Tag Archives: Technology

Technology

Advent 4211 / MSI Wind: UMPC me happy

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I’ve spent a not insiginificant portion of the last six months or so debating with myself as to whether I should buy one of the emerging class of ‘Netbook’ PCs – subnotebook laptops in a 7-10inch casing powered by a low-energy Intel processor and running very minimal sofware and hardware. The bare minimum you need to be an effective Netizen.

Given how much of my day is spent advocating the move to the cloud for one client or another, and / or discussing the increasing mobility of the average man with various media, it seemed only appropriate that I found a way to be more online in more places,

And so, after much headwrangling, and after reading mediocre reviews of the Asus 1000H and the Lenovo Ideapad S10 (to be fair, only bad previews of the latter), I’ve finally bought the cheapo, rebadged MSI Wind that is the Advent 4211. Thank you PC World for saving me some cash.

The machine, needless to say, is pretty awesome. I’m typing this blog post on it and my usual touchtyping pace isn’t being noticeably diminished by the 85% keyboard, the screen is bright, crisp and clear, and the machine outperforms my (admittedly aging) old IBM Thinkpad T40 (vintage: 2004). There are, of course, a few niggles….

1) It shipped with a wireless driver that randomly disconnected from my Access Point. Finding one involved navigating the slightly confusing MSI website, as obviously Advent hasn’t set up a useful one of its own. The very useful MSIWind.net user forums proved invaluable in addressing this issue.

2) The trackpad is a bit small, and I haven’t worked out if its possible to disable tap-to-click (which I gather will be annoying in time) and it doesn’t do side scrolling — which is very annoying.

3) I’m still getting used to a 1024*600 screen. You lose so much real estate! Given that I’m normally working on twin displays this takes a little adjusting. Chrome is well suited to this little laptop, or Firefox with F11.

4) The battery life seems significantly less than the advertised 3 hours if you’re using Wifi. Or maybe Pokerstars just drains more juice than your average app. Or maybe I haevn’t figuried out the mediocre PC World software and power-management features…

Generally, however, its a story of so far so good. I’d recommend the MSI Wind over most of the current generation Netbooks I’ve seen (though both Samsung and Toshiba’s offerings looked interesting on Engadget…) and I just hope they take a while to move the dual core Atom processors into a new generation of Netbooks so I get a brief window in which I feel that I’ve got the best and shiniest tech.

Big picture? I think UMPCs are going to continue to be a big thing for the next couple of years. The combination of easy portability, battery life, compelling price point and general full featuredness of them is remarkable. We’ll see more given away with laptops, more sold in major retail chains, and more people sporting 3G models on the trains. We’ll see more manufacturers churning out carboncopies of each others Netbooks, we’ll see differentiation in some software layouts (especially for the Linux variants) and battery lives and design (and not much else). It’s a connected future, awwww yeah, and there’s no getting away from it.

Software, Technology

The shine of Chrome

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Disclaimer: Google Enterprise is a client. This isn’t really my clients’ beat but its not unconnected given how much faster Chrome is with Ajax/Javascript than most things, and therefore Google Apps. Well, until Firefox 3.1. Maybe.

I love Firefox. I love Chrome. I’m switching between the two interchangeably at the moment. Here’s the good and bad of Chrome and why I haven’t given up on FF altogether.

Good
Fast!
Less resource hungry – no more memory leaks!
Clean interface
More stable than FF & IE!
Windows only (I maintain my view that Apple Macs suck, and am not bothered that Google hasn’t yet released non-Windows versions. I’ve read that they will, so that’s good in principle)

Neutral
Still can’t save passwords for Yahoo (FF can’t either). Why not?
Can’t distinguish between different Google Apps profiles (again, FF can’t either). Why not?

Not so good
Shortcuts go weird (e.g. CTRL – minus in Google Docs to delete a row doesn’t work)
Needs an IE rendering plugin, and lots of other plugins, which will come in time…
Some websites go bananas
Needs nicer animation around the shortcuts toolbar

Technology

On Shy iPhones, Flo’ Windows Mobiles, and World-eating Androids

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Right, so much as I enjoyed Stephen Fry’s epic opus on the iPhone*, my general love for fully specced** devices and general contempt for Apple’s hype machine (how can a company with such a good rep have such an arrogant approach to PR?) means I don’t really give two hoots about the launch last Friday. No idea how many iPhones they’ve sold and unbothered that it doesn’t sound like too many…

More interesting to me is the Android launch from Google. No idea, really, what the devices will look like but there are lots of elements of the software that look awesome. In particular, the 3Dness of it all, the full technical spec (and I love that HTC is behind the platform because I love their phones)… Check out this video, via Kat at Tech Digest:

Annoying as the American marketing speak and repeated references to the “power of the platform” are, it does look like it has some good stuff in there.

As to Windows Mobile? Well, I’ve been on that platform since 2002 and would love it to do well — but ‘TouchFlo’ probably won’t cut it in the long term. They need to do some proper innovating on the UI there. That said, I’m up for contract renewal in February, and given that I have no intention of buying an iPhone in the near future and that the first Android handsets will miss my upgrade window by about 6 months, I will probably be trying to pick up an HTC Touch Dual in February…

* His ‘dork talk’ column on the subject is actually less enjoyable, IMHO…

** Rory Reid on Cnet.co.uk, speaking wittily on the rumoured Apple tablet PC:

So, can Apple turn the Tablet PC into a success when previous attempts have failed? The short answer is ‘yes’. Any company that can make a mobile phone with no buttons, no picture messaging, slow Web access and no video capture into the most desirable phone on the planet can easily make tablets popular.

Technology, Work

An interesting work week

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Had a really interesting week at work last week – amongst other things, was working with a couple of fascinating senior Cisco-ites (Richard Allan and Robert Pepper) to campaign for wireless broadband to get some of the spectrum that is being freed up following the Digital Switchover. If you don’t know what the digital switchover is, check this… and this. For those who need disclaimers, obviously Cisco is a client…

In any event, here’s what’s happening. The analogue TV transmission signal is being switched off, in stages, starting last week in Whitehaven, Cumbria. In 2012, or just before, Ofcom will ‘auction’ off the license that is being freed up, as digital TV transmissions are more efficient, and can be compressed to use less spectrum for more channels. Various people, including the HD for All group and the EU commissioners (as I understand it) are campaigning for different things — the HD group for the spectrum to be allocated to HD over Freeview, and the EU has some thoughts on allocating some spectrum for DVB-H (mobile TV).

Cisco’s thrown its hat in the ring for wireless broadband, and I’m totally with them on this one. The impact broadband has on social and business development is remarkable and intuitively understood by someone who works where I do… a conversation with Damian highlighted the fact that, actually, it may not be so intuitive for others, but this is the role of education, and local business industry groups to work on. It is ludicrous that in this digital age, things like this happen — according to the Times, a woman had to wait 11 months for broadband to be wired to her home… 90 miles from London, the biggest Facebook city in the world.

There are a few reasons broadband needs this spectrum…

First: As Richard put it, it is the “Park Lane and Mayfair” of the EM spectrum (Pepper called it the “beachfront real estate” for you American readers) – it passes through everything easily, which a lot of wireless technologies, operating in their native frequencies, don’t. If you live in a big house, does your home Wifi signal penetrate through as many walls as you’d like it to?. Cisco’s actually technology neutral in this debate — they just “love broadband.” How else will you reach that 0.7% of the population (or whatever it is) that live outside the range of the fixed line infrastructure?

Second: Fixed line broadband needs viable competition! Wireless broadband will force the fixed line providers to up the ante and be good for consumers.

Third: In developing countries, we can skip fixed line altogether! But we need this spectrum – higher frequency transmissions apparently don’t pass through leaf foliage. Not quite so useful…

Fourth: You can still have video content delivered (over wireless broadband), which will be more interactive and generally better than the TV you’re used to (eventually, once Joost and IPlayer and applications like them grow up and get better). And, thanks to compression, you can still have HD over Freeview and mobile TV – just maybe not as many channels as people might like. But then, how much HD content is there? And, over time, we can re-allocate the current TV spectrum between SD and HD channels…

Fifth: The opportunity to ‘rezone’ the spectrum doesn’t happen often! We shouldn’t miss this opportunity by locking ourselves into a restrictive medium that doesn’t reflect the way people increasingly live their lives… (think of all the surveys that have shown that we surf the web more and watch TV less…)

There’s lots more to this debate, and some of it has been picked up by some of the journalists we spoke to – including Jane Wakefield’s piece on BBC News Online and David Meyer’s ZDNet article. There’s lots more interesting things coming – Google is rumoured to be putting a bid in for the US’ spectrum (which goes on auction in January) so there could be a whole spate of new, disruptive technologies coming into play.

Completely fascinating stuff, and great to be involved with them on this. Be interesting to see how the conversation develops over the next few years.