You may have seen the Viliv S5 navigation demo from the guys over at Streetdeck recently; now it’s the Viliv X70’s turn. The X70 [Portal page] is larger than the S5 [Portal page], and has integrated GPS as well as 3G data. That means that everything needed to run the great looking Streetdeck software is already under the hood. With the car kit that Viliv has made for the X70 and the Streetdeck software, it looks like the X70 could work wonders as a navigation device. The power of using a full fledged PC as your navigation unit really shows over that of a simple dedicated GPS device. As you watch the demo below, take a look at the map as Chuck drives the car around. You can practically watch the map turn in real time as the car turns. Most of us using dedicated GPS devices are probably used to seeing the screen update every one or two seconds. With the X70’s relatively huge screen, you can bet that it will be easy to operate the Streetdeck interface and see all of the necessary navigational information. Take a look at the video below, the first few mins are a short overview of the device and car kit; the in-car demo starts at 6:30.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the prospect of Android being employed full time as a netbook OS. It looks like Acer is taking one of the first big steps and officially stating that they will bring an Android running netbook to market in Q3 according to Acer’s head of IT products, Jim Wong. Acer has been showing an Acer Aspire One D250 [Portal page] around at Computex with Android as the OS. They are saying that this isn’t the actual product, but just a test platform. And that of course would leave one to believe that they won’t just be releasing one of their previous netbooks with Android as an OS option, but instead be developing a new netbook specifically for the inclusion of Android.

I still can’t quite see the major appeal to running Android on a netbook instead of a more mature computer OS. I’m sure costs factor into the equation; maybe Android is cheap and requires little configuration from the selling companies end, but then again, wasn’t that what they were trying for with Linux? Would you buy an Android powered netbook given the choice between Android and XP (or even Linux)? Let’s say that choosing Android saves $100….

[Register Hardware] [Engadget] (additional pics and video through the Engadget read link)

I’ve been eagerly awaiting information on the upcoming Jolicloud OS and finally we can see what this cloud oriented OS brings to the table.

Sascha has a great video of the Jolicloud alpha over at Netbooknews.com. The 14 minute video gives a very nice overview of Jolicloud, which Sascha is calling a ‘social OS’. I have to agree that Jolicloud looks like it is much more than just another Linux distro with a netbook orientation. They are really bringing the concept of cloud computing into the OS itself. One of the thing that I find most interesting is that all of your settings are essentially stored in the web an synced between any devices that you own running Jolicloud. I’m not entirely sure if it works like this yet, but it seems that you might be able to sit down to a friends computer that is running Jolicloud, log in, and be looking at the exact configuration that you would be if you were using you own computer. Head over to Sascha’s site to see the video overview of Jolicloud, and don’t forget to swing by Jolicloud.com and enter your email address if you are looking for an invite to the Jolicloud alpha.

I stumbled across an interesting looking little program called GMA Booster while browsing the MicroPCTalk forums.

Apparently devices which have 945GM/GME/GMS/GSE or 943/940GML/GU Express chipsets are ULV versions of what is normally called the Intel 945 chipset (and can be found in many of the netbooks and UMPCs out there today), and they all feature the same GMA 950 graphics, but for the ULV chipsets, GMA 950 is underclocked to help improve battery life among other things.

A nifty little app called GMA Booster steps the GMA 950 graphics back up from 133/166 MHz, to the level that is found in non-ULV version of Intel 945, 400MHz. The nice thing about this is that it seems to be a simple instruction set sent to the chipset; it doesn’t change any voltage levels, and isn’t pushing the clock speed higher than it is designed to go, just up to its regular level.

Interested in knowing if your UMPC/Netbook/MID uses GMA 950 and could benefit from GMA Booster? Just hit up the Portal and navigate to your device, check the Graphics category on your device’s Portal page to see if it uses GMA 950.

I tested GMA Booster on my VAIO UX180 and the HP Mini 1000 [Portal page] to see what difference GMA Booster could make. I ran Crystal Mark and compared the graphical test scores before and after using GMA Booster to push the graphical core up to 400MHz.

Sony VAIO UX180

HP Mini 1000

As you can see, using GMA Booster to put GMA 950 up to 400MHz increased the graphical performance (as rated by Crystal Mark) by a little more than 20% on both devices. While 20% isn’t huge, I think it could be noticeable depending upon what you are doing on your device. It probably won’t translate to a direct 20% performance increase in the graphical applications that you are using as there is more that factors into graphical rendering, but again it could help the performance. Other benchmark programs which more specifically rate graphics capabilities might note a bigger improvement in scores.

GMA Booster is ‘donerware’ as the dev calls it. It is basically free, but you need to download it again after a week to keep using it. If you donate you will receive a serial number to alleviate that hassle.

Download GMA Booster

If you do venture out and give GMA Booster a try, why not comment here and letting us know how it works with your device?

Before I sent the VAIO P [Portal page][review] back to its home I dropped the beta of Windows 7 on it to see how it would handle the upcoming operating system. As you may have heard around the web, Windows 7 seems to be a bit more snappy than Vista, making it feel more like XP while keeping the nice new features. You may have read in the performance section of the VAIO P review that turning on Aero in Vista brought some very visible sluggishness; well I can’t say that has changed in Windows 7, but it did score a bit better on some preliminary benchmarks and it handled boot/standby/hibernate a good deal better than Vista.

One particularly nice thing about Windows 7 was that it pulled down some updates for the VAIO P right as it was installed. Automatically through Windows Update it let me know that there were a few driver updates available for the chipset (in addition to standard Windows updates) and a few moments later I had them installed. Now that is service!

The biggest improvement from Vista to Windows 7 is the decrease in boot times:

Compare that to the Vista based boot times and you’ll note an increase that nearly runs across the board:

In addition to improved boot times, the VAIO P scored higher with Crystal Mark when running Windows 7. While the Vista based test scored the VAIO P at 27879, I was able to get Windows 7 to score right around 30400. I was glad to see that the VAIO P was able to break 30k even though Windows 7 seemed to handle the SSD a bit more slowly than Vista. This seemed odd to me because Windows 7 is supposed to deal with SSDs more effectively than previous versions of Windows. However Windows 7 in still in beta so they may still be tuning that facet of the OS. But as I mentioned, despite the slight drop in SSD score (Windows 7 running around 10k while Vista scored 11447), it still scored higher than Vista. Aside from a slight increase in all other areas, there was a largely noticeable jump in the OGL score. Vista has been noted to have poor OGL rendering as I believe it emulates the XP version. Whatever the case, it looks like they’ve gone back to the XP version, or brought the component up to speed as I seem to recall OGL scoring over 2000 as opposed to 135 under Vista.

I’m looking forward to the day when Windows 7 will be offered on a computer like the VAIO P instead of the more bulky Windows Vista.

My review journey continues with the Sony VAIO P. The unit is quite pleasing to use, even if it is running Windows Vista. A quick refresher on the VAIO P’s basic specs for those of you who are just joining us:

• 1.86GHz Atom CPU
• 2GB of RAM
• 128GB SSD
• 1600×768 screen
• Windows Vista

Find more detailed specs on the VAIO P’s Portal page.

So we have the top end VAIO P running Windows Vista. Certainly, because the OS is the center of everything that happens within the computer, people tend to get concerned when a company makes the choice to put a heavier OS (like Vista) on a mobile device. Luckily, the VAIO P has the specs to run the OS like it should be run, in the background, and not taking up the majority of resources. As the VAIO P is sitting here idle, the task manager is reporting that 1GB of RAM is in use. Now the question is, do you see the RAM as half full, or half empty? In all seriousness, I wouldn’t want to be caught running Vista with just 1GB or RAM, but then again, maybe that’s why Sony opted to put 2GB of RAM in the VAIO P. It isn’t as bad as it sounds though, if you were running less than 2GB of RAM, the OS would probably make more utilization of the page file (which would be a nice alternative if you are using an SSD). But in the end, Vista performs well visibly, so long as you don’t turn on Aero. Windows and apps are quick to load with no hang time.

Turning on Aero really hammers the system and drops performance quite noticeably. I would attribute this to the particular processing that is required to render the transparent Aero effect (and with no dedicated GPU, all of that processing has to be run on the CPU). Don’t worry though, the VAIO P is quite snappy when it comes to other tasks. Have a look at the performance section if you are interested in some additional details.

As I mentioned, the VAIO P has a zippy 128GB SSD for storage. However, out of the box my VAIO P only had 92GB available and only displays as having a maximum of 119GB. This is after Dynamism installed an awesomely bloatware-free image of Vista. So where is the extra 9GB of space that seem to be missing from my drive? Sony has a good track record of installing recovery partitions on computers that don’t have disk drives. This is useful because they don’t need to ship a DVD with the computer, and you don’t need to own a DVD drive. I’ve used the recovery partition on my Sony VAIO UX180 many times with great success. In fact, I used to do so on a fairly regular basis to keep my computer running in tip-top shape. There are ways to reclaim that space if you really want it, but for the majority of users, I would leave it there in case you want to restore back to the VAIO P’s factory state.

But what about the other 27GB of space that is already used on the drive? There are several things that are most likely to be consuming this space. First and foremost is the operating system itself. Vista certainly isn’t the slimmest OS in town. Second is probably the page file. Beyond those two, there is always the recycling bin, and hibernation file. All of these can be trimmed down, it is just a matter of what you are willing to give up.

I always have a feeling in the back of my mind that dropping Vista in favor of XP on the VAIO P would take it from ‘better-than-netbook’ performance, up to ‘real-laptop’ performance.

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An interesting story over at Kotaku talks about a new service called OnLive. The vision of OnLive is to bring processing intensive gaming to low end hardware, a sort of on-demand gaming service.

The way it works is essentially opening a video stream from the OnLive server to an OnLive client application on your computer. Your inputs would be sent to the server, and all of the game’s processing would happen on the server and the results would be streamed to your computer. The idea is actually not new, we told you about StreamMyGame back in June of 2008 which uses the same basic idea except you can use your own personal computer to act as the server. The idea was targeted toward those who already had expensive gaming computers, and could use StreamMyGame to play games on lower end hardware over their own network.

OnLive aims to bring high quality gaming to those with low-end hardware, without the need to own expensive equipment. By staging all of the processing on their own servers, the real bottleneck is not hardware performance, but instead, internet connection speed. OnLive says that full quality SD gaming can be achieved on a 1.5mbps connection, and 720p with a 5mbps connection. OnLive says that they are using patented technology to do the video compression, and say that games will play through their service at up to 60 frames per second. If there is any artifacting or lag in the streamed game video, OnLive will have a hard time convincing any hardcore gamers to use their service.

Interestingly, the Kotaku article mentions that OnLive claims that their game video streams will have a ping of less than one millisecond. They also said that their patented video compression will take about one millisecond to complete as well. If true (and there aren’t any other lag points on the way) these times should mean that you will get nearly lag free gaming on any hardware that can play back the video stream, and has a fast enough internet connection. That category could include netbooks and lower end hardware like the MIDs and UMPCs that we cover here on UMPC Portal.

So what would it really mean for people who like to play games but own netbooks? Obviously you would be able to play graphically complex games that your netbook would never be able to handle rendering on its own, but there are more benefits. This style of server-side gaming would mean not only no downloads, but no instillations of games either. Theoretically, this could mean being able to play a game like World of Warcraft, which currently consumes about 15GB of your HDD, on a device that has even less storage than the game itself requires for normal instillation. Not only would you be able to skip the 15GB download, but you wouldn’t need to wait for a long instillation session. Another advantage this has for netbook and other mobile hardware users is that on-demand gaming doesn’t require a CD/DVD drive. The majority of netbooks out there do not come with CD/DVD drives, and unless you want to play around with .ISO files, you are usually out of luck when it comes to installing games to your system. OnLive’s service would make an easy entry point for someone who doesn’t know how to mount an .ISO, but would still like to try some of the latest and greatest gaming.

All of this sounds a little bit too good to be true right? Hopefully that isn’t the case. Kotaku says that they had a chance to test the service (albeit, in a controlled environment) and were able to play Crysis (a game known for bringing some gaming rigs to their knees) on a low spec machine. The OnLive service is still in internal beta, with an external beta test planned for this summer. We’ll keep an eye on OnLive and see how it all turns out.

Quickly I want to also mention that OnLive plans on rolling out a small piece of hardware that one could use to have the OnLive gaming experience on their TV. The little box, probably not much larger than a 2.5” external HDD, could be hooked up to your HDTV via HDMI, and given a fast enough connection, play high end games in 720p on your TV. The unit is targeted to have a competitive price, possibly lower than that of the Wii.

There are several upcoming “pre-OS” solutions, but it looks like Presto will be one of the first out the door. The concept of a pre-OS is to be able to launch into a very quickly booting environment that offers key parts of a traditional computing experience, such as media playback and a web browser. Presto, like most, is based on Linux, and is said to load in 15 seconds. I’m downloading the beta now, which is free for the time being, but when released in full on April 13th, will run you only $20.

“But there are tons of other light weight Linux distros out there!”, I hear some of you saying. Well, Presto has been packaged in a way that you don’t need to be a Linux guru to get it running. In fact, Presto installs through Windows; no need to mess around down in your BIOS fooling with partition space or making your computer boot from the right device. Presto is also making it easy to install apps, just visit the Presto App store (which is just a webpage), and they have neatly organized lots of apps you can install to Presto.

I’ll be testing Presto soon, hopefully on the Mini 1000 [Portal page], and on the VAIO P [Portal page]. I’m interested to see how quickly the VAIO P will be able to load the pre-OS with its quick SSD.

Other upcoming pre-OSs that we’ll be keeping an eye on include: Jolicloud, and gOS Cloud.

Even though in my experience, Windows XP always runs better than Vista on these type of mobile computers, the VAIO P handles Vista pretty well. The unit comes pre-installed with Windows Home Premium. I opened my unit to a nice clean slate, a perfect Vista install with no bloatware. I’m going to chalk that up to our pals at Dynamism, as Sony is notorious for sending out computers that need to be cleared of bloatware right out of the box (as happened with Jenn’s VAIO P).

Vista took several minutes to set it self up, as usual, as I powered on the VAIO P for the first time. After a fairly lengthy update session thanks to Microsoft, the VAIO P was ready to go. The first thing I generally do with a mobile unit, is go through the different settings and get everything set up so it feels right. I was excited when I found a program provided by Sony called the VAIO Control Center. The VCC lets you adjust a lot of system settings from one well organized page. The best part about this is that there is very little software overlap. That is to say that the VCC changes settings at their base level in the system and don’t get get overridden by other setting adjustments. For instance, the speed of the mouse can be adjusted right inside the VCC. Any changes to the mouse speed in the VCC will be reflected in the default Windows configuration. This is nice compared to some other devices that include their own configuration utilities but override system settings and vice-versa.

Another thing I like that relates to non-software overlap is the hardware buttons that control simple functions like volume and screen brightness. You’ll find these functions bound with an Fn modifier to the F-keys. Adjusting volume up or down using these keys changes the system volume in real-time. This helps keep everything simple, instead of having system volume be different than the volume that the hardware buttons control. The display of the changing levels (volume/brightness) is also very reserved. A very simple box pops up in the lower center of the screen and shows you what the current level is, and how you are adjusting it. There is no obnoxious fade in/fade out effect or any information that you don’t need. They are there when you need them, and gone when you don’t.

Vista is quite responsive. I would hope so given that this is the top end model of the VAIO P. Applications launch quickly and windows come up fast as well. Turning on Aero results is a very visible decrease in performance. Windows drag around the screen at a much slower framerate and the whole unit becomes sluggish. Aero off as I mentioned, feels fine. I would imagine that the particular processing that is needed to render Aero, is not the forte of the integrated graphics. Without a dedicated GPU, the CPU ends up doing the graphics work, and with a 1.86GHz clock, it is best to not ask too much of it is it is already powering Vista fairly well.

There are several pieces of software that Sony has provided that I just don’t get. For example, the ‘VAIO Music Box’ application is an extremely simple media player (too simple in my opinion). It can’t even be maximized, and really just sorts your media by the year it was released, album, or artist. The controls are pretty much limited to track forward/back and play/pause. The one interesting thing about the program is that there is a ‘Chorus Playback’ option which claims to playback only the chorus parts of your songs. This requires a separate application, the VAIO Content Analyzer, which analyzes your songs to identify the chorus parts. Luckily Sony thought to have the VAIO Content Analyzer, which would be constantly running your HDD as it scanned content, disable itself while you are on battery power. Thanks for the though Sony, but I really just don’t feel like it is worth it to begin with, so I’ll skip the content analyzer all together and use a more common media player.

Instant Mode

The VAIO P has a pre-OS that Sony refers to as ‘Instant Mode’. Pressing a hardware button on the unit next to the mouse buttons while the device is powered down will launch it into instant mode. We showed you a bit about Instant mode back when the VAIO P was announced at CES 09. The XMB (PSP or PS3 style interface) is still used a the GUI, and you have access to videos, music, images, an instant messenger, VOIP, and a web browser, all from instant mode. Considering Sony isn’t pushing this as a huge deal (at least from what I’ve seen), I’d say this is a decent attempt at an in-house pre-OS. We’ll get you plenty of detailed info on Instant Mode when we delve deeper into specifics in our long term software impressions piece, stay tuned.

See the VAIO P review roadmap here.

When hardware and software work together in harmony, beautiful things happen. Take, for example, this video of Streetdeck 2 navigation software running on the upcoming Vilic S5 MID [Portal page]. Try to watch this video and then tell me that you don’t wish you had this as GPS solution for your car.

I’m really impressed with both the hardware and the software in this demo. A few things make this possible, first of which is the fact that the S5 is much more powerful than any standalone GPS unit. Streaming satellite radio while viewing real-time 3D navigation is no problem. Second, is that the Viliv has GPS built in. I might be able to do something similar with my UX180 (which I’m looking to experiment with), but I’ll definitely need to use a Bluetooth GPS device.  This video puts the capabilities of my supposedly ‘gps equipped’ iPhone 3G to shame, and even my dedicated GPS unit.

[jkkmobile]

It has definitely been an interesting testing experience with the Mini 1000 MIE [Portal page]. The netbook, as you have probably read, runs a custom Ubuntu interface designed by HP. They call it the Mobile Internet Edition of the Mini 1000. I am anything but a Linux pro, so I approached this as a newcomer to Linux. Luckily, HP is marketing the Mini 1000 MIE to less experienced computer users and not Linux pros. I gave you my initial software impressions not too long ago, but I’m ready to give you some more detailed information.

Home Screen

Where to start…. The home screen, as we’ve showed you before, does a good job of simplifying the computer experience down to some of the most commonly used activities on a computer. There is easy access to email, web, and photos/music. I have some issues with the home screen though; it seems like it could be set up to make people a bit more productive. My biggest issue is the photos/music section on the right side of the home screen. For some reason this is really unappealing to me. It shows the album art of the last three songs you have played, or the last three photos in your photo library. All it functions as is a shortcut to my photo or music library. Do I really need to have that 1/3 of my home screen experience taken up by the last three photos I put into the library? For some reason it just doesn’t sit right with me, I have no need to say “Hey look, those are the last three photos I took”. If I want to look at my images, I will actually go look at them, looking at thumbnails of the last three that I happened to take really doesn’t do anything productive for me.

I want dynamic information displayed in this extra space that is actually useful. You can squeeze shortcut button to my photos or music somewhere else on the home screen, but it seems like something else in this 1/3 space would be much more beneficial. One of the things I have considered would be weather. It would be really cool to see the current weather, temperature and, the forecast for the next few days. How about severe weather alerts too? Another idea, which could even be in addition to a weather section, would be some stocks. It would be nice to see some graphs of different stocks which could be customized by the user. Of course you could always p00  pull down some recent news from a major news website. This is the kind of dynamic information that I feel would be much more useful in this space rather than simply showing me the last three pictures I took, or the last three songs I’ve listened to.

The Web section of the home screen gives you a URL bar to reach any page, a drop down list of bookmarks, which aren’t easy to navigate if you have a lot of them, and four customizable squares that act as shortcuts to your favorite sites. It would be nice if each of the four site shortcuts had titles so you could see exactly what you were looking at. You can see small thumbnail previews, but all four of my boxes were filled with Google services, and every thumbnail was the Google login screen, I basically had no idea which site I was going to.

The Mail section of the home screen seems good in theory. There is a list of messages from your inbox right on the home screen. Mozilla’s Thunderbird is the application that makes all of this happen, and clicking on one of your messages in the inbox list will launch the application. I tried setting up Thunderbird using the automatic configuration of a Gmail address but it hasn’t worked correctly for me. It wanted to set up a POP connection to my Gmail account and it downloaded some very old emails for some reason. To be honest, I didn’t dig down and properly set up my email with Thunderbird for two reasons. The first of which is that I didn’t want to accidentally download a bunch of emails to the Mini 1000 and mess up the organization of my Gmail inbox. The second reason is that a target Mini 1000 MIE user should not have to dig through configuration options to make their email work, especially if they already specified that they have a Gmail account (it should know how to set it up correctly for them, given the proper credentials). I trust Thunderbird as a reputable email client to be able to be configured correctly for any email account that supports POP or IMAP, but the point remains that it shouldn’t be up to a target Mini 1000 MIE user to have to figure out how all of those ‘behind the scenes’ preferences work.

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I’ve been pondering this question for a long time and have never come up with a decisive answer. Ever since the iPhone came out, people have been criticizing it for not providing the ‘full internet experience’, citing the lack of true flash support. I just don’t get it though, where is the demand?

Several years ago it seems like having a full flash website was all the rage, but since then lots of great web technologies (javascript, ajax, etc.) have been utilized to make highly interactive websites that often outperform their flash counterparts in both performance and utility. These days it seems like the majority of flash content comes from flash video players, and of course the king of all flash video players is YouTube.

When you upload a video you YouTube, by default, is it transcoded to a format playable by most modern smartphones (using built in media players, not flash). I couldn’t tell you for certain, but in my experiences, it seems like the majority of YouTube’s content is available in this format. The iPhone already has a dedicated YouTube application which makes it easy to browse YouTube’s library and play videos. For phones that don’t have a dedicated application, there is the www.m.youtube.com site for browsing the library and doing many of the things you would do on the full version of the site like rating and commenting on movies. Once you get past YouTube as the majority of Flash content, you start to break it down to other video players. Sites like Hulu, Netflix, and many others offer video through flash players as well, but don’t offer nearly the amount of content as there is available on YouTube.

After videos players, I would argue that the second most common flash content is flash advertisements. These things are scatter all over pages these days, and unfortunately, those that design flash ads are not usually concerned with the efficiency of their animations, they just want to animate enough motion and colors to capture your attention. What this leads to is poor performance on the flash content that you actually want. For example, a website like Gametrailers will have a flash banner ad, or a box on the right of the video that plays a flash ad while you are trying to watch a video through a flash player, and flash generally splits the available resources between the two. I’ve seen the framerate on videos drop so low because of other pieces of flash content (like ads) playing on a page at the same time that they are unwatchable, and that is on a full computer. How do people expect mobile phones to handle all the flash content on a page these days, in addition to watching a flash video player? It is important to realize that if you are asking for full flash support, you are also welcoming all the resource sucking advertisements that plague websites. These ads aren’t usually a performance concern for full computers (except the situation I provided above), but on low powered hardware they could be a serious performance ditch and that always leads to reduced battery life.

Aside from flash video players and flash ads, the remaining flash content doesn’t seem to be in high demand (unless I’m missing something important). For example, there are lots of flash games out there, and they are lots of fun. But even if we did have full flash support on mobile phones, I don’t feel like phones are equipped with the necessary control schemes to be able to manipulate that content. Do people expect to be able to play Desktop Defense with the navigation ball on their Blackberry Pearl? I don’t think that it is realistic to expect mobile phones to be able to interface with flash content that was designed with a user, using a mouse and keyboard, in mind. Do people expect flash developers to adapt their flash content to function with the myriad of phone control schemes that are out there?

It all seems rather ridiculous to me, and I still don’t understand what content there is that drives people to ask for flash on their phones. Flash videos players are great, but the majority of content (ie: YouTube) is already available to most modern smartphones. If other flash players want to bring their content to mobile phones, they could do so much more efficiently (for the phones) by following YouTube’s approach. I don’t quite see it being necessary to provide full flash support on mobile phones; what would be the benefit of doing so? Maybe providing a familiar programing environment?

One potential option that I see for the future is that phones begin using a ‘Flash Lite’ standard which provides programmers with a familiar programming environment, and makes it easy for popular flash player sites to create simple flash applications (like video players) that will launch from a link on a website into a Flash Lite application on the phone.

I don’t think we’ll see full flash support (ie: flash players, apps, and ads embedded directly into websites) in mobile phones for a long time because it just doesn’t make sense when you weigh the content gain against the performance and battery life concerns, and isn’t practical when you consider the logistics of controlling that content with various phone control schemes.

I’ve been using an iPod Touch/iPhone 3G for nearly a year now and I can’t say that there are many times while using them that I’ve said to myself “Wow I wish this thing supported flash”. Sure, occasionally there is a video I want to watch that isn’t hosted on YouTube, but on another flash player instead; is that justification to ask for flash on phones? In my opinion, the answer is no, but I want to hear the thoughts of others. When you are using your mobile phone for web browsing, what content do you come across that makes you wish you had full flash support?

I was baffled during my review of the Acer Aspire One [Portal page] at the apparent lack of power management software that should have been included with the netbook. Aside from some hardware toggles, there were no settings beyond the default Windows power options to help get the most from your battery. I reported a while back on a nice utility that allowed users to control their Aspire One’s fan, but there wasn’t much more in the way of power management.

Luckily there are people out that who are passionate enough about their technology to spend time making good software for them. Take a look at a small freeware utility called a1ctl. For its tiny size, this utility has a lot of features:

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Read the full story

As the day goes on I’m sure we’re going to get more MID-related software news from Open Source in Mobile, the conference taking place in Berlin for the next three days.

The first MID-related press release comes from Fluendo, the media player software company. They’ve announced a codec pack for Moblin that will cover MPEG2, MPEG4 part2, VC1 (WMV 9) and H.264 decoding and will utilise the hardware decoding layers of Poulsbo.  "“We are so excited to see the Portable Media Player and Sub Notebook market expansion with GNU/Linux solutions. Our Fluendo codec pack, which now is a mix of software and hardware codecs, has been fully optimized" said Julien Moutte, Fluendo co-founder and CEO. That makes two media player applications in for Moblin-based MIDs now. Real Networks, who also offer a codec pack already have their application on the Gigabyte M528.

Qiro is a location based service that is already established and used by many in Germany. They’ve announced today that their service will be available on MIDs. From their website - "Qiro answers the most frequent question asked on the phone or by SMS: "Where are you now?". Qiro shows your friends in your vicinity on a digital map right in your device’s display. Find a buddy near you, contact him by call or SMS and meet up." Very similar to what Gypsii want to do. The (German) press release is available here.

It seems great that you could go out and pick up a tiny netbook capable of browsing the web for around $300 today, however many of these inexpensive new netbooks offer only a small amount of storage. For instance, the new Inspiron Mini 9 can only be equipped (from the factory) with up to 16GB of storage. With such little space available to us, it is important to keep data organized and make the most of the space you have.

I have personally been using a VAIO UX180 UMPC as my primary computer for the last two years. Of the total 30GB that are actually contained with the HDD, only 21GB is available to me (because of the recovery partition), I occasionally do a fresh wipe of the UMPC to keep it running optimally, but right now I’m bumping up against the wall at the end of my storage space.

Enter WinDirStat: a wonderful little program that will help you to visualize the data distribution of different files and folders on your drive(s). Using WinDirStat over the last week, I was able to browse around all the folders on my computer and see what was really taking up all my space. I was surprised at some of the things I found, and I quickly realized that there was quite a bit of data that I could delete to make room for more important things. I wanted to share this program with you readers because those of you following this site are likely to have a mobile device such as a UMPC or netbook that has limited storage. This powerful and free application can be a very useful tool for any computer.

Take a look at this screenshot below (click to view full size). WinDirStat takes a moment to analyze your drive, then breaks down every file and folder on the computer. It even color codes different files so you can see which types are clustered together. Highlighting a folder in the file hierarchy list will outline the contents of that folder in the visual area. Expand that folder and highlight individual files and watch them be located within the file group. Its actually rather neat to see, and you can even zoom in to see those super small files. (the blue files that represent the majority of the space in the screenshot below are all part of my music library).

Find WinDirStat here.

Thanks to everyone that replied to my cry for help on mobile operating systems. I’m trying to take a developers view on the mobile platform market and work out why a developer might choose a particular OS or platform. Coming from an X86 world myself, I find it difficult to understand how Moblin, one of the first X86-only mobile operating systems, might fit into the big, carrier-influenced, ARM-focused, 100million-device-per-year world of converged mobile devices.

Since my article, Nokia announced that Symbian and related projects will be pooled and gradually turned into open-source operation. This article at GigaOm has some good thoughts. Given that they have 65% of the global market it’s obviously a significant move and I’ll be watching closely to see what happens. In the meantime, here’s a list I created of the choices that are in the market. The top 4 basically take the whole of the 100million+ per year smartphone market with LiMo carrying most of the rest. The most shocking thing is the list of Linux options. What on earth are they thinking? Open Source Linux appears to translate to a lack of focus and if I was a commercial development house right now i’d be looking to the top 4. LiMo appears to have some traction with good carrier support and penetration. Android on OHA has a lot of backing and media attention and Moblin has a number of distribution deals although at the moment, these are non-voice netbook distribution deals. It remains to be seen if the X86-focused Intel can stimulate smaller-screen distribution and make the conversion to being a voice platform when their smartphone-focused Morestown cpu comes into play in 2010.

So here’s the list of platforms, systems and methods i’ve put together. i’f i’ve missed one, please let me know!

Top 4 - 95% penetration of mobile device (*1) market.

• Symbian (65%)
• Windows Mobile (13%)
• Blackberry (10%)
• iPhone/ OS-x (7%)

Linux flavours

• LiMo (now includes LiPS)
• Android - OHA
• Moblin - Linux+Gnome+Hildon
• Meamo - Nokia. Linux+Gnome (GtK+, Gstreamer, Matchbox, Hildon)
• Mobilinux - MontaVista Linux
• Acces Linux Platform (LiMo compliant?)
• OpenMoko - Linux+Gnome
• TuxPhone
• Qtopia

Others

• Garnet (Palm, Access)

High-level languages, kits and methods:

• Ajax
• j2me
• Adobe air
• Silverlight
• Flash
• Flex

(*1) % Figures from Canalys

Mobile video and modding extraordinaire Jkk has just published a review of the newest Origami software pack we mentioned yesterday. Head on over to jkkmobile to check it out and see what he thinks. Good news is there are no more hardware checks in place so it will run on any device, no installer file hacking required.