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 ultra mobile PC 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 inch 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.

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?

It used to be a lot simpler. An email and a response was all that was needed to communicate over the internet but now, multimedia, the need-for-speed and the possibility to broadcast messages and presence information has changed that permanently. We’re now in a situation where people are leaving email until last and if you want to talk to someone you need to be quick, concise and to catch them when they’re in their virtual office. I.e. Status: ONLINE!

In my daily work for UMPCPortal I’ve always tried to remain available and online but because of the fragmentation that has happened in the last 10 years, I now need to be multi-present. It’s like I’ve had to build multiple doors, tunnels and stages in my virtual office so that people can come in through any method they choose. Apart from the fact that this often kills my already fragile ability to concentrate, it creates a challenge. Should you attend to all doors or leave some locked or hidden? How do you integrate them into your PC desktop experience and how do you transfer that into a mobile scenario…

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