A little something i picked up

Not umpc but…
Phone stickers are huge in japan. Never really felt the need personally and also never really got with the US craze of stickering up their laptops either. But i saw this makie sticker and thought it would suit my macbook pro. What do you think?

Ideal portable UMPC X70 setup?

Got everything humming in Windows 7 so I thought I’d build my travel setup for the interstate trips I’m about to begin taking.

The setup consists of:

Viliv X70 with Windows 7 Ultimate and Open Office

Think Outside Stowaway universal bluetooth keyboard

Think Outside Stowaway travel mouse

Windows 7 running like a dream on the X70 with full tablet features

After a few hours of flaky wifi (seems to clash with the bluetooth) windows 7 is running well on the X70. I used citanics hosted hid installer and have full functionality as a tablet which is great as windows 7 has some great features.

UMID mBook M1 reviewed – The good, the bad and the ugly

Here is my layman’s review of the umid after using it for  3 days.

In summary, I really like the UMID mbook due to a very useable keyboard, a touch friendly responsive bright screen, being truly pocketable and a great battery life..all the criteria I am looking for in a MID.  It is by no means perfect but the good outweighs the bad and ugly for me.

The next gen M2 mBook is tipped to address the flaws so I can’t wait for that!

The good

- Truly pocketable. 303g,slightly larger than a Nintendo DS. I was able to put this in the front trouser pocket.
- Great battery life at 6 hours
- Thumb friendly keyboard with great tactile feel and easy reach to all keys.
- Lovely touchscreen..bright and responsive
- Great resolution 1024×600 res on a 4.8inch screen.
- Has a microSD slot..yay..
- Has a SSD drive…this is really quick.
- Has a 1.3MP webcam and in built mic for video conferencing
- Runs XP very well with an Atom 1.33mhz cpu and 512mb Ram
- Runs most apps under XP well.

The bad

- Screen does not tilt back quite far enough so not ideal viewing ergonomics when typing..does not bother me though.
- Reports that Win 7 doesnt run efficiently with just 512mb Ram
- Mono speaker not audible in a moderately noisy environment
- Youtube videos can be jerky at times

The ugly

- No proper standard usb port..requires a dongle..can get annoying!
- Wireless and BT automatically turns off when device is put to sleep..so you will need to turn on upon resume
- No proper headphone jack but comes with a proprietary headphones,

Viliv X70 windows 7 upgrade so far

Successfully installed from the windows RC DVD I burned a while ago. To get it to boot from the DVD though I had to only use the buttons on the Viliv, the keyboard wasn’t working to get to the boot menu or select or enter to boot from the USB drive, so I had to use the joystick and the B key.

I installed the wifi driver and connected to my wireless. Then I installed the iViliv updater application. Even though I had downloaded all the drivers off the viliv site in advance I wanted to see if it’s own application would handle the windows 7 driver installation itself.

I’m happy to report it does. I’m only just at the beginning but it seems to be hunting down and installing all the drivers. Interestingly though the chipset driver that I downloaded is newer than the one iViliv wants to download, so I guess their website is more current than the application.