This Week at Mobile Tech Manor #31- Spring Break is in the Air

mobile-tech-manor-large-22It’s time to share my week with you, my favorite time. This week was Spring Break but that didn’t affect me much as I was working away in Mobile Tech Manor (MTM). I swapped phones, revived a cool gadget and got rid of some gear that’s been around for a while. There is a very sweet notebook on the way to MTM that I can’t wait to share with you.  Come on in and let’s chat a spell.

This week saw Spring Break hit my house but the only kid at home from school had the flu and slept through most of it. The week also saw a lot of rain; there were times when it felt like it would never end.  It was almost like living in Seattle, there was so much rain.  We needed it, though, as the area is far behind in rainfall for the year.  There are near-drought conditions all over Texas so the rain was not begrudged too much. It provided a good excuse to keep my head down in MTM and do the things I do.

Cleanup at Mobile Tech Manor

The rainy week provided a good excuse to do a bit of spring cleaning in the office. Three evaluation units were packed up and sent back to their owners with my work with them completed. The HP 2730p and Mini 2140 have now gone back to the company, making room for new stuff that will be arriving on the doorstep.  There is always something showing up.  The Lenovo IdeaPad Y650 also went back due to the problem I’ve chronicled with the touchy touchpad. I am certain this one was defective so Lenovo agreed I should send it back and hopefully they can send another one. The short time I had with the Y650 showed me it is a very nice 16-inch notebook, but I need a good touchpad to appreciate it properly. I don’t want to give you a false account of how bad the touchpad is to use if it’s defective.

With these three notebooks packed up and sent away the spring cleaning was extending to the MacBook. I went through all of the applications I’d installed over the past few months with an eye toward getting rid of those programs I don’t really use. I test a lot of software and it’s scary how fast it piles up on my systems, and this process demonstrated just how fast. The main criteria I set to determine if an app should be removed was if I had not used it in the previous two weeks.  If not, out it went, and it cleaned up the Applications folder more than I thought it would.  Of course now I start the process of installing other programs to evaluation; it’s a never-ending process.

Old and new gadgets

The folks at Dynamism are sending me a Sony VAIO P to test out briefly.  I am excited about this because it’s the smallest notebook form that still has a pretty decent keyboard for touch-typing. The VAIO P caught my interest in Vegas this year at the CES, where it first appeared, and I can’t wait to get my hands on one.  This one is the Japanese version that can only be picked up at Dynamism here in the states.  That means it has no integrated WWAN, which I wouldn’t use anyway, but more importantly it means it has the faster 1.86 GHz Intel Atom processor. I’ve not had the pleasure to test a system with this fast Atom so I’m looking forward to it.

This week my project to revive the HP tc1100 Tablet PC hit full stride as I made a big effort to get it going full speed again. It’s been sitting unused for almost a year now and I had no idea what kind of shape it would be in for this project. It turns out it’s in better shape than I thought and it’s been an interesting journey so far. I have two batteries for it but they’re both on their last legs, which isn’t surprising given their age.

The first few times I ran the tc1100 neither one of the batteries would last longer than about half an hour. The Battery Bar utility I use in Vista showed that they only had about 40% of their full capacity available when fully charged. This is common for old, well-used batteries but it demonstrates concretely the way batteries lose their power over time. Some online research I did into this phenomenon indicated that sometimes you can cycle old batteries to get them to restore some of the lost capacity. This consists of a full discharge until the system shuts down, followed by a full charge. Then you rinse and repeat until the full capacity stops increasing. I was able to get one of the batteries to increase from 42% full capacity when fully charged to 65%, so this cycling method does work.

I was surprised to find that new batteries for the old tc1100 are still readily available for purchase so I’ll probably pick one up. I wasn’t surprised to find them on eBay so much as I was to find them still be sold on Amazon by real vendors. I guess it shows how many of these things are still in use which proves how durable they are.

Swapping the phones

I have too many smartphones as part of my work here on jkOnTheRun and I don’t use them all every day. That’s not a true test for how well a given phone works for me so what I usually do is spend at least a week with one of them to remind myself how well it works for me. I can then compare it to another of the phones that I used the week before and have a good feel for how well each of the phones works for me.

I had been using the BlackBerry Storm on Verizon for a full week and a half and it served me well. I still like using the touch-screen with the SurePress keyboard and was quite happy using it as my only phone. This week I put the Storm down and picked the iPhone 3G back up and have only used it for the week. It’s still a great phone, with different strengths and weaknesses than the Storm.

The primary weakness of the iPhone over the Storm was the carrier.  Verizon beats AT&T hands-down in my location and that was apparent all week. I had stopped noticing it so much in the past but going from the Storm to the iPhone made that clear. That difference was mitigated somewhat with the WiFi on the iPhone, something that RIM should really put in all their phones. The Storm could really benefit from WiFi and having it on the iPhone drove that point home.

While using the iPhone this week I really missed the BlackBerry messaging system. I can’t stress how useful it is having a simple LED that flashes when a new message (email or text) arrives on the BlackBerry.  The iPhone would really benefit from that simple little tool, a fact clearly demonstrated when I went from the Storm to the iPhone. Apple would clearly benefit by putting such an LED on future iPhones, in my opinion. The LED should be on the very top of the phone like it is on BlackBerrys so you can see it when the phone is in the shirt pocket.

The main thing I missed about the messaging system was the unified Inbox. All of my various email accounts get push email on the Storm and it was a breeze to go through them all in the one Inbox. The Storm’s touch interface shines in this area as I get a lot of email and I can spin through them by simply swiping my finger side-to-side to advance from one opened email to the next. The BlackBerry duly marks the email as read when it changes from one to the next and this method makes it easy to check a ton of email with one-handed operation of the Storm. Not so on the iPhone, as I have to manually switch from one email address to the next and then hit those arrow buttons all the way at the top of the screen to go from one email to the next. This needs some work on the iPhone messaging app, something I sadly didn’t see in the newly announced iPhone 3.0 software.

e-book of the week

I am still going through “Executive Orders by Tom Clancy,” a great book.  Clancy’s books are huge, as far as novels go, and I’ve been reading it all week. I can easily state that eReader Pro on the iPhone is a much better app for reading than the new BlackBerry version I used on the Storm last week. That version is still lacking a lot of the usability features that the more mature iPhone version has for making reading better.  This is primarily in the use of themes and the night-time mode on the iPhone which makes it easier to tailor the book’s display to suit me. The BlackBerry version lacks full justification of the book content and that makes a big difference to me personally.

Wrap-up

That’s my week in a nutshell, although a big nutshell. I will be back next week with another look back at the goings on in Mobile Tech Manor. Thanks for sharing this time with me and for letting me into your world.  Until then, peace to you.

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