UMPC Explorers! | Ultranauts.com » 2007

Laptop upgrades are not difficult to complete yourself, and there are three key upgrades that you can easily accomplish to make your laptop run faster. These will also give your laptop a higher resale value when you decide to replace it.

One of the most simple laptop upgrades to complete yourself is to upgrade your operating system. If you are running Windows XP or Windows Media Center, upgrading to Windows Vista is a good idea. You will be able to take advantage of the many features of Windows Vista, as well as enhance the speed of your system. An upgrade to Windows Vista for the Home Basic edition is under $100 and is worth it to enhance the efficiency of your system. (More…)

I’d like to hear from some Tablet Kiosk and Asus owners on their UMPC support experiences. My own Samsung support continues to be very good and I’ve heard this from others as well. Heck, great support alone is enough of a differentiator to recommend UMPC’s!

I’m near the end of my warranty and my battery life has suddenly dropped from 2+ hrs to about 45 mins on low brightness. Same thing happened late last year. No gradual drop, it’s a battery cliff. So I called Samsung and they are sending a second replacement battery now.

The rep was again polite. There was no try this, try that BS. There was a lot of background noise and I suspect the call center is much bigger than when I had a video problem last June, but they continue to do a good job of scaling up support.

Asus, Tablet Kiosk, Others - How has your support experience been?

With all the changes going on in life it’s organizing time again. The GTD system is slowing coming back on line and OneNote is finally starting to come into it’s own. As I print things I want to keep to OneNote, I’m reminded of why I prefer storing items on an always with me UMPC to storing things in online repositories, aka, the Cloud. A UMPC is better because:

1) The cloud loses stuff. There I’ve said it. The vaunted Gmail had dumped users inboxes. Tripod once dumped an entire website of mine without apologies. I then dumped Tripod but it was a free site so I had little recourse. A favorite interviewing video from Manager-Tools is no longer available on the web. I have a local copy and thank God I do. It’s gotten me my last 2 jobs. A couple times a month people come begging for copies but the authors have asked me not to share while they figure out how best to distribute it. So if you relied on the cloud, you got screwed. Yes I still have to have a good backup system, but that’s a lot easier over a LAN rather than figuring out how to backup gigs of photos and email stored on the Internet.

2) The cloud is still less accessible and less mobile. “Internet is everywhere” is still a load of hooey. For fun, go stand in line at the ticket counter of your local international airport and tell the agent, “Wait a minute, I need to bond my PC to Bluetooth so I can check my Gmail and get you the reservation number you can’t find. Computer is booting, just a minute. Ok, phone is bonding. Oh crap, Bluetooth shut down. Just a minute while I reboot. ” Be prepared to run from the angry mob in line behind you. Internet is not everywhere, all the time yet. Even here in Orlando where we have every flavor of high speed cellular internet, Cingular still reverts from HSDPA to Edge periodically with no rhyme or reason. The counter argument is “Yes, but what if you’re away from your PC?”. Um… with my Q1, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

3) Local is still slicker. Too many Web 2.0 applications still aren’t as fast or smooth as their local counter parts. Integration between apps isn’t there. Folks are working on it but I may be sporadic forever. Need to move a Google Calendar item to your HiTask task list? Warming up your typing fingers. I have yet to see anything as slick as the Outlook 2007/OneNote 2007 integration in the cloud.

The PC is still personal, ultra-personal for me.

Ryan Tollefson has posted his first version of a Media Center Virtual Remote designed for a UMPC. He writes that he wanted to control Media Center from his Origami device (he doesn’t say which one) so he wrote the MCE Virtual Remote app building on the MCE Controller work done by Charlie Kindel.

You’ll need both apps to make it work and while the install isn’t quite “hit setup and go”, the interface looks good and the buttons look big enough to push with your finger.

There’s no reason why this won’t run on a regular laptop but where’s the fun in that!

WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com

Our CEO sent me a request via email this weekend. I was at the beach and had my trusty UMPC with me. So, I replied in ink. It worked great except that he has a Blackberry which can’t display ink. Oops!

It’s tough being so far out ahead some days.

If you haven’t seen it, Vikram Madan takes a look at some lost scenarios for mobile PC’s.

Some of my favorites are the Ultra-Ultra-Ultra-Ultra-Ultra Mobile PC scenario

The End is Near scenario,

and the All Month battery scenario

Take a look at all the scenarios on his blog.

I know I’m late with this but congratulations to Hugo Ortega on joining the Gottabemobile monopoly, er team! It’s always good to see folks working working together to improve the Tablet PC platform. Ink shows with an Aussie accent may take a little while to get used to but I’m looking forward to them.

Have you ever asked yourself the question in the title? It won’t be as efficient as a Tablet PC according to what I have read at TabletPC Student. But apparently there are others that have overcome these limitations according to this review posted recently at Origami Project, which I consider a very good example that shows that a Q1 can be a powerful tool in the hands of any student. (More…)