Archive for the ‘Review’ Category

Viliv N5 Review

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

I received my new Viliv N5 at about 10:30 Monday morning. I was excited!

After days of installing stuff and trying it all out, I’ve gotten a handle on what I’ve just bought. Originally, I was looking for something to replace my netbook and my DS as “the thing I carry around.” As it turns out, the netbook is simply better at some things—Keyboard, ethernet cables (LAN), and touch-pad navigation (I’ve gotten good enough to play Diablo II on it).

It turns out there’s also a really big difference: Wi-Fi range. The N5 can’t see access points my HP Mini can, which is a breaking-point.

Long story short, the N5 simply cannot replace my netbook. I’ll use the Mini at home and pack it in my bags when I go places.
Meanwhile, I’m finally able to carry a PC in my pocket wherever I go, no matter where that might be (besides the sea-floor).

Since 2008, I’ve been carrying a Nintendo DS as my pocket-thing. It’s served me well, and it has let me play music, view re-encoded video, or play a couple games while I was on the go. It’s fairly limited, however, and has no good text-editing capabilities. Its touch screen is only 256 x 192, and the second screen isn’t touch-sensitive. It has only 4 MB of RAM, and the two processors are 33 MHz and 66 MHz.

All in all, the N5 blows the DS out of the water. Not only does it emulate most of the games I’d play on the DS (though DS games play a bit slow on an emulator), it doesn’t require me to re-transcode video and will play 720p. The storage space is tremendously larger, too. I’ve found a program called GMapCatcher that lets me save Google Maps offline, so that replaces the mapping program I’d used in my DS.
The DS is slightly smaller and has controls suited to gaming, but that’s about it. I can make due.

A good netbook can, for all intents and purposes, replace a desktop machine. The Viliv N5, though, can’t replace your main system. The wi-fi is too weak, the keyboard is borderline crappy, and the navigation methods slow you down too much (unless you’ve got a good stylus).

So, my original intent was to replace my DS and my netbook. What would I need?
Basically: something about two inches longer (the real killer is that some keys are smaller than others, because they couldn’t fit everything), with slightly-better battery life, strong wi-fi, and a more responsive touch screen.

I’m disappointed that the Viliv N5 isn’t absolutely perfect, but it’s still a good machine. I’ll be using it a lot in the next few years (until Medfield devices start coming out)!

There are a few things the N5 does fantastically:

  • An infra-red nub for mousing, rather than some sort of capacitive bit. Also, resistive-touch screen. Those two combined means I’ll be able to use the device perfectly while wearing gloves in the winter.
  • Deliciously high resolution. I’m getting iPhone 4 syndrome, where I look at my regular monitor and do a double-take at all the blocks everywhere.
  • Those tiny keys are actually almost perfect for playing games. I can nearly use the W/A/S/D keys as a directional pad, with my thumbs. I’ve been playing NES games.
  • The form factor is a joy to hold. It’s not glossy, so you need to be pretty greasy before fingerprints start showing up. The screen is sheer plastic, though, so I have to keep my hands off the front of it. (I usually use a fingernail for the touch-screen.)

There are a couple things I’d have changed, if I were them. First, there’s no ‘context menu’ button on the keyboard, so you have to get the cursor to an item and right-click. The rest of the keyboard makes enough sense. Also, the thing cost over $700, so does it really have to come with Windows 7 Starter? You can’t even change the desktop wallpaper. I futzed around with the settings and services and performance options enough that I somehow ended up with a much-more-compact classic look (Win98-ish).

Final recommendation: It’s a nice device, but it competes more with smartphones than with laptops and netbooks. It can do nearly everything you want, but it’s weaker in some areas. Meanwhile, it also has far less battery life than a smartphone, and doesn’t generally take calls, so you’ve got to carry some sort of phone around anyway.
This is best for someone who’s out and about a lot. There’s nothing better than being out of the office and still being able to do everything you’d usually do with a laptop (albeit more slowly).

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Why Use Twitter?

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

From what I’ve seen, a great many people can’t see a use for Twitter. I understand, because Twitter is best when you’re looking for some specific things.

Think about an iPhone (or equivalent mobile device). Why would you want one of those instead of a laptop? It’s because you can take it with you, and it’s easy to do something quick with it between things.
Basically, it’s small and mobile. Manageable.

Twitter is the same way. Blog posts are long, and aren’t easy to follow when you’re out and about—especially on a mobile phone, which is where Twitter (Twttr, back then) was first envisioned for. You need something small and light, to fit with the mobile nature of your small and light phone.

As well, while you’re working, trying to keep up with blogs can really hinder your progress (believe me, I know). Keeping Twitter open on the side helps you keep in touch with what people are doing, minute-to-minute, while not taking so much overhead that you lose (much) productivity.

Twitter was adopted early and heavily by the professionals of the Open Web, because of what’s possible with it. I could send a message to a top CEO, and I’d likely get a reply back. I could engage many of my idols in conversation (if I had something to say; I hate to come across as an idiot).
Everything said on Twitter is completely public, which is half the magic. (There is a friends-only setting, but those are uncommon, and usually as a second, personal account beside someone’s public account.)

Facebook is a two-way process: you ask to be someone’s friend, and they might let you.
Twitter, on the other hand, has a follower/following model, where who you follow is your own choice. I can follow Obama, or Pepsi, or Bill Gates, if I wanted to. I would see what they’re saying. People can follow me if they find me interesting.
Because of this, I rarely have to worry about spam. I do check whoever is following me, and sometimes I’ll remove them, but they otherwise have no bearing on my experience.

So, if you’re interested in:
-Specific people
-How/What those people are doing
-Open communication
-A ‘marketplace’ kind of social atmosphere

Actually, that last one makes me think of something.
In Canada, if you smile to someone as you pass by them, they might smile back at you. In large gatherings, we find it easy to introduce ourselves to the complete strangers around us and share the experience. I hear this is being put to good use around the Olympic games.
Geeks, too, are similar. We bond together, and share ourselves through our technology (which is why geeks had really taken to Twitter a couple years ago, before the media hype).
In the states, I hear things are far less fun for normal people. I could imagine strangers are suspicious in public places, and you tend to ignore each-other in the streets. Twitter would hold far less appeal to you.
Just a theory.

Anyway, I hope that clears some stuff up. I was skeptical of Twitter (and, in fact, am skeptical of other services I’ve heard about since then), because I didn’t see a use for it in myself. After a while, though, I fell into that Open Web group and started really opening up my life. At the point where I was sharing my feelings to the public, Twitter made perfect sense.

@CozyCabbage

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Netbook Redux

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Since I got my netbook, I’ve used my big desktop machine two or three times. The desktop has a larger screen, which is nice (I really wish this netbook had video-out), but there’s really nothing special it can do that my netbook can’t. I guess there’s an old game I wanted to play, which needs at least 1024×768 resolution (this has 1024×600), but that’s about it. Graphics files would be easier to work with on a large screen, too.

I’ve never used much disk space, and I have a combined 44 GB of space on my netbook.
I can’t remember when I last maxed out my CPU, besides when I’m encoding movies, but that would just take a bit longer than usual. On really slow CPUs, I can’t play emulated SNES games at a good speed, but this netbook plays them perfectly. I think the only time I’ve run into CPU limits on this device is when I had several pages open with embedded video, and tried to watch them.
I have as much ram in this as I have in my desktop, and I plan to double that sometime.
The write speeds on my drive are terrible, and that’s about the only problem I can see with the netbook. Truth be told, the SSD is likely using technology from 2008, and is undoubtedly from the lowest end of the price scale. When I get an upgrade, for a couple hundred dollars, it’ll be an order of magnitude faster.

The battery also runs out too quick for my tastes, but that’s a null argument when talking about a desktop; if I unplugged the big machine, it would cease operation immediately.

So… when you get right down to it, a netbook is actually all people need. I think a VGA port is needed, so people can buy bigger, higher-quality displays, but otherwise there’s really no argument.

I wonder when they’ll have netbooks with DDR3 and Super-Speed USB?

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Moar Netbook

Friday, January 8th, 2010

In my last post, I tried to do some sort of real review, which I’m sure sounded a bit boring and normal.
This time, I’m going to put it in real-world terms (much like music players, with their “how many songs can it hold”).

What can you do with this Netbook?

  • Travel around
  • Play old games
  • Emulate NES, SNES, or PSX games smoothly
  • Move and shake about
  • Run image rips of CDs or DVDs
  • Play music or video from a flash-drive or SD card
  • Office computing
  • Small-size graphics editing
  • Connect to the internet through Wi-fi (b/g), cable, or mobile
  • Install and use your USB devices
  • Use an external SATA drive.

What can’t you do with this Netbook?

  • Play newer games
  • Do anything for longer than three hours
  • Color-correction (the quality is crappy)
  • High-powered rendering
  • Use it in the shower

Overall

Really, just don’t expect things to be too fast. Gaming takes lots of speed, so nothing too new will work well. Other applications, like rendering or coding movies, will just take more time. Working from flash drives or SD cards takes some time.
Other than that, it’s incredibly capable and very broad-ranged. Waking from sleep mode only takes about three seconds, and the keyboard is nearly flawless.

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HP Mini 1116nr

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

I decided to get a netbook; the $200 refurbished HP you can order from Future Shop.
It’s actually kind of amazing. The specs are as follows:

  • Intel Atom N270 (with hyper-threading)
  • 8.9″ WSVGA (1024×600) anti-glare display
  • 16GB SSD
  • 1GB DDR2 SDRAM
  • Windows XP Home SP3 for ULCPC
  • Wireless b/g
  • 3-cell battery (approx. 2.5 hours)
  • Webcam + Microphone
  • SD/MMC Card slot
  • An amazing keyboard

This is actually better than I had hoped it would be. The entire width of the netbook is taken with the keyboard, which means the keys are larger than usual and aren’t squished into any odd configurations. It’s pretty much a full-width keyboard. I can type on it perfectly fine, unlike with other netbooks.

The screen is pretty bright, even on its lowest setting, but the colour quality is abysmal, which I fixed by altering the colour profile in the included Intel options panel. This is the same for other HP laptops, from what I’ve seen; the gamma is almost too high, the colour washed out, and with just a bit too much blue in the mix. I’ve just turned the brightness down and the contrast up, and that almost fixes most of it.

The solid-state drive is some old, small, cheap model from who-knows-when, probably with a J-Micron controller. It’s not very fast, and takes forever to do things when it’s taxed (I believe this is what people meant when they say it ‘stutters’). I was planning on getting a new, fast SSD, sometime; one of those able to outperform hard-disks in all aspects. The netbook came with a backup for Windows, so I’ll be able to reinstall everything on the new drive.
I’m not using it as my main system, and I’m not keeping bunches of movies on there, so the 16GB of storage is just fine, along with an extra 16GB SD and 8GB flash drive.

It came with 1GB RAM, but apparently Kingston has a 2GB module out for $40 or so, which I might end up ordering. It’s got a fast little access panel on the bottom for RAM.

Another surprising little tidbit: It usually comes with a mobile modem. There’s a slot for the SIM card, under the battery, but it doesn’t currently have a modem installed.

Windows is running fine on it, and I haven’t had any problems. It came with a load of bloatware, but I’ve turned most of that off.

The charging brick is small! It’s capable of 30 watts, and is built like a regular laptop charger, but is about three quarters the size. I can carry it around in my pocket without too much hassle.

The microphone is above the screen, out of reach of the whirring fans in the body. I’ve had to use a laptop where the microphone was right beside the disk, and anything that I recorded would have whirs and clicks throughout.

Downsides: No VGA-out, which means I can’t use my HD monitor. Only two USB ports, though there’s a hidden one that’s more-or-less inaccessible (for the Transcend-made ‘Expansion Drive’).

Other: It comes with an HP Expansion connector, but I’d have to get the cable elsewhere. That would allow me to plug a monitor into it, and would give me some extra USB ports.

Overall: For $200, this is a lot of computer. I couldn’t do everything on the limited screen and drive, but then I’m not trying to make this my main machine. It’s for when I’m on the go, and need to do some work from my flash drive, or surf the internet, or download things while I’m at my parents’ house.
I give it five stars. Out of… five.

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Christmas!

Friday, December 25th, 2009

I know; only children excitedly brag about their Christmas gifts. Maybe I’ll do a proper review, instead?

If you’ve been following Swiss Miss, you’ll have seen a bunch of beard-related stuff. I just received a Beard Head, and it’s about as wonderful as I could have imagined. It’s a perfect fit for my head, and the moustache-customization feature is simple ingenuity. Wearing a coat, I can see that the whole of the engineering is planned out: The back of the Beard Head comes down to my jacket’s collar, but isn’t so long that it gets pushed up by it. There’s room at the front-sides so that I can turn my head easily. The moustache can be taken off and buttoned elsewhere into the natural weave of the wool.

I can’t wait to wear it out and about!

I got a Lexar 8GB class-6 microSDHC. I had half-expected it to be a bit slow, from what I’d heard on forums, but it turns out to be faster than the 2GB card I’ve been using this year. I had gotten a 4GB class-4 card last christmas, but the slowness of it ruined my expectations of these cards’s speed and was useless for my every-day use.
In short: The 8GB microSDHC is great. It also seemed to get slightly faster when I filled it up with stuff. 

          MAX(µs) AVG(µs)
  512 B -   430 /   235 (Sequential)
    4KB -  1830 /  1820
   16KB -  7280 /  7265
  512 B -   500 /   480 (Random)
    4KB -  1895 /  1875
   16KB -  7335 /  7320

I also got a cheap black-and-red Chinese console with two slots which lets me play NES and SNES games. The S-video is low quality (and plays NES games in greyscale), my mom apparently had to glue together a broken part, and one controller has a faulty R button, but it’s otherwise good enough quality. I spent a couple hours last night (this morning?) playing Super Metroid (which I also just got), and it’s as fun as I remember.
I only have about three or four games, but still.

I saved the best for last: Handcrafted CSS, by Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte; Content Strategy for the Web, by Kristina Halvorson; and Painting the Web, by Shelley Powers. I’ll save those reviews for after I read the books. I think I’m starting with Handcrafted CSS, because the cover is just so tactile. It’s also pretty short, and reads like a blog entry (complete with links to other peoples’ blogs).

It raises a question, which I might later remember and go into in more detail: Are books like really old blogs? I’m reading this book in 2009, but it’ll be as irrelevant as today’s blog entries after a few years.
(That is to say, not entirely irrelevant; but still kind of “What?”)

I’ve still got to get Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition. Maybe for my birthday? Is John Resig’s book out, yet? (Never mind, I’ll google it myself. It seems that it’s not quite out, yet.)
Oh, I also want Transcending CSS.

I’m going to have to introduce some of the students at the college to these books. I’ve read so many blogs everything in them will likely seem old-hat to me, but the new students will find them invaluable. Or supervaluable.

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Opera Mini 5 Beta

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

I few days ago, I downloaded the Opera Mini 5 beta. The Download page told me they didn’t know if my phone would handle it, so I figured I would write about my experiences.

My Phone

My phone is a cheap Sony Ericsson W200a, which is the pay-as-you-go version of the W200. The screen is 128×160, though I use the 160×128 horizontal setting.

Review

When you first start the program (after installation), you get the “OperaMini” splash screen (which is cut off to “peraMi” on mine) while it loads, and then the speed-dial page. This page has been completely retooled with a 3×3 grid and a big, beautiful UI, which works great with a large touch-based device. My phone, however, is neither large nor touch-based, and the UI takes up the entire screen. In 128×160 mode, the ‘Exit’ button is completely cut off, and only the first option in the pull-down menu can be seen. In 160×128 mode, the ‘Exit’ button is half-visible, but you can’t see a single option in the pull-down. It’s easy enough to blindly scroll through them, try them out, and remember what each does (reminds me of playing a Japanese version of Final Fantasy), but that’s not something the average user wants to do. The large amount of padding around the different UI elements is part of the problem, and the screen is so small that the element sizes feel too big and out of proportion.

Opera Mini 5 gives you some standard browser controls, such as Back, Forward, Home, and New Tab.
The forward button is handy, because Mini 5 switches around the Back and Menu softkeys. That’ll take some getting used to.
Even on my cheap phone, switching between four tabs was quick, with only a hint of lag. There was a bit more lag when I had two of those tabs loading data, but the fact that I can switch between a number of tabs and refresh many of them at once is pretty impressive, and will be wonderfully useful. In Opera Mini 4, I was constantly returning to the Speed Dial to go to another site, and was relying on my sessions to keep me logged in.

Opera Mini 5 saves passwords for you, too! When I log into something, I get the confusing message, “Password m…” which I suppose means “Password memorize?” or something.

This brings me to a big problem of mine: System font size. Even when I set the size to extra-small, the UI stays the same, such that in the Settings (or any other menu), I can see only two options on the screen at the same time. The padding, again, is also using up half the screen.

The extra-small font in Opera Mini 5 is a lot better than in Opera Mini 4. It’s very solid and readable, though the letter ‘d’ tends to look like ‘cl’. The difference is that there is only one column of pixels between the bowl of the ‘d’ and its ascender, while there are two columns separating a ‘c’ and an ‘l’.

I had a bit of a finicky time trying to select a small checkbox, but it’s otherwise very good at navigating through links.

Summary

In summary, there are a couple problems with my experience:

  1. It’s not made for my screen. The splash image is too big, there’s too much padding on the UI elements, and the Back/Forward/Home/Etc. icons are very, very large.
  2. The system font is a bit big. Text notifications get cut off with ellipses, and I can only see two menu options at a time.
  3. The smallest font setting has some invisible hairlines.
  4. Some fields (such as when entering a web address) only use the abc method, with no T9 option. It’s a lot slower, even though most websites use english-based names.

I propose some solutions for my problems:

  1. Have a ‘small’ option which strips away most of the padding and shrinks the icons down to size.
  2. Allow the user to change the system font size, so that words don’t get cut off. Alternatively, use multi-line notifications (there’s no reason you have to fit two long words on one line, when the screen is 160px tall).
  3. retool or otherwise optimize the smallest font setting so that the hairlines in the ‘d’, at least, are visible. The rest of the letters look fairly goocl.
  4. Allow T9 in the web address bar, even if it uses abc by default.

Overall, it’s quite a change, and I think it’s a lot better than the previous version.

P.S.
My phone’s ‘return’ button, which would usually be either ‘back’ or ‘cancel’, based on the context, is completely unusable throughout my entire experience. I suppose that’s something that has to be added on a per-phone basis, which is why I only added this as a foot-note.

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Opera 10

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

Most of you know, by now, that Opera 10 is out. They’ve updated their engine, have gotten a new icon, and have had the UI redesigned by the very talented Jon Hicks (the guy who rendered the Firefox icon).

What does this mean for you?
Opera 10 introduces a bunch of new features. Opera Turbo gives you extra speed and less data-transfer, if you don’t have all the bandwidth in the world. Unite allows you to host documents on your own computer. Support for web fonts and advanced styling means you’ll see well-made pages as the designer intended them to be seen.
You can also put the tabs wherever you like—top, bottom, left, right; it’s all fine! You can even stretch the tabs to reveal thumbnails of each page you’ve got open.
Meanwhile, you get all the Opera classics: the ability to disable images, the option to do away with min-widths (and thus horizontal scrollbars), a whole host of accessibility options, and a relatively quick start-up (something that Firefox can’t brag about).
And did I mention that it’s beautiful?

So check it out. You can have any number of browsers installed on your system without affecting any of the others (and, in fact, I’d recommend it).

If you have a cell-phone, I recommend also trying Opera Mini. You’ll realize that most cell-phones have something so shameful it shouldn’t be called a browser. Opera will fix that right up.

Download Opera, the fastest and most secure browser

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Opera Mini 4

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

As I sat in the mall, today, I wished I had a laptop or something. I wasn’t in range of an open wireless hotspot, which I’d be able to use with my DS, and my phone was just generally crappy on the internet.

When I was downloading Opera, I had browsed around and found Opera Mini, which told me to visit a certain URL with my phone. I remembered that, and decided to try it.

As it turns out, everything about it is ten times as amazing as what my phone came with. I could set the text size down smaller, and was able to rotate the screen so I hold the phone sideways. I thought my phone had really poor memory, but it turns out to be perfectly capable. Pages suddenly load fast, and I can switch between small pages in the blink of an eye. I can visit large sites, which gives me an overview, and I can zoom in to regular size when I want to see things close up. The text containers are all squished to my screen’s width, and the cursor auto-snaps to those thin columns, which makes all the text very easy to read.
The '1' button acts as a right-click, and then I can use * and # as function buttons to refresh the page, load bookmarks, or change the settings.

I had never been able to log into Twitter, and I was never able to post on some other sites. Now I had no troubles at all. Everything worked perfectly!

Really, I can’t get enough of it.

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