Thank goodness for fathers day! I was able to push everyone aside today and test the Paceblade Easybook P7 out to my hearts content. Which was fortunate because a (very) little package turned up the day before and distracted me somewhat.

More about that next week.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time chatting to various people about the battery life issues. We’ve pretty much exhausted the possibilities of further testing now. I did think about taking the Paceblade apart and doing some infra-red photography but thats going too far! Although there’s the possibility of a firmware issues, I personally think its a hardware problem with the Tablet Kiosk Eo’s. We’ve provided them with a lot of information both through the journals and via direct email contact with people in TK so it’s in their hands now. I look forward to TK’s response on this.

I got a chance to test out DVB-T TV again (it is fathers day!) and unfortunately I found out that the software provided with the MSI Mega Sky USB receiver doesnt take advantage of the VIA MPEG-2 hardware. The DVB-T streams are high-bandwidth MPEG-2 streams (depending on setup, the streams are commonly between 2 and 8Mbps.) and without any hardware decoding support, the CPU has to work very hard to decode them. I’d be interested to hear if anyone has found DVB-T software that can use the VIA Unichrome capabilities because it has the potential to save over 20% of battery power. VIA hardware support is becoming a recurring topic and if it doesnt improve, customers are going to be buying hardware that just doesnt perform as expected.

I was chatting to ‘JKK’, the Finlander that shocked us all with his good Eo battery life on the Origamiproject forums, and we were talking about the design of the Amtek 700 variants. I mentioned the ‘nice’ yellow protective bag that is rather embarassing to use and he told me about his home-made UMPC case. He’s using a 2-high CD case. What a great idea. I reached over and picked up a CD case I had, pulled the inside out of it and hey-presto! What a fantastic idea. There’s even space left over for your mobile phone. Try it out yourself!

As I reported before, UMPC’s aren’t that thrilling. There’s no new software and certainly no new hardware to impress. It just ‘works’ and after a few days it was working in more places than I had imagined. Families might need two of these!

Barbie.com was the big hit this morning. I had a lovely hour of peace. I guess my daughter enjoyed the flash-loaded experience too! Need for Speed Road Challenge was fun (fathers day again) although it needed the CDROM to be attached while it went through the startup sequence. Its an oldie but a goodie! Linking up the mobile phone and the GPS receiver via bluetooth and running MeHere to show google maps in the car was a good technology test. Loading up Cubase VST was easy and very useable. As I mentioned before, I think musicians are going to love UMPC’s

The sports training software that I wanted to try didn’t load becuase it checks for a 1024×768 screen before installing. I found some other sports software though and had to wear a data recorder on my arm for the afternoon to test it out. It worked and its clear that health studios and personal trainers could gain a big advantage with this computing mobility. (Its also now clear from the data recorder that I need to get even more mobile myself!)

The rest of the time was spent on photography and I’ve got a lot of great photos for the full review coming up over the weekend (if that Sharp Zaurus doesn’t distract me again!) I’ve taken a few videos too and will find somewhere to put those too. Anyone got any tips for video hosting? If not I guess i’ll put them on YouTube.

Regards
Steve / Chippy.