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.

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 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.

To the last point, I take better-than-average care of my gadgets, but now I find myself being a bit less careful with my netbook. Since the upgrade, it hasn’t been uncommon to see me toss my Aspire One onto the couch, walk around the house with it running, or let my kids take it wherever they want to use it. Knowing that I don’t have to worry about the hard drive crashing in the device is very comforting indeed. Now, if I can just keep from dropping it off the roof while I’m hanging this year’s Christmas lights it will all be good (I might need to reference something on the web while I’m up there)! :^)

I may be crazy for wanting to put an SSD that cost as much as the computer into my netbook, but I have always wondered if the upgrade experience on my T61 could be replicated.  Would the lightweight processor in the netbook cancel any benefit from the faster I/O?  Could a person justify spending that much on an upgrade for their netbook?  Well, yesterday I got to find out when  I got my hands on an Intel X25-M 160GB SSD to play with.

It almost killed me to not rip my netbook open to install it, but I had to practice some patience in order to get some baseline performance info for my system with the native 120GB hard drive.  To get some subjective data, I timed how long it took for the system to boot from a powered off state and open a text file I had placed in the startup folder.  I then placed shortcuts for a word document, an Excel spreadsheet, and Visual Studio 2008 in the startup folder, logged off, and then back on.  The first test took 54 seconds and the second test took 31 seconds with the hard drive.

In our lab at work, we have a hard drive duplicating device that does a bit-by-bit copy of hard drives.  I slaved in the SSD and made an exact copy of my hard drive (dual boot operating systems, temp files, data, and all).  I then installed the SSD into my Aspire One and reran the tests.  This time the boot took 47 seconds and the application launch took 24 seconds.  The improvement was 13% and 22% respectively. 

The netbook goes to sleep from Windows 7 faster than a worn out gamer after a two day LAN party.  It’s tough to get a good time, but it seems to sleep in just about three seconds and resumes in just more than four.  It seems so much faster than the hard drive based system that it feels like instant-on!

Anecdotally, the system feels quite a bit faster.  It takes about 10 seconds to launch iTunes and parse my larger than average library, only about 3 seconds to open a two page document in Word, and some very small fraction of a second to open “My Documents.”  I don’t have anything empirical to compare it against, but it feels significantly faster than before. 

Now, to get to the question of whether or not I think the upgrade is worth it.  Honestly, probably not in a netbook (although certainly worth it in a full laptop) but I want to spend a couple of days forming a full opinion.  I can say for sure that I didn’t see the huge leap forward in performance that I noticed on the T61, so the processor is definitely a big part of the equation.   There are benefits to consider beyond raw performance such as battery life and durability that will certainly need to be considered though.  For a device that was designed to be small enough to take everywhere with you, these could be important factors.  I’ll try to weigh in after a few days to tell you what I think.

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.

It’s hard to notice much besides the woman who looks like she’s looking forward to taking a bite of her tasty Aspire One, but try to look at the “Retail Value” of the netbook:  $847.60 – ON WHAT PLANET???

Good thing they’re offering it for the amazing value of just $499.90 (plus $27.95 for shipping and handling).  What they’re really doing is preying on the uniformed because the almost 50% markup they are charging is ridiculous.  For people who want one that bad, I’d be willing to part with mine for a mere $475 (with free shipping)!  :)

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.

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.