Brian Jarvis, UMPC Geek

After taking a hiatus from ultra mobile computing (since my netbook died earlier this year), I am now back in the saddle. Yesterday I went to Best Buy and purchased a 32GB wifi iPad after tons of deliberating. It was a very difficult decision for me to make as I struggled to choose between a new netbook, a used MacBook, waiting for an Android tablet, and of course the iPad. In the end, however I decided to take the plunge on this device and so far I am glad that I did.

One of the things that I was not able to find when I was trying to make my decision was a follow-up review of the iPad. I really wanted to read what someone thought of their device after a couple of months of use (after the magic wore off). I plan to write one on this site, so stay tuned.

P.S. I thought the soft keyboard on the iPad was going to be a joke, but I am amazed to learn that I can touch type on it quite easily with the iPad sitting in my lap.

At this conference, they have issued every attendee a “Spotme” device. It is a great little handheld device that holds the show schedule and allows you to interact with other attendees. You can easily exchange business cards by holding two devices close to each other and even find someone using a “radar” feature.

It has two pretty serious limitations: the screen is not touch enabled, and the keyboard is almost criminal. I can understand the former decision in an effort to reduce cost and extend the battery (they say the battery will last 3 days). The keyboard layout atrocity is inexcusable though. With the symbol key where the “A” key should be and the goofy space key, typing on it us a terrible experience. It has the ability to add notes for sessions and people you meet but the keyboard experience is so painful that you don’t want to type more than a word or two.

It is the little aspects of design like an appropriately sized space key that make a huge difference in the user experience. It can make or break a mobile device and in this case it breaks it.

I am currently in Las Vegas at our annual Intel Solutions Summit and it has been a great show already and we’re only a few hours in to a two day show. Here we are able to demo some of our latest (and upcoming) hardware to our top customers in North America. I just saw a demo of the new server platform product we will launch tomorrow. Without going into any detail, I will say that I was absolutely blown away with how much computing will be possible tomorrow with just 100 watts of power.

I love working for a company that is continuously pushing the envelope of what is possible. There are many critics who say that AMD is the reason why we innovate, but that is simply not true. I firmly believe in the value of competition, but Intel’s culture is one that drives technology because we are passionate about what we do. Whether you’re talking about a computing device that fits in your pocket or one that belongs in a server room, the employees at Intel are driving to make that the best experience possible.

I am married to an absolutely amazing woman but truth be told, she isn’t the world’s best passenger on road trips. If she has a good book to read she does great, but if not, “Are we there yet?” comes more from my wife in the passenger seat than from my the kids in the back seat.

This weekend, we drove from Portland to eastern Idaho for a family reunion: 10 hours of driving nightmare bliss each way. My wife brought two books along for the drive, but she finished the second about 4 hours before we got home. After chatting for about an hour, she confessed that she was going crazy and asked me if I had anything to read on my BlackBerry. With a tear in my eye, I pulled to the side of the road and revealed to her the wonder of Ereader.com.

Within a few minutes, we had Sense and Sensibility up on the screen and she was contently reading from its virtual pages. That is pretty cool in my book, but the real shock came when we got home and she told me that she preferred reading the digital version! She read from my BlackBerry until almost midnight. I don’t know that there was a prouder geek in all of Oregon.

When Google first released its Chrome browser, I used it quite a bit.  Over time, I found myself using Firefox more and more largely because it plays nicely with small screens.  The screen on my netbook and my UMPC just don’t have enough screen real estate to waste it on Chrome’s huge header.  I had really hoped there would be a full screen option for Chrome by now.

Today I accidentally discovered that you can give yourself an “almost” full screen experience.  Check this out:

Here’s how I did it:

1. In Chrome, browse to a good home page (Google’s home page or iGoogle works well as noted below)
2. Click on the page icon to the right of the address bar in Chrome’s toolbar
3. Click on “Create application shortcuts…”
4. Select “Desktop” and click “OK”
5. Go to your desktop and launch the “Application shortcut” that has the name of your new home page
6. Maximize the window and enjoy “near” full screen browsing in Chrome

Tips:

• There are no navigation buttons available to you in this view.  You can use the “Backspace” key to go backwards in your browser history.  Alternatively, you can use the Alt key in combination with the left and right arrow keys to go backwards and forwards (respectively) through the history. 
• You don’t get an address bar this way, but if you use a Google page as suggested above, you can do a Google search for any URL and it will always be the first hit.
• If you want to truly maximize your screen real estate, change your taskbar to not stay on top of other windows.

Most error messages aren’t very helpful, but today when my Lenovo T61 chashed, I witnessed the mother of all useless error messages:

I went to Microsoft’s support page and read the documentation and they suggest you check a half dozen things, but nothing specific.  The error message doesn’t even help them.  

I rushed out this morning to install the latest update from Apple largely for one feature:  on-device podcast downloads.  It is nice that now you can go out and manually pull down single episodes to your iPhone or iPod Touch, but there is one major feature missing that seems like a huge oversight to me.

There is no way to view your list of current subscriptions and do a refresh that grabs the latest episode.  The only reason I regularly attach my iPod to my computer is to update my podcasts.  I purchase new music once every few weeks in batches, but find myself syncing for podcast support every other day or so.  This seems like a great way that Apple could free the iPod from PC’s completely, so I thought for sure it would be a feature.  :^)

I hope that future software updates will provide a way for me to automatically get the latest episode of Mobile Tech Roundup without needing my PC. 

I wrote about killing my Aspire One some time ago, and ever since it died, I have wondered what might have caused it.  I know that Acer replaced the board during the repair, so I figure that something significant must have happened.  Well, I have a pretty good hunch that it was me being careless that killed it. 

The other day, I went to plug something into the USB port and was having a little trouble getting it to go in.  When I started paying attention to what I was doing, I realized that I was trying to put a USB drive into the Ethernet port.  It dawned on me that this would totally explain my previous experience when my Aspire One stopped working.  If I had plugged my drive into the network port before, it wouldn’t have booted (like it didn’t), and it certainly could have shorted the board out (like something did).

I have learned some interesting things:

1. Apparently I don’t look very closely when I plug in USB drives
2. A USB connector and an Ethernet port are very close to the same dimension
3. Warranty at Acer will repair hardware even if mindless behavior caused the problem

Yesterday I installed a new control utility for my Aspire One:  a1ctl.  It is similar to AA1FanControl in that it allows you to control the fan on your netbook, but it also provides additional functionality.  For power savings, the software has the ability to  step the CPU back to 800 Mhz or you can disable the LAN, Wifi, and webcam separately.  It also allows you to downscale the screen so that you can run a 1024 x 768 resolution (I’m hoping I can run Rise of Nations now).  I’ll give a more complete review of the software after I have been using it a few days.