My mother-in-law still uses dial-up and has no interest in broadband. She uses her computer for email and for pulling photos off her camera and printing them. Being on a fixed income, why should she spend more money for bandwidth she doesn't need?
You're not a luddite if you decline to buy something you don't need.
I can see where ISPs wouldn't want to provide dial-up anymore, but until broadband approaches parity, there's no reason to switch. (Rates vary wildly in different geographical areas, but for a given area, dial-up is almost always cheaper than broadband.)
Not to mention, being on broadband makes you more of a target as your machine tends to be on the net with the same IP address for longer periods of time. Us geeks know how to set up the router and machines so we don't (usually) get hacked, but grandmas who are only interested in email are unlikely to have this expertise.
Thanks for the review, I was considering a 755 as a replacement for my elderly, scratched and wobbly 650, even though it meant switching carriers, but I do a lot of reading also and couldn't handle the slowness you talk about.
My company gave me a 750 (Windows Mobile) with a company SIM card and an unlimited data plan, and I really really tried to like it. Ended up returning it after a week. The whole sorded story can be found in the link below if anyone's interested. It was slow and unreliable (lots of resets) but I could maybe live with that and hope it got better when the software was updated. But I did finally return it to the company and went back to my personal 650. The bottom line is the 750 wouldn't work reliably as a phone, and being on-call I needed a phone with dead-nuts reliability. I don't know how people stand it. Who would own a phone that won't reliably take incoming calls?
A mode you can set and keep in preferences to minimize the amount of real-estate the controls take, for small screens like on sub-sub-notebooks. Ideally there would be nothing showing except a small row of buttons on the title bar for most used gestures like "back" and "home". Give me an option to get rid of all that cute real-estate-chewing crap at the top of the browser.
I'd love to have a good tactile keyboard again, but my wrists have become addicted to the "natural" (split keyboard) layout. Any of these tactile keyboards have that configuration?
> I might have bought a Foleo but now I have an eeePC, which was a huge hit for Asus. Some of the specifics like the tie in to the Treo were a bad idea, but the hardware platform might have taken off if they had persisted with it.
We have an EEE also; it's pretty cool. You're right; obviously there is a market for such a device. But it's not Palm's area of expertise, and the Folio abortion drained resources from their core product line. Would have been much better had they partnered with Asus or some other company that was doing the exact same thing, instead of going on their own. Being able to attach an EEE seemlessly to GPRS over bluetooth would have been something. But instead of figuring out how their core expertise could play in the subnotebook department, they decided to compete head-on in a market in which they had no experience.
I can tell you what happened to Palm, Charlie Brown.
The simple matter is that they're selling the same crufty old hardware today that they were selling 5 - 7 years ago. Same elderly version of Bluetooth, same low-resolution camera, same old version of PalmOS, same obsolete display, same antiquated specs, same tired old apps. And still no wifi. I've been hanging onto my ancient Treo 650 since 2005, having replaced the screen, antenna, misc screws and twice replaced the battery, in the vain hope that Palm would come up with something that would make it worth upgrading. During that time, they have come up with new marketing slogans and some different, rather clunky packaging but nothing substantially different in features. It's like they fired their engineering staff in 2004 and have been coasting since.
For the last time, this is what we want to see from Palm:
- Refresh the OS and applications, especially the mailer and browser.
- Bluetooth version 2, for God's sake! It's been out since 2004!
- Wifi. Don't give me crap about Palm OS 5 being incompatible with wifi. Either fix the OS or get some new engineers.
- While we're at it, stop making noise about someday running the PalmOS API on Linux and how neat it will be. It's time to put up or shut up. Release something now. Anything. Let us know that you still have the capability to design a product and bring it to market.
- Minimum 3 Megapixel camera with flash. C'mon, Blackberry is doing it. Get with the program.
- Palm was one of the first with touch screen, and then they never did anything else with it. Excite us. Not with blocky new packaging, but with substantially better UI. And this *doesn't* mean porting the same old Windows Mobile platform everyone else is using. We're excited about what Apple is doing. We endure Windows Mobile. Do you understand the difference?
When other companies continue to innovate and improve, Palm continues to coast, wasting what feeble engineering capability they still have on abortions like the Folio.
I hear Vista doesn't scale much past an 8-way. What you could do is create a virtual community of Vista users and do some social experiments regarding a community that shares files reeeeealy sllloowwwwly.
> If the prop is mounted 250 feet up on the pole, but each blade is 150 ft, that means the diameter of the the prop is 300 ft., so... the blade digs in the water by 50 ft?
Um no, it's the radius that's important, not the diameter. The blade will miss the water by 250 - 150 = 100 feet. The tip of the blade will also travel 150 feet above the top of the pole.
> And they say "No, you take this laptop as-is and use it" with the same unthinking and unresponsive attitude with which they fired him, and then where is he?
...and some places really do this. That's why you accidentally blow out the install in some unobvious fashion and hand it back. "I dunno, it broke." If they're in the habit of recycling old installs, they should be used to random breakage.
At one company I was handed a laptop with the previous occupant's contacts and stored passwords still resident. Being in (a different part of) IT, I could scrub and reinstall myself. Was a little frightening, though. 'S why I don't let the computer remember my passwords.
>Under the bill, even though I run GNU/Linux and do not use any Microsoft products, what's to prevent Microsoft or some other vendor from breaking into my system and screwing with it, whether as a result of legitimate error or intentionally, for the purpose of protecting their software?
Oooh oooh oooh. Especially since your GNU/Linux box violates 235 Microsoft patents. This would give Redmond the tools for sweeping proactive measures. Shutting down large numbers of patent-violating machines in one fell swoop. Wow.
> This is interesting. Could you point me in the right direction as to how to enable to standard Xandros desktop? My grandad has a 6 months old EEE that works well but I have not figured out on how to run updates - there are a couple of glitches. Any help is appreciated, I am familiar with Linux but have not gone beyond the user interface of the EEEPC.
The article below gives you several ways to do it. We chose "the manual way". Had no problems. You'll need an active wifi connection because it has to download stuff, and you'll lose a little bit of space.
The desktop looks enough like Winders that anyone with pc experience should be able to use it. Even my wife, who's aggressively techno-naive, can make use of it without being coached.
> One advantage of running Windows on these portable devices is to sync with the 'big computer' at home. Even getting my Nokia 6288, which supposedly supports SyncML, to sync with Kontact is a pain. I currently don't have the week to invest in fixing this issue. I know that with Windows I would have been good to go the minute that the Nokia was out of the box
My last two phones have been Palm based, and getting them to sync with the "big computer" is truly mindless. Haven't played with the Nokia, but it's demonstrably not true that you must be running Windows on the device to easily sync with the "big computer".
> In the UMPC's own little world, Linux is fine. But Linux won't talk to the big computer at home for those who run Windows there.
You've got to be kidding. The little Linux box shows up in network neighborhood in the proper workgroup, has it's own netbios name, shares printers, plays well with DHCP, what more do you want?
> She chose Linux over XP because it is less complicated and has fewer issues? It sounds like you made her chose Linux over XP so you can post a heart warming success story.
Oh, you know that's not what I wrote. She chose Linux over XP "because the XP versions were comparatively sluggish". The important thing to her was how well it worked, not what OS it was running. You're implying I'm giving her too much geeky credit for picking Linux by name. I'm *saying* she didn't care about the OS, she only cared about whether the appliance could do what she wanted. It's us geeks that say Oh, it's gotta run Ubuntu or Windows Mobile 6 or whatever. Real people, who haven't been indoctrinated, pick what does the job. Especially for small specialized electronic devices, the OS truly doesn't matter.
There *have* been a few minor issues -- I had to remember how to configure Samba, it took some time to discover how to make the wifi settings persistent, and we had to get it out of "novice mode". Once those issues were settled, it did exactly what she wanted it to do and she's perfectly satisfied with it. Scary? I hope so.
> yeah I know but its still a market that Linux is very competitive in. XP cant be in that market segment for that long (they say 2011). What will Microsoft's new product for this market be?
After XP is gone, all they'll have in that space is Windows Mobile. I can't imagine Microsoft coming up with a *new*, lighter-weight OS. It's not how they work. They're stuck with Vista, and the next version will be even more hardware-intensive.
Idle thought -- how does Microsoft's business model work in today's "green" market, where running white-hot hardware and upgrading every two weeks is no longer the norm? Will it be global warming that finally kills Microsoft?:-)
> There's an explicit exception for the mini-notebook market, for the very reason that Microsoft is afraid that Linux will sweep it.
True. I wonder if that'll help. My daughter (13) last Saturday bought an EEE (with her own money!) and specifically requested Linux because the XP versions were comparatively sluggish. Was soon frustrated with easy mode, but after we got the full Xandros desktop loaded, she's been very happy with it, and hasn't looked back. (I think Asus should just default to the full Xandros desktop -- it's pretty, and even Windows users would be comfortable with it.)
Point is, she chose Linux over XP on the EEE for the same reason we've been choosing XP over Vista on desktops -- less complicated, fewer issues, faster on the same hardware. Put simply, the lighter weight OS provides a better user experience on the same hardware.
Moreover, considering the use to which these sub-subnotebooks are being put, there's very little reason to run XP, any more than a PDA or phone needs to run Windows. (They can, but they don't *have* to.)
"(10) detection or prevention of the unauthorized use of software fraudulent or other illegal activities."
When I hear of something like this, the first thing that occurs to me is how valuable the keys or mechanism or whatever that actually does the "preventing", how badly the criminal element would want to get hold of that information, and the inevitability that this will happen when the right price is found for whomever holds the keys.
In other words, this kind of thing will eventually, inevitably, be used for nefarious purposes.
Sounds like another reason to avoid Windows Mobile, "Microsoft powered" vehicles,...ur... Windows for Warships... (wow, that's a scary thought... "Fire control is down, sir. The popup says we're being rude.")
They're not even confined to building "manners" into new devices -- just include it as part of the next Windows Mobile update. Whee.
Seems to me that the SDK and private keys (if it even uses a secure mechanism to shut down the device -- you never know with these guys) are going to be highly sought-after in the criminal world. Wow, to partially or completely shut down any device running a Microsoft OS... what a capability.
So, lessee... I can get this Symbian device that works everywhere, so the babysitter can call me during an emergency, or this Windows Mobile device that won't work in theaters or restaurants. What to do, what to do...
In a few months, Thinkgeek offers a new product -- a universal remote that disables any Windows Mobile-based device. Think of the fun you could have at the mall. I wonder if they're taking advance orders.
Slashdot Mirror
My mother-in-law still uses dial-up and has no interest in broadband. She uses her computer for email and for pulling photos off her camera and printing them. Being on a fixed income, why should she spend more money for bandwidth she doesn't need?
You're not a luddite if you decline to buy something you don't need.
I can see where ISPs wouldn't want to provide dial-up anymore, but until broadband approaches parity, there's no reason to switch. (Rates vary wildly in different geographical areas, but for a given area, dial-up is almost always cheaper than broadband.)
Not to mention, being on broadband makes you more of a target as your machine tends to be on the net with the same IP address for longer periods of time. Us geeks know how to set up the router and machines so we don't (usually) get hacked, but grandmas who are only interested in email are unlikely to have this expertise.
Thanks for the review, I was considering a 755 as a replacement for my elderly, scratched and wobbly 650, even though it meant switching carriers, but I do a lot of reading also and couldn't handle the slowness you talk about.
My company gave me a 750 (Windows Mobile) with a company SIM card and an unlimited data plan, and I really really tried to like it. Ended up returning it after a week. The whole sorded story can be found in the link below if anyone's interested. It was slow and unreliable (lots of resets) but I could maybe live with that and hope it got better when the software was updated. But I did finally return it to the company and went back to my personal 650. The bottom line is the 750 wouldn't work reliably as a phone, and being on-call I needed a phone with dead-nuts reliability. I don't know how people stand it. Who would own a phone that won't reliably take incoming calls?
http://www.ronaldchristian.com/article.php?story=20070517181903636
Good points, but Xandros is the default Linux distro for the Asus EEE PC. I'd expect a sudden boost in popularity just from that.
A mode you can set and keep in preferences to minimize the amount of real-estate the controls take, for small screens like on sub-sub-notebooks. Ideally there would be nothing showing except a small row of buttons on the title bar for most used gestures like "back" and "home". Give me an option to get rid of all that cute real-estate-chewing crap at the top of the browser.
> ...as well as render the page and all text FIRST before loading graphics and other crap.
Didn't Mosaic do this? I wonder how we lost this feature.
> I am tired of the bloated dead fish that browsers have become.
Copy that.
It would save a lot of time.
I'd love to have a good tactile keyboard again, but my wrists have become addicted to the "natural" (split keyboard) layout. Any of these tactile keyboards have that configuration?
> Why did the LifeDrive have only 32 MB of ram?
Yeah. They say geeks don't have much of a life, but geeze...
> I might have bought a Foleo but now I have an eeePC, which was a huge hit for Asus. Some of the specifics like the tie in to the Treo were a bad idea, but the hardware platform might have taken off if they had persisted with it.
We have an EEE also; it's pretty cool. You're right; obviously there is a market for such a device. But it's not Palm's area of expertise, and the Folio abortion drained resources from their core product line. Would have been much better had they partnered with Asus or some other company that was doing the exact same thing, instead of going on their own. Being able to attach an EEE seemlessly to GPRS over bluetooth would have been something. But instead of figuring out how their core expertise could play in the subnotebook department, they decided to compete head-on in a market in which they had no experience.
I can tell you what happened to Palm, Charlie Brown.
The simple matter is that they're selling the same crufty old hardware today that they were selling 5 - 7 years ago. Same elderly version of Bluetooth, same low-resolution camera, same old version of PalmOS, same obsolete display, same antiquated specs, same tired old apps. And still no wifi. I've been hanging onto my ancient Treo 650 since 2005, having replaced the screen, antenna, misc screws and twice replaced the battery, in the vain hope that Palm would come up with something that would make it worth upgrading. During that time, they have come up with new marketing slogans and some different, rather clunky packaging but nothing substantially different in features. It's like they fired their engineering staff in 2004 and have been coasting since.
For the last time, this is what we want to see from Palm:
- Refresh the OS and applications, especially the mailer and browser.
- Bluetooth version 2, for God's sake! It's been out since 2004!
- Wifi. Don't give me crap about Palm OS 5 being incompatible with wifi. Either fix the OS or get some new engineers.
- While we're at it, stop making noise about someday running the PalmOS API on Linux and how neat it will be. It's time to put up or shut up. Release something now. Anything. Let us know that you still have the capability to design a product and bring it to market.
- Minimum 3 Megapixel camera with flash. C'mon, Blackberry is doing it. Get with the program.
- Palm was one of the first with touch screen, and then they never did anything else with it. Excite us. Not with blocky new packaging, but with substantially better UI. And this *doesn't* mean porting the same old Windows Mobile platform everyone else is using. We're excited about what Apple is doing. We endure Windows Mobile. Do you understand the difference?
When other companies continue to innovate and improve, Palm continues to coast, wasting what feeble engineering capability they still have on abortions like the Folio.
That's what happened to Palm, Charlie Brown.
I vote "making your commute even more suicidal" as the phrase of the day.
Were I a kid in the back seat, I'd be terrified.
Give Kerry Conran another shot.
I hear Vista doesn't scale much past an 8-way. What you could do is create a virtual community of Vista users and do some social experiments regarding a community that shares files reeeeealy sllloowwwwly.
> If the prop is mounted 250 feet up on the pole, but each blade is 150 ft, that means the diameter of the the prop is 300 ft., so... the blade digs in the water by 50 ft?
Um no, it's the radius that's important, not the diameter. The blade will miss the water by 250 - 150 = 100 feet. The tip of the blade will also travel 150 feet above the top of the pole.
> And they say "No, you take this laptop as-is and use it" with the same unthinking and unresponsive attitude with which they fired him, and then where is he?
At one company I was handed a laptop with the previous occupant's contacts and stored passwords still resident. Being in (a different part of) IT, I could scrub and reinstall myself. Was a little frightening, though. 'S why I don't let the computer remember my passwords.
>Under the bill, even though I run GNU/Linux and do not use any Microsoft products, what's to prevent Microsoft or some other vendor from breaking into my system and screwing with it, whether as a result of legitimate error or intentionally, for the purpose of protecting their software?
Oooh oooh oooh. Especially since your GNU/Linux box violates 235 Microsoft patents. This would give Redmond the tools for sweeping proactive measures. Shutting down large numbers of patent-violating machines in one fell swoop. Wow.
> This is interesting. Could you point me in the right direction as to how to enable to standard Xandros desktop? My grandad has a 6 months old EEE that works well but I have not figured out on how to run updates - there are a couple of glitches. Any help is appreciated, I am familiar with Linux but have not gone beyond the user interface of the EEEPC.
The article below gives you several ways to do it. We chose "the manual way". Had no problems. You'll need an active wifi connection because it has to download stuff, and you'll lose a little bit of space.
The desktop looks enough like Winders that anyone with pc experience should be able to use it. Even my wife, who's aggressively techno-naive, can make use of it without being coached.
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:getkde?s=advanced
> One advantage of running Windows on these portable devices is to sync with the 'big computer' at home. Even getting my Nokia 6288, which supposedly supports SyncML, to sync with Kontact is a pain. I currently don't have the week to invest in fixing this issue. I know that with Windows I would have been good to go the minute that the Nokia was out of the box
My last two phones have been Palm based, and getting them to sync with the "big computer" is truly mindless. Haven't played with the Nokia, but it's demonstrably not true that you must be running Windows on the device to easily sync with the "big computer".
> In the UMPC's own little world, Linux is fine. But Linux won't talk to the big computer at home for those who run Windows there.
You've got to be kidding. The little Linux box shows up in network neighborhood in the proper workgroup, has it's own netbios name, shares printers, plays well with DHCP, what more do you want?
> She chose Linux over XP because it is less complicated and has fewer issues? It sounds like you made her chose Linux over XP so you can post a heart warming success story.
Oh, you know that's not what I wrote. She chose Linux over XP "because the XP versions were comparatively sluggish". The important thing to her was how well it worked, not what OS it was running. You're implying I'm giving her too much geeky credit for picking Linux by name. I'm *saying* she didn't care about the OS, she only cared about whether the appliance could do what she wanted. It's us geeks that say Oh, it's gotta run Ubuntu or Windows Mobile 6 or whatever. Real people, who haven't been indoctrinated, pick what does the job. Especially for small specialized electronic devices, the OS truly doesn't matter.
There *have* been a few minor issues -- I had to remember how to configure Samba, it took some time to discover how to make the wifi settings persistent, and we had to get it out of "novice mode". Once those issues were settled, it did exactly what she wanted it to do and she's perfectly satisfied with it. Scary? I hope so.
> yeah I know but its still a market that Linux is very competitive in. XP cant be in that market segment for that long (they say 2011). What will Microsoft's new product for this market be?
After XP is gone, all they'll have in that space is Windows Mobile. I can't imagine Microsoft coming up with a *new*, lighter-weight OS. It's not how they work. They're stuck with Vista, and the next version will be even more hardware-intensive.
Idle thought -- how does Microsoft's business model work in today's "green" market, where running white-hot hardware and upgrading every two weeks is no longer the norm? Will it be global warming that finally kills Microsoft? :-)
> There's an explicit exception for the mini-notebook market, for the very reason that Microsoft is afraid that Linux will sweep it.
True. I wonder if that'll help. My daughter (13) last Saturday bought an EEE (with her own money!) and specifically requested Linux because the XP versions were comparatively sluggish. Was soon frustrated with easy mode, but after we got the full Xandros desktop loaded, she's been very happy with it, and hasn't looked back. (I think Asus should just default to the full Xandros desktop -- it's pretty, and even Windows users would be comfortable with it.)
Point is, she chose Linux over XP on the EEE for the same reason we've been choosing XP over Vista on desktops -- less complicated, fewer issues, faster on the same hardware. Put simply, the lighter weight OS provides a better user experience on the same hardware.
Moreover, considering the use to which these sub-subnotebooks are being put, there's very little reason to run XP, any more than a PDA or phone needs to run Windows. (They can, but they don't *have* to.)
"(10) detection or prevention of the unauthorized use of software fraudulent or other illegal activities."
When I hear of something like this, the first thing that occurs to me is how valuable the keys or mechanism or whatever that actually does the "preventing", how badly the criminal element would want to get hold of that information, and the inevitability that this will happen when the right price is found for whomever holds the keys.
In other words, this kind of thing will eventually, inevitably, be used for nefarious purposes.
Sounds like another reason to avoid Windows Mobile, "Microsoft powered" vehicles, ...ur... Windows for Warships... (wow, that's a scary thought... "Fire control is down, sir. The popup says we're being rude.")
They're not even confined to building "manners" into new devices -- just include it as part of the next Windows Mobile update. Whee.
Seems to me that the SDK and private keys (if it even uses a secure mechanism to shut down the device -- you never know with these guys) are going to be highly sought-after in the criminal world. Wow, to partially or completely shut down any device running a Microsoft OS... what a capability.
So, lessee... I can get this Symbian device that works everywhere, so the babysitter can call me during an emergency, or this Windows Mobile device that won't work in theaters or restaurants. What to do, what to do...
In a few months, Thinkgeek offers a new product -- a universal remote that disables any Windows Mobile-based device. Think of the fun you could have at the mall. I wonder if they're taking advance orders.
Yeah, that's a great patent...