XO Laptop

The picture shows my new XO laptop next to my Kohjinsha SH6. I received the XO about a week ago, having ordered it through the One Laptop Per Child program. I got one, and a child in a developing nation received one as well. In addition I got a one-year free T-Mobile Hotspot account. Not a bad deal!!

As you can see, the XO is a little larger than the SH6, but the screen resolution is lower. The screen itself is very bright and very nice for reading The XO is also quite a bit heavier than the SH6 – I’d guess anywhere between 50% to 100% heavier.

So far I’ve found the XO to be huge fun to play with. The “Sugar” user interface over Linux is quite different from anything I’ve seen before, and quite a lot of fun to use. The WiFi reception of the XO is phenomenal. The mesh networking is also amazing, although since I’m the only one around here who owns one I haven’t had a chance to really use it. Someone has set up a server on the net that enables mesh networking between XOs not physically near each other and I may check that out to see how well it really works, but the concept alone is awesome!

The built-in applications are definitely oriented for kids but are really very imaginatively done. I think this device will be a huge educational tool for kids.

The browser is really quite nice. It works well with all the Google apps. I can see using the XO with Google Docs as a “cloud-based” ultra-portable laptop.  It’s got three USB ports and an SD slot.

Right now the only downsides to the XO seems to be as follows:

• The software is Version 1 and a little unstable, although a software updated is scheduled for this month which will hopefully correct most of those issues – plus the update is supposed to increase battery life to 10+ hours!
• The device looks like it was built by Fisher-Price and I’d feel a little strange using it at an airport!
• The keyboard is definitely built for kid-sized fingers and touch typing is a bit difficult – even for someone who has become accustomed to the SH6′s rather small keyboard.
• It’s slooooow, having a 433 Mhz processor.

I haven’t decided whether I’m going to give this XO away to one of my grandkids, or to an XO developer, or keep it myself. I’m actually having so much fun playing with it that I may just keep it. If so, I’ll likely play around with the Python-based development environment and maybe even write some software for it.

Why I’m Not Buying A Kindle

It seems as though everyone in the blogsphere is buying a Kindle. I’m not, at least until someone can tell me why I’d want to spend $400 on an additional device I’ll have to carry to read eBooks.

Now, first of all I’m a big eBook reader and have been for many years. Today, I read eBooks on my Kohjinsha SH6 UMPC or my Treo. In fact, I actually read most eBooks on my Treo because I always have it with me. It’s always in my pocket and whenever I have time to kill I can pull it out and get some reading done.

My eBook reading is done using eReader on both Treo and UMPC. Even eReader DRM’ed books can be read on both devices. When I used my N800, I used the freeware FBReader on it. It’s worked great and supported a ton of formats. Now that I’ve retired the N800, I’m quite happy with eReader. I even have the eReader Studio program for creating nicely formatted eReader books from a wide variety of other formats, including Word.

My first problem with the Kindle – unlike freeware eBook readers like FBReader, the Kindle can only read Kindle DRM’ed books, text, non-DRM’ed Mobipocket, and non-DRM’ed Palm OS .prc files. Kindle format files are locked to the device. You can’t even transfer files from one Kindle to another, even if you delete them from the original Kindle. If it’s going to cost me $400 it better do more than that!

It’s big enough so that to carry it I’d really need a shoulder bag. If I’m going to carry a shoulder bag, then I’m going to be carrying my Kohjinsha SH6 in it, not another device. I just retired my N800 because I don’t want to have to carry extra devices with me. The Treo is my bread and butter, with me all the time, pocketable computer. Any time I require more heavy lifting in the computing arena, the SH6 and it’s mega-external battery gets packed up into the Walmart DVD player shoulder bag I use to carry it. I’d have to buy a bigger bag to carry a Kindle as well!

The one big benefit I see in Amazon’s Kindle initiative is that they have brought down the price of eBooks. This new pricing can only benefit everyone as their eBook competitors will be forced to match them.

A Day in the Life of a Mobile Computer Consultant

This posting was inspired by: jkOnTheRun- a typical day with all my gear.

The alarm rings at 5:00 AM this morning, because I’m flying out on the 7:15 AM flight to Philadelphia. This will get me to my pharmaceutical client’s research headquarters by 10:15 AM, even allowing time to pick up my rental car and drive there from the Philadelphia airport.

I just have time to shower and dress and do a quick check of email using my Treo 700p, as well as check the status of my flight. I’ll also check the weather forecasts for both home and Philadelphia. The Treo is great for email and light Web surfing.

My Kohjinsha SH6 is already packed up in my Booq Boa XS bag, along with all of the other gadgets I normally take with me to a client site. The Kohjinsha is powered off, and it’s one of the few times during the week when it will be. Most of the time it is in a sleep state when I’m not using it. I typically shut it down and boot it up just twice a week – for the outbound flight and the return flight.

Upon arriving at the airport I’ll check my RSS feeds using Google Reader on my Treo while waiting for my flight to board. After boarding my flight I have a choice of entertainment devices to use when the OK is given by the flight attendant: my 60GB iPod or my Kohjinsha SH6. On this flight I feel like napping, so I put on my Bose Q2 Noise Cancelling Headset and plug it into my iPod. This time I’ll listen to some relaxing music and drift gently off to sleep for most of the flight. Other times when I’m feeling more alert I’ll watch a video on the SH6 (see more on that below).

Upon arrival at the Philly airport I make a quick call home to my wife on my Treo 700p to let her know I’ve arrived safely. I use my Blue Parrot Bluetooth B100 headset with my Treo. I know – it’s huge! – but it’s simply the best Bluetooth headset I’ve ever used and I’ve tried a whole bunch of them. It’s the only headset I’ve found that enables me to always be clearly heard regardless of background noise, even when I’m speaking softly.

After picking up my rental car (a Chevy Tahoe SUV this week) I’m off to my client. Upon arrival I pull out my SH6 from my Booq bag and the BatteryGeek BG 15-21-130 External Laptop Battery that will power it. I leave the SH6′s power adapter home during my business trips as the BatteryGeek unit provides all the juice I’ll need for my SH6. It will enable my SH6 to run all day at the client site and I just need to recharge this external battery at my hotel room in the evening.

Next I plug in a Belkin 4-port USB hub that in turn has a Belkin USB Dual/PS2 adapter cable plugged into it. Connected to the adapter cable are the PS/2 mouse and keyboard cables from a D-Link KVM-121 switch. I also plug in the VGA connector from the KVM switch into my SH6. The KVM switch allows me to share the LCD monitor, keyboard, and mouse between my SH6 and the HP Compaq Core 2 Duo desktop that my client has provided me. I next plug my Treo sync cable into the Belkin USB hub. CradleCare software on the Treo automatically kicks off regular syncs between my Treo and the SH6, making sure everything is up to date on both systems. I finish up by connecting an Ethernet cable to the SH6 that connects it to my client’s network and boot up the SH6.

After the SH6 finishes booting up Vista Home Premium, I hit the FN-F3 keys to redirect the screen output to the KVM switch, and from there onto the HP 17″ LCD panel. The SH6 can drive this screen at up to 1600 X 1200 resolution, but my tired old eyes prefer a resolution of 1280 X 1024.

At that point I type in my “startup” ActiveWord. I’m a huge fan of the ActiveWords program as it helps me automate countless tasks on my SH6. The startup ActiveWord loads up all the normal software I have running on my SH6 during my work day, which includes:

• Outlook 2007
• Firefox with iGoogle, Google Reader, and my company’s Outlook Web Access email web pages open in three tabs
• PINs (a password management utility program)
• Twitterroo
• Evernote (which I prefer to OneNote)
• Life Balance (my favorite PIM, and which has a Palm OS version on my Treo that syncs with the SH6′s version)

Some of the additional programs I’ll run during the course of the day include Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Project 2007 and Visio 2003. With 2 GB of memory on my SH6 I have no problem running all my “startup” programs along with one or more of these Office programs all at the same time without any noticeable performance degradation.

At lunch I head for the cafeteria with other team members. During our lunchtime conversation a couple of tasks come up that I need to perform, so I enter them into Life Balance on my Treo 700p. They will be automatically synced into my SH6′s version of Life Balance as soon as I return from lunch and connect my Treo to the sync cable.

In the afternoon I need to attend a one hour meeting. So, I uncable the SH6 from all its cables, disconnect it from the BatteryGeek external battery, close the screen, and take off for the meeting. Since the meeting is only an hour I don’t need to bring the external battery along with me. The 2+ hour battery life of the SH6 will be more than enough to last through the meeting. However, I do occasionally need to go through the ordeal of the “all-day meeting” where we meet through the entire work day and have lunch brought into the meeting room. Then the BatteryGeek external battery comes along with me, freeing me from the mad dash to find the few open electrical outlets in the meeting room. Today I won’t need it with me for this short meeting.

At the meeting I take detailed notes using a meeting template I created in Evernote. During a lull in the meeting I tether to my Treo using Bluetooth and the PDANet program. These allow me to get onto the Internet through the Sprint EV-DO network. I’ll then do a quick check of my email. There are never enough Ethernet cables in the meeting rooms at my client but with PDANet and my Treo I don’t need them.

After the meeting I return to my office and wrap up another day’s work. Then it’s time to leave and check into the hotel.

Many of the hotels I stay in still have Ethernet connectivity through cables rather than WiFi. That’s the case in my current hotel, but I bring along an ASUS Portable WiFi access point and plug that into the room’s Ethernet cable. This frees me from having to work at the desk in the hotel room and allows me to access the Internet on my little SH6 even from the bed! After logging onto the hotel network with my SH6 I’ll check personal and business email one more time and access my RSS feeds using Google Reader. I’ll also plug my BatteryGeek external battery pack into an outlet on the desk in the room to charge it up for the next day. The BatteryGeek battery can also continue to power my SH6 if need be, even when it’s being recharged.

As the evening winds down I consider my entertainment options. I can use SlingPlayer on my SH6 to access any of the zillion DirecTV channels we have at home. These are fed into a SlingBox connected to the satellite tuner in our family room. Alternatively I can watch a movie or TV episode that I have on my SH6. Right now, I have five Seinfeld episodes from the final season, two entire seasons of the BBC drama Upstairs/Downstairs, two episodes of Ken Burns’ War documentary, and full-length versions of the movies Forrest Gump, Office Space (today’s picture is from this movie!), and The Prestige on my SH6′s commodious 100GB hard drive. I choose to watch a couple of Seinfeld episodes. These were ripped onto my SH6 using Pocket DVD Studio. Some of the movies were captured from DirecTV using my Neuros Video Recorder 2.

Since this is a Tuesday, tonight I’ll do my weekly image backup of the SH6 onto the Western Digital 160GB USB external disk drive I carry in my Booq bag. I use the Acronis True Image program, which was provided to me by Dynamism when I purchased my SH6. They use Acronis to create their restore CDs.

The backup will take about 2 hours, during which time I’ll read a book (maybe even a non-digital one!) and listen to music from my iPod over my iHome iH5 that goes with me in my suitcase whenever I travel. It has wonderful speakers for such a small unit and its sleep feature allows me to listen to music while drifting off to sleep at night.

Speaking of which, the backup is done so it’s time to disconnect and put away the external drive and put both SH6 and myself to sleep!

GottaBeMobile on the Vye S37

Warner Crocker of GottaBeMobile has been evaluating the Vye S37 and has some very interesting comments on it.

Infinite (Well Nearly!) Battery Power

Although the 2+ hour battery life of my Kohjinsha SH6 really hasn’t been an issue for me since I’ve owned it, I decided it would be nice to be able to have “all-day” battery power available to me. So I just bought a BatteryGeek BG 15-21-130 External Laptop Battery. If offers 130 Watt-Hours of juice for the Kohjinsha. It’s even smaller than the SH6 and easily fits into my Booq bag that carries the Kohjinsha and all my work stuff. In fact, it’s small enough to fit into the Walmart DVD player case that I use to carry my SH6 with me on short trips out of the house.

It seems to have arrived at my house fully, or near-fully, charged and so I just turned it on and plugged my SH6 into it this morning. It’s been powering the SH6 all day so far (it’s about 2:30 as I’m writing this) and the BatteryGeek unit still shows 50% power left in it. So between this external battery and the SH6′s, I should now be able to go all day without needing to plug into an outlet. As I mentioned above, so far I’ve never had to go more than a couple of hours away from an outlet, but it’s good to know that I now can stay away from an outlet for a whole work-day, if needed!

SlingPlayer on the SH6

I’ve had SlingPlayer installed on my SH6 since I’ve owned it, but really hadn’t used it until last night. That’s when I noticed that the ESPN channel was out at my hotel. Since I very much enjoy watching Monday night football I decided to give SlingPlayer a try and attempt to get ESPN flowing from my SlingBox at home onto my SH6. I was extremely pleased to find that it works great even in full screen mode, as the above picture shows. I got to watch Pittsburgh thrash Baltimore with very good quality video and sound. Hooray for SlingBox!

Can This Really Be The End?

Close observers will notice a change in the heading of this blog: no longer does it mention the Nokia N800. That’s right, I’ve retired this little computer from active service and am looking for a good home for it right now. Over two months experience with my Kohjinsha SH6 has shown me that this UMPC has made the Nokia N800 completely superfluous to my computing needs. The N800 is a great little computer – I just don’t need it anymore!

 

Kevin Tofel has a review of the Vye S37 focusing on the inking experience with this device. I’ve used inking on my SH6 less than half a dozen times in the more than two months that I’ve owned it now. It’s pretty much a laptop replacement for me.

Vye S37 Review

 

UMPC Portal has a very thorough review of the Vye S37, a device viritually identical to the Kohjinsha SH8.

On Vacation

My wife and I have been on vacation all this week. We’re staying at a wonderful resort in the mountains of West Viriginia. The picture above was taken right from our balcony – we definitely have a million dollar view of the mountains and forest here!

So far we’ve visited the Green Bank Radio Observatory, Seneca Rocks, and the Cass Scenic Railroad State Park – in addition to reading, playing games, napping, and eating at the resort: which features one of the finest restaurants I’ve ever eaten in.

I brought both my Konjinsha SH6 (used to create this posting) and my Nokia N800 along with me on this trip. So far the N800 remains unused in my travel bag. Can this really spell the end to my use of it? I’m starting to feel that all I need for truly portable computing is my SH6 and that the N800 is now superfluous to me. Who would have guessed that a few months ago?

As a result I have no interest in the new N810, which seems to be a very nice evolutionary improvement over the N800. Well back to napping!