Lenovo it is indeed an antenna for the optional integrated 3G modem. This unit doesn’t have the 3G, but the antenna is there just the same. Lenovo prevents the rotation of the screen for use in my desired orientation as that would put the antenna too close to the body. They have determined that it is safer to use without letting the antenna get too close, so that orientation is disabled. It seems unnecessary to me, especially lacking 3G anyway, but Lenovo prohibits the rotation of the screen in that orientation.

That’s just an Android in my pocket

I’ve had a blast playing with the HTC Hero this week, although my T-Mobile G1 stared at me with those sad green Android eyes. The Hero is an improvement over the G1 in every way, although I do find at times I wish it had a sliding keyboard. The onscreen virtual keyboard is pretty good, but a hardware keyboard would have been nice occasionally.

The HTC Sense interface is one of the most useful phone interfaces I have used. I think the webOS interface on the Palm Pre looks a lot better, and is in fact better at task management, but the Hero’s interface provides more functionality. Putting widgets on the seven home screens is very powerful, and having that customizable functionality is very productive.

The web browser on the Hero is not as fast as that on the Pre, but the Hero’s browser is more usable. The reflowing text when zooming in or out is extremely useful. Simple things like a scroll bar on large web pages is highly beneficial, and something the Pre browser really needs.

My G1 is still patiently waiting to have Donut, aka Android 1.6, pushed OTA. G1 owners have begun to receive the update, but it’s trickling out for the rest of us. I want to compare the G1 with Donut with the Hero with Cupcake to see how they stack up. That’s if Donut ever gets here.

A new Pre

Speaking of the Palm Pre, version 1.2 of webOS rolled out this week. It seems to be a bit faster than the previous version, but to tell you the truth I think that’s just wishful thinking. I still find the Pre to be laggy at times, although not enough to be too annoying to use. I find the task management to be far better on the Pre than on any other phone I’ve used. The ability to swipe the cards off the screen to shut down tasks is just so darn simple. It’s also very powerful to be able to see at a glance all programs running at a given time.

A man’s Castle

I usually just write about tech and e-books in these Mobile Tech Manor columns but I wanted to mention the TV show that has become my favorite. It’s sort of related to the e-book topic, as you’ll see if you bear with me. The show Castle is now one I don’t miss if I can help it. I have come to love this show, and this week I figured out why.

For those unfamiliar with Castle, it is about a famous detective mystery novelist who uses his clout to get the mayor of NYC to let him work with a group of homicide detectives on real cases. Castle is a rich, funny guy, and he’s constantly ticking off his “partner” in Homicide. On the show his imagination brings a new angle to the detective’s real work on these cases, and each week he ends up playing a pivotal role in the solution of the case.

I find the show to be well written, and I like the actors involved. I think I also like the fact that the novels the fictional Castle produces, are the very type of novel I so enjoy reading. Anyone familiar with this column knows how much I like a good detective novel, and the Castle show fits right in with my likes.

e-book of the week

The e-book of the week was an interesting detective story that took place in South Africa. Detective Mat Joubert was a troubled man for reasons that unfolded in the novel, and the cases in the story were entertaining. Dead Before Dying by Deon Meyer was a good read, and I enjoyed the book. The characters were very believable and likable, and the surprise ending a great end to a good book. I’m definitely going to pick up some of the other books written by Meyer.

Wrap-up

The week is drawing to a close and it’s time to spend a restful weekend at home. I hope you enjoyed the chat, and I look forward to next time.

The Writing Tablet

The recent appearance of the Lenovo x200 Tablet PC has resulted in a resumption of processes that has rejuvenated my writing. I have long claimed that preparing for long writing projects by working with pen and ink on a Tablet PC stimulates the creative process. This week has proven that to me again. There is nothing like sitting comfortably with the slate in my hands, pen in hand, and jotting down my ideas for the article in free-form.

This process makes the ideas flow as fast as they come to mind, and the pen is the catalyst. I don’t think about the method, I simply concentrate on the ideas I need to think about. It is liberating, quite frankly, and has to be experienced to understand.

When I use a keyboard to do this prep work for writing projects, no matter how hard I try to ignore the tool, it still intrudes on the process. I can create an outline with a keyboard as quickly as anyone, but I can’t help looking at what I’m doing while I’m trying to generate ideas. Or maybe I’ll have a typo while keying something and I’ll have to correct it. That is a total stoppage of the thought process. Writus interruptus. I don’t have these interruptions with the pen and ink.

I always switch back to the keyboard when it’s time to get the full writing done, that is the best way for me. I am a fast typist and can let the thoughts flow from my mind through my fingers without even thinking about it. This is aided by the thought process I go through when I ink the outline. I have it fresh in my mind and the article just flows onto the screen. If it sounds mystical, it’s because it seems that way when it happens.

The x200 is the best Tablet PC I have used, and I’ve used a boatload of them. It is as thin and light as a tablet should be, yet it’s powerful enough to plow through everything I need to do. The screen is the perfect resolution for the size, and the keyboard is awesome. Some folks can’t handle the lack of a trackpad, but I’m finding the trackstick to work very well. Throw in the touch controls while in slate mode, and it’s simply awesome. I don’t have any room in the budget right now, but if I did I would have already planned on ordering one of these for my very own. I will be lost when this one goes back to Lenovo.

Browser Infidelity

I have a problem. I have not been faithful to my browser. No matter how hard I try to stay with just one web browser, I find myself wandering after a while. It’s not that the browser doesn’t meet all my needs, it’s more like I’m afraid I will miss something that another can provide. It’s pretty sad, I suppose, but it’s my nature.

I have used Firefox for years, and still love using it. It has evolved over time and gotten better and better. The speed is as good as I could want, and the ability to add capability through extensions is great. So why do I stray? Because the competition is getting better too, and I am afraid I’ll miss out if I don’t try them all.

One of the strengths of Firefox is the multi-platform nature of the beast. I switch between Windows and OS X regularly, and Firefox not only works on both but is absolutely the same. It looks the same and works the same on both of those OSes, so I don’t even notice when I’ve switched platforms. None of the other browsers have that sameness across the platforms, except maybe Google Chrome.

I like using Chrome, especially on Windows. It is so darn fast, and the interface is as clean as can be. It works pretty much the same across platforms too, but it’s a little bare bones for my liking. I use it for short spurts but not for extended periods.

On the Mac side this week I have returned pretty much to Safari. I haven’t spent a lot of time in Safari lately, and it had been updated a fair bit since the last time I used it. I was immediately hit with how fast it was, while Firefox has been very fast for me I found Safari was even faster. That enticed me to try using it again for extended sessions, and before long I was in trouble and made it my default browser on the Mac. That’s the ultimate commitment one can make to a browser, and I did it. I’m so bad.

One of the tools that kept Firefox on my screen so much was the Xmarks add-on. Xmarks keeps my bookmarks and passwords safely stored in the cloud, so my Firefox environment on all computers remains in sync. It’s automatic and works flawlessly, and like me is platform independent.  This is an area in which Chrome fails, and keeps me from using it more. That may change down the road as Xmarks has a Chrome version in private beta.

Xmarks has a Safari version, but my recent upgrade to Snow Leopard on the Mac broke it. That was a big impediment to my use of Safari. This week I found that Xmarks for Safari had an update that addressed the Snow Leopard incompatibility, and once I updated I found it worked again. This led me to try Safari for extended periods, and doing that for a couple of days was all I needed to make the switch full-time. Yes, Safari is now my default browser on the Mac.

I still use Firefox on Windows because I’ve never liked the Windows version of Safari much. Not even the Firefox use on Windows is a given, though, as Opera 10 is over there staring at me from the sidelines. I’m using Opera more and more on Windows and it’s growing on me. It runs really well on the Mac, too, so if I’m not careful I can see another browser switch in my future. How fickle can I be? Opera has inbuilt syncing that makes it totally platform independent like Firefox, too.

e-Books of the Week

This week has been a strange one for e-books. I found myself reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, something I didn’t think I would do. I’ve read several of Brown’s earlier works, and quite frankly I didn’t like them much. I can’t understand how The Da Vinci Code became such a mammoth best-seller. I didn’t like it when I read it, and as I’ve watched the acclaim for it grow over the years I just can’t see it. I had no intention of reading The Lost Symbol, but admit I fell victim to the hype about his latest novel, so I picked it up. I liked it better than his earlier work, but not that much. His stories always seem so far-fetched to me.

The e-book I am reading now is a pleasant surprise. I have been following Jeff Kirvin since his old “Writing on Your Palm” web site. He is a true mobile gadget freak, someone with whom I can readily identify. He’s always billed himself as a frustrated writer, and I’ve followed his adventures for years. Imagine my surprise this week, as I was traipsing around the eReader site looking for something different to read, to discover that Jeff had published a novel a few years back. The Unification Chronicles: Between Heaven and Hell is a unique story dealing with modern day demons and angels, and the constant battle between them with humans thrown in the mix. I am only halfway through it and loving every page. Jeff is a talented novelist, and it was a great pleasure to find this story. Thank you for writing this, Jeff. Just today Jeff tweeted that he was thinking of releasing this novel as a podcast. I hope he does.

Wrap-up

That’s the way my week went down, and I feel good having shared it with you. Next week looks to be full of gadgety goodness, and it will be a pleasure sharing it with you next week. Until then, keep it mobile.

Gadgets in Hand

This week saw the arrival of a few new gadgets, some small and others not quite as small. The Viliv S7 UMPC hit Mobile Tech Manor early in the week, and I spent a lot of time trying to find the best usage scenario. It is as small and portable as can be, and therein lies the problem.

I write for a living, it’s what I do more than anything else in front of a computer. I don’t always need a keyboard, that’s why I like Tablets, but I absolutely have to have one to do my job. The little keyboard on the 7-inch S7 is just too small to allow touch typing. I can almost do it, but not quite. It doesn’t help that in addition to having such a small keyboard, Viliv chose to make a number of keys smaller than other adjacent keys.

This causes me to mis-type constantly, as these undersized keys are too small to hit consistently. I tried and tried but I can’t use the S7 to do any work at all, and that’s a real shame. It’s a nice device otherwise, and I did use it a lot as a slate with the screen swiveled around. It has a good touchscreen and makes a great slate device, much like the Viliv X70 that I have been using.

The X70 is a better slate than the S7 because it has no keyboard adding bulk and weight. If the UMPC can only be used in slate mode, there’s no need to have the keyboard. I will continue to give the S7 a try as time goes on, but that keyboard is making it hard.

Also arriving this week was the Lenovo ThinkPad T400s with the new multitouch feature. It had Windows 7 preinstalled and is designed to take full advantage of the new touch capabilities in the OS. I have to admit the ability to use 4 fingers on the screen simultaneously to manipulate things is cool, but I found these features to be hard to use on a laptop. I found the ergonomics to be uncomfortable for touching the screen.

Lenovo heard my complaints about multitouch notebooks and sent their x200 Tablet PC, also with multitouch. It has both an active and capacitive digitzer, so it can handle writing on the screen as well as manipulating the interface with touch. The x200 only arrived yesterday, and I haven’t put it down since it got here.

The x200 is easily the best Tablet PC I have used, and I’ve used many Tablets. It is small and light, and using the pen to write on the screen works perfectly. Microsoft has done a wonderful job with the Tablet functions in Windows 7, and I am getting great use out of it.

The addition of touch to the x200 is icing on the cake. Working the interface via touch is a natural in the slate configuration, unlike in notebook mode. Windows 7 touch features go a long way to making touch useful, and Lenovo has also done a good job integrating it with the ink capability.

Windows 7 makes it possible to pan in most windows, and sitting with the slate in my lap using my finger to scroll around the screen is simply awesome. The intellligent way that Win 7 switches between the big touch keyboard and the Tablet Input Panel (TIP) based on whether I touch the screen with my finger or the tablet pen is the way things should work.

That touch keyboard was pretty handy, and I liked the way the keys highlight when pressed. I also installed the uBoard keyboard that I have installed on every touch device I’ve used and was happy to find it works well on the x200. It stretched to the width of the screen automatically which made it nice and big for easy tapping of the keys.

I have been using Opera 10 on quite a few mobile devices since its release and I am thoroughly impressed with how well it runs. The Opera Turbo mode made it run so fast, especially when I was connected over 3G. Opera didn’t knock my old favorite Firefox out of default browser status, but it earned my respect more each day of use.

I have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of notebooks in MTM lately, so this week I had to clean house. I returned five laptops to the folks who loaned them to me, and the FedEx guy was impressed. Going back to their origin were the HP Mini 5101, Lenovo S10-2, S12, and the T400s. The T400s returned was the original model without the touch features, and it went back since the touch version came this week. It was nice getting some space back for use; every surface was covered with gear prior to sending these back.

e-Books of the Week

I finished the J. P. Beaumont series by J. A. Jance this week, and it’s amazing that I have read all 18 books in the series in just a few weeks. It was a bit sad to reach the end, but fortunately Jance has written another series involving Sheriff Joanna Brady of Arizona. Brady made an appearance in Fire and Ice, the 18th book of the series just completed. Jance wrote one novel , Partner in Crime, that stars both Beaumont and Brady, so I’m reading that now to seque between the two series.

Wrap-up

That’s the way my week was spent. New gear, and gear going away. I enjoy sharing each week with you and look forward to next week’s chat.

The Gear

The early part of the week was spent in preparation of the trip. I went through my usual process of deciding what gear should go with me. I always try to take as little as possible yet make sure I am covered no matter how things shake. The kit I took was very portable and it served me well, which proves my decisions were sound.

The MacBook served me well; no matter on what side of the Windows/ Mac fence you sit you cannot overturn my conviction that MacBooks are simply better for mobile work than the Windows varieties. Instant on, great battery life, and low maintenance. My MacBook sat in the bag until needed, and got right to work when the lid was opened. This was repeated countless times and it never disappointed me.

The little Viliv S5 UMPC also performed flawlessly and I was glad I brought it with me. I used it for simple things, especially reading e-books, leading up to the conference. The Mobilize conference is where the S5 got a real workout. I spent almost all of the day walking the show floors, it covered two stories, and I left the MacBook in the bag up in the staff workroom.

The S5 stayed with me all day, nestled in my front pants pocket, and it was there when I needed it. It was a common sight to see me walking around with the S5 in my hand, writing notes with the stylus, or even checking the live feed from the conference floor. The venue was blanketed with good Wi-Fi (shout out to the organizers for that) and I was able to keep up with the panels and keynotes while walking the floor. The S5 rocked for that.

I have installed Windows 7 on the S5 so it has the tablet bits as a result. I took lots of ink notes on the screen using Windows Journal. It worked very well and a lot of folks commented on that when they saw me. I did so many video interviews of attendees I lost count, including one with Motorola CEO Dr. Sanjay Jha, and I used the S5 to make quick notes in preparation for each interview. I had the S5 in my left hand while shooting the interview, the microphone in my right. I could glance down at the notes on the S5 to make sure I didn’t forget to ask any important question of the interviewee.

This system worked so well I was really impressed. It was like having a handheld Tablet PC all the time, and that’s because I did. Many of the interviewees were amazed at the capability of the S5, and virtually none of them knew such a device existed. These were all mobile tech luminaries for the most part, so that shows the lack of promotion on anyone’s part. Dr. Jha in particular was very impressed and asked a lot of questions about it. Maybe Motorola will be jogged to look into UMPCs? One can dream, right?

I also brought the Verizon MiFi with me as it accompanies me every time I leave Mobile Tech Manor. I had the good fortune to find good Wi-Fi almost everywhere, so it didn’t get used much. It came in really handy when needed, as it always does. I am still convinced that the MiFi is the mobile gadget of the year. It is simply game-changing given the utility it provides.

GPS in Taxis

I believe the standalone GPS device is far from dead. The inclusion of navigation systems in smartphones is likely hurting sales, but this trip I saw evidence that standalone GPS systems are getting more popular. On past trips I often wondered why taxis didn’t have GPS systems installed. They are the most logical uses I can imagine for them, but I never found taxis with GPS installed.

This trip that had changed. Three taxis I used for transportation not only had GPS systems of one flavor or another, the driver actually used them. I questioned each of these drivers about the systems, and they absolutely loved them. Each of these drivers had only recently purchased the GPS system, and all three admitted it was only because they had fallen in price. They each told me that when the systems fell to less than $200, they grabbed one. We often say that price is a critical factor for mobile technology, and this firmly proved that.

Mobilize 09 Conference

The Mobilize conference was the purpose of this trip, and it was a day chock-full of good things. The show had grown dramatically from last year, and it is a heady experience to find so many people focused on mobile technology in one place. It was great being immersed in the technology I hold so dear.

The focus of the event for me was certainly the unveiling of the Motorola CLIQ Android phone. I had the pleasure of actually playing with the CLIQ for about 20 minutes the day before it was announced. It was all a secret thing and I couldn’t take any photos, but it was a great opportunity to get my hands on such a ground-breaking phone for Motorola.

I was impressed with the CLIQ from the moment the Motorola CEO handed it to me. The phone is smaller than an iPhone, yet looks very much like an iPhone, with the addition of a sliding keyboard. I have to admit, that keyboard was a real joy to use and the phone is much more useful as a result.

The CLIQ was the most responsive Android phone I have tested, and that was in spite of the heavy graphical burden the MOTOBLUR messaging system puts on the system. The phone was very responsive, and it felt like a fast phone. I can’t wait to get a CLIQ in my hands for a more extended period. I want to thank Dr. Jha for giving me the opportunity to use the phone prior to launch.

I’d also like to thank Motorola for allowing Kevin and I to shoot the video of the CLIQ right before the phone was announced. It was a very comical scene with the two of us hunched over the phone with the Motorola rep shooting the video. We were literally in a darkened hallway behind the stage where the CEO was soon to make the official announcement, and it was a very clandestine meeting. Motorola handlers were preventing anyone from entering the hallway so the phone wouldn’t be seen by anyone other than us, and when we finished up there was a line of folks anxiously awaiting to enter the backstage area. Sorry folks, we didn’t mean to delay your entrance.

I spent a lot of time at the conference watching the crowd to see what kind of laptops were being used. I was absolutely shocked to not see a single netbook the entire day. I’m sure there must have been some there, but unlike other events I didn’t see a single one. This was a mobile tech-savvy crowd so that surprised me a lot. It did seem to me that the crowd was about evenly divided between Macs and ThinkPads. Lenovo is definitely the Windows notebook of choice among this crowd.

I had the pleasure at the event of seeing a lot of friends in the tech world I don’t get to see often, and I made some new friends. It was great seeing Andy Abramson, Ryan Block, Ed Hardy, Xavier Lanier and Robert Scoble once again. I was pleased to meet new friends Chris Ziegler and Brian Lam.

Wrap-up

I need to wrap this column up and get ready to head to the airport for the return trip. I didn’t have much time for reading this week so there is no “E-books of the week” coverage. I missed my e-books. I am excited to get back home for all the expected reasons, but also because there are two new gadgets on the way to Mobile Tech Manor. One is a secret I can’t tell you about for a few days, but it will be worth the wait. The other is the Viliv S7 UMPC, a 7-inch convertible netbook.

Until next week, take care.

Snow Leopard Hits the MacBook

Late last week I updated the MacBook with the Snow Leopard installation that the FedEx guy dropped off on Friday. Microsoft can learn a thing or two from Apple when it comes to OS upgrades. While I knew I would upgrade to Snow Leopard I wasn’t in a big rush to do so; it is largely an incremental update over Leopard. But Apple anticipated that, and when I visited the online Apple store early last week, the upgrade to Snow Leopard was all over the front page.

Apple informed me that the upgrade to Snow Leopard was only $29, and with free shipping they guaranteed it would be delivered by Friday. That turned the decision to upgrade into a no-brainer. Free shipping and I would receive the boxed set the very day it was available in the Apple stores. I duly purchased the upgrade and it showed up at 9:30 Friday morning for $29. See how that works, Microsoft?

I upgraded the MacBook later that day and it took almost an hour. There were no issues with the update and I have to say the MacBook runs noticeably faster with Snow Leopard. That’s the mark of a good update, the system performance is improved. There are minor interface improvements that I won’t get into here, and I am satisfied with the update.

I’m only having one issue since the update to Snow Leopard, and I’m not sure exactly what is causing the issue. It doesn’t happen a lot but sometimes when I am editing a new post in the WordPress editor the editor crashes when I try to add an image to a post. It has cost me a bit of work that I had to repeat and I’ve gotten in the habit of saving my draft posts often. It may be a coincidence that it started the same time as the Snow Leopard update but the timing is suspicious. This problem is only in Firefox so there are a lot of pieces involved– Snow Leopard, Firefox, WordPress. It’s certainly annoying.

Windows 7 Hits the MacBook

This week I installed Windows 7 on the MacBook using Parallels Desktop and I already shared that process which went very well. I have been running Windows 7 alongside OS X on the MacBook much of the time since the install and I am impressed with how well the whole thing works.

I use Spaces in OS X and have two spaces configured. I run the standard OS X desktop in Space 1 and Windows 7 in Space 2. It is a simple key command (OPTION – ←) to instantly switch from one OS to the other. This lets me use Windows 7 to test software, something I do quite a bit.

I get asked why I use Parallels and not VMware Fusion, and the answer is simple. I own Parallels, I don’t own VMware. I’ve heard that a lot of folks are quite happy with VMware, and I’m sure it is a good solution. I am happy with Parallels so no reason to switch.  I find the performance of Windows 7 using Parallels is very good on the MacBook with 3 GB of memory. It is definitely faster than on any netbook I have tried with Windows 7.

Screencasting

I will probably start doing screencasts more often than I have in the past. These are the screen recordings that show how a given program works in real time, and they are well received as a rule. Snow Leopard brought a new QuickTime player, and Apple added a screen recording function to the player. It is well implemented, and recordings are full screen captures of the desktop. The recordings can be made with or without audio.

I have tested this quite a bit and the video quality is outstanding, even for big desktops, while the resultant .MOV video file is fairly small. I will use this method to demonstrate programs going forward, as I get asked to do this quite frequently.

MiFi in the Home, Opera Turbo Rocks

I have adopted a new evening ritual involving a UMPC and the Verizon MiFi that is working well for me. I have gotten in the habit at night of sitting in front of the big screen TV with the Viliv X70 in hand, surfing the web while watching the tube.

The X70 is great for using in portrait orientation with that 7-inch screen, and if not for one little problem would be near perfect. My comfy chair in front of the TV is as far from my wireless router as it can be. The Wi-Fi signal is very low no matter what device I use in that chair but the X70 is worse than most. I have discovered that when I hold the X70 in portrait mode that my hand blocks the antenna, and that causes the signal strength to drop slightly.

Ordinarily this is not a big problem but when I am sitting in my chair, already pushing the limit of signal strength, the X70 keeps dropping off my network. That drove me crazy until I realized I had a simple solution, the Verizon MiFi. I set the MiFi on the table next to the chair, turn it on, and in seconds the X70 is connected to the 3G network. It works so well that I forget I am not on my home network. I can do this for four hours before the MiFi battery starts getting low.

This week Opera released version 10 and I installed it on the X70. I have been testing it a lot and I have come to really appreciate the Turbo mode while on the 3G network. Web sites load so quickly with Opera Turbo activated that surfing on the 3G network is actually faster than on the home network without it. They have done a wonderful job with Opera 10, and I am really impressed with it the more I use it. I do wish they would automatically pull in bookmarks from other browsers as part of the Opera install, though. All of the other browsers do this and Opera should too. It would make adoption a lot easier.

Mobilizing for a San Francisco Trip

Next week is our big Mobilize 09 conference in San Francisco and I have been thinking about the mobile kit I will take with me. I’m going to try something a little different for this trip, as the conference will be a big event to cover. It’s only a one day event but it will be at least 12 hours long for those of us working the conference and that requires some special gear in the bag.

I will take the 13-inch MacBook with me for regular work. I have the two batteries for the MacBook and I can get an easy 10 hours of use away from an outlet. Plus it’s easy to carry. I have also decided to bring the Viliv S5 UMPC with me, due to its small form. I will be working the conference floor quite a bit, doing video interviews and the like, and the S5 with its 5-inch screen will make it the perfect little tablet to use on the floor.

Last year I brought the HP 2710p Tablet PC with me, and while it worked well at times I wished it was a lot smaller and lighter. It was difficult at times to handle the video reviews and the Tablet PC at the same time. This year I’ll have the little S5 in my hand and it will be easier to handle. I have Windows 7 installed on the S5 so I’ll use Windows Journal with the stylus to jot quick notes on the show floor, which I can then refer to during the interviews. It should work pretty well and it takes almost no space in my gear bag. I also have two batteries for the S5 which will yield a solid 12 hours of use without an outlet.

Kevin will be the master of ceremonies for the conference and I’ll be doing the opening comments to help kick off the event. It is a good one-event covering all things mobile, and of course Motorola is going to launch their Android phone portfolio during the event. We will be live-streaming the conference here on jkOnTheRun, so be sure and look for that on Sept. 10.

e-Books of the Week

This week found me still in the grasp of the J. A. Jance series featuring Detective J. P. Beaumont in Seattle. I have been plowing through this series and this week I finished books 8 – 12. These are:

• Minor in Possession
• Payment in Kind
• Without Due Process
• Failure to Appear
• Lying in Wait

I love how each book in this series takes place a relatively short time after the previous book, which makes it feel like I am part of the character’s lives. I love this series the more I get into it, and the characters are developed nicely.

I have been reading using the X70 UMPC a lot, and I believe the 7-inch screen has allowed me to read more than usual due to the big screen. It has me thinking that if Apple does produce a big iPod, it could be the ereader of choice for me, easily.

Wrap-up

That’s it for another week, I hope you enjoyed sharing it with me. Next week will be a good one with the trip and the conference, and as usual I will look forward to sharing it with you. Until then, all the best.

I spent a good portion of this week with my sleeves rolled up, up to my elbows in one gadget or another. I started by installing Windows 7 on two UMPCs, at least that was my intention. The first upgrade was the Viliv S5 UMPC, which was harder than it should be.

Windows 7 on the UMPC

I have installed Windows 7 RTM on several PCs with no issues but the S5 presented a bit of a challenge. The S5 does not have an Ethernet port due to its small size, it relies totally on Wi-Fi for connectivity. I installed Windows 7 from a USB stick that I created for this purpose and it went smoothly. Windows 7 installs fairly quickly and it didn’t take long to get it on the S5.

The Viliv S5 requires a lot of drivers that Windows does not install to get all the hardware working properly, so I had prepared by downloading all the drivers and loading them on the USB stick. The fact is that Windows 7 has a lot of the hardware drivers either in the install itself or it gets them from a Windows Update immediately after the install, with a few key exceptions. Of course, that update is only possible if you have Internet connectivity, something the S5 lacked. I had the proper Wi-Fi hardware driver but I could not apply it as Windows could not see the radio.

The S5 lacks a physical radio on/off switch for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth; it relies on a Viliv supplied utility, VilivManager. The problem I ran into is that the S5 default is for the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios to be powered off upon boot. This means that Windows could not even tell they existed as they were off. Since Windows couldn’t see them, I couldn’t apply the drivers to get them going. A less than humorous Catch-22.

What I had to do was to get VilivManager installed and running well enough to let me turn the radios on. This required a little bit of finagling but once I had the radio turned on I was able to get the Wi-Fi driver applied. That let me connect to the web where I could run Windows Update. The rest was a piece of cake and Windows 7 runs very well on the S5. The interface is much more touch friendly than XP, although the special Windows 7 touch enhancements were not installed as only Microsoft certified touch digitizers get those.

Windows 7 Bricks Another UMPC

I liked Windows 7 on the S5 so much I decided to install it on the loaner Viliv X70 UMPC. I felt the 7-inch screen of the X70 would be a natural for Windows 7. I checked around on the web at various enthusiast web sites and a number of X70 owners indicated they had successfully installed Windows 7 so I set out to do the same.

Windows 7 began the install properly and went fairly quickly due to the SSD drive in the X70. It reached the point where it rebooted the X70 and then the trouble began. Right after that reboot the process hung, although it looked like it was completing the install. The activity light on the SSD was duly reflecting activity, but the install process wasn’t really doing anything.

I decided to interrupt it after sitting there for a couple of hours and redo the whole install. It went exactly as it did the first time and eventually hung up again. I was stuck at that point as it was dead in the water. I did some tweeting about it and quickly discovered that others with pre-production units like mine (I received it before the launch) also experienced the hang-up. Commercial units could be upgraded OK, but the pre-production units would hang up like mine did.

Upon hearing that others hit the same snag I decided to go back to Windows XP, and Viliv had me covered. They have a recovery partition (5 GB) on the SSD and all I had to do was boot the X70, hit the “C” key when the big Viliv boot screen appeared and the recovery process was initiated. In 20 minutes I had a fresh Windows XP install with all the drivers and utilities working as they should. Another hour of updating Windows and I was back in business. I am impressed with the recovery process that Viliv uses on their UMPCs. It is as fast and easy as any I have used in the past.

What I Carry Every Day

I get asked what device I carry every day, or how I choose which of the many gadgets I have in Mobile Tech Manor to throw in the bag. It’s a fair question without a simple answer. The philosophy I adhere to as far as mobile gear I carry is simple: I carry the smallest kit possible to cover all situations I may encounter when I leave the office.

That is an oversimplification but it is the basis for my decision process I go through before heading out the door. I find that any trip out the door will fit one of five possibilities:

1. Need performance and battery life
2. Need performance but not that much battery life
3. Simple running around, may have to get some work done
4. Running around, needing to work is not likely
5. Running around and do not want to work

1. The primary purpose of these day trips is to get work done, and a lot of it. I need a good performing laptop with me that can go hours without a power outlet. These types of work trips qualify for carrying the 13-inch MacBook. It is a good performing laptop and I have two batteries. I can get around 10 hours of work with those two batteries so this goes in the bag. It’s usually overkill but it weighs less than 5 pounds with the extra battery and it fits in my little backpack.

2. These trips are different than type 1 trips. The primary purpose of the trip is also to get work done but I don’t expect to need extra battery life. Most of the laptops at Mobile Tech Manor will get a good 5 hours on a charge and that’s all I need on these trips. I often take the loaner Lenovo ThinkPad T400s as it offers great performance and is lighter than the MacBook. The 14-inch wide screen displays a lot of information and it’s my gadget of choice for these trips. Some days I will take a netbook for these trips, as they are as small and light as can be while still doing a good job. I will usually take the HP Mini 5101 or the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2; both of these evaluation units are solid netbooks.

3. Some trips are just running around performing errands and the like but I believe the random opportunity may present itself for me to get some work done. This would be in a coffeeshop or the like and would be a short work session at best. If I suspect that may be the case I often take the Viliv X70 UMPC along with the Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. The 7-inch X70 is good for work sessions with its netbook equivalent screen resolution (1024×600) and the keyboard is full-sized to handle lots of writing. It’s a little desktop system that fits in a small gear bag and I love this kit.

4. Sometimes I head out for trips similar to the type 3 trip, mostly to run errands. I don’t think it’s likely I’ll need to work but I want to be covered just in case an opportunity crops up. This type of trip calls for the Viliv S5 UMPC due to its small size. I bring the keyboard and mouse with me just in case since they take up little room and bulk in the bag. The three gadgets combined make for a super little desktop system that can handle short work sessions without compromising too much.

5. The last kind of trip is my favorite. The sole purpose of these trips is to run around and I have no intention of working, no matter what. It’s good to clear the head with these trips from time to time. All work makes James a dull boy. I do carry the Palm Pre with me since it’s my main phone, and I often throw the iPhone 3G in my pocket. I always want an e-book reader with me and for these trips that’s the iPhone.

I should point out that for the work trips (1-4), the Verizon MiFi is always in the bag. That guarantees I will have web connectivity no matter where I end up. I always have the iPhone in the bag for the e-book reading, and the Palm Pre is in my pocket.

e-Books of the Week

This week has been a big week for e-books, both the ones I read and the Sony Reader announcement. Sony introduced several models of their e-book Reader line, and more importantly announced an affiliation with the New York Public Library (NYPL) to make it possible for Reader owners to “borrow” e-books from the library. I’ll have more to say on this soon, I did some light checking at the NYPL web site and discovered they already loan e-books. They offer e-books in ePub and Mobipocket compatible formats now, as long as you have a library card.

What I find interesting is that library e-books have largely the same constraints as the physical variety. The library buys a few copies of each e-book they intend to lend, and when those copies are checked out of the library, no one else can borrow that book. It seems strange, given that e-books are not physical things per se, but that’s the way it is. That’s why the NYPL has a big “recently returned” section in the e-book library.

You must have a library card to check e-books out of the NYPL, which makes sense. As near as I could tell that means that only New York state residents can check e-books out online. It’s not clear if the Sony deal will open that up and if so, will it just be restricted to the U. S. If they open it up, that limited number of copies will become a big factor limiting availability of popular e-books.

As busy as I was this week I was able to spend a fair bit of time reading e-books. I mentioned last week how happy I was to find a new detective series, the J. P. Beaumont series by J. A. Jance. I was even happier than I thought as this week I read the third through the seventh book in the series, and I started the eighth. The books I read:

• Trial by Fury
• Taking the Fifth
• Improbable Cause
• A More Perfect Union
• Dismissed with Prejudice

I find I am breezing through these novels as Ms. Jance is great at creating believable mysteries involving realistic characters. I enjoy the mysteries, and I like the major players in them. I am going to be broke getting through the remaining ten books in the series.

Wrap-up

Windows 7 dominated my week, and I am liking it very much on netbooks and UMPCs. It seems to be easier to operate on lower resolution screens than XP and performance is almost as good as XP. Thanks for sharing my week once again, and until next week- take care of yourself.

Netbooks- What’s in a Name?

Netbooks are growing more popular than ever. I see them out in public all the time, and stores have them in stock as a matter of course. The companies that produce them are still introducing new models, and the prices keep dropping. I don’t believe prices can keep dropping much more, but as usually happens with computers I think components will get better and the prices will hold steady. Which is sort of like a price drop.

I have a few netbooks in MTM currently but my favorite of the week is the HP Mini 5101. The metal casing, small size and good performance make it my choice to grab when I’m heading out the door. The good performance is aided by the fast hard drive; HP decided to only offer it with a 7,200 rpm drive and I am convinced that’s making a difference over similarly configured netbooks. The other netbooks have either a 5,400 rpm or worse, a 4,200 rpm drive. Those netbooks may be gentler on the battery but based on my experience with the 5101 and the faster drive, I’ll take the fast drive every time.

That big 160 GB drive made it easy to install Windows 7 RTM this week. It was a pretty painless install once I made a good USB stick for the install. Netbooks don’t have optical drives, so you either plug in an external drive or use a USB stick, and I chose the latter method. It’s not difficult to build a USB stick for the install; I used the clear instructions and utilities I found on the web. The beauty of this method is that I now have a USB stick that can be used to install Windows 7 on any netbook. I used a nice, big, 16 GB USB stick, which is big enough to allow me to store programs and other needed files for the install in addition to the Windows 7 files.

When I installed Windows 7 Ultimate on the Mini 5101, it took about half an hour. When it was completed I only found a few things that would not work on the Mini, the most pressing of which was no Wi-Fi. I was ready for that possibility, and since the wired Ethernet was working I plugged in and went to the HP Support site to get what I needed. I downloaded drivers for Vista Ultimate, which all worked OK under Windows 7.

Once I installed the wireless LAN drivers I was able to get Wi-Fi working. I ran a Windows Update, after which only two other components were still not working. I downloaded the Synaptics drivers and utilities to get the touchpad working fully. It was doing OK, but the Synaptics configuration options weren’t installed and the scroll areas on the touchpad weren’t working, either.

The last USB “unknown device” was the HP DriveGuard component. DriveGuard is the sensor that detects when the netbook is dropped or jolted, at which point the drive heads are parked to protect the disk from damage. I downloaded the utility from HP and everything was working normally once it was installed.

I’m happy with Windows 7 on the Mini; it’s performing well and the new interface is better for netbooks than XP. I am particularly enjoying having a big battery gauge on the desktop, something that is incredibly useful on a netbook. Aero was working from the first boot with no noticeable performance hit. Once Windows 7 was working properly I immediately loaded up my “must-have” programs to get busy. The list, in the order of importance, for me is:

• Firefox
• Google Chrome
• GoBoingo
• SnagIT
• Skype
• Tweetdeck
• OpenOffice
• PDF Complete (pre-installed by HP, downloaded the Vista version)

These programs I had copied to the USB stick that I used for the install so I just loaded them back-to-back. All told, it took me about an hour to get the system built the way I wanted, which is not bad for Windows.

I always install Firefox first and immediately add the Xmarks add-on. This quickly syncs all of my bookmarks and builds my bookmark toolbar in Firefox and brings my environment up to snuff. I then install Chrome and tell it to import the bookmarks from Firefox and in just a few minutes I have both browsers updated with all of my information. I like to have both browsers on Windows systems as I usually find Chrome to be faster, but I do like Firefox better. Google Chrome is faster on the Mini, so it’s my default browser.

I do have one odd situation with Firefox on the Mini 5101. It existed under Windows XP, too, so it’s not a Windows 7 problem. When I use Google Reader in Firefox on the Mini, I usually hit F11 to put Firefox in full-screen mode. I then use the j and k keys to go to the next/previous item in Reader. This doesn’t work in Firefox on the Mini, and I’ve checked everything I can think of. Hitting the j or k key does absolutely nothing in Reader, something I’ve never seen on any other computer. This works fine under the Chrome browser; it’s just Firefox that will not work properly. All other key shortcuts work in Firefox as they should; it’s only the j and k keys that won’t work. This is maddening as they are the most used keys in Reader the way I work. Or rather, the way I should work. I absolutely have to use Chrome for Reader for this reason alone, and my research on the problem has turned up nothing. This only happens on the Mini 5101, and under both XP and Win 7. It is very bizarre.

Speaking of netbooks, this week I was involved in a little debate over Twitter about the term, yet again. Some people are taking offense to the fact that people refer to the new CULV-based laptops as netbooks. My position is, who cares what we call them? They, like netbooks, are small, thin, light, cheap notebooks. They aren’t quite as small, thin, light or cheap as netbooks, but almost. I just can’t get excited about what we call netbooks and what we don’t. They are little laptops, and that’s good enough for me. It’s what they do that’s important to me, not what we call them.

Whatever we call them, I’ve been promised an evaluation unit that I’m excited about. The Mimo 720-S is the external 7-inch display that hooks up to any computer, or netbook, via USB, which adds a touchscreen for additional screen space. This Mimo folds flat for mobility and while I don’t imagine it’s something I’d routinely carry around, it’s cool that I could if need be. I’m thinking that it would be very practical to have a small second screen while working at a desk with a netbook. It’s very cool that it’s powered via the USB, so no brick required.

The Battery is Dead

I ordered a Seidio extended battery for my Palm Pre to add a little battery life. I’m using the free Sprint Navigation service on the Pre and it eats the battery pretty quickly. The Seidio battery is the same size as the original Palm battery meaning it can use the same Pre back for the Touchstone charger. I used the Seidio happily for a week and then one morning I awoke to discover that the Pre had a dead battery, even though it was sitting on the Touchstone charger.

I did some troubleshooting and determined that the Seidio battery would no longer charge with the Touchstone. I could direct charge it via USB but not on the Touchstone charger. I contacted Seidio and they rushed a replacement battery to me. They said no one else has reported this problem.

I installed the new Seidio and so far it’s worked fine all week, though I’m keeping a wary eye on it to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Other than this one problem, I find the 15 percent extra battery to be useful.

e-Books of the Week

Time was tight for reading this week but I still got through some good books. I did most of my reading on the HTC Advantage and that 5-inch screen definitely let me read faster than on the smaller phone screens. I started off the week with a good thriller, “The Siege” by Stephen White. This novel found suspended Boulder cop Sam Purdy in Miami where events sucked him into dealing with a hostage situation on the Yale campus. It was an enjoyable read by all counts.

The next book I read this week has excited me as it exposed me to a new detective series I had previously missed. “Until Proven Guilty” by J. A. Jance is the first book in a series that is now up to 18 novels and it introduced detective J. P. (Beau) Beaumont. Beau is a regular guy who is a good detective in Seattle and I enjoyed the heck out of this book. I was so excited to find another good series to read, and I wasted no time in picking up the second book. “Injustice for All” continued the story of Beaumont right where the first book left him and I raced right through this one, too. I’m just starting the third book in the series and only have 16 more to go. My wallet is going to get awfully thin. Ms. Jance has quickly moved into my “favorite author” club.

Wrap-up

That’s it for this week, I hope you enjoyed sharing it with me. Netbooks definitely offer the most bang for the buck when it comes to mobile devices. Wow, I just checked and this week I have published 12,450 words! It was definitely a busy week. Until next week, don’t sit in one place too long — be mobile.

My daughter, son-in-law and two grand-kids headed out last weekend for their trip back to South Dakota. They drove back with few stops, just as they drove down here for the visit. It shows that it’s good to be young as each leg is 24 hours of driving but the two of them shared driving duties, and they went straight through. I had a wonderful time during their visit, and I certainly didn’t work as hard as usual while they were here. I don’t get to see them often enough so it’s worth it.

Are Netbooks Good Enough?

I got a chance to get my daughter’s reaction to different laptops in Mobile Tech Manor. She brought her own laptop to check work email but I had her use some of the netbooks lying around to see how she liked them. She is not into tech like me, and she wouldn’t know a netbook from a UMPC.

I started her off small with the Lenovo S10-2 with the 10-inch screen. It’s small and light and she was very impressed with it. She found it more than powerful enough to do what she needed and she liked the keyboard. I then graduated her to the HP Mini 5101 and she like it even better. The chiclet keys threw her off at first but she quickly determined that she really liked them. She had never seen a netbook before and she sure got a crash course in them at Mobile Tech Manor.

What impressed her most of all was the low prices of them. She kept asking why she spent so much on the 17-inch laptop she bought earlier this year, when these little netbooks did the job. She likes her big 17-inch screen but admitted the 10-inch screens were fine for what she does.

I let her use the HP Mini 1000 netbook and her impression of using it surprised me. She was amazed that the Mini 1000 was so much smaller than the other two netbooks, yet the keyboard and screen were the same size. She liked using the 1000 but at the end of the day she said she preferred the other two. Why? Because the small, plastic Mini 1000 made her feel like she’d break it. That’s the first time I’ve heard that from anyone.

The last netbook I had her use was the Lenovo S-12 with the big 12-inch screen. She only needed 5 minutes with the S-12 to decide that’s the one she’d use for the remainder of her visit. The bigger 12-inch screen, full-size keyboard and the higher screen resolution sold her. She was amazed that it was only slightly more expensive than the other netbooks.

Both of the Lenovo netbooks have the face recognition software (VeriFace) that uses the web cam to log the user into the laptop. I had both of them configured to recognize my face and my daughter found it totally cool and high tech that she had to hold them up in front of my face to log into the netbook. I offered to enroll her face but she thought it was funnier to watch it recognize my face. She was unaware that such security software existed outside of James Bond movies.

It was good to hear her thoughts on all of the netbooks. She ended her visit convinced that a $400 netbook is all she needs, and she’ll consider that next time she plans to purchase a laptop.

I Hate Patch Tuesday

Patch Tuesday is the day Microsoft releases patches for all versions of Windows. These usually deal with security issues to provide protection from new threats, along with system updates. Last Tuesday was Patch Tuesday and let me tell you, I hate that day.

I currently have 8 Windows laptops installed in Mobile Tech Manor, each of them in varying stages of evaluation. Patch Tuesday is thus a big chore for me, especially when Microsoft releases patches for all versions of Windows. These 8 notebooks are running Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, and all of them had at least 11 patches to download and install. It only took about 20 minutes to do each system, but that was times 8. I had to watch them too as some of the updates required user intervention mid-process, so I couldn’t just fire them all up at once.

I understand the necessity to apply the updates; there are big, bad hacker people out there and this is the only way to keep them at bay. I just hate going through the process with so many notebooks. Not that I’m complaining I get to test so many notebooks, heaven forbid I give that impression. I love it.  I just hate Patch Tuesday.

The Best Headphones I Ever Lost

A year ago I bought the best headphones I’ve ever used with a phone. The Bang & Olufsen Earset 3 were expensive, but they were great for listening to music on the iPhone. They were also a great phone headset, and I attended many telephone conferences using them. They worked great with all of my phones, not just the iPhone. That is until they disappeared.

I am very careful with my gear. I do not abuse gear and I baby things to make them last forever. I am very good about keeping track of the gear, and I have never lost anything. This week I needed the B&O headset for a teleconference and was shocked to not find them where they normally live. I always put things back where they belong so they’ll be there the next time I need them, but they were not where they should have been.

I looked everywhere. I combed every gear bag on the bag tree, I emptied every drawer in the office and I tore the place apart. No dice, they were just missing.

I sat quietly in my chair and thought about the last time I had seen them. I figured that would tell me where to look. I thought about it for a long while and realized the last place I had seen them was in a hotel room in Carmel. Oops. I had taken them on my business trip a few weeks ago just in case I might need them. I remembered putting them in the desk drawer in my hotel room so they’d be there when I needed them. Unfortunately I never did, and I am certain I left them there.

I called the hotel to explain my situation, but of course they were never turned in. They are gone forever, and I can’t bring myself to spend big bucks to replace them.

Game of the Week

I bought Civilization Revolution for the iPhone this week and I’ve wasted far too much time playing it. It is the best game I’ve played yet on the iPhone, and it is completely true to the series. The game controls are very well done and game play is a lot of fun. I completely forget I’m on the small iPhone while playing the game, and that’s a great tribute to the developers. It was the best five bucks I’ve spent in a good while.

e-Books of the Week

I was very excited to see that James Patterson had released the latest Alex Cross book in e-book form. The Cross series is one of my favorite and Alex Cross is one of my favorite protagonists. The 14th book of the series, Cross Country, starts out in typical Patterson style with whole families being murdered by some really evil killers. Alex gets sucked into the investigation as one of the victims is an old girlfriend of his. Unfortunately, this book turned out to be my least favorite book in the Alex Cross series.

The story quickly moved to Nigeria, and unbelievably DC detective Cross heads to Africa to chase the killer. The story changes at this point to become a vehicle for Patterson to describe the plight of the people in this part of the world. I am sympathetic to this but this is a novel. I read novels to be entertained, not to have a cause thrust on me. The story got more and more unbelievable as a result, and by the end of the book I was thoroughly disappointed.

On a happier note, I am now entranced by another Darrell Bain novel, The Long Way Home. Bain tells stories that take place in the future involving regular people. I believe that’s why I like his books so much; it’s entertaining to read about real people having adventures in the future. I can tell this one will be finished all too quickly.

Wrap-up

That’s my week, I hope you enjoyed sharing it with me. I’ll be back next week, same time, same channel. Until then, take care.

Running All Over Town

The week has passed in a blur, with countless trips to various attractions all over Houston. We visited the Houston Zoo, Chuck E Cheese and made many trips to visit relatives all over the area. My mobile gear accompanied me everywhere. I would prepare a gear bag in the morning that would be ready at a moment’s notice to hit the road. It was a lot like old times for me, when I worked outside most of the time.

I used a lot of different gear this week; what I took with me depended on my expectations for that particular day. I took the Viliv S5 UMPC on days when I didn’t think I’d get much of an opportunity to work. I’d carry a small gear bag on those days and throw the S5, portable keyboard and mouse inside the bag. This was a great fit for those days, as I could use the S5 in my hand for brief chances to check my email, surf the web and correspond with co-workers. When longer periods cropped up, I’d pop out the keyboard and mouse and use the UMPC as a little notebook computer. I created a lot of content using this system and it was a testament to the method that such a tiny kit could be fully functional.

On days when I felt I’d likely have more time to work somewhere, I’d take the same kit but replace the S5 with the Viliv X70. The larger 7-inch screen made it easier to work for longer periods, and the X70 case with the built-in stand worked just like a netbook with the keyboard and mouse. It was useful to get by with such a small bag, as I had to carry it around many more hours than I got to actually use it and work. Small and light saved the day (and my back).

There were days when I had deadlines that couldn’t be missed, and I knew I’d need to work longer and write much more than I did other days. The good folks at HP sent me a Mini 5101 to evaluate and it came in handy on those days. I’d throw the Mini 5101 alone in my gear bag and hit the road with the family. I was able to pull the netbook out of the bag and get some serious work done without missing a beat. I absolutely love the keyboard on the 5101, I could type like a speeding locomotive without any compromises.

I am happy to report that the one thing I didn’t like originally about the Mini 5101 keyboard has a simple fix. I had lamented that the Function keys could only be accessed in conjunction with the Fn key. This was a minor fault but I found it annoying given the way I work. Several readers suggested that perhaps there was a BIOS setting to change this and indeed there was. It was a simple setting change after which the F1 – F12 keys work as I prefer. You readers rock my world!

The one constant item in every gear bag I used this week was the faithful Verizon MiFi. I used the MiFi every day and it made connectivity something I never gave a thought. That’s the mark of a great tool.

With all the running around we did this week, the Sprint Navigation service on the Palm Pre was also used every day. It is the full Telenav navigation system and it is a great deal for Sprint to include it for free in the Simply Everything plan. I used it even for trips when I was familiar with the route, as the traffic notification saved us from traffic tie-ups on more than one occasion.

I used the Pre in the car for navigation with a windshield mount I bought a long time ago. It is the Arkon CM920 mount that is a universal mount for phones and PDAs. It attaches to the windshield via a suction mount and the phone sits securely in the universal holder. The gooseneck extension is flexible and permits putting the phone just where it is needed to use the navigation screen, while permitting clear vision for driving. The simple push-button release makes it a breeze to remove the phone when needed. This is one of the best purchases I’ve made for mobile gear.

Writing Software

I didn’t have much time for fiction writing but I did pick up two programs to use when I get back to it. StoryMill is a program I having been trying (demo) for a while and I decided to buy it. It can handle just about any writing project, and offers as much control over the project as desired. I intend to really dive into it when I get back to work with the fiction.

I picked up another program by the same developers of StoryMill — Mariner Software. I have been considering a using a daily journal to capture my thoughts. I have long felt that it is important to do so but have never put the proper effort into do so. I had a couple of people recommend MacJournal as a good program to facilitate that effort. Several writers showed me how it can even be useful in writing projects. Based on those recommendations I plopped down my money and installed it this week. I haven’t spent much time with it yet, but on the surface it looks like it will do what I need.

The only downside to both of these programs is they are Mac only. I use a lot of Windows notebooks and netbooks, so I won’t have access to the information on those devices. I have to determine a way around that.

New Camera

I have been needing a good HD camera to shoot more video of cool gear, so I pulled the trigger on a new one. The Canon VIXIA HF200 arrived this week and it is smaller than I thought it would be. It packs a ton of features in that small package and I need to spend a lot of time to get familiar with it — time I didn’t have this week. I did use it to shoot the 5101 video this week, but it’s not encoded in true HD so I have to change my methodology going forward. Expect good videos down the road.

e-Book of the Week

I didn’t have much time to read e-books this week either, and it’s been killing me. I have covered reading the Sten Series by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch, a wonderful sci-fi series that kept me entertained for days and days. The problem I eventually ran into was that only the first seven books of the 8-book series was available in e-book format. I read up to the final book in the series and then couldn’t get the last book. That was a couple of months ago — talk about frustrated!

It was with great delight that I heard from author Allan Cole that book 8, Empire’s End, was finally available for the Kindle. I grabbed it so fast that my head spun and I am in the middle of this great book. It is wrapping up the entire series and shedding light on how things came to be. I am both anxious to finish it but reluctant to do so at the same time. That’s the mark of a great series.

Wrap-up

That’s the way my week has gone down at Mobile Tech Manor. Lots of mobile gear used in many different places. I hope you enjoyed sharing the week with me. See you next week.

I had a great trip to California but sadly it was all too short. That meant I had to get back in the swing of “normal” life this past week, whatever that means. I spent some quality time with my favorite UMPC, the Viliv S5 Premium. The S5 has been with me for weeks now and I felt it was time to seriously try one of the utilities that Viliv supplies with the device.

Updating the UMPC the easy way

The iViliv utility is an update tool that helps owners keep the UMPC up-to-date, but I have to admit I haven’t run it as I should. I tried it when I first got the S5 but of course it simply told me that everything was up-to-date because it was new. I then forgot about iViliv and haven’t tried it since then. I wasn’t even sure what exactly the program updated, whether it was the Viliv utilities that were preinstalled or the system software.

I firmly believe in keeping computers updated so this week I fired iViliv up and got a gander at how it works. It turns out that it is much more comprehensive than I thought. I was surprised to see that iViliv updated hardware drivers, some programs and all of the special Viliv utilities that were installed on the UMPC. When I started it up it scanned the entire system to see what version of each of the above was currently installed, and then it checked the Viliv database to see if there was new versions that needed installing.

The scanning process took a few minutes due to the sheer amount of information it was checking. Once it had compared my installed versions with the ones available from Viliv, it determined that I needed quite a bit of updating. The iViliv program showed me a list of everything that it checked, with needed updates ticked off for my convenience. Once I hit the Install button it began what turned into a 30 minute update process.

On the hardware driver front it installed a new Intel Graphics driver and the BlueSoleil Bluetooth software. The latter was a 78 MB download which took a good while given how slow the Viliv server was running. Each of these updates downloaded and then installed back to back, a painless process.

Once the hardware drivers were done it then updated some programs such as Adobe Air. I was surprised to see that iViliv was keeping tabs on non-Viliv software. I expected it would only update the Viliv supplied utilities but that was not the case.

The Viliv utilities presented the final update category and it found new versions of all of them. Viliv is obviously continuing to improve their utilities and thus new versions were installed. These updates included the iViliv utility itself, the Cube interface, the soft keyboard and the Viliv Manager.

Once the update process was complete I rebooted the S5 and was then running a totally updated system. The inclusion of a comprehensive update utility was welcome as it gave me a one-stop update process. I wish all OEMs would provide something like this. Many do but not all and it was very helpful.

Task solution

I have been happily using the Palm Pre for a while now but one thing that has been bugging me is the lack of integration with Google Tasks. The Pre has a simple task app but it doesn’t sync with Google or anything else, I don’t think. Since the Pre is not the only device I use I have not been using Tasks.

I am very task oriented and I desperately needed a task solution that I could use on all of my devices. I have used Remember The Milk (RTM) on the iPhone in the past, but had stopped using it because I needed it on all of my devices. I decided to try it again, since I had paid for the Pro version way back when. I am glad I did because it’s working out pretty well.

The first thing I did was make sure it was working well on the iPhone, since that’s where I originally used it. There was a new version so I updated it and found that while pretty simple it was adequate for my needs.

The next step in getting a good solution was to get it integrated with GMail. This would make sure I could access my Tasks no matter what computer I might be using. I have all of my other information in the cloud for this reason, and it made sense to have my tasks there too. Happily, RTM has a GMail gadget that can be installed within GMail which adds a sidebar for working with the tasks. It was easy to install and works well. I can always see my task list while in GMail, which I am running all day. I can add tasks, edit task details and mark tasks complete (my favorite thing).

So at that point I had RTM working well on the iPhone and on all of my computers, so the only thing left was the Pre. There is no native RTM app for the Pre, something I hope they produce, but Kevin recently pointed out a good way to get it working on the Pre. There is a web version of RTM that is optimized for the iPhone, and it turns out this web page works well on the Pre too. The only thing I can’t do on the Pre in RTM is mark a task complete, but I can live with that.

So far this week I am pleased with the RTM method of working with tasks. I can interact with my task list no matter what device I am using, and each of those devices has a version of RTM that is optimized for the particular screen it’s running on.

Grandkids are coming

My oldest daughter Misty and her family got here last night for a week’s visit and I am excited to see them again. They drove in from South Dakota and did it in a single day, with few stops. It must be great to be young and tireless.

I will be spending a lot of time with them as I don’t get to see them nearly enough. My two grandsons, Grady and Beau, are getting so big already. We’ll be doing a lot of fun things the week they are here so my work time will be sporadic and truly mobile. It will be like the old days, me working in different places all day.

E-books of the week

I read two e-books this week, and if you’ve followed my reading list over time you are familiar with how varied my tastes can be. These two books were very different but each pleasing to read. The first one I read was Relentless by Dean Koontz. This was a disturbing story of a couple of authors who get on the bad side of a critic. A really bad, evil critic. The story kept me turning (swiping actually) pages for hours, the mark of a great story. I was sad to see the book end, the definitive trait of a great story. Koontz is one of those rare authors who can tell a story that starts out light and happy, yet gets very scary quickly. I enjoyed the heck out of this story.

The other book I read was one I’ve read many times over the years. I felt like revisiting my friend Bilbo Baggins, and I read The Hobbit again. It never ceases to amaze me how I discover something new every single time I read through the Tolkein tales. It’s been a few years since I read The Hobbit and it was like picking it up for the first time, I was quickly engrossed in the story.

Wrap-up

That was pretty much how I spent my week. I got a lot done and felt very fulfilled in doing so. Next week I will be working all over the place, and I look forward to sharing it with you. Until then, take care.