The Dodge Retort

PC Pitstop has conducted a netbook satisfaction survey which places the MSI Wind U100 at the top. Pitstop surveys folks downloading its Overdrive diagnostic download and asks three simple questions:

• How satisfied are you with this PC?
• Is this PC running slow?
• Is this PC hanging or requiring frequent reboots?
  

  Rob Cheng

PC Pitstop CEO and co-founder Rob Cheng who I knew a dozen years as a Gateway honcho says the netbook results were extracted from “well over a million and probably closer to two million” survey responses. However, the number of netbook responses ranged between 107-1,035, reflecting the small number of netbooks out there relative to overall PCs.  So while the U100 got the top rating with 170 responses, number 8 on PC Pitstop’s survey Acer AOA150 garnered the most responses with 1,035. That reflects Acer’s dominant position as the market netbook share leader.

Some of these models are a bit long in the tooth given the rapidity with which new models appear. Also, check out which ones crash the most or are reported as slow. PC Pitstop also looked at desktops (Dell took top nine spots!) and laptops (Dell, HP and Toshiba) as well.

A Verizon TV ad pushing a free Compaq netbook caught my attention today. I only caught the tail end of it, but apparently my ears were not decieving me. Verizon has a promotion that started Saturday giving away a free Compaq netbook (said to be a $299 value) to new FIOS customers. Or customers have the option of selecting a free Flip mini flip camcorder instead.

The netbook looks exactly like the HP Mini I bought earlier this year for $399 and returned once I finished reviewing it for eWeek.com. Now, they’re giving them away… sort of. They’re free only when you commit to either Verizon’s $120 or $130-a-month Triple Play TV/Internet/Phone plans. With the $110 a month plan, you still have to fork over $100 for the netbook or camcorder.

The deal also includes free HBO and Cinemax for three months, according to some folks kibbitzing about it on Verizon’s site. If only I could get FIOS in my neighborhood!?

My full review of the HP Mini Model 1151NR bundled with Verizon mobile broadband is now up at eWeek.com. In any case, I give it a B- given the inconsistent bars I got, but it pretty much works as advertised.

A better option for Internet ubiquity is the MiFI 2200  mobile hotspot which I also reviewed for eWeek. The full review was filed yesterday and I will link to it when it is posted.  In a nutshell, the device – smaller than an iPod Touch – is mobile broadband in one end and up to five WiFi connections out the other. And you don’t have to deal with Verizon Access Manager on the host after the first mobile broadband connection is made. After that, you simply switch on the unit and it automatically connects to Verizon’s 3G network.

The WiFI worked well once I understood you have to unplug the MiFi from host where the mobile broadband was the connection was initially made (For a host, I used a netbook running Windows 7 release candidate which worked fine). The device costs $100 and $60 or $40 a month for the ususal Verizon two-year service commitment. If I spring for mobile broadband  given its relatively high cost, it will be for this.

Verizon MiFi charging

Meanwhile, I am blogging away about at SmartPlanet.com which covers its namesake “smart” technologies. Check it out. Today’s topic was cameras implanted in a prosthetic or bionic eye.

I’ve been playing with HP Mini Model 1151NR that come bundled with Verizon Mobile Broadband for a couple of weeks now and the convenience is growing on me.

It’s much slower than Wifi and cable Internet and the Verizon Access Manager that you use to find the network and connect is a minor imposition. One problem is in my office I only get one bar ( four is tops) so connecting can take a little longer. You can track you speeds from a Statistics tab. Verizon says average speeds are around 500 Kbps with bursts up 1.4 Mbps and it generally delivers as promised.

Video downloads take several minutes, but it’s fine for browsing, Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, email, visiting The Dodge Retort and other standard apps.

I’m going to return the loaner to Verizon soon and am going to miss it. Next decision is whether to spring for the unit at $200 and a two year commitment at $60 a month. I have a full review of the HP Verizon bundle  coming up at eweek.com.

Also, Verizon just gave me a Mi Fi mobile router with Mobile broadband in the back end and Wifi out the front so I don’t have to decide right away. It’s about two thirds the size of an iPod Touch and connects via USB to its host. I will report back in a week or so on that. Meanwhile, stay connected.

I have not posted for several days because I was busy with my new CBS Interactive blog ThinkingTech at SmartPlanet.com. Check it out.

We’ll cover all manner of smart technologies from the rehabilitation of the grid to smart gadgets that report on traffic in realtime. The focus is on smart technologies that are kinder to the planet and that help humans. It’s a great site with lots of video (hey, it’s CBS!)

But don’t worry, The Dodge Retort is still a top priority for me. In fact, I’ll be introducing video shortly and should be getting a Dell Mini 10v to review.

I also finished my review for eWeek.com on the HP Mini 1000 Model 1151NR that comes with Verizon wireless mobile broadband. I will summarize that review here next week. My conclusion is that it works as advertised, but could use some refinements. It’s all in the bars!

I’m posting this from the passenger seat of a moving car, by the way. I do like that!

Seeing red is goal of HP's Vivienne Tam edition

Dell Mini 10v is awash in colors

You can have a netbook in any color you want as long as it’s black. While that timeworn notion thought to be coined by Henry Ford is changing, it would still seem to be the case (pun intended) from netbook leader Acer which dominates a third of market.

Acer’s most powerful model the Aspire One 11.6  says nothing about color choice and it’s black in the picture so I assume it’s, well, black. Or dark. It’s the same with Aspire One Pro 10.1, Ultra-thin 10.1 and regular 10.1 models. Only it’s 8.9 models comes in colors: sapphire blue, golden brown (like a perfectly-cooked McDonald’s fry), seashell white and rose pink. Near as I can tell, there is no black for the 8.9 inch model.

I’d like to think Acer is a reflection of the Taiwanese netbook maker’s greater focus on real features than cosmetics. Black is fine with me, but let’s face it, to teenage girls, color is a major feature. Dell and Asus by comparison are downright psychedelic.

In fact, number two maker Asus offers multiple colors for all its 24 netbooks. It’s new Eee PC 1008HA comes in white, black, pink, blue, sapphire blue and Ruby Red. Dell, too, is awash in color with the Mini 10v which can be had in jade green, ice blue, promise pink, passion purple, alpine white, red and not just black but obsidian black (Dell makes a $5 charitable contribution when the red and pink are purchased). All but the latter is $40 extra. What’s more, Dell offers the Mini 9 and 12 with sleeve covers in grey/famingo pink and jet/cabernet.

The wildest design is the Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam edition which probably comes closest to looking like a purse especially when it’s owner is wearing a similarly styled print dress. It plays off the notion of the art of accessories. It’s way too red for me – passionate red some politely might say and the $700 starting price is in the stratosphere.

Then again, it’s all in the eyes of the holder (of the netbook).

One thing I looked for in an operating system is predictability meaning it will work the way I anticipate. Windows 7 in its attempt to automate functions and deliver every imaginable feature falls down on this front. Unanticipated things occur, some good, some bad. Whoever said Windows was simple?

Yours truly high up on St. Bartholomew's Cathedral in Plzen. WIndows 7 does a great job of organizing photos.

Case in point: I never recall turning on the picture Slide Show viewer. The surprise was somewhat serendipitous because it allows me to automatically view the hundreds of shots I took on a recent trip to Europe. I like this applet. Hey, there’s Dvorak’s grave…and Smetana’s.  That’s son Chris and wife Ann high above the Voltava River in Prague. That’s me high up clinging to side of St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral in Plzen, Czech Republic. Very nice. Photos appear in user-defined increments of five seconds to five minutes with optional transitions. This very nice applet is easy enough to shut down so no complaint there, but I don’t recall activating it (as it turns out, a single click turns it on – Libraries->Pictures->Slide Show).

On a related note, Windows 7 does a vastly superior job of organizing files. To me, the Libraries feature as I come from XP is one of the best in Windows 7. It offers relief from the usual unorganized mess of photos, music, videos and documents that quickly accumulate year after year. Kudos on this, Microsoft.

It’s a different story with Narrator, the overbearing voice-guide to Windows 7 for the vision-challenged. Run the mouse over the icons and the voice spits out a rapid-fire jumble of definitions like “checkbox, exit button, application, focus on start button, show desktop, running application toolbar with five buttons.” Huh? Granted, I turned on Narrator (click on Programs->Accessories-> Ease of Access), but often it’s describing that seems to have no relationship where I am in Windows. Worse, it only sort of shuts off. Searching help with “Shut Off Narrator” yielded zero results. I exit the program and it keeps working (Windows has a habit of making you feel like it’s your fault).

One other feature I’ve played around with is the Network and Sharing Center which most of us use to find a Wifi hotspot. It functions the same way as the same way as Wifi manager in XP, but looks different for no advantage that I can immediately detect. It’s just another thing to learn although that happens quickly. Features like this seem the next model year of a car that you don’t need. Maybe as I dig down, I’ll find the Network and Sharing Center is vastly superior to its XP counterpart, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was no need to a network center. You just connect. That’s coming some day.

A nit with Windows 7 which should be fixed once it’s commercially available is no Windows 7 option for downloading Flash, Adobe Air and presumably other applications. I clicked on the “Vista/XP/2003/2000″ option and after several tries, it downloaded, but Flash applications do not run reliably. And I can’t Air-based tweetdeck to run.

As for performance and reliability, Windows 7 on my netbook continues to do fine. I have to keep telling myself to give the myriad features on it a chance.

Shut this off already!

Windows 7 desktop

It’s no secret Windows 7 runs perfectly fine on netbooks which I have now discovered for myself. I installed the release candidate Build 7100 yesterday morning on my Lenovo IdeaPad S10 Model 4231 with only a few minor hitches.

Windows 7 appears to be a better Windows. Vastly better? I don’t know yet, but will report my revelations as I pound on it. The big thing Microsoft seems to have done is lots of little things. My first impression is positive given Windows 7 has performed well with no application hitting the skids as they so often do in XP. Then again, third party programs usually are the ones that hang and since I have downloaded only Tweetdeck and Firefox, smooth operation should not be a surprise.

[Unfortunately, word is most netbooks will come pre-installed with a Windows 7 Starter edition which I presume to be something less than the Windows 7 “Ultimate” edition I am running. Reports surfaced Friday that Microsoft will abandon limiting Starter to running only three applications at once. My former Ziff Davis colleague Ed Bott has a good piece on it. Motivation for Starter editions on netbooks and small notebooks appears to be driven by economics given full Windows 7 can run on any Atom processor-based netbook with moderate capacities such a 1 GB RAM and a small hard drive. I’ll shine more light on the Windows 7 netbook strategy mid-next week after I interview some Windows 7 folks.]

The goal of my testing was to see how well or badly Windows 7 ran on a netbook and describe the `out of the box’ experience you might have as opposed to providing a comprehensive soup-to-nuts review. I try to walk in the shoes of Joe and Jane Sixpack netbook user. You can find out everything about Windows 7 at any number of tech sites and Microsoft offers a decent features overview in which it promises faster and more efficient performance, greater ease of use and expanded media capabilities, all based on user feedback.

Rather than burn an installation DVD from a downloaded ISO disk image which is what Microsoft recommends, I used an 8GB USB memory thumb stick to create what amounted to the installation disk. That worked fine after I unpacked the ISO setup file using a trial version on WinRAR (thanks for the suggestion, Chrystioff. Worked like charm). My apologies to those who expected a Windows 7 on a netbook review in the last PC Pitstop newsletter. My aging DVD drive didn’t work and I ran out of time before a long-planned vacation to Prague and Vienna…now you really feel bad for me, don’t you?

Setup was easy with Windows 7 immediately finding my Wifi network without any prompting so I was off running. A review of the beta said there were some problems with Wifi recognition, but none occurred for me. Upon booting up, I can choose between XP or Windows 7 so it appears that the version of XP that came on the netbook originally is preserved (Windows 7 also has a an XP Mode for running XP applications). This is important because the version of Windows 7 I am running expires next March 1.

In summary, Windows 7 is more graphical and automated than XP. With features like Jump Lists, Windows 7 tries to zero on your most recent activity and position it closer to you. For example, more graphically descriptive icons of, for instance, your browsers, libraries and jump lists to the task bar as opposed to a wholesale redesign of Windows. Run your mouse over them and up pops mini windows showing what you did last rather than a mere 2-3 word static description.

The Start button is still there as are cascading menus and as usual, Windows proficiency rises with more stuff you can find. Still, there’s an awful lot there to overwhelm newbie users. For netbooks, maybe all some of us need are a browser and couple of applets, but I digress….

My first test was the timing boot up and shutdown and I noticed little or no improvement over XP on a netbook. Three shutdowns averaged 29 seconds and as many boot ups 32 seconds to password entry. This is disappointing, but if Windows 7 will reliably shutdown without hanging on an “end program” as is almost always the case with XP, there will be a bit of a time savings. And it has one click shutdown which is new for me. I like the “show desktop” feature that makes the minimized application windows obscuring your desktop go opaque, but applications in full window mode like the browser still have to be minimized to get out of the way. Like I said, Windows 7 focuses on little things such as better organization.

The handiest applet I’ve discovered so far is the “Snipping Tool” which performs piecemeal of entire screen captures. Snipping Tool was introduced in Vista, but like me many users will come to Windows 7 from XP and will be seeing it for the first time. Flexible screen capture hasn’t always been easy for me. The Snipping Tool fixes that.

Two other applets are Magnifier and Narrator. Magnifier enlarges or shrinks the display contents and has been in previous versions of Windows, but in Windows 7 is now a magnifying glass. Click on it and up come the applet. This is an important tool for netbooks given their smaller displays. Narrator audibly describes the screen contents for the blind or persons with vision problems. If you don’t need it, don’t use it. It will drive you proportionately nuttier the faster you move the mouse across the display’s contents. And ever though I thought shut it off, it didn’t shut up (in fact, I am exiting it now for umpteenth time).

Also, try out the gadgets. The CPU and memory meter seems to indicate Windows 7 taxes system resources more heavily than in a more powerful machine, often running at 60-70% whatever that means exactly. Bottom line, though, Windows 7 performance on my netbook so far has been acceptable if not a bit better than XP on my desktop. Other new gadgets worth trying are the RSS reader and stock ticker.

One of the features I like best is the Libraries organizer, which for first time appears to really organize my documents, photos, videos and music in one place. I downloaded about 300 photos from our trip with ease. They preview more easily and faster than in XP for renaming purposes. For users with mounting masses of this type of content, organization is crucial, but netbooks in many cases will not be main repository for photo albums and music. Or maybe they will.

I’ve barely scratched of Windows 7 given it comes with Internet Explorer8 and Windows Media Player 11, large applications in their own right. Windows has always been PACKED with STUFF. Netbooks OSes like Ubuntu and Android take a more minimalist approach with far less demanding system requirements. Still, they have yet to prove themselves so it will be interesting to see if they can take root in the fast- growing netbook world. Do I like Windows 7? My answer is qualified yes until I use it more.

Windows 7 taskbar icons

Windows 7 Libraries

Many exciting things are on tap for The Dodge Retort and yours truly, John Dodge. From the top:

– Tomorrow, I will post my First Look at the Windows 7 Release Candidate running on a netbook. The review will also be promoted in the PC Pitstop newsletter (circ. 900k!) that goes out Tuesday so it should get great exposure.

– Dell has promised to send me an evaluation unit of its education netbook, the Latitude 2100. I will do a no-holds barred review. Trying to nab a Mini 10v, too.

– The buzz today is that Apple will do a tablet of some sort as opposed to a traditional netbook. Check out the coverage.

– I’m supposed to getting the Storm and LG Versa phones from Verizon for review. The Storm has been out a while, but I want to see why folks are opting for the Curve like I did instead of the Storm.

– On June 1, I will be blogging for ZDNet’s on smart technologies. Stayed tuned for more details in next week or two.

Have great long weekend everyone!

Dell isn’t a company that keeps quiet and then all of a sudden blasts out press releases on the  product announcement day. That’s the old model.

Rather, it teases us with possibilities via its blogs. That’s exactly what it did with a video post today showing Android running on the new Dell Mini 10v.

Dell software guru Doug Anson was featured in the video showing that porting different OSes to the 10v is fairly simple. Anson said Android ran “fairly nicely” whatever that means and then put on the disclaimer:

“We don’t have any announced products plans with Android running on a netbook. We just wanted to show you it’s possible to run,” he said. The Android implementation on the 10v was running a browser, dialer and contact manager.

I have to think an Android netbook from Dell is coming, but this could also be a negotiating ploy aimed at other OS vendors, namely Microsoft. He kept emphasizing how Android and Ubuntu, the other OS he showed in the 2:12 minute video, are small and “snappy.” We know Windows XP is not small and snappy is not a word I’d associate with it either.

Judge for yourself.