Congrats to Shozu for raising a $12 million Series C round!

It’s not a secret that I really love Shozu’s product, so I’m glad to see they’ll have the resources to keep improving it. If you haven’t tried it yet, you certainly want to head over to their site and sign up. It is the best way to get images from your device to multiple online destinations, and has a lot of other bidirectional features as well.

According to Yahoo!:

The ShoZu application will ship pre-installed on more than 50 million mobile phones in 2008. In addition, the number of users downloading the ShoZu client to non-preloaded handsets is more than doubling every quarter, with more than 100,000 users currently registering every month.

Being pre-installed on phones is the holy grail of software and services developers, and these guys have it. Way to go! But let’s see some active users stats guys - I’m curious to see how many signups stay around.

This is a proud moment for Clearspring, a company striving to be the least like Dilbert’s company as possible.

Use the Grab It button in the top right to send it where you want it. You can even download it to your PC or Mac desktop. Plus you can choose from several different sizes to fit your destination the best.

This is a very high quality widget, and we want to give kudos to the Dilbert team for a great widget implementation.

Check out the announcement at the official Dilbert blog.

This was such a surprise to me. I went into Best Buy last weekend, and as I was walking out of the store, I caught a glimpse of a sign saying “Unlocked Devices”.

Turns out, they had an N95 North American edition, a Nokia N810, an HTC 5621, and a few Sony Ericsson handsets sitting there ready to buy. In Best Buy. Recent, awesome, unlocked devices. In Best Buy. My brain couldn’t process it.

So I dug a bit online and I find the official Best Buy unlocked device page.

Are all stores doing this? I mean, this store wasn’t in Manhattan or anything, it’s a random store on Long Island. Is this a trend? Will we be seeing unlocked devices in big boy stores now?

It’s a brave new world folks. A brave new world.

I’ve had some time to play around with Android developing an actual app and wanted to make a few comments on my experience.

In general, development was quite pleasant, as I thought it would be when I took my first look. But there are some issues from the SDK being a bit immature that poked their heads up.

My goal was to write an app that made use of Android’s WebView component, and right off the bat, I was sorry to see that the link to example WebView code was broken. Many other components had excellent example code, but WebView’s gave me a fat 404.

OK. No need to dismay, they put up a nice class hierarchy, so I just needed to dig in there for a bit to get started. But first I needed to learn how to create layouts and Views.

Turns out it’s pretty cool, and makes extensive use of preprocessors set to run on build when you create an Android project in Eclipse. In your project’s resource (res) folder, there’s a layout folder where you can put XML files for each of your screens. For my one screen, in my main.xml, I used the line

<webview id="@+id/webview" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" />

to create a fulscreen WebView.

The preprocessor processed this XML on the next build, and updated an R.java file in my src path, providing a unique ID for me to access the WebView using findViewByID(), and probably modified some stuff in /bin to create an actual instance of a WebView in the binary. This really creates a nice separation of UI design from code. Good times.

It was a relatively easy task to tell the WebView to load a URL, and it was refreshing to see a lot of hooks into the browser callbacks - you can even bind your Java code to Javascript calls in the browser. But many of these features were a guessing game or required a bit of searching on the forums to figure out how to do - the docs were really lacking. Again, this is just SDK immaturity.

Creating menus and other UI views was just as easy, but had some much better documentation to guide you. However in most cases, the android forums could be mined to find someone who has come up with a solution to holes in the docs.

Once a project is compiled, it’s packaged into a standard pkzip format file with the extension .apk. Given that an apk is the official install package for Android, you’d expect it to have a MINE type identifiable by the built-in browser, allowing it to be installed OTA. No such luck in the version of the browser in the rc37a version of the emulator. I assume in a final version, the browser will download and install them like we’re used to with .cab or .JAD/.JAR’s.

The Eclipse integration makes emulator control very nice. An excellent logging system allows you to create useful logs with their own error levels and easily activate filters to monitor specific logs and levels in real time. You can manage the emulator filesystem with simple get and put commands, and get a barebones sh-style shell into the emulator from the commandline.

All things considered, developing for Android was fun and productive. Though I only tried a few components, (with the WebView probably being the worst documented of all), the experience made me want to come back for more when the docs get a revision.

It’s the battle of the niche market computers! When you don’t quite want a laptop, you don’t want to spend $2 grand for a ultra-slim full-featured notebook, but you still need to do “real” PC tasks, what do you get?

I’ve been using a $750 Samsung Q1 Ultra running Vista Home Premium for 5 months now, and I just switched it for a $350 Eee PC 701 4GB Surf. Why did I do this? Read and see.

Of course, everyone will have their own needs, and one device doesn’t fit all. Some devices I’m very impressed with include the Nokia N810 and the OQO Model 2, just to name a couple. But as you’ll see below, my use cases necessitate a Windows-based machine (bye-bye N810), and I don’t want to spend well over $1k for this type of device (see ya OQO). So if you’re in the market, please do yourself a favor and really get out there and research.

In order to know why I purchased these two devices, we’ll review them in the context of my primary use cases - computing around the house and before I go to sleep. Say what you will about not being able to disconnect, but these types of uses are becoming more and more common, and I’m sure some of you want to do the same things. So with that, let’s jump in.

Use Case 1: Fully-capable Web Browsing

• Google Reader
• Random browsing
• Online banking
• Blogging
• Using my online recipe database

The web is the killer app for the PC, hands down. We’re all starting to get the concept of adapting content for mobile devices, but where does the ultralight/UMPC formfactor fit into web use? As I mention below, I think it’s more of a desktop experience than a mobile one, and I want my device to be able to deliver that.

How much do we really type when web browsing?

Many of the UMPC / tablet form factor machines start with the concept that text entry will be either an infrequent or non-existent affair when you’re browsing the web. Therefore, UMPC’s like the Q1 employ touch screens so you can use some form of on-screen keyboard or handwriting to do what text entry you need. Done and done.

Sorry, bad assumption. I type a lot when I’m on the web. Searching, blogging, entering URLs manually, typing authentication information - these are all frequent tasks on the web, and I for one can’t have an input method that completely stops the game when I need to bang out some text.

Text Input on UMPCs

Natural handwriting recognition should take care of that, right? Sorry again. I am very impressed with how handwriting recognition heuristics have evolved over the years, and in ideal circumstances it actually works amazingly well. However, UMPCs including the Q1 use resistive touch panels, which suck at palm rejection and have a noticeable distance between the touch surface and the screen image. Combine that with the fact that I’m computing on my back in bed, or perched on one elbow on the couch, or running around the kitchen - and handwriting ergonomics go out the window. Even in ideal circumstances, the Q1’s touchscreen does not offer a good handwriting experience, due to the calibration drift, its binary touch sensitivity, and the fact that you have to push so hard to trigger a press.

What about onscreen keyboards? I have no problems whatsoever with my iPhone’s virtual keyboard, and that’s due to a combination of its keyboard hotzone remapping heuristics, the graphical feedback when you hit a key, and most of all, the quality and behavior of its touch screen. The Q1’s touchscreen has all of the issues I mentioned before, which renders typing on a virtual keyboard annoying at best, and Vista’s Dial Keys and onscreen keyboard are both unintuitive and lacking in visual feedback. How can I see the button I press highlight if my finger is on the button? Think, Microsoft… Think.

Dial Keys is Vista’s new(ish) “ergonomic” UMPC input method. It’s designed so that if you hold the device, you can use your thumbs in the bottom corners of the device to tap out some text. However I couldn’t map the keyboard layout into my brain to be effective. I just couldn’t. Enter, backspace and shift are all wrong to me, and even if the screen responded better, I don’t think I could ever get past the initial “complete clot” stage of typing on it.

Least… Intuitive…Keyboard…Evarrrr….

The Difference Between Hardware Keyboards

The Samsung Q1 Ultra tries to address these input issues by adding a hardware keyboard of its own. Nice try, but there are several issues that make it a complete waste. You need to use Number Lock to type any number, then guess if it’s on or off. You need to hold down Symbol like a Shift key in order to hit many needed characters. On top of all this nonsense is no backlighting. So I had to use the force if I wanted to type at night in bed.

Q1 Ultra’s Keyboard for Masochists

Enter the Eee PC. It has a small, normal QWERTY keyboard that works well and gives excellent tactile feedback. That’s it. No, it’s not ideal for typing in weird positions, but here’s the irony - the Eee is so small, I could actually hold the thing and use my thumbs to type on its keyboard. Eat that Dial Keys! No, it’s not backlit, but the light from the screen casts down onto it, making it perfectly visible in the dark. No issue.

The Eee PC’s Happy Keyboard

The Nokia N810 and OQO both have slide out keyboards for thumb typing, so I would assume that these fall somewhere between the Eee and the Q1 Ultra. My guess is that both of these would blow the Q1 away - you can’t get worse, really.

The Hardware/OS Effect on Browsing

Putting keyboard issues aside… for me, browsing capability is the major data-driven feature that separates a UMPC or ultraportable from a mobile phone. You’re in a different context when you use it - it’s not as much for immediate information or optimized sites that get the essentials to you fast. It’s about bringing a solid longer-term, more rich browsing experience with you when you’re not in front of a full-fledged PC. Given that, there are some requirements:

You must have a high enough resolution to view desktop websites. I’m gonna call this one at 800×400 minimum. You may disagree, but that all factors into which device you choose. The Eee comes close to dipping below this, but you can jack it up to a virtual 800×600, and browsing in Firefox’s full screen mode at 800×400 is just fine. Check out the screenshot below. Keep in mind, I installed Firefox Full Fullscreen to dynamically hide and show the address bar.

Firefox Full Screen is Fine on 800×400

You must be able to load multiple full web pages without running out of memory or slowing the machine to a crawl. There is nothing worse than watching an OS thrash around trying to scrounge up memory, and finally giving you the word that the game’s up and here’s your busted, half-loaded web page with no CSS. You should be able to open a bunch of large pages of rich media web sites simultaneously without worrying about memory. The Q1 does that just fine with its 1GB RAM (with some horsepower caveats I’ll mention later) and so does the Eee PC with my Nlited version of XP. I’ll talk about how and why I ditched Linux on the Eee later.

You must be able to run the latest version of Flash. This means Flash 9. I’m browsing on a desktop alternative - though Flash 8 support isn’t a deal-breaker, I’m dealing with a laptop-alternative here and not a phone, so I don’t want to be shut out of any websites. Luckily, Flash 9 is out for Linux, so the N810 has it, and so does Xandros, the customized Eee Linux distro. Of course, all the UMPCs running Windows have it as well.

You must be able to play video well. This menas Flash video like YouTube and CNN’s video streams and other random video plugins you find on the web. Hey, a big reason for having a machine around for random web browsing is to kill time, and it sucks when you come across media you can’t play or is unwatchable from lack of horsepower. This kind of horsepower implies that you’ll be able to run JS/AJAX web apps well without slowdown as well, which is also very important. Both the Eee in my XP configuration and the Q1 do a good job with this. However…

Vista Kills Browsing on Low-Powered UMPCs

This brings me to a huge issue with the Q1 which I can’t blame on the Q1. It’s all Vista’s fault. Vista is a RAM and CPU-hogging dog, and there is nowhere it is more emphasized than shoving it into a memory and CPU-constrained device like the Q1. Peh - I can’t believe I’m even saying the word “constrained” here! It’s running a 800Mhz Intel A110 with a gig of RAM! THIS MACHINE SHOULD NOT BE CHOKING ON A YOUTUBE PAGE!! Sure, it plays and doesn’t stutter much. But if I do so much as click on anything else, I get stutter and pause. Are you kidding me?

Let’s put aside the fact that a whole section of the manual is dedicated to telling you how to disable Vista visual features to get better performance (let that sink in), but the fact that it was still behaving much worse than the Eee with only 512 megs of RAM, even after I ran through with msconfig and disabled pretty much everything, just speaks to the fact that Vista is bloated and inefficient and should not be considered for ultra-portable devices at this stage.

The Eee with a light XP install is perfect for browsing. I do not miss my desktop except for some screen real-estate - and this is the experience you want with this device form factor. They hit it right on the head. It feels like it’s always ready and eager to jump in and browse with no fuss or anything else to worry about.

Use Case 2: Streaming & Shared Media

• Streaming media from my PC
• Torrented TV shows
• Home movies and photos
• E-Books, Comics

Slinging and Streaming

This is a huge requirement for me - it is almost as important as web browsing for this type of device. When I’m getting ready to sleep, I tend to consume media like crazy. This means watching the latest Top Gear I’ve torrented, maybe some Mighty Boosh or other awesome shows that aren’t shown in the States. It also means watching some of the shows I’ve recorded on my DVR via my Slingbox.

Some of this video is quite high-resolution, and Sling’s Slingplayer software is not light on the CPU use. I will not tolerate stutter, so the machine needs to have some horsepower and a decent WiFi stack. Given that Slingplayer only works in Windows and OSX, I’m stuck with a Windows variant for my ultralight machine. Both the Eee with my light XP install, and the Q1 could handle all of these tasks. But the Q1 was bogged down again with Vista, and random background tasks would frequently muck up the video. Context switching would also destroy everything. I made sure no maintenance processes were running on the Eee, and the video remains rock solid. It’s only an 800×400 screen anyway, so it’s not blitting a whole lot. So I can get great 30fps full screen video streamed over WiFi from a Windows share or 27 or so fps from Slingbox and still context switch over to the browser really quick.

Check out the picture below of the Eee driving an extended 1280×1024 desktop on my external monitor while streaming V for Vendetta from the Slingbox. This was going at a good 25-30 fps with no dropouts over WiFi.

V for Very Good Slingbox Performance

512 is Juuuuust Enough

That said, I do need to be careful multitasking on the Eee with only 512 megs of RAM. I disabled the swapfile in order to save writes to the SSD - they apparently have a more limited R/W lifespan than hard drives. So when I run out of RAM I get the little warning bubble and things stop working. I could easily upgrade to 2 gigs at any time - much easier than cracking the Q1 open to upgrade - but I really haven’t felt the need to. Playing video is the only time I feel I need to be careful running other programs.

Other Media

In addition, I consume E-books and comics, and in general, the machine is great to bring around the house to look at photos and video we’ve recorded. Pretty much the only reasonable way to do this is to have a mounted drive of some sort, and since my media storage RAID is on my Windows desktop box, that means it needs to connect to Windows shares. Therefore, it’s a Windows variant or bust for my ultralight machine yet again. Unless Apple releases an ultralight (fingers crossed).

Use Case 3: Email/IM/Twitter

For me, this means Exchange support for email, multi-protocol IM like Pidgin, and using Twitter through either a desktop widget, a Firefox plugin, or in the worst case, the website.

The Exchange support is the biggie and basically locks me to Windows. I want my calendar and contacts synced well and correctly, and I don’t want to jump through hoops to get it that way. So it’s Outlook or bust pretty much. This is one of the major reasons I installed XP on my Eee, but if I were getting one for the family mostly and not myself, this issue wouldn’t tie me to XP, as the Eee’s Xandros install is perfectly fine for browsing, IM and basic tasks. It even does Skype with voice and if you get the 8GB with the webcam, video too. Sweet package.

Instant messaging and Twitter usually come fairly easily on any device, and honestly I don’t use IM much when I’m not at my desk (IM means “working” to me, and if I’m working I’m in my office). There are many ways to connect, and you can even resort to web-based IM like Meebo if you can’t find a decent native client. That said, I love Pidgin, and it’s nice that both the Q1 and Eee can connect use it natively.

Boot Time and Battery Life

The other major issue to think about for these tasks is battery life. Will you be leaving this machine around the house unplugged and forget about it for days? If so, you’re going to want to turn it off when you’re not using it so the battery doesn’t die in standby, and you want it to boot up super-quick when you want to check your mail.

Don’t look for that in the Q1, or any Vista UMPC. Boot time for the Q1 on a good day was a few minutes. We’re talking about 3-5 minutes from off to usable here folks. It’s utterly ridiculous. The Eee boots in 20 seconds with my XP lite install and it’s ready to go with no disk activity. The solid state drive has a lot to do with this, but also a light OS is key to making this happen. I didn’t test the Xandros boot time (I really wiped it clean as soon as I got it), but from what I’ve read it’s quite fast as well.

I’d love to hear what the boot times are like on the Nokia and Oqo. My guess is that the Nokia is less than a minute, but the Oqo is a couple minutes due to Vista on a normal hard drive, like the Q1.

If you don’t care about booting because you use standby instead, no machine will last long. You’re looking at 24 hours max on standby for the Eee and much less for UMPCs.

In my experience with the Eee, I’ve managed to get over 5 hours of casual browsing out of it in one charge. Depending on what you do with it, and if you’re not doing a ton of Flash and video, you might even be able to push that. Honestly I was surprised - I don’t even have the larger battery that comes with the Non-Surf 4G and the 8G. Compare that with about 3 hours max for the Q1, which is probably Vista burning cycles.

Keyboard is Key

And again, the key to any of these tasks is a usable keyboard, and the Eee provides it. The Q1 doesn’t.

Use Case 4: Travel & Photo Manipulation

As a slightly distant 4th, I want to use the machine when I travel. I don’t mean daily commute bluetooth blah blah and all that nonsense. I want to be able to use it as a base of operations when my wife and I go out of town, take some pictures, and want to manipulate and upload them.

Manipulating & Uploading Pictures

With the rise of web-based photo-manipulation tools, the 1 gig of space left on the Eee’s internal drive (after XP and office 2k7 and Firefox) is not an issue. Sure, I could install Photoshop on the Q1, but with Vista being such a dog, I wouldn’t want to deal. To be fair, 512 in the Eee is probably not enough to really do Photoshop work anyway. So online tools really shine here.

The $1000+ Q1 Ultra models have an SD card slot, which is great for getting pictures off my instant camera. But the $750 barebones Q1 didn’t have this, which is what I was stuck with. The $350 Eee does though! And it’s a great way to add an extra drive for some working space. I can also use my USB card reader for my Cannon’s CF card.

#*$&ing Vista!!!

The Q1 failed me miserably last Christmas on a trip to Delaware. I took a bunch of great pictures and wanted to copy some to other family members’ SD cards so they could take them home. It’s a simple enough task. To do this, I brought the Q1 and my awesome USB multi-format card reader.

I plug it into the Q1. Sorry, can’t find the driver. I manage to get online and have it search. Sorry, can’t find the driver. It’s a freaking USB mass storage device! What is the big deal? Needless to say, no copying happened that trip.

I plugged the same device into the Eee running XP. No network needed. It just installed and worked.

Bluetooth Would Be Nice

To add to the usefulness of both of these machines, it would be nice to have Bluetooth for the times when WiFi isn’t available when traveling. Again, the more expensive Q1’s have integrated Bluetooth, but mine did not. Some of the newer Q1’s are even shipping with internal 3g chips. Cool stuff. But these get way way pricey. As an alternative, there’s an awesome hack to add internal 3G data to the Eee for a couple hundred bucks. Both of these solutions aren’t ideal for less-frequent traveling, since they require a separate 3g data plan and I’d rather use dial up networking with my phone through bluetooth.

The Best EEE Can Be: Install XP

Throughout this post, I’ve explained the reasons why I installed XP on the Eee. Check out this post for more. Keep in mind, I’ve created a custom XP build using the awesome Nlite software, and this makes it possible to keep enough space to make the 4gb Eee usable with XP on it. It also keeps a lot of the unneeded XP services unloaded, helps boot time, and makes for a super-optimized computing experience. That said, the Xandros install isn’t bad at all and certainly gives you 80 - 95% the bang for the buck depending on what you’re doing with it.

But of course, if you want to hack on the thing and don’t just want a rock solid media and web device, you’ll want to keep Xandros.

That’s It: The Big Conclusion

Yeah well I said it right up front - I switched from the Q1 to the Eee. For my use cases, isn’t it obvious why?

I must say to you though, if you’re considering a Q1 as a cheap tablet PC, because you’re into tablet PC’s, at least get hands on for a while with a Q1 to see if you can actually write on it. If you really want a pen-based device, it’s much more reasonable to go with a true tablet designed for notetaking. UMPCs are hybrids that have to balance their functionality with price, and you just don’t get good pen input at cheap prices nowadays. You’d be much better off finding a used convertible tablet for $600 with a better digitizer.

I’d love to hear your experiences with UMPC’s - try to sell me on a different one! But just remember my use cases above. There’s no need to be a fanboy with these devices. We’re getting into an area of really personal computing form factors here, and if we all keep critical minds, we can send the companies messages about what we want to see. So let’s be critical and constructive, and really celebrate when someone gets it right, like Asus.

Update: Samsung announced at CES that the new Q1 Ultra Premium will be running XP Tablet! Wow, I guess they realized Vista was crippling them too.