Brian Jarvis, UMPC Geek

As a true geek, I have an unhealthy appreciation for hardware just for hardware’s sake. It’s alright though, because I am seeking professional counseling. I have cut the number of trips I make each week to the Apple Store and Best Buy just to drool on the hardware in half and my counselor says I’m making fine progress. She tells me that most people do not share this addiction and that it is not healthy.The reality is that hardware alone is well…kind of boring for most folks. The hardware is like the engine in your car. It has inherent value and represents thousands of hours of engineering. Yet without a transmission and chassis, it will never get you where you want to go. As an integral part of a complete automobile, you must have all of the components working together to have any real value. Similarly, computers require a combination of hardware, software, drivers, etc working together to work properly.

Taking the automobile analogy a bit further, in the average consumers mind it’s the body of the car that gets most of the attention. The average car buyer is more concerned about how the car looks than the merits of the exhaust system. Similarly, in the computing world, it’s usually the software that gets most of the attention. User interface, usability, and eye candy are important at every level from the operating system to the web browser. A beautiful interface on barely adequate hardware will always have more consumer appeal than an inferior interface on the latest hardware offering.

It turns out my iPod Touch has a pretty good email client. Like every other email application in the world, it has a delete button for getting rid of your unwanted mail, but Apple implemented theirs with class. When you touch the trash can, the icon tilts to the side, the lid pops up, and your message is sucked down into the trash in an animated vortex that has never made spam more fun to delete! [I have included a video below for those who have never seen it - I apologize for the video quality] I introduce this as an example that well written software can be powerful, fun, and liberating. Many developers could take a few dozen lessons from the team at Apple (who clearly understand this concept).

The reality is that well written software is not as common as it should be. It takes time and effort to really think through the user interaction and implement it effectively. As a geek who likes to dabble in Visual Basic once in a while, I know how difficult it is to write extraordinary code. Salute to the software developers of the world who are willing to do it though…you’re making a difference!

I couldn’t stop wondering how well my Samsung Q1 would drive my new 23 inch monitor at work. So this afternoon, I hooked it up and took it for a test drive.

For business applications, it worked very smoothly and could easily be used for daily use. My guess is that the graphics engine on a 915GM chipset could easily be overwhelmed with this many pixels to drive. I didn’t try killing it, but suspect that you probably could with a couple of videos playing on a display this large.

If Samsung made a docking station for the Q1, I would use my UMPC even more than I do now (perhaps as my primary computer). It’s just a bit too much work to connect the VGA cable, USB keyboard and mouse, etc every time I get to my desk. The computer is very capable and I would love to do it, but I would need some sort of docking solution for it to be practical. So today’s experiment really falls into the W?BIC! category.

After reading Matt Miller’s post, I installed the latest update from Apple on my iPod Touch and I am VERY pleased to report that the bug with the time changing has been resolved!  Now I can plug my iPod into my PC without having to kill iTunes first.  Thank you Apple!

When I started this blog, I was much more interested in the concept of Ultra Mobile Personal Computing than Ultra Mobile Personal Computers. Now don’t get me wrong, I love the current UMPC hardware options, but I know we are only beginning to see what is possible here! More than the hardware, I am super excited about the possibilities of mobile computing moving forward.

I think the industry is getting hung up on definitions at this point and I fear that it may stand in the way of the progress of the concept. I personally consider smart phones, iPhones, PDA’s, MID’s, UMPC’s, and even subnotebooks to be ultra mobile computing platforms. They all have their merits and their drawbacks and each has their place in the market. My concern is that people who are not as geeky as me may get confused with all of these categories and delay their adoption.

All they know is that they want to be able to be productive while they are in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Do they care what segment it falls into? I don’t think so. I think the whole industry needs to focus more on computing in general than on specific hardware verticals. That’s my two cents, you want to throw in yours?

I’ve been dealing with the date and time being wrong on my iPod Touch since I bought it. If you’re not familiar with the problem, I’ll give you a one sentence summary:

Under certain conditions (don’t know the specifics), when you sync your iPod Touch with your Windows XP computer, the time zone on the iPod defaults back to “Cupertino” and the time is randomly generated for some day back in November of 2007.

I have done a bunch of digging around on the internet to try and find a solution. Last night I took one more try and came across something in the Apple support forums: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1357347&tstart=0

Although it doesn’t present a solution, it does present the workaround of closing iTunes before every sync then relaunching it after the iPod is already attached. This is working well for me and now I can finally synchronize my iPod with my coputer without messing up the time and date. I’ll be satisfied with this for a while, but I’m expecting Apple to fix this bug.

BTW, the other option of turning off daylight savings detection did not work for me.

I mentioned earlier that I recently picked up a iPod Touch. It truly is a great device and I’m using it a ton. It’s an average music player, a very good video player, and a great mobile internet device. I think Josh Bancroft hit the nail on the head that Apple was “pwned” the MID market by beating everyone else to the punch.

I love the Safari browser on the Touch. Using my finger to navigate web pages and flick the screen to scroll couldn’t be more natural. With the one exception of the inability to view Flash-based pages, it’s perfect. Even with that one (pretty significant) shortcoming, it’s still the best mobile browser I’ve ever used. I look forward to other platforms learning from the usability of the iPhone/Touch experience.

I’m also looking forward to the release of the SDK and hope that it will open a firestorm of sanctioned applications for the device. I think it would be great to get better PIM functionality and some productivity apps written for off-line use. Originally I thought that the soft keyboard would limit effectivness of this device as a mobile computing platform, but the keyboard works better than I thought. It is the perfect size and weight to replace any non-phone PDA on the market and I believe that it will.

So far, it’s great. I only really struggle with two things:

1. Should I have bought the iPhone instead?
2. I need a better answer for my son who keeps asking why we need 4 iPods in the house.

I bought an iPod Touch a couple of weeks ago and for the most part I LOVE it. I’ll post more thoughts on it at a later point, but I’ve got two huge gripes about it that are driving me nuts.

First, there is some bug in the interface between the Touch and iTunes on the PC that messes up the time on the Touch. After syncing with my computer, the time is off by about two months! It’s really annoying because I can’t count on it and it makes the calendar almost useless. I’ve scoured the web and found that I’m not the only one with this issue. Here’s a picture of the problem:

The other problem is equally as annoying. Every time I plug the Touch into my UMPC, it brings up the “Would you like to purchase the software update for $19.99 screen.” At the bottom of the screen, there are two buttons: Remind Me Later and “No Thanks.” The problem is tht the “No Thanks” button NEVER works (bet I’ve clicked it 20 times). I get an error that says, “The iTunes Store could not process your request, please try again.” Pretty convenient that it’s available to browse and purchase music, but not get rid of an advertisement!

I’m tempted to buy the stupid update just so the message will go away! :^)

A friend at Micron has provided me with a Lexar JumpDrive Lightning to test out. I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with this USB drive. I had heard that the Lightning was really fast, but didn’t know what to think about that. Like many of you, I was of the opinion that a USB drive is pretty much a USB drive nowadays.

Head To Head To Head Contest
I decided to test that assumption by comparing the Lightning to the Sandisk Cruzer and Sony Micro Vault I own by getting some relative performance data. I recognize that the following tests are not scientific and I noticed a certain degree of variation from one trial to the next. That having been said, the results I’m presenting here were typical over several cycles.

To get a feel for how quickly you could write to these drives, I selected a folder on my PC that contained 107 files (for a total of 93.4 MB) and copied it to each drive. Below are the results of the test.

You can easily see that both the Lexar and Sandisk drives were significantly faster than the Sony drive. I expected this as I figured I was giving up performance for convenience with the smaller drive. I was surprised however that the Lightning was consistently about 15% faster than the Cruzer. The difference was quite noticeable and makes a significant difference if you copy larger files. I was pretty impressed.

Next I wanted to get a feel for how quickly these drives could read data. I copied the same 184 MB file from each drive onto the desktop of my PC. Here are the results:

Again, you can see that the Sony drive gets trounced, but that the Sandisk and Lexar drives are closer. After several cycles, I found that the Lexar drive repeatedly finished the move just less than a second faster than the Sandisk. Both represent very respectable performance and the difference would really only be perceptible if you were consistently copying very large files off the drives.

Puting 4 GB To Work
Shifting gears a bit, I wanted to put the 4 GB capacity of the Lightning drive to work. To do so, I wanted to load up MojoPac on the drive and give it a bit of a workout. I use MojoPac because it allows me to run a virtualized system on my work laptop with some of my personal data and customized environment without messing up my work system. It was pretty cool to see that after loading the MojoPac bits onto the drive, I still had a whole bunch of room to play:

I loaded Firefox and Visual Studio 2008 (only the VB bits) on the drive and still had 2.6 GB left over. I thought that was really cool and sure beats having to tether my iPod to my laptop to get the same environment (I suspect it would also use less battery power to use the flash drive instead of the iPod hard drive). The performance also seems faster with the flash drive as well (it “boots” almost 10 seconds faster).

Included Software
Lexar includes a utility called “PowerToGo” on the drive that’s similar to the U3 interface available on a number of other drives. It’s not as polished as U3, but does have some pretty nice tricks up it’s sleeve such as recognizing Microsoft Office on your system and adding it to the “All Programs” menu.

The Lightning drive has very little other software installed out of the box. One title is an application called “SecureII” installed that allows you to create encrypted partitions on the drive and shred files. The latter functionality works on files that are located on the drive or on your PC. The other title preinstalled is Evernote. There are a variety of other applications that can be added either through the online “Add-on Center” or by installing them yourself.

Conclusion
Overall, I’m impressed with the Lexar JumpDrive Lightning. It’s very fast and large enough to be very useful. Not everything was perfect as I’m not crazy about the mirrored finish - think HUGE fingerprint magnet! Other than that little gripe, I think it’s a great product and was glad to have the chance to play with it a bit. It’s definitely on my recommended list!

This weekend, while painting our son’s bedroom, my wife wanted to listen to some music.  In our home, we have two portable stereos, 4 iPods, an iPod speaker system (albeit relatively cheap one), and a couple of radio alarm clocks (including one in the room that we were painting).  I was very proud that given all of those choices, my wife asked me to go get my UMPC to play music on.  It is a testament to the multimedia quality of the Samsung Q1.

She’s getting more geeky all the time.  Pretty soon she’ll be asking to use the UMPC instead of my laptop for surfing the web.  Well…