Recent Gadgetry
My recent gadgetry have been mostly related to netbooks. Nothing to major though. Mainly re-installing the linux os on my EEE 1000 (down-graded from Ubuntu 8.10 to the EEE tailored 8.04.1) and getting familiar with my wife’s Mini 9 (N270 1.6 GHz atom, with 1 GB ram, 16 SSD, and Ubuntu 8.04). I mainly downgraded because the performance on my wife’s new Mini 9 was a lot better than on my EEE 1000. I think that it mainly has to do with the SSD, as my EEE 1000 has a sh!%%y controller that only allows for around 33 – 35 MBs reading, versus my wife’s Mini 9 reading at around 60 - 65 MBs. The downgrade from the full version of Ubuntu 8.10 to 8.04.1 EEE did help quite a bit. I was able to salvage all my wine installed programs without reinstalling, and have not put back as many applications as I had before to try to keep things running as smoothly as possible as long as possible. I have read a lot of articles about the Runcore SSDs for the EEE and am considering getting one, or two (a small one and a larger one, as the EEE 1000 has two SSD ports).
My wife’s Mini 9 is a lot better than I was expecting. I did not have high hopes for Dell’s first foray into the netbook realm, but have been pleasantly surprised with the performance and usability of their small machine. I was trying to think of a complaint about the Mini 9 but am unable to think of anything other than the function keys (f1, f2, etc) being fn keys, which makes it harder to launch programs by using alt-f2. The keyboard quirk is nothing major though, as I have become familiar with the keyboard layout and have instinctively started hitting alt.fn-s to open the run application window. I can see the advantages of the keyboard layout utilized by the Mini 9, as 5-rows (instead of 6) and the keys other than a-z are smaller to allow for the letter keys to be as larger as possible. Just typing an email or a search phrase is just as easy as on the 92% keyboard of my EEE 1000, despite the 2″ in wide that the EEE has on the Mini 9.
My brother and his wife came in from CA for the holidays. My brother has recently purchased a HTC Dream/Google Android Development phone. I played with it for only a few minutes but could tell that Android might be here to stay, especially if they are backed by awesome HTC manufactured devices. I have always been a crazy HTC fan, and I have only had HTC phones since my BlueAngel 4 years ago. I am wanting to get a new phone, which runs Android, but I am on AT&T, and cannot afford the $400 for the Android development phone for Google. 2009 looks like it will be the year or Android though, as Samsung, Sony Erricson, and several other big names have stated that they will be delivering Android based devices this year.
