The picture shows my Kohjinsha SH6 at work – connected to a full-sized keyboard, mouse, and monitor. You should also be able to see my Treo 700p connected to the SH6 for syncing/charging.
So what do I like and not like about the SH6 after 4 days of ownership, including a day and a half at work?
Dislikes:
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Bluetooth and WiFi shut off when the unit goes to sleep requiring a manual restart when waking up the unit. This is actually a pretty minor gripe since I’ve already gotten into the habit of hitting FN-F1 and FN-F4 to turn them back on whenever I wake up the SH6, but it’s a gripe nevertheless.
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The mouse pointer by the screen is pretty stiff to use, although it may loosen up over time.
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The Japanese keyboard has punctuation characters in non-standard positions, although again I’m learning to adapt to it.
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It always reverts back to a 1600 X 1200 resolution when first hooking it up to an external monitor. That’s a little small for my tired old eyes and I end up having to manually reset it to a lower resolution for ease of viewing.
That’s it!
Likes:
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The screen: it’s gorgeous, brilliant, and very visible in any light conditions up to full sunlight.
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The size: it’s so small and light it’s a pleasure to carry and pack for travel.
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Performance: I’m still amazed at how well this device runs Vista Home Premium including Aero Glass and all the applications I need. Believe it or not, with some of the software I run it’s actually faster than my Electrovaya Tablet PC! Taking average performance of all the software I use, I’d say it’s only a little slower overall than my Tablet. See my video on this topic to witness its performance with your own eyes!
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Keyboard: Wonderful feel and just barely large enough for me to touch-type on it at virtually full speed.
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All the buttons: It has a plethora of buttons for ease of use. On the keyboard there’s a nice touch-pad (with left-click on tap) and left and right mouse buttons. Around the screen, and very handy when using it in slate mode, are a D-pad, mouse pointer, launcher button, shutter for Webcam, rotation button, enter button, brightness control, scrolling buttons, and left and right mouse buttons.
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The Webcam: it works right away with Skype video calls without any configuration needed.
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SD and CF slots: I use the CF slot with my Neuros Video Recorder 2 to quickly get TV shows and movies onto my SH6 for viewing while traveling, and the SD card for transferring still pictures and videos from my Sanyo VPC-CG65 6MP MPEG-4 Digital Camcorder (which is what I’ve been using to create all of the videos for this blog).
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Did I mention the performance?
August 28, 2007 at 12:45 pm |
[...] Michael has posted a likes/dislikes post about the Kohjinsha SH6. Tags: Kohjinsha+SH6, UMPC Ultra Mobile [...]
August 28, 2007 at 1:27 pm |
i’ve heard that battery life is abysmal. what are your thoughts about it?
August 28, 2007 at 1:53 pm |
Did you try the handwriting for quick note taking using OneNote?
What about screen rotation?
How convienient is it to hold the Kohji in tablet-portrait format?
Do you know what “tweaks” were applied to make the system snappier, in addition to the 2 gigs of ram?
Do you have an antivirus running? Anti-spyware? Indexing?
Sorry for all these questions, but when compairing Chippy’s video and yours, there’s a significant difference! Thanks
August 28, 2007 at 2:01 pm |
Nice. Thanks.
August 28, 2007 at 2:22 pm |
Nikottin,
I don’t use OneNote, but the little handwriting I’ve tried on the SH6 works fine. It’s easy to hold the SH6 in tablet-portrait format and you can rotate the screen through 360 degrees using the Rotate button.
I only did the following tweaks to Vista:
- Turned off Sidebar
- Turned off indexing
- Turned off following visual effects: animate windows when minimizing and maximizing, fade or slide menus into view, fade or slide ToolTips into view, fade out menu items after clicking, show shadows under menus, slide open combo boxes, slide taskbar buttons, use a background image for each folder type
I’m running AVG Free antivirus software and Windows Defender. Also, I’m using the Balanced peformance profile.
Did Chippy’s system have 2GB of memory when he shot his video? Also, I got my SH6 from Dynamism using their Vista image, while Chippy got his from Conics. There may be some differences in how each image was configured. Finally, if I’m not mistaken his was running Vista Home Basic during the video while mine is running Vista Home Premium. Of course one would think Premium would be slower, but who knows!
Michael
August 28, 2007 at 2:23 pm |
When you say ’sleep’, isn’t that a Vista function that can be altered? For example, you can choose to turn off the monitor and/or the hard drive. What if you tell Vista to not turn off the hard drive?
August 28, 2007 at 2:41 pm |
See http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/fastsleepandresume.mspx for an explanation of Vista’s Fast Sleep and Resume function. This state is also automatically entered on the SH6 when you close the screen over the keyboard.
I normally never shutdown my SH6, I just put it into sleep mode. I also did that with my Tablet. I only restart when it’s required by a software install or update, and only power off when I’m traveling.
Michael
August 28, 2007 at 3:22 pm |
Thanks Michael for that fast answer. It’s great to have all the tweaks listed. Really precious! Kohjinsha/Dynamis/Conics should use these “by default”…
Chippy was indeed using Windows Vista home basic, but he did have a 2 gig ram. While he went rapidly through the features, I had the impression he’s system was slower than yours. Maybe it is an artifact?
Could you tell me whether you can let your wrist rest on the frame while writing on the screen. Does it feel awkward? Being a light weighted touchscreen, I would expect some vectoring if one does not either let his hand either in the air or on the frame.
Again, thanks a lot!
August 28, 2007 at 3:23 pm |
Oh yes, regarding the battery, do you also have 2 hours at max?
August 28, 2007 at 3:35 pm |
Nikottin,
I reallly haven’t done enough handwriting with the unit to comment on screen vectoring. One of the reasons I wanted the SH6 as my UMPC was that it came with a keyboard, and I’m much more of a keyboard user than a handwriting user. Over time I’ll likely be able to better comment on this topic.
I just took a quick peek at Chippy’s video again and he doesn’t start a single program on it, so I’m not sure why you think my machine runs faster than his. You’re not confusing his SH6 video with his Everun video, are you?
My battery life seems to be about 2-1/4 hours. Since I’m just about always near an electrical outlet, except during my twice a week 1 hour flight, it’s not an issue for me.
Michael
August 28, 2007 at 4:01 pm |
Michael,
Can you comment on whether the SH6 runs warm or hot and if so, where do you feel the warmth.
August 28, 2007 at 4:21 pm |
The SH6 runs about as warm as my Electrovaya Tablet did, and in the same area: the lower right hand quadrant on the bottom of the unit. It’s right by where the fan outlet vent is located on the SH6. The SH6 has never run hot for me, at least not so far. By the way, rumors of a load fan noise aren’t true either, at least not with my unit. I can only hear the fan at all for very brief moments during intense CPU usage and most of the time I don’t even notice when it happens.
August 28, 2007 at 5:37 pm |
I feel your pain with the “non-US standard” keyboard. I tried using a German-layout keyboard once (at the time, that was all that was available locally) and it drove me nuts. I never did get the hang of it. I eventually got hold of a “normal” keyboard, but before that I found a company that made little stickers you could put on each key on your keyboard so that, in conjunction with keyboard mapping software in the OS, you could re-make the keyboard into a proper US QWERTY layout. It may be a bit extreme, but it’s certainly an option if you find it hard to adjust to the Japanese keyboard.
August 28, 2007 at 6:44 pm |
The Japanese keyboard isn’t really that bad and I’m actually getting used to it. I got some experience in working with non-US keyboards when I worked for a computer manufacturer in Europe.
Michael
August 28, 2007 at 11:40 pm |
I wonder if the battery is of a lower quality…Yeah, it’s said to be a “3 cell” but are all 3 cells identical? Posters at other forums said on a McCaslin platform like this, one should get around 3 hours with all radios on. That’s what a Samsung Ultra gets with its 3 cell. The Ultra has similar components apparently including the screen. If the battery is indeed at fault, then there is nothing wrong with the electronic design as chippy and others have suggested.
August 29, 2007 at 1:45 am |
I guess my biggest issue with the keyboard was that I had a laptop with a US keyboard that I used at the same time. The German keyboard was for my desktop PC. Going back and forth between the two keyboards — often in the same session — was more tedious than things needed to be. If they had both been German keyboards I probably would have adjusted in time, but I found the mixed versions to be a real pain. On the other hand, I didn’t really like the prospect of putting little stickers on each key, either. Fortunately, a trip to the US solved that problem.
August 29, 2007 at 7:53 pm |
Is it possible to install a miniPCI EV-DO card internally?
August 29, 2007 at 10:58 pm |
Not being much of a hardware hacker, I can’t say for sure, but I doubt you can install an internal EV-DO card. Sprint has supposed to have been making a USB EV-DO available for the past year, and I’ve even heard of a CF-based EV-DO card under development. Personally, I use PDANet through my EV-DO Treo 700p and it works quite well when I’m out of WiFi range.
Michael
September 2, 2007 at 6:21 pm |
U cant install internal wwan card… no room: http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2007/08/kohjinsha-sh6-dissected.html
U can turn wifi or/and bt on/off by default on BIOS settings
… so you don’t need to us fn+key combi anymore.
September 17, 2007 at 10:50 pm |
I was wondering about Skype: I have an SH6 and Skype using the webcam runs awfully slowly, the conversations get choppy, etc.
Any word on that?
Oh just for the heck of it, I can actually run an Oracle database on it, which shows it’s pretty good !! If only it had XP instead of Vista then everything would be nice!
September 18, 2007 at 4:55 am |
I haven’t used Skype video calls on my SH6 yet, other than to do a quick test to see that they actually worked. I’ll have to do a more serious test this week and after I do I’ll post the results here. Thanks for mentioning it!
Michael
January 5, 2008 at 1:07 am |
i got a problem with the rotation button after ive updated my vista, cant seem to work. only if i clicked the intel media accelerator options. can there be a workaround for this? i am already sold out with downgrading to windows xp pro or tablet pc 2005.
anyway, over all performance is quiet fine for this small device.i even use this as my primary wokhorse
January 5, 2008 at 3:10 am |
I never rotate the screen myself, so I can’t help you with that problem. I agree that the performance is very good and I also use mine as my primary computer.
Michael