This isn’t a “power laptop” - I don’t play games - but for the price I think it’s amazing value: 69200 yen, about 665 USD, for a dual-core machine with 3GB memory. I paid nearly 3 times that for my Intel 2GHz Dual Core / 2GB laptop 2 years ago.
The reason for buying it at first was to replace the little Kohjinsha SA1 that sits beside me at work, to surf the internet, check email, etc. The Kohjinsha is great for travel, but using it with logmein to connect to my home PC is a pain: 800×600 screen trying to display a 1280×800 screen - not nice.
However, I’m going to benchmark it against my machine at home first. If there’s little difference (Intel Dual Core 2GHz, 2GB memory), I’m going to use the new machine at home. Not only will I appreciate the larger screen for viewing photos, but I’ll be able to get all my iTunes on the internal drive. My current home machine is also smaller, so it will fit better on my desk at work. In honesty, I want a nice desktop machines with multiple monitors at home - but I’m trying to resist that, because I don’t want to have yet more junk to carry from country to country. If this machine performs well, it’ll make it easier to resist splashing out :)
Speaking of small: Third purchase - new memory for my little Kohjinsha SA1.
I had no idea memory prices were so cheap these days.The 2GB for the Acer was just 4400 yen, about 40USD - that’s nothing.
My SA1 has been struggling running XP with 512MB and its little 500MHz AMD Geode chip. While looking for the Acer memory, I just happened to search for memory for the SA1 out of interest. If I’d known I could have upped the memory to 1GB for just 6000 yen, I’d have done it months ago. I’ll never get over the limitations of the processor - but for the price of 6 pints of beer, XP can now breathe.
The Acer hasn’t arrived yet - they will deliver it on Sunday. It comes with Japanese Home Vista Premium, so my first task, after slotting in the extra memory, will be either installing XP or an English version of Vista.
This laptop is not available in the shops, so with the help of Google Translate, I had to buy it online. What astounded me is that even though the website is Japanese only, when I phoned them up to confirm the delivery date after buying, I was able to talk with a guy who speaks fluent English. And they’re delivering on a Sunday. Cool.
Memory: Ark in Akihabara, found from Kakaku.com price matching site.
Kakaku is a brilliant site - I check the price of everything electronic there before I buy.
Ark is a shop that I didn’t know about before, though I knew the street it’s in. As well as very cheap prices on memory, I noticed they also have 4GB SDHC cards for 1,770 Yen - that’s almost giving them away!
I kid you not. I have a 30 minute video to prove it, where I’m told by McDonald’s staff that it’s “impossible” to put mayo on a Big Mac - that if I want it, I have to buy a burger which has mayo AND buy a Big Mac and then they will put that mayo on the Big Mac. When I refused, they said “wait a minute” and five minutes later, four, yes FOUR, policemen turned up.
I’ve got to work out how to upload videos onto YouTube. Almost arrested in Japan for asking for mayo on a Big Mac. It’s ridiculous.
It almost reminds me of when I was trying to buy an S11HT - the big Bic Camera in Shibuya argued and refused to allow me to return it if there was no signal at my home or office, so I couldn’t buy it there. I then went to the small Bic Camera in Shibuya and they said “Sure, no problem” and even wrote on the contract that I could return the phone in 14 days if I had a problem getting a signal. Completely ridiculous. Just like McDonald’s calling the police because I wanted mayo.
On my recommendation, one of my friends bought a Popcorn Hour media server. Being a non-technical girl, I was given the task of setting it up for her. Sometimes I think the girls in my life use me only for my technical knowledge.
The Popcorn Hour can supposedly run without a hard drive, so to keep things simple, I hadn’t told her to buy a HDD. It had been hard enough working out how I could make buying a WIFI router easy for her - since she needed one of those also to set up a LAN.
I know the Popcorn Hour can’t run the built in Bitorrent client and file server if there’s no hard drive installed, but I thought it would still be able to see network shares. It turns out, however, that it can’t see samba shares either without the hard drive installed - well either that or the Popcorn Hour doesn’t play well with Vista shares. I wouldn’t put it past Vista to be the problem; I used it for the first time last night and it was, as expected, pants.
In the end, I had to run the media streaming server which Popcorn Hour make available for free. It kind of works, but sometimes the Popcorn Hour wont see that the server is running, and the only way to get it to recognise the server is to - unintuitively - toggle the “Support iTunes” option on and off. Weird.
I felt a bit uneasy leaving her with this slightly flakey setup. I hope I don’t start getting calls at 1am asking me to “make things work” because she can’t watch the latest episode of “Grand Designs”.
Aside: My friend’s Popcorn Hour remote is slightly different from mine - it’s a different colour, has slightly different shaped buttons, and has a strange “rb” logo with a hand. Strange.
I solved one of my last two frustrations with Windows Mobile 6 EMonster this morning - I found out how to turn off the “beep” sound of systems alerts. The answer was staring me right in the face all along - unfortunately it was staring me in the face in Japanese, and my face doesn’t respond to Japanese.
Anyway, to turn off the “beep” of system alerts and the “beep” when you tap on the wrong place on the screen, go to the sound options and uncheck the first box. The reason I didn’t spot this before is that I took イベント (e-be-n-to) to be related to calendar events rather than system events. Should have looked up the kanji, I guess - but I can’t look up the kanji for everything, there is just too much.
I should be down to one frustration now - how to scroll a line/half page at a time rather than a page at a time - but I discovered a new one this morning: after downloading an MP3 to my phone, I can’t find out how to make it into an alarm or ringtone. It should be easy, right? I probably need to do some conversion to WAV or cut the MP3 short or find come obscure option, however.
As an aside, I really wish Microsoft would provide language packs for WM6. It can’t be that difficult - can it? They have experience making Windows multi-language, and Vista has language packs. Even the iPhone and iPod support multiple languages.
Even if Microsoft dont want to bloat ROMS with English and multiple other languages, at least make them downloadable. Being forced to use Japanese rather than being allowed to switch to English is as annoying as doing a PC Windows Update and then having a pop-up remind you every 2 minutes that you need to reboot your computer… grrrr….
Netfront is a web browser used in many Japanese mobile phones - there’s a version of it in my Sharp phone, and in my Samsung phone. I don’t know how prevalent it is elsewhere in the world.
Initial impressions:
Netfront renders webpages on a “virtual desktop”, eg. 800×1024. Scrolling around the page is smooth and fast - a big improvement on the jumpy and “screen at a time” implementation of Pocket IE.
In addition to arrow-key scrolling and finger scrolling, double tapping on the page shows a small thumbnail representation, you can use the stylus to move around.
Default sizes (Text Size of Medium, Zoom of 100%) renders images and text too large, needing too much scrolling around the page. Setting Text Size to Largest and Zoom to 50%, graphics are nicely downsized, and text remains just large enough to read. Text smoothing is used, so even small text is readable - unlike Pocket IE.
Lick The Lard doesn’t render properly - the entire right hand side is missing. Pocket IE doesn’t have these problems. This blog (Lemon Soju) seems to render correctly.
When it doesn’t find fonts, eg the Verdana font used here, it renders in Courier. Not pretty. Update: I fixed this by going to Tools -> Browser Settings, then playing about with the settings and then restarting the browser. I can’t say specifically what I did because Courier isn’t even listed in the font list - potentially an uninitialised variable caused Courier to become the default?
There’s a built in “Infoseek Japanese to English” page translation option - not yet tested.
Websites recognise the browser as an English language desktop browser, which means I no longer get Japanese “optimised for mobile” webpages. I like that a lot - Google, for example, always presents Japanese pages with no option to change to English. I should try downloading Google Maps again and see if I get one with English.
It’s nice to have English menus again :)
The trial expires at the end of May. Looking at the Symbian page, Netfront seems to require payment for keeping its browsers long term - not good. Still, they seem to be releasing new “concept” versions every few months at the moment, so maybe it will continue to be useable until Mobile Firefox becomes available.
Update: When Netfront is running, it seems that some applications, such as Mobile Outlook, are no longer are able to access the internet. Other applications, such as the Gmail Java application, work fine. Opera Mini seems unable to access the internet at all after Netfront is installed. I need to test this more to verify.
Update 2: After rebooting the S11HT, I could access internet with Opera Mini again. I then closed Opera Mini, run Netfront, and tried starting Opera Mini again - no connection. It definitely seems that Netfront is making a change somewhere that prevents other applications from using the internet connection, even when it is not running. As a side note, I uninstalled and reinstalled Netfront - after reinstallation, the previous settings from the first installation were restored, so Netfront isn’t particularly good at cleaning up after itself.
