This has to be one of the coolest things I’ve seen it a while, but word is emerging about a new secret Skunk Works project called “Courier” which is a new innovative “booklet” design. This thing apparently has 2 7″ LCDs on a rigid hinge and it looks like something that might be direction tablet computers are heading towards.
One thing I’m not sure about is whether this design allows you to operate it like a notebook computer with a virtual keyboard if you need to type an email. Had this device been invented 10 years ago when a lot of people didn’t know how to type, it would have been an instant mega hit. These days, almost everyone knows how to type so they’re probably going to want a keyboard. It’s also not clear if you can flip the booklet back to back so that you have something you can hold in one hand though I doubt it since it’s probably too big for that. While it’s definitely a very cool device, I’m not sure if it’s as useful to me as a laptop. The user interface looks good but who knows if it actually works as responsive as it appears in the video. Ultimately, this may be a very nice niche product but I think it needs to be smaller, thinner, lighter for easy standing operation.
An organic farmer Lenny Levine in Nova Scotia just blocked his rural community from having broadband access by convincing the Kings County Council to block the construction of a microwave tower several hundred meters from his farm. Levine cites his unfounded fear that the microwave radiation would mutate the DNA in his organic crops.
The “Environmental Working Group” ewg.org just put out their report on the dangerous of cell phone Radio Frequency (RF) fields. The problem is that their report either relies on very small studies that show a possible correlation with increased cancer rates but they completely omit the largest studies that found no dangers with cell phone RF fields.
The EWG makes several claims in their executive summary but they seem to contradict the larger body of evidence. Read the rest at Digital Society.
Update 11/9/2009 – Nokia is recalling the chargers sold with this phone made between June and August of this year for fear of electrocution! You have to go to this site to exchange the charger.
I just picked up a new Nokia 1661 to replace my lost cell phone. Unfortunately, I lost my Samsung Blast which was a nice slim phone and I had a 2GB memory card in it. I’m 17 months into my contract, and I have to pay way too much money to get another phone from T-Mobile. So I got a free SIM card instead and one of these pay-as-you-go phones.
The Nokia 1661 looks great, but the instructions are absolutely horrible on how to insert the SIM card. The way they make the slot look makes it very confusing, and even this online guide doesn’t show you how to plug the SIM in correctly. The way it’s slotted makes it look like the SIM card needs to be slid down towards the middle of the phone, and that just doesn’t work. Turns out you just push the SIM card towards the very top of slot towards the top of the phone rather than try to line up the SIM to where the groves makes it seem like it’s supposed to reside.
It seems like other people are trying to find the answer too so I’m posting this to help them out when they do a search. Here’s a picture of how it should look after it’s fully inserted.
How to install a SIM into a Nokia 1661 cell phone
Here is an additional photo which has a higher resolution image you can click on.
A product that has caught my eye since last year is the Peek Simply email device from Peek that gives you wireless email and SMS capability. It’s an inexpensive device that costs $20 for the Classic model and $60 for the “Pronto” model more suitable to business users. The Classic model gives you access to 2 email accounts and image viewing capability while the Pronto gives you access to 5 email accounts with image, DOC, and PDF viewing capability.
The Pronto also has Exchange compatibility and the email service is supposedly instant “push” email, but I called Peek to confirm that it’s a 90 second delay which probably means that Peek’s servers poll the POP3 or Exchange server every 90 seconds. As for the Exchange “compatibility”, that’s for the inbox only and it grabs your mail by logging in to your company’s Outlook Web Access (OWA) server. The sent email goes through Peek’s SMTP server which unfortunately means that mail sent from the Peek Pronto is not synchronized in the Exchange server. Now if Peek can download email using your OWA account, there’s no reason they can’t send email using your OWA account so this might be something they might fix eventually. Being able to sync on the inbox and sent folder is an absolute minimum requirement for me. You can probably forget about any kind of calendaring compatibility and I doubt they download every message in your corporate inbox on your Exchange server. You’re most likely not going to be able to search through your sent mails either so it effectively treats your Exchange server as a POP3 mail server.
While the screen is fairly large and detailed, you can’t surf the web because there is no web browser. Besides, you’re only paying $15 to $20 a month (12 month or 1 month term) for the email- and SMS-only wireless service when full service wireless Internet usually costs $60 per month.
$15 per month is pretty cheap so it is an attractive service for people who want mobile email without buying an expensive smart phone and contract. However, don’t even expect it to offer the same level of functionality as an iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, or Android phone. It’s definitely good enough for SMS and consumer class email especially if you prefer carrying a plain old dumb phone that doesn’t crash and lasts days instead of hours.
I’ve debunked the myth that wireless mesh networks are practical before, but the same nonsense came up at the FCC wireless technology workshop and the testimony from the New America Foundation’s Sascha Meinrath went unchallenged. I’ve taken the time to thoroughly debunk this myth once again along with a detailed explanation of why mesh doesn’t work.
If you’re going to be installing BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) 5.0 on a Windows Server 2008 machine, you better be ready to call technical support or read this blog post at a minimum. I spend 5 hours on the phone with BlackBerry customer support over the course of two days to work out all the installation problems that should have been automated by the installer and documented in the pre-installation guide. I will give Research In Motion support credit for helping me through these problems.
The main different between BES 5.0 and BES 4.1.x is that the administration interface is Java and ActiveX web based only, which irritates me to no end. BES 4.1 gives you a real interface that works without a browser and isn’t dependent on some complicated JBoss+Apache web server setup. This web based aspect of BES 5.0 was the source of some major installation and configuration headaches. With BES 4.1.x, you don’t have to put up with any of this nonsense. The reasoning behind 5.0 using a web administration interface is that now the users can manage their own BlackBerry Enterprise accounts though I really didn’t need this feature.
Just getting the basic preparation work done for a BES 5.0 install is daunting enough because you have to go through this pre-installation guide. That involves setting up a BES service account, the local server permissions, the active directory permissions, the exchange server permissions, and other software that needs to be pre-installed. It gets a bit confusing and I definitely recommend just using the SQL Server 2005 express they include in their BES 5.0 installer and then you don’t have to worry about additional JDBC drivers for remote SQL databases. Don’t bother installing SQL express yourself as it will only make things more complicated. You will need to install the Microsoft Exchange MAPI client before you install BES.
One pre-installation step that is missing is that you need to make sure that IPv6 on Windows Server 2008 is disabled. Un-checking IPv6 in the network interface is not sufficient, and you’ll need to follow the instructions in this Microsoft KB article (Jeremy in the comment section below pointed out that the updated KB article is here) and edit the registry. [NOTE - Disabling IPv6 will break Windows Small Business Server (SBS) which means you don't mix BES with SBS]. Once you’ve done this along with all the other pre-installation procedures above, you can proceed to install BES. Note that during installation, be sure to select BlackBerry Server authentication for the web administration interface and not Active Directory (AD) integrated authentication. BlackBerry technical support couldn’t figure out how to get this working and they told me to reinstall from scratch on a clean machine and don’t use AD authentication for web administration.
There’s more pain after you’ve completed the whole installation. The web administration interface also needs access to the SQL database which doesn’t work out of the box and can frustrate you to no end. Because the BES installer didn’t bother to nail down the SQL ports from dynamic to fixed TCP 1433, the web admin page refuses to come up. You need to go into the SQL Server Configuration Manager and manually set the TCP ports to 1433 as shown below.
Internet Explorer 8.0 in Windows Server 2008 also requires you to enable “compatibility mode” for the administration page and you must also put the administration URL in the trusted site list. The other problem you’ll find is that because the BES 5.0 installer generated its own SSL certificate rather than using the one that is either already on the server or easily obtained in a Windows network environment with a Certificate Authority in place, the browser throws up error messages that it doesn’t trust the SSL certificate. You can fix this by right clicking on Internet Explorer and choose “Run as administrator”. Then you can view the certificate and install it. However, it’s installed in the wrong place in the personal user certificate store and you’ll have to export the certificate and import it into the computer certificate. A better option is to import the certificate into Active Directory trusted certificates using this procedure I wrote up in 2006 and that solves your problem for every computer within the active directory that needs to use the BES web administration page.
Anyhow, it’s all working for me right now and I hope this document helps you avoid the headaches I went through.
Just got my hands on an Asus Eee PC 1008HA clamshell yesterday afternoon. So far, this thing is very much impressing me with its form factor. The 1008HA looks like a miniature MacBook Air at 1.1 kilogram (2.4 pounds) and no more than 1 inch thick. There are no breaks in the contour of the chassis and the unit looks very nice. I put the unit in my wife’s purse and it barely feels like there’s a netbook inside. The ladies will definitely care for the pink, red, blue, or white 1008HA.
Quick estimate on battery life looks like it will last 5-6 hours with wireless on, maybe 7+ hours with wireless off for reading/editing text, and just over 4 hours in video playback. Of course, I need to put it through an actual drain test to be sure and that will be part of the full product review.
Update June 7, 2009 – Finished battery drain test last night on DivX 4 704×396 video playback. With the LCD at 40% brightness and wireless turned off (using the convenient wireless toggle button), it achieved 4 hours and 22 minute playback time which is astonishing for a netbook weighing so little.
I’ve previously called the Asus 1000HE netbook one of the best values in the netbook market in terms of bang per buck but I had to try it out myself to see if it actually lives up to my expectations. I’ve now had the opportunity to live with the Asus 1000HE for about a month and I’ve performed a good deal of testing on it to see how it performs in common tasks that one would expect a netbook to perform.
The Intel Atom N280 CPU
The Asus 1000HE is one of the first netbooks on the market that use the slightly faster N280 1.66 GHz Atom processor with a faster Front Side Bus (FSB) whereas most netbooks use the N270 1.6 GHz Atom. The 1000HE uses two additional unofficial clock speeds of 1.25 GHz in low voltage mode and an overclocked setting of 1.75 GHz. It’s actually quite common for netbook makers to offer a “turbo” mode for their products and MSI even pushes some of their N270 netbooks to 1.9 GHz and some users even push their Atom processors to 2 GHz. At the stock speed of 1.66 GHz, the Intel Atom N280 has a super low Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 2 watts compared to the 2.5 watt TDP of the N270 processor.
The Intel Atom’s closest competitor is the Via Nano 1.3 GHz processor which has a TDP of 8 watts. The Nano 1.3 doesn’t perform as well as the Atom 1.6 or 1.66 processor. There have been many mainstream websites that have deceptively compared the Via Nano 1.8 GHz 25 watt TDP desktop processor to an Atom 1.6 and incorrectly declared the Nano the superior netbook product. But when we compare actual netbook parts and usable clock frequencies, it becomes apparent why netbook manufacturers have overwhelmingly selected the Atom. The Atom as a netbook processor simply has better performance and battery life than any other netbook processor.
The Intel 945GSE GMA950 graphics chipset
One of the disappointments in the Asus 1000HE is the continued use of the Intel 945GSE GMA950 graphics chipset when the newer Intel GN40 chipset is available. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to get use to GMA950 because even the next generation of Atom processors will have the 945GSE processor embedded on to the processor package itself as a separate die. But some good can come out of this as software makers are being forced to optimize their software again which results in better performance for everyone whether they use a netbook or high-end desktop computer. However, I see the Asus 1000HE as more of a premium netbook and I wouldn’t mind paying an extra $20 to $30 for a GN40 chipset which decodes 720P or 1080P high definition video.
Asus is coming out with the 1004DN netbook with a GN40 graphics chipset with a smaller 1.8″ hard drive and battery to make room for the optical drive but I’d rather have the bigger/faster 2.5″ hard drive and bigger battery. Optical drives are obsolete as far as I’m concerned and you can always hook up a USB optical drive and rip the movies you want on to the hard drive or just put a bunch of movies on a cheap SDHC flash card.
Glare free vivid contrast display
The first thing I noticed about the 1000HE was the gorgeous 10″ 1024 by 600 display. The display is probably one of the best netbook displays I’ve ever seen and it’s one of the few on the market that doesn’t use a glossy coating. That means you get to look at the actual content on the screen and not the bright reflection of the lights or windows. This particular matt finish display was surprisingly vivid in contrast and it has one of the deepest blacks I’ve ever seen which makes all the brighter colors pop out. The 1000HE LED backlighting is also super bright.
Tip 1: There are third party tools like eeectl can boost the LED brightness high enough to make the display very readable in broad daylight. You wouldn’t want to use that tool indoor because it makes the screen too bright and it drains the battery much faster. Eeectl can also control the fan speed, CPU clock speed and voltage settings though you should be very careful with the tool because you can lock up your system requiring a hard reboot and possibly even damage it.
Unfortunately, most netbooks (and laptops) on the market have unfortunately switched to glossy displays because it’s one of those cheap aesthetic effects that consumers seem to be swayed by. It’s refreshing to see Asus bucking the stupid glossy LCD trend. The only bad thing to say about the display is that it doesn’t have a resolution of 1280 by 800 which is typically only available on 12.1″ LCDs and rarely smaller screens with the exception of the very expensive Sony Vaio P. I could see a lot of demand for a higher priced premium netbook with higher display resolution and GN40 graphics chipset.
Video playback performance
As far as video playback and CPU performance is concerned, the Asus 1000HE is essentially not much different than any other 945 plus Atom N270 1.6 GHz netbook on the market. The N280 1.66 GHz processor makes it slightly faster than the N270 as expected because of additional 3.75% clock speed increase. I’ve managed to get good 720P video playback performance even in 1.25 GHz power save mode if the application is optimized. Adobe Flash and Apple QuickTime are some of the least optimized video playback software on the market and they fail badly at 720P playback. Windows Media Player, VLC, and Media Player Classic using the K-Lite Mega Codec pack works well with 720P playback. Luckily, I’ve found a great way to convert Apple QuickTime MOV files to AVI files which allow for very smooth playback using VLC using FFmpeg and I’ll follow up with a tutorial on that.
For browser embedded video content, Windows Media Player works the best though it only works on the Windows platform. For cross platform compatibility, Silverlight stutters slightly with 1280×720 (720P) content but runs 854×480 (480P wide screen) smoothly and barely runs 1024×576 (576P widescreen) content in 1.75 GHz turbo mode. Adobe Flash has no chance with 720P and barely handles 480P widescreen content on Hulu.com. You can compare all three embedded players here. The popularity of netbooks will hopefully get Microsoft and Adobe to optimize their video playback though Microsoft clearly has a substantial head start.
The chassis and overall design
The Asus 1000HE chassis has a glossy finish which looks great until you actually touch the darn thing. Once you touch it, it looks like you’ve been slobbering all over it because the material is a huge finger print and oil magnet. The 1000HE also has two USB ports on the right hand side which is really useful for hooking up an external USB-powered optical drive. You need two USB ports to provide enough electrical power to drive an optical drive and the last thing you want to have to do is use a USB extension cable to reach the other side of the netbook.
Tip 2: There’s a single access panel to gain access to the 2.5″ hard drive and memory slot. If you want to boost the performance of the Asus 1000HE netbook, just put in one of the fastest and lowest power 2.5″ 320 GB hard drives on the market for around $75. I took my Vista storage score from 5.3 to 5.9, doubled my capacity, improve battery life, and boosted transfer times by 50% with this relatively inexpensive investment and it’s the best improvement you can make on any laptop or netbook on the market. For another $20, you can replace the SODIMM and double the RAM which is also very beneficial especially if you’re going to upgrade to Windows 7. 1 GB will worked fine when I tested Windows 7 beta but more RAM always results in better performance. Storage and memory performance is as important as CPU and graphics and often overlooked.
The LCD lid unfortunately doesn’t quite open up 180 degrees or more which is annoying to me since I like to prop my fully opened Lenovo ThinkPad X200 on my thighs on an airplane and read it like a book. The display becomes twice as large because it’s half the distance to my eyes and I can comfortably view two pages side by side. I can still do this to a certain extent with the Asus 1000HE but it’s not comfortable because the display isn’t quite facing me. Overall, the Asus 1000HE is a slightly larger and heavier netbook because it uses a 10″ display and a huge capacity 6-cell battery but it’s a good tradeoff because the product is much more usable.
Bluetooth and 802.11n wireless
The wireless capabilities of the Asus 1000HE are impressive. It comes with both 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth out of the box when many laptops charge an extra $50 for these two features. Having 802.11n means you get to transfer files more quickly though you’ll probably want to opt for a wired interface or just using the SDHC slot to transfer larger files. Bluetooth is an absolute necessity for a wireless mouse and cell phone tethering for wireless Internet access.
The keyboard
The Asus 1000HE keyboard uses a Chiclet design which is common on Apple Macbooks. Overall, I found touch typing on the 1000HE reliable and fast so long as I didn’t accidently palm the track pad (which is why I usually prefer track points). There were some minor keyboard flex issues in the upper left hand corner of the keyboard with the F1, F2, F3, ~, 1, 2, and 3 keys but I don’t use those keys that often and it’s more of a minor annoyance than a problem. This annoyance might be attributed to the fact that this is a pre-production unit. I noticed there were even a few screws missing inside that were supposed to hold the hard drive in place, so I expect the production units to be better.
Best netbook track pad on the market
Although I personally prefer a track point over a track pad, the Asus 1000HE probably has one of the best netbook track pads on the market. It’s big enough and the buttons are correctly placed so you can operate it like a normal track pad on a full size laptop. Most netbooks track pads are frustrating to me because they put the buttons on the sides of the track pad or use a silly single wide button on the bottom that seesaws left and right. Because of the way the 1000HE mouse buttons goes over the bottom edge, your thumbs can actually press forward and down which is more ergonomically correct for a track pad of this size. It’s also a multi-touch track pad that supports zooming, two finger scrolling, and maybe some other gestures. Scrolling worked fairly well but zooming is a bit difficult to control. Most desktop operating systems and applications (including those from Apple) don’t really have good smooth scrolling/zooming interfaces like the iPhone so I place the blame on the software rather than the hardware. Modern computing hardware (including netbooks) is fast enough to play video on a 3D surface so there’s really no excuse they can’t get the scrolling and zooming on a simple webpage smooth and responsive.
Super long battery life
Battery life is one of the most important metrics on any portable device and this is where the Asus 1000HE shines. I measured the peak battery life of the Asus 1000HE to just over 11 hours if everything is set to the absolute lowest power setting. No, that’s not a typo when I wrote over 11 hours. That means the 1000HE draws less than 5.3 watts in this lowest power operating mode. That is with 802.11n, Bluetooth, and camera is turned off and the screen is set to the lowest possible brightness and nothing is taxing the CPU, GPU, or storage subsystem at all. Realistically, this is not a common usage scenario for most people but I have on occasion used my laptop in this manner when I’m reading or editing documents on a darkened airplane.
The other common usage scenario is 480P H.263 video playback which is the codec commonly found in DivX video files. H.264 would likely result in slightly higher CPU utilization and lower battery life but I used H.263 for the video playback battery drain test. I used VLC because it was the least CPU hungry playback software. On the hardware, I shut off 802.11n, Bluetooth, and the camera and set the display to 40% brightness and clocked the processor down to 1.25 GHz low voltage mode. I ran a full power drain in this configuration and managed to get an astounding 6.8 hours which is simply crazy. That means I’m drawing a mere 8.53 watts during video playback.
For most other tasks, I can usually get an honest 6 to 9 hours depending on what clock speed I’m running at, how CPU and graphics intensive my applications are, and whether wireless is running or not. Most netbooks and laptops won’t even touch this kind of battery life and you can reliably go around all day without carrying the AC adapter which makes up for the slightly bulky weight of 1000HE at 3.2 lbs. You just throw the 1000HE in your bag and never worry about untangling or tripping over the AC adapter’s wiring. Simply wake the machine when you need it and put it to sleep when you don’t. Just be aware that there is about a 25% power drain per 24 hour period in suspend mode because power is needed to keep the memory state but that isn’t a problem if you’re charging the laptop once a day.
Other features of Asus 1000HE
The webcam is a decent 1.3 megapixel camera rather than the usual 0.3 megapixel cameras you see on many netbooks. I’ve posted some samples on YouTube here and here and the performance for a built in webcam is relatively good. You’re not going to be running Skype in HQ video mode anytime soon because the processor isn’t fast enough to encode/decode 480P H.264 in real time nor is the camera capable of producing a low noise image needed for Skype HQ mode, but standard Skype video conferencing runs fine. Then again, no built in webcam on any laptop regardless of price will handle Skype in HQ mode and you would need something like the $75 Logitech Quickcam Pro.
Instant OS restore is another good feature. Simply hit the F9 at boot time and it will load Norton Ghost and restore the system image to factory settings. The 1000HE comes with two hard drive partitions so if you store all your data in the second partition, you won’t have to worry about losing any data when you invoke the factory restore and recreate the C drive.
Another good feature is the “boot booster” feature in the BIOS. Once you turn it on, the BIOS post time drops from 13 seconds down to 2 seconds so you can start loading the OS sooner and cut down the overall boot times. After system post, the system takes another 27 seconds to get to a fully operational Windows XP desktop. With boot booster on, it’s possible to finish a complete boot in just under 30 seconds though I generally use suspend mode to start up the system in about 4 seconds.
Conclusion
For a typical street price of $375, the Asus 1000HE netbook simply can’t be beat in terms of value. It is one of the best netbooks on the market at any price. The netbook is a bit bulky compared to other 8.9″ netbooks with 3-cell batteries but you don’t need to carry your charger with you and the bigger size screen and track pad is a welcome change in netbook design. You can’t put it in a large coat pocket like the Sony Vaio P but the Vaio costs $900+ and has horrible battery life and a tiny display. If you’re looking for a reasonably priced 10″ netbook with a great looking non-glare display and all-day battery life, the 1000HE is for you.
I travel quite a bit these days because of my job, and I have been noticing more and more than I can get AT&T hotspot service at places like Starbucks or many airports and some hotels. In the past, one would have to pay $20 per month for T-Mobile hotspot services or cough up $10 or more per day for Wi-Fi access. Now if you’re an AT&T DSL customer, you get this service for free which is really convenient. Even if you have 2G or 3G data service, you will still want to use the much lower latency Wi-Fi access when it is available.
While this Wi-Fi service is nothing new and I’m not making news here, it’s good to point this out for people since not everyone knows about it. The coverage seems to be getting better over time. So if you’re already an AT&T DSL customer, simply use your username and the domain you belong to which you can pull down from a menu such as SBCGlobal.net. Then you use the same DSL password you use for your PPPoE account.
Update 11/9/2009 – Nokia is 
A product that has caught my eye since last year is the 
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