As you might have guessed by the lack of posts last week, I was away. I was in England with the family and took it fairly easy at my parents house in Internet no-where land. Thanks to the 3UK PAYG web access I was able to get Internet access from the top left-hand side of my parents house but it was certainly a bit hit and miss out in rural Suffolk.
As PC’s I had the Raon Digital Everun and the Vye Mini-S V37 with me and its interesting to look back at the way I used both devices. The Everun was my companion and ultra mobile PC and with me pretty much all the time. It served as the perfect Mobile Internet Device and also did a very good job at navigation using the excellent PC Navigator 7. With the built-in Expedite HSDPA module from Mobilx I was able to get and send emails, manage the portal, keep up with RSS feeds using the fastest method possible (Google Reader) access ALL linked news items and keep up with posts in the forum. I know for sure that it wouldn’t have been possible with a smartphone. I even had the Nokia E90 with me but didn’t turn it on once. Its totally superfluous to my needs now that I have the Everun. Where the Everun stopped being useful was in full work situations though. Productive situations. The Everun was no good for writing my posts, for editing images and longer emails and so that’s where the Vye Mini-V S37 stepped in. The main test was in London at the HTC Shift press conference where it served very well as the live blogging tool. As before, I had the Canon S2IS on a tripod, connected via USB and controlled by Canon’s remote capture 
software. From there I uploaded direct to the gallery and used the images in the live blog post that I was writing. I hardly had to look up from the keyboard at all as the scene was viewable directly on the screen in front of me. The keyboard really is very good. The screen brightness and resolution is fantastic (I had to wear my glasses in the dim surrounding light but as I have an astigmatism, its a usual occurrence for me to have to wear glasses in presentations.) The huge 100GB disk drive gave me tons of space to offload videos and images (about 5GB during the day) and the touch screen was quicker than the mouse for changing window focus. I doubt that others around me had a more productive experience with their huge laptops and when I got to Starbucks afterwards, no-one had the table space that I had either! Negative points were the battery life. Running on that standard 2-hour battery was a worry as a hibernate to change the battery would have cost me a few critical minutes. The processing power was also a problem…..when I got to rendering the video! Hardly surprising eh! The editing process was quite painless. I managed to load up the video and cut it to size without a problem but 1 hour re-encoding time for a 10 minute video is way too much to be practical. In the end I aborted the process and did it at home where I was able to leave the PC safely in the corner of a room!
Later in the week I took the Everun out for a few social beers (pocketed, surprisingly comfortably, in my jacket) and waited until the conversation got round to mobile phones as it inevitably does with my fashion and tech-conscious friends. I asked them about Internet access and two out of the 9 of them said that they do try and use the Internet on their mobile phones. One of them was happy and the other was rather unimpressed with their solutions. It turns out that the one that was unhappy was a webmaster. He has a website for pharmaceutical sales and needs access to his admin tools. His smartphone doesn’t give him access to it but when I whipped out the Everun, connected to 3G and demonstrated ‘real’ Internet access, he was sold. He saw the advantage and he now wants one ASAP. There must be thousands of other webmasters out there that would benefit from having the real Internet to hand!
I sold the V37 too (in theory.) My Sister now wants one as she hates carrying around heavy laptops and her boyfriend said that he’s going to sell two cheaper laptops in order to buy one. It was easy to demonstrate the Vye S37 due to its form factor. Its a small version of something that people are familiar with. When you tel them thats its got a 120GB drive, 4 hours battery life show them the swivel touch screen and demo a video on the gorgeous screen, most are pretty impressed!
All in all it was a very successful ultra mobile PC week. It proved to me that I need an XP-based handheld MID (I would have had problems without XP on the Everun) and I need a device with a keyboard. It is arguable that something like a Flybook or even a Sony TZ would be better but it would have never fitted in my small bag. I”m happy that the S37 fits my my requirements although I would like to have had an extended battery during the critical press conference (note that the shipping versions of the S37 include the extended battery as standard) and an HSDPA option would have been a nice back-up to hotspot access.
Details of the kit I used in the press conference will be in a later post. The Vye Mini-V S37 was kindly provided by the UK-based distributor and is now shipping through VyeUSA and resellers in the UK. The HSDPA module for the Raon Digital Everun was kindly provided by Mobilx.hu
Raon Digitial Everun information.
Vye Mini-V S37 information.
