In this post, I am going to talk about Microsoft’s Windows Media variants: Windows Media Player 11, Origami Experience, and Windows Media Center.  For many UMPC owners, I’m sure these are essentially the default choices for music playback.  On my eo v7110, I pretty much exclusively used a combination of WMP and Origami Experience and they were the first players that I tried on my Vye as well.  In time, I found them to fall short of many of my needs, though.  I eventually tried a few other products and ended up selecting Media Monkey as my preferred music player.  In the near future, I will write up a separate post entirely about that product.

Finding the right music player for use on my Vye was essential as it is one of my key uses.  I have a big CD collection that I have accumulated over many years and have put a lot of time and effort into ripping them all to digital copies.  My wish to have my whole library on my UMPC was a major motivator in buying the Vye and upgrading it to a 250GB hard drive.

Part of the reason for the large size of my collection is that only a fairly small percentage of it consists of typical 10 track or so pop albums.  Instead, I have a very extensive collection of film scores and compilations as well as quite a bit of classical, Broadway and film musicals, and other similarly specialized music.  In those genres, many of the CDs approach the 75 minute maximum and frequently have large numbers of fairly short tracks.  My collection includes over 1,400 albums with over 26,000 separate tracks.

When I first started the process of copying my CDs to digital files, hard disk space was a lot more expensive than it is now.  In order to limit the space needed a bit, I stuck with MP3 files at 128 kbps.  The sound quality on that isn’t bad, but certainly could be better.  Now that you can get a terabyte of storage for not too much more than $200, I’ve been re-ripping the entire collection in the lossless, open-source FLAC format.  Obviously, those files are still too big to be practical for the Vye.  For the portable use, I have converted each of the FLAC files to 128kbps WMA files, which are roughly the same size as the old MP3 versions, but with a better sound quality.

A music library this large does tend to be a bit of a challenge for most digital jukebox software.  That is a lot of meta data to keep track of and I also need a user interface that doesn’t make it too overwhelmingly difficult to locate whatever particular music I am looking for at any given time.

After the jump, I go into a more in-depth discussion of the 3 Windows Media based music players.

Windows Media Player 11

Windows Media Player, which is included with Windows, is not really a media player that is particularly well optimized for portable computers, much less those with relatively small touch screens.  It is essentially a front-end for the underlying media management features of the operating system, though, meaning that it is likely to at least somewhat come into play on any system.  Its underlying API is the heart of other Microsoft media players like Media Center and Origami Experience and even most third party music players at least make use of some features of WMP, particularly for playing protected content.

The standard WMP interface is clearly not at all designed for, or friendly to, touch screen devices.  The controls are almost without exception too small to manage effectively via touch and the displays often do not scale all that well to the 1024×600 display.  It is useable, but far from being very friendly.

My biggest issue with WMP (and its variants) is that it just doesn’t handle large libraries very well.  With a small to moderate library, the performance is fairly snappy, but the more tracks that are added, the more it slows down.  With a library as large as mine, it tends to be a bit sluggish even on fairly fast machines (like my Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM desktop system) and it definitely has a hard time keeping up on a fairly slow system like the Vye.

Another big problem that I have with Windows Media Player is apt to be an issue for many UMPC users, which is its inability to handle libraries that change frequently, particularly if some files previously in the library may end up no longer available.   This has been an issue for me as I have been re-converting my library and regularly swapping out older versions of tracks, but it is also very likely to be an issue for anyone with a smaller hard drive that might want to keep music on a portable drive (or memory card) or generally rotate music in and out of their library.

Microsoft has pretty much made the assumption that all library manipulation will be purely done inside of WMP and, thus, has little tolerance for dynamically changing libraries.  There is no capability for re-scanning the library with any purpose other than simply adding new tracks.  It can’t automatically remove tracks from the library that no longer exist on the hard drive, nor can it re-scan the meta tags on existing files to update their entries in the library.  Even changing the tags on media within WMP doesn’t always write those tags back out to the file, preventing those changes from being seen elsewhere or if the library is re-generated.

As noted at the beginning of this article, I have a long-term project going on to re-rip my library.  That has also included a lot of re-working of the tags on existing tracks to get everything better organized.  Most of this happens on my desktop system and is later synched to the Vye.  With WMP, the only option is to go into my user directory, blow away the library file, and then re-scan the whole thing.  This process typically takes a couple hours with such a large library.  Even re-scanning to add new music that was ripped somewhere other than WMP (such as on a desktop system) can take a pretty long time.

Origami Experience

Despite some big limitations, I actually used Origami Experience pretty extensively as a primary music player on my eo v7110.  I was not entirely satisfied with the navigational performance or the flexibility of the user interface, but it did generally work better than most alternatives.  Under Vista, I found that the audio quality on the eo was generally best with Windows Media Player and its variants and the interface was much more useable on a 7-inch touch-screen than the stock WMP interface.

Installing Origami Experience on the Vye turned out to be something of a challenge as Microsoft unwisely put restrictions on the installer designed to prevent people from installing the software on anything other than a UMPC.  Unfortunately, these restrictions prevent it from being installed on a number of devices where it really should work, including the Vye.  I’m not entirely certain, but I believe the 1024×600 resolution of the screen is what the installer believed to be outside of specifications.  Fortunately, UMPC Portal published instructions for modifying the installer to remove those restrictions and following those directions easily allowed me to install the software on the Vye.

I had two major complaints with Origami Experience on the eo and both still apply on the Vye as well.  First of all, the user interface is very touch-friendly and generally looks good, but it isn’t particularly flexible.  My biggest problem with the interface is that it really only allows single level navigation by either album, genre, title, or artist.  With such a large library, it helps to be able to narrow the selection down further.  To be specific, I have carefully organized all of my collection into a core set of genres, but Origami Experience doesn’t provide any way to drill down from genre to album or artist.

Performance is an even bigger problem with Origami Experience and I was surprised that it really isn’t much better on the Vye than it was on the eo.  It can take as long as 30-40 seconds to bring up the music library and allow selection of albums or tracks.  This is obviously a reflection of the general performance issues surrounding Windows Media Player and large libraries, but it really seems to be a problem that is amplified quite a lot with Origami Experience.

I used Origami Experience a lot on the eo mainly because there really wasn’t an alternative that was all that much better, but I really spent fairly little time using it on the Vye.  On the faster, more powerful system, its limitations stand out more.  I probably will give the upcoming version 2.0 a chance when it becomes available, but the first version just isn’t a great choice on the Vye.

Windows Media Center

Vista Ultimate (as well as the Home Premium version that is usually included with the Vye) includes the Windows Media Center, another WMP front-end.  While it is really intended for across-the-room use on a TV screen, it is also a pretty decent interface for a small touch-screen.  In many ways, the interface is actually fairly similar to that of Origami Experience, although it is definitely more flexible and much more refined.

The interface includes pretty extensive options for navigating through a large library, immediately making it much more useful for me than Origami Experience.  When navigating by genre, drilling down further gives a list of all albums within that genre, which I previously noted was a serious shortcoming of Origami Experience for my use.  Media Center gives pretty full access to the various commands available in Media Player, including the ability to edit tags or even delete items from the library or entirely from the hard drive.  This makes it more of a complete alternate interface.

As I noted, the interface is "decent" for touch-screen, but it isn’t ideally suited for it.  The icons for selecting titles and menu items tend to be large, which works well.  The "now playing" screen and other displays are full-screen with large print, which also works well on the small screen.  On the other hand, scroll arrows and playback controls are all clearly designed for use with a remote control or mouse and tend to be pretty hard to use with touch.

My favorite feature of Media Center is the slide-show feature.  From the "now playing" screen, an option to start a slide-show is always available.  The photos are then presented in full-screen, but you can keep the current track information (including album art) in the bottom left corner of the screen.  Playback controls are also available at any time without having to interrupt the slide-show.  While Origami Experience does offer a slide-show as well, it isn’t nearly as slick or easy to use.  My only real complaint is that Windows Media Player doesn’t allow separate folders to be specified for music and photos, which means that I have to periodically manually purge album art images from the photo library.

The big downside to Media Center is, once again, performance.  On the eo, it performed so poorly that it was simply not usable.  It does work considerably better on the Vye, but it still has a tendency to slow way down or even come to pretty much a full halt occasionally.  Probably the worst problem is that it will sometimes simply become non-responsive after I start music playing.  In these cases, the music will continue to play uninterrupted (and with no disruption in sound quality), but I will have no access to any controls for a period of time.  This includes the volume control, which can be a particular issue when first starting music playing.  After 30 seconds or so, it does eventually free up.

Response times can also be pretty sluggish while navigating menus as well, particularly when first displaying a page of albums or songs.  Album art is used as the primary means of presenting music choices, but it can often take quite a while for Media Center to load in and display all the artwork on a given page of items.  This results in an initial display of a bunch of light blue boxes with the title printed in white text, but with the album art slowly popping up in replacement over time.  This wouldn’t be so bad, but the system is pretty non-responsive while the art is loading.  It doesn’t cache this well either as returning to the same list of albums/tracks later typically repeats the same process.

Closing thoughts

I realize that I have a somewhat unusual situation due to the size of my music library.  It is probably on the large side compared to the amount of music that most people manage on their desktop systems and it certainly is a very large library for using on a small device like a UMPC.  Still, my library is what it is and it does result in substantially degraded usability for Windows Media Player based products.

At this point, Media Center does have the best interface that I have yet found for a small touchscreen device like this and I also think that Origami Experience is an attractive and generally well-designed product as well.  If it weren’t for the performance issues, I could easily see some combination of the two (with a probable nod towards Media Center) as my first choice for music playback.

The performance issues and inability to manage a rather dynamic library have led me to seek out other options.  As I said at the beginning of this post, Media Monkey has largely become my first choice as a music player, despite some definitely shortcomings on small-screen devices.  In the hopefully near future, I will share my in-depth discussion of that product in another post.

In the mean time, I figured that it would be good to do another of my "stream of consciousness" posts reporting on some general thoughts and experiences now that I have had the Vye for a little over a month.  As with the one-week report, this will probably not be exceptionally focused, but I hope the info is interesting.

Notetaking

I have actually spent a lot of time in pretty information-rich meetings at work during the last month and have really been very happy with the Vye as a note-taking device.  As I noted previously, the inking experience on the Vye is generally pretty poor.  As a result, I have switched to taking notes using the keyboard instead of trying to hand write them.  Even when writing on the eo (or, for that matter, on paper), my handwriting has always been pretty awful, so the typewritten notes are really turning out to be preferable.  In a couple cases, I’ve even emailed them to the meeting organizer to use in the minutes, which is something I probably wouldn’t have ever done with handwritten notes.

The keyboard on the Vye is extremely quiet, which makes it pretty suited for use in meetings.  As I have become accustomed to its somewhat cramped size, my typing speed on it is now pretty close to my normal speed on a full-sized keyboard.  I’m a pretty fast typist (in the 60 words/minute range), so this makes it pretty easy to keep up while taking notes.  In fact, I have to write pretty slowly if I want my handwriting to be at all legible, which means that typing notes has generally worked a bit better for me.

The inking has continued to be a pretty big weakness, though, and it has been a bit of a hassle when copying down diagrams or otherwise annotating.  Simple line drawings come out ok, but it is really hard to add legible hand-written labels.  I’ve been in 2 meetings so far that included whiteboard drawings that I wanted in the notes.  In one, I did hand-draw the diagram in OneNote, but spent a fair amount of time after the meeting cleaning it up and converting the hand-written labels to typed ones.  In the other meeting, I just snapped a picture of the whiteboard using the camera on my Treo and then popped the SD card into the slot on the Vye and dragged the image into OneNote.  That was definitely the better approach and is one I’m sure I will use again.

Vista

I actually still have not done very much tweaking of Windows Vista, other than fairly routine tasks such as disabling unused security features (I’m not a fan of User Access Control and I use ZoneAlarm instead of the included firewall) and turning off indexing of sections of the hard drive where I don’t really need it.  Otherwise, I’ve pretty much left things alone and performance has continued to be pretty acceptable.

In an earlier post, I had mentioned using VLite to strip the Vista installation down a bit.  That is actually something I have come to regret a bit.  I think the concept is good, but it is just to error prone at this point without the flexibility to correct mistakes.  Later discoveries that something useful was left out can only be addressed by a complete wipe and re-install of the OS.

I was caught by this one last week when I realized that I had left out some of the components needed to manage MTP based music players.  I bought my wife a new MP3 player (a Sansa View)  for her birthday and wanted to pre-load it with some of her favorite music.  Since I have our full music collection stored on the Vye, I figured I could set up the new MP3 player much more discretely from it than I could from our desktop PC.  Unfortunately, I was completely unable to get it to recognize it.  I tried quite a few things, including manually copying the MTP drivers from the original Vista CD, but nothing worked.  I ended up just staying up late after my wife had gone to sleep one evening and loading the music player from our desktop PC.

The other big issue with VLite is that you generally can’t do an update install of the recently released Vista SP1 if it was used.  I would certainly like to get the Vye updated to SP1, so I probably am going to do a full re-install this weekend.  My plan is to back up as many system and software settings as possible to the extra hard drive that came with my Vye.  I’ll then download the full ISO of Vista with SP1 from MSDN subscriber downloads and do a fresh re-install of the OS using that.  With that backup and the way that I partitioned the hard drive (with separate partitions for software installation packages and music/media), I’m hoping that I can get the system back up and running pretty quickly.

Stability under Vista has been something of a mixed bag, although I again suspect VLite as a likely cause.  I have had occasional system crashes, although fortunately they have been very rare.  I’ve even seen the "blue screen of death" a few times.  Those generally have only occurred while connected to my work network with VPN and, unfortunately, Cisco’s VPN client is still known to be pretty flaky under Vista.  Fortunately, the problem doesn’t extremely often and I’ve generally been able to do the work that I need to do under VPN.  For the most part, I mainly just use the VPN to synchronize OneNote and Outlook.

Travel

Last weekend, my family took a trip to Phoenix to visit my wife’s family.  This short trip provided my first opportunity to use my Vye while traveling.  While this wasn’t really the heavy-use test that a business trip would be, it still gave me a taste of how well it works while on the road.

Obviously, the biggest advantage of traveling with the Vye is its small size.  I have taken along full-sized laptops on trips in the past and their bulk can be hugely inconvenient, particularly during air travel.  While we did take along just the eo on a couple trips last year, my wife is not at all comfortable with a slate tablet and generally wasn’t very happy with it being the only computer we had along.  On one trip, she actually ended up just going down to the hotel’s business center to check emails or visit the web.  On a later trip, she was able to get by with the Bluetooth keyboard and wireless mouse on the eo, but she still found it awkward.  In contrast, she seemed much more comfortable with the Vye, since it looks and feels like a smaller version of a conventional laptop.

As my main UMPC carrying case, I have long been using a Case Logic portable DVD player case.  This case is large enough to hold the Vye plus an extra battery in the main compartment.  It also has a side zipper compartment that is large enough to carry along my Sprint USB EVDO modem, a wireless notebook mouse, a USB stick, and a couple miscellaneous cables.  All of this is very small and lightweight and easily fits under the seat on an airplane.  The case came with a shoulder strap that I leave off of it most of the time, but which is very helpful to attach when traveling.

During our trip, we stayed at two different Holiday Inn Express motels.  We got in fairly late on the first night and, thus, stayed at the one right by the airport.  At that motel, I was very easily able to connect to their wifi network and get online.  The signal was pretty strong from our room and, thus, the connectivity was very effective.  I’m always a little leery of public hotel networks like that, but I do have ZoneAlarm’s firewall and anti-virus installed on the Vye and kept it turned up to a fairly high level of security.

For the second and third nights of our trip, we moved to another Holiday Inn Express that is much closer to my in-laws’ house.  This one also offers free wi-fi, but my past experiences there have shown it not to be very reliable and it again lived down to my expectations on this trip.  While I was able to connect to the network itself, I was never able to actually get connected to the Internet with it.  This wasn’t really a big deal, though, as I simply flipped the "wireless" switch to off and then plugged in the Sprint modem.  I was able to get very fast and reliable connectivity that way.

More on the Keyboard

In my last post, I already talked a bit about my early experiences with the keyboard.  The presence of the keyboard definitely is the biggest difference compared to my previous UMPC and I’m already seeing a substantial change in my use patterns.  With the eo, I found that I generally used it primarily as a sort of a combination of a web browsing device (essentially a MID) and an MP3 player.  When I bought it, I had visions of using it more for writing than I ever did.  The truth is that I never really got the hang of making handwriting recognition work.  Even with the improvements in Vista, I still had to make a huge number of manual corrections.  Even short discussion board posts, blog comments, or even emails took a ridiculously long time.

I do have a Think Outside folding keyboard that I used with the eo, but it never was extraordinarily convenient.  It was pretty much unusable without a table top available and also took a fair amount of effort to take out, unfold, and connect.  The attached keyboard on the Vye, on the other hand, is always present and readily available.  The size of the unit is such that I have found that I can very easily use it in "laptop mode" even while lounging on the couch or in bed.   With the Vye, it is really easy to work on a blog post or some other written work pretty much whenever I have a bit of down time.  Over the last few days, I’ve done a fair amount of writing while also watching TV, something I never found easy to do in the past.

I’m still not joining the camp that believes that a UMPC absolutely must have a full keyboard in order to be useful as I’m well aware that different people have different needs.  Some people certainly have much better handwriting than I do and I’m certain are able to be significantly more productive via handwriting recognition.  For me, though, I am now pretty much convinced that a keyboard really is the best input option and I see my productivity likely growing dramatically with the Vye.

Ink and Touch Screen

That does bring me to the other side of this, which is the overall inking and touch screen experience.  To be honest, it really isn’t that good.  The touch screen on the Vye is a much softer touch than the eo was and I have found the legibility of handwriting to be quite a bit lower.  I don’t have any past experience with inking on larger than a 7-inch screen and have never had a habit of resting my hand on the screen, so that hasn’t really been a problem. Instead, the lighter touch and the finer detail with the higher resolution 1024×600 screen (which I otherwise love) are making it tougher.

As I said above, I’m not a heavy inker as my handwriting is pretty lousy anyway, but I do occasionally do some hand-written notes in OneNote during meetings.  I’ve only had one occasion to use the Vye this way so far and it was a bit of a rough experience.  After doing some experimentation with line widths and overall writing angles, I did get the writing to be at least acceptable enough for notes that are only for my own use.  Longer term, though, I think I’m going to probably have to rework my approach some.  More than likely, I’ll end up using the keyboard a bit more for general notetaking in meetings, switching to ink mainly for diagrams as well as for hand-annotation of documents, PowerPoint slides, etc.

Even the use of the touch screen for general navigation and selection is taking some getting used to.  I’ve had a bit of a hard time getting accurate calibration, even after several attempts.  As with the inking, I think that has a lot to do with simply being not quite used to the differences in resolution and touch sensitivity compared to what I’m used to.  The rotating screen seems to have some effect as well as I haven’t quite found the right position for effectively doing the calibration.  With practice, I think this will improve, but I have so far found myself using the track pad and track stick a lot more than I did with the eo.

The Vista Decision

The question of the appropriateness of Vista versus Windows XP (or even Linux) for UMPCs is a common subject of debate.  While I definitely recognize the performance limitations of Vista, I also think the overall advantages in the Tablet PC and media features, in particular, do make it worthwhile.  I’ve was actually using Vista on my eo v7110 for much of the past year as well and I couldn’t see going back.  Better Vista performance was a big motivator for me to move up to a new UMPC.

Other than slimming down the Vista installation a bit using VLite, I haven’t really done any significant performance tweaks so far.  That is largely intentional as I want to get a feel for how well the OS performs on the Vye without disabling any features.  I did have to do some pretty serious tweaking on my eo in order to make it useable, which meant that I did without some of Vista’s key features such as the search indexing.

The performance certainly isn’t up to what I get with Vista on my pretty high-end Core 2 Duo based desktop system, but it definitely is very useable and lightyears better than what I saw with the eo.  As is all too typical with Vista, the performance does vary somewhat, not always for clear reasons.  Vista is known for running slower during the initial indexing and I have definitely noticed that it is running snappier now than it did during the first couple days.

Over time, I’m sure that I will do a fair amount of tweaking of performance as well as general experimentation to see what works best.  I haven’t really run any benchmarks yet, but perhaps I’ll do so later and report back a bit on that.

Organizing the 250GB drive

I know the 250GB drive in my Vye is extremely unusual for a UMPC, which introduces some organizational challenges that most UMPC owners don’t generally face.  I decided to separate the 250GB drive into three partitions.  I set up a 100GB partition for media (mainly my music collection) and 12GB for drivers and various software installation packages.  The rest of the drive was assigned to the primary system partition, with the OS plus applications and general data.

One of the realities of Windows is that every once in a while it does become necessary to wipe the system partition and re-install in order to correct problems or even just to clear out enough garbage to get it back to acceptable performance.  Partitioning the drive in this manner allows me to avoid having to re-copy all the media files and also to have the key drivers and software readily available during a re-install. 

This partitioning also will allow me to potentially use BitLocker on the C drive without affecting all the media, although I haven’t decided for sure yet whether I want to do that.  Right now, I don’t really have anything stored on the system that I would consider to be particularly sensitive, but that could change depending on how much I end up using it for work purposes.

More to come

I’ll close out this post here, but I certainly still have a lot more to say about the Vye.  For my next post, I expect to discuss some of my specific application experiences with the Vye.  In particular, I have a fair amount to say about media playback (particularly music).  I also will post some comments about my experience using Photoshop Elements to prepare the photo that I included in my previous post about the aesthetics and design.

Exterior size and appearance

Even having used a different UMPC for quite a while, I still couldn’t help but react a bit to how small the Vye is. Even when the FedEx delivery man handed me the package, I was struck by how small it was. I suspect that if I had told the delivery man that the box contained a full-featured Windows Vista laptop computer, he probably wouldn’t have believed me.

Since it is a convertible rather than a slate, the Vye is definitely a bit bulkier than the eo was, but it actually gives more of an impression of smallness since the form factor is one that we are generally used to seeing in devices that are twice as big or larger. The eo looks a lot like an enlarged iPod while the Vye looks much more like a laptop that was hit by a shrinking ray.

The exterior of the unit is rather sleek and attractive, with the glossy black case and nicely curved edges. The surface is something of a fingerprint magnet, though, which means that they likely should have included a microfiber cloth (fortunately, I already have several from previous devices).

My only major complaint about the exterior appearance is that I definitely could have done without the giant “Vye Computers” logo on the back of the screen. I would have vastly preferred a plain exterior and I really think the tastefully subtle Vye logo under the screen should have been sufficient branding. Even with the giant logo, the etched on branding is definitely more tasteful than the logo stickers that TabletKiosk stuck on the eo.

The keyboard does make the unit somewhat thicker and a bit heavier than the eo was, although honestly not by that much. The included 6-cell battery is fairly large (about the same size as the eo extended battery) and extends out quite a bit behind the screen. This makes for a fair amount of dead space below the screen when it is rotated around to slate mode, making it a bit more awkward to use.

I’ve been pretty impressed with the battery life so far (the extended battery seems to make it to the 4-5 hour range), so I have placed an order for the optional 3-cell battery, figuring that the smaller battery should be sufficient for most meetings, lunch hour use, and even much of my around the house use. The 6-cell battery will, of course, be my first choice when traveling or in other scenarios where I will be away from electrical power for a longer period of time.

The Vye does include a small, plastic stylus that is well hidden in a compartment on the upper right side of the screen. In fact, it is so well hidden that I had to search for it and even initially thought there might not be one at all. The stylus is very small and pretty flimsy and isn’t going to be useful for anything other than really quick tasks. I definitely will need a larger stylus/pen for any notetaking or other extensive tablet use.

Buttons and Ports

The set of buttons and controls alongside the screen on the Vye are pretty comparable to those on the eo, although often in different positions. I am especially glad that the device does have a trackpoint and mouse buttons next to the screen, although I’m not quite as pleased with the placement. The trackpoint is on the lower left side of the screen while the mouse buttons are on the lower right. Inexplicably, the “left” and “right” button are stacked vertically instead of being next to one another. I’m finding that a bit hard to get used to, although I haven’t really used the device all that much in slate mode yet.

The screen bevel also includes a square 4-way rocker that acts as the four arrow keys. It is a comfortable design, although I miss the placement of the enter button in the center as found on the eo. There is a somewhat less-convenient enter button on the upper right of the screen along with “launcher”, “shutter”, and “rotation” buttons. The first two in that group are used to control the built-in webcam located above the screen. Below those buttons is a horizontal rocker button for adjusting brightness and a pair of large buttons for scrolling the page up and down. Of course, most of these controls can also be accessed via the keyboard and touchpad, so they are mainly needed when using the unit in slate mode.

For the most part, the ports are well positioned and pretty appropriate for this kind of unit. It has two USB 2.0 ports, one each on the left and right side. On the right side, there are also SD and Compact Flash readers. The USB slot on the left side is in a small covered compartment that also includes an Ethernet port. The cover is a bit flimsy, though, and I’m not really sure how well it will hold up. There is also a VGA port on the left side, which I actually would have preferred being under the cover instead of the USB, which will likely need to be accessed much more often. The power switch is towards the front of the left side. It unfortunately lacks the “lock” mode that was available on the eo and was useful for transporting the unit short distances without having to worry about accidentally hitting buttons or the touch screen.

One design choice that I really like a lot is the inclusion of two Kensington lock ports, located towards the back of the unit on both the left and right sides. I do use a Kensington lock to secure my UMPC while at work and the location on the bottom of the eo was incredibly inconvenient. With the Vye, I can very easily leave it locked until I next need to transport it. The lock never gets in the way at all.

The selection of ports and buttons are rounded out by headphone and microphone jacks, a volume control, and an on-off switch for the wireless along the front edge. I initially wasn’t sure that the placement of the headphone jack would work all that well, but after a few days of use and a bit more thought it seems fairly unlikely that I would have the unit in slate mode for media use. With the unit opened, the headphone jack is pretty well-positioned.

Keyboard

I can’t really discuss the overall design and aesthetics of the Vye without writing about the keyboard. My reaction so far is that this keyboard is probably as good as you are going to get for a unit this size. Yes, the keys are certainly a bit cramped and the layout has a few compromises, but it is an extremely usable keyboard. I do wish that the keyboard had a backlight, or at least was designed with a bit more contrast between the keys and the key labels, as it is very difficult to see the keys in rooms with low illumination. The small, closely-spaced keyboard does make it helpful to be able to occasionally look at the keys, even for a touch typist.

I’m a fairly fast touch typist and I have found that I am able to come pretty close to my normal speed and approach to typing on the Vye. It has taken a bit of practice to start to feel comfortable with it, but it really hasn’t required as much acclimation as I thought it might. The biggest problem that I’ve had has been a tendency to sometimes hit the ctrl key instead of the shift key, which can sometimes have some slightly unfortunate results. I have found that this problem has very quickly lessened with practice.

The other aspect of the keyboard that I have found a bit of a frequent cause of errors is the fact that the number keys are shifted one position to the left of where they normally are placed. This is because the escape key was moved to the function key row above the number keys. Because of this, I have pretty regularly found myself off by one when typing numbers. I would imagine I will also get used to this soon.

I honestly wasn’t sure how useful the small keyboard would really be for extended use and, thus far, have been keeping my Think Outside Stowaway keyboard in my gadget bag as a back-up. I have been quite pleased with the Vye keyboard, though, and I suspect I will soon decide that carrying around the folding keyboard is no longer needed.

I have actually written this entire blog entry on the Vye using the built-in keyboard without much difficulty. The first half of it was written during my lunch hour while sitting at a table at a favorite pizza place. The second half was written while stretched out on my couch at home with the Vye comfortably placed on my lap. I am going to hold off on actually publishing the post until tomorrow as I have some photos that I would like to add. I will most likely work on those during my lunch hour tomorrow, giving Photoshop Elements a bit of a work out on the Vye.

This really is ultra-mobile computing at its best!

I am paying attention to the UMPC-related announcements coming out of the currently running Consumer Electronics Show, but I don’t think it is too likely that anything will be a better fit for me than the Vye.  I’ve already seen the announcements from TabletKiosk and Samsung and their new UMPCs don’t appear to be better fits.  With the current trends, I have little expectation that anyone else will put something out that fits my needs either.  I probably will at least wait until the end of the first day of the show (Monday), but I expect to put in my order for a Vye in the next day or so.

The following is a run-down of the key criteria for my next UMPC purchase as well as the reasons why the Vye seems to meet them closely enough.

Performance

In terms of basic processing power, the eo v7110 is a top candidate for the title of weakest Windows-based UMPC released to date.  That means that pretty much any other model out there is going to be an improvement overall.  Like most people that closely follow the UMPC world, I have some trepidations about the Intel A100 processor that powers the Vye, but I have no doubt that the performance will be a significant step up from what I have and most reviews of the Vye have indicated the performance to be pretty snappy.  Unquestionably, the much improved Intel graphics chipset will make a big performance improvement too as will the Vye’s 2GB RAM capacity, which is double the maximum on the v7110. 

I do think that I would be somewhat happier with a higher-end processor, but I don’t really see signs of anyone putting out a unit that uses a faster processor without falling quite a bit short in the other areas important to me.  The newly announced Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium does sound nice with its Core Solo processor, but it still falls pretty short in many of my other key requirements.

Operating System

There is a lot of debate right now about what operating system makes the most sense for a device with a UMPC form-factor, but I definitely want to stick with a Windows-based system.  My preference is Windows Vista, as I truly believe it is the most future-proof and currently provides the most flexibility, particularly when it comes to Tablet PC features and media.  Although Windows XP is available as an option for the Vye as well, it really was designed as a Vista system and reviews have suggested that it runs it reasonably well.  The graphics chipset is even capable of handling the Aero interface, although I honestly don’t know if I will be likely to use that on a UMPC.

I fully realize that no UMPC right now is probably going to provide an ideal Windows Vista experience and I’m prepared to do a lot of optimization work on it.  I like the overall improvements to the Tablet features and media player enough, though, that I’ve actually been running Vista on my v7110 since early last year.  That is one of the main motivators for my decision to upgrade now and I feel confident that I will at least see an improvement in performance.

Storage

The availability of sufficient on-board storage is a big issue for me and, quite frankly, the main sticking point for most of the currently available UMPCs.  Right now, I’m not a huge fan of "cloud" computing as I haven’t yet really found connectivity to be sufficiently ubiquitous or reliable for that.  I use my UMPC as my primary music player (particularly while at work) and I definitely have found that streaming audio is problematic at best.  I have a large music collection and I really do like having all of it available on my UMPC, all ripped at a reasonable bit rate (I mostly use WMA files at 128 Mbps). 

One of the main reasons why I originally chose the v7110 was that it was the only first-generation unit that used a standard 2.5-inch laptop hard drive instead of a lower-capacity 1.8-inch drive.  I eventually upgraded the drive to 160GB and actually have a pretty large percentage of it filled.  In a pinch, I could see going with a lower capacity internal drive supplemented by an external USB drive, but that would be far from my preferred solution.

Storage is where the Vye has what is probably an insurmountable advantage over the competition for my purchase.  Like the v7110, it uses a 2.5-inch drive, allowing for higher capacity.  The standard configuration comes with a 120GB drive, but I have been in contact with Vye already and they have confirmed that they can build me a customized unit that will use a 250GB Western Digital drive.  To do this, they will charge me a $50 "fitting fee" plus the cost of the drive, a very reasonable arrangement for a vastly improved capacity.

User Input

Unquestionably, I do want a UMPC with a touch-screen and Tablet PC capabilities.  With my v7110, I have become very used to navigating via touch, particularly when couch surfing or otherwise using my system in environments other than tabletop/desktop.  I’m not a heavy user of ink, but I do like the ability to occasionally hand write notes during meetings or phone calls.  The Vye does apparently have a lighter touch than the v7110 and, thus, may not be as good an inking experience, but I suspect it will still be fine for my needs.

What I have never had much success with, though, is handwriting recognition.  My handwriting has always been atrocious and even with the learning capabilities and overall recognition improvements in Vista, my accuracy level has still never gotten very high.  As a result, I still find myself having to use my Think Outside folding keyboard for most writing of any length, even including most quick emails or discussion board posts.  For this reason, the keyboard on the Vye is something that I will be glad to have, even if it does add some additional weight and bulk over what I’m used to.  I do like very much that it is a convertible design, though, which still gives me the ability to use it in slate mode where appropriate.

That said, I can’t say that I’m absolutely committed to a unit with a keyboard.  My experiences using the v7110 with the Think Outside folding keyboard have generally been positive, even if it isn’t as convenient as an integrated unit is.  I also have some doubts about how efficient my typing will be on a keyboard that small and I do suspect I may still want to use the folding keyboard for longer writing sessions.  I do see the inclusion of a keyboard as basically a check mark in the "positive" compartment for the Vye, though, although I would likely still be willing to go with a slate if there was one out there that better matched my other criteria.

Screen

The Vye has a 7-inch screen, just like the one on the v7110.  Even though UMPCs have been trending towards somewhat smaller screens, I don’t know that I would want to go much smaller.  My eyesight already isn’t what it once was and I doubt it is going to get much better as I continue to get older.

What I do find to be a big plus is that the Vye has a native resolution of 1024×600 rather than the 800×480 resolution of the v7110 and other first generation UMPCs.  Even on the v7110, I very rarely had the resolution set to less than 800×600 and I often found myself using it in the 1024×600 mode as well.  The wider resolution is simply much more optimal for many Windows applications and web sites now.  The fact that the Vye display should be much clearer and less distorted at these higher resolutions is a big plus.

As these models are fairly significant re-designs of the first two Origami models, these two systems probably have the best claim to a “second generation UMPC” title. While Samsung has released several incremental upgrades to the Q1 before, the Q1-Ultra is really their first substantial re-design, both internally and externally. In fact, some leaked pre-announcement materials on the awkwardly-named Q1-Ultra showed that it was originally planned to be the Q2, which would have probably been a better name.

While Windows Vista compatibility/optimization looks to be a key driver for both devices, each also has a somewhat updated feature set intended to address some of the complaints/criticisms of their predecessors. Both appear to have improved CPUs and graphics processors. Reportedly, the Q1-Ultra has even been shown running Vista with the rather demanding Aero interface active. Less is known about the T770, although it seems to be a pretty safe bet that it almost has to improve on the fairly poor graphics performance of the T700.

As with the earlier models, Samsung continues to offer a lot more bells and whistles than the somewhat minimalist Amtek device. The Q1-Ultra carries over the built-in ethernet and VGA ports that were standard on the Q1 and it substitutes the Q1’s CompactFlash slot for a now more common Secure Digital slot. It also adds a fingerprint scanner, built-in web and snapshot cameras, and cellular networking. Probably the most talked about addition is a split thumb-keyboard across the face of the unit. This was almost certainly added as a response to the many reviews of the Q1 that complained of the lack of a keyboard. The Q1 was easily the most widely-reviewed of the first batch of UMPCs (some mainstream publications made it look like it was the only one on the market), and it isn’t surprising that Samsung would feel the need to address this widely mentioned item.

The upgrades to the T770 are more internal improvements rather than added features, although it does reportedly add an SD card reader and a camera. It is expected to retain the biggest advantage that the T700 had over other UMPCs, which is the use of 2.5″ hard drives, which currently allows a maximum of 160GB of on-board storage with the potential for 200GB or higher drives in the near future.

Coming down to the bottom line, I guess the obvious question that any UMPC early adopter has to consider is whether or not either of these second generation devices might prompt an upgrade. Personally, I’m tempted somewhat, but still definitely in a “wait and see” mode. Some of the bells and whistles of the Q1-Ultra are attractive, but I definitely would have a hard time giving up the 160GB hard drive capacity that I have on my current UMPC. As for the T770, I do get frustrated sometimes by the fairly weak performance of the T700, but I would definitely need to see strong indications of substantial improvement before I would shell out for an upgrade.

That said, I do see it as a positive sign that the first two companies to ship Origami UMPCs are still committed to the concept and are still working to advance it. In a time when all too many mainstream publications are ready to declare the whole UMPC idea a “failure”, it is very reassuring to see two of its main champions clearly acting like they disagree with that assessment.

The event was primarily an informal opportunity to get some hands-on exposure to TabletKiosk’s UMPCs and Tablet PCs and accessories as well as an opportunity to network with staff members from TabletKiosk as well as members of the UMPC/Tablet PC community. I did feel like the event was targeted more at prospective UMPC buyers than at current owners (I actually was doing a bit of “salesmanship” of the concept myself), but it still was a nice opportunity to see most of TabletKiosk’s products in person while also meeting a few other members of the community.

There was no formal program and no major announcements were made, but they did have pretty much all their current systems and accessories on display and they also showed up a few prototypes of new accessories. They also had a drawing where they gave away 10 gift-bags of Intel swag as well as one $300 gift certificate to TabletKiosk.com. Unfortunately, I did not win anything.

The next events will be held on November 9th in Orlando, Florida and November 30th in Houston, Texas (a previously-announced 11/2 event in Ft. Lauderdale, FL has been cancelled). TabletKiosk is also promising to visit quite a few more cities with similar events during 2007.

After the break are some photos from the event. Clicking on any of the photos will take you to a larger, higher-resolution image.

This sign near the hotel lobby directed attendees to the proper location.

This reception desk was outside the ballroom where the event was being held. Here guests signed-in (on a tablet PC, of course!) and were issued a ticket for the drawing.

A generous buffet of cheese, crackers, veggies, and even warm, soft pretzels was provided.

The bar served free soft drinks and water while beer and wine were also available for a fee.

This table towards the front of the room showed off traditional tablets and a few accessories.

These tables showed several models of traditional Tablet PCs.

The three current models of eo UMPCs were featured at this table.

Close-ups of signs describing each of the three currently available eo models.

This additional table showed many of the eo accessories, both new and old. Conspicuous in their absence were the long promised port replicator and docking station for the v7110, although we were assured that the port replicator was at least still coming soon.

A couple particularly interesting items on this table included a prototype exterior for the eo v7110 and a wooden mock-up of an eo that was being used for demonstrating mounting accessories.

One of the most interesting prototypes on display was this handle grip that attaches to an eo via the universal VESA mount bracket sold by TabletKiosk. It is intended to allow easy one-handed operation. It is demonstrated here attached to the wooden mock-up mentioned above.

This folding stand attaches to a mounting hole on the back of the eo v7110 using a thumbscrew, providing that model with one of the features that is most frequently cited as an advantage of the Samsung Q1 and the TabletKiosk i-series. The stand was demonstrated attached to the eo, but I unfortunately was not in a position to get a photo at that time and didn’t get another opportunity. I can attest that it appeared to work quite well.

I did ask if the stand would also be available in white to match the white case option for the v7110, but was told that wasn’t planned. Their view was that most people wouldn’t be looking that closely at the back of the units, but I do hope that this will be re-considered.

These are protective bump cases for the v7110 (top) and i72xx (bottom) UMPCs. As with the stand, it would be nice if they would offer the v7110 bump case in white as well.

Two views of the eo portfolio case

The eo slip case

This is a prototype design of a portfolio case with room for an i-series eo on one side and a pouch for a cell phone or PDA on the other.

TabletKiosk now sells this Targus USB folding keyboard. I just purchased one of these earlier this week and will plan to do a comparative report on this and the ThinkOutside folding keyboards in the near future.

The key difference between the two TabletKiosk UMPC product lines is the choice of processor and chipset at their core. With the i72xx series, the “i” stands for “Intel” while the “v” in v7110 stands for “Via”. The i7209 is based on the Intel Celeron M while the higher-end i7210 is based on the Intel Pentium M. Both models also use the Intel 915GMS chipset, with integrated DirectX9 3D graphics. Both also have a 1.3 megapixel camera, an SD card slot, and 7.1-channel sound built-in. Finally, these new models also each come with a docking station that provides Ethernet, VGA, S-Video, and additional USB connectors.

These are all nice enhancements over the previous model. The Intel processors and chipsets should provide a decent performance boost over the Via, particularly with the Pentium M based i7210, likely to be the fastest performing UMPC yet available. Until some hands-on reviews of the units start to be circulated, it won’t really be known whether the battery life is better than what was found with the v7110, but improvement is very likely. The better video and sound capabilities should give these new models an advantage over the v7110 for multimedia features, also competing pretty strongly with what the Samsung Q1 offers in this area (other than its instant-on capabilities).

The main area in which the v7110 continues to have a big advantage is customization of the memory and hard-drive configurations. With the older model, you can select configurations of 256MB, 512MB or 1GB of RAM, while the i7209 is only available with 512MB and the i7210 comes with 1GB. Even more significantly, the v7110 uses 2.5” hard drives, which provide a considerably wider range of choices than the 1.8” drives used in the i72xx series. The i7209 comes with a 30GB drive while the i7210 comes with a 60GB, each running at 4,200RPM. Surprisingly, TabletKiosk doesn’t appear to offer the opportunity to customize the i7209 with more memory or a larger hard-drive, although I would think that such upgrades should be possible.

The v7110 is available with hard-drives ranging from 40GB all the way up to 160GB and at speeds of 5,400 or 7,200RPM. Obviously, the v7110 is capable of substantially higher storage capacities and much faster performing drives. They do also offer the ability to send the unit back for later upgrades to the larger drives or memory (at a pretty substantial cost, of course) or the components to perform those upgrades yourself are pretty readily available, assuming you are pretty comfortable with that kind of fairly delicate computer maintenance.

With the faster processors and other added features, the i7xxx series does cost more than the v7110. The i7209 is priced at $1,099 and the i7210 costs $1,399. By comparison, the v7110 starts at $899 for the minimum configuration, with 256MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive. Even if you upgrade the RAM to 512MB to match the i7209, the price is only $998 and that is with a larger, faster hard drive. If you upgrade both the RAM and hard drive to match the i7210, the v7110 comes to $1,239. The price of the v7110 doesn’t exceed that of the i7210 until it is upgraded to either a 100GB 5,400RPM drive or a 60GB 7,200RPM drive, either of which comes to $1,423.

My v7110 has 1GB of RAM and the slower 100GB hard drive, meaning that I paid the above referenced $1,423 price, only $24 more than the i7210. Obviously, if I were purchasing my UMPC today, I would have to give serious consideration about which model to buy. I’m honestly not entirely certain which one I would have chosen if I were making the decision cold, but I don’t regret my purchase. Doing a quick check on my hard-disk, I have about 40GB free currently. That means that trying to carry everything I have on my eo currently, the hard-disk on the i7210 would be completely full with memory cards or external USB drives as the only option for adding additional storage.

I certainly would appreciate the extra processing power, improved multimedia features and, likely, improved battery life of the newer model, but portability of data was really the prime motivation for me purchasing a UMPC. In fact, that is the main reason why I choose the eo over the Samsung Q1. I use my eo to carry around essentially all of my personal and professional documents, my entire digital photo collection, all of my purchased tracks, as well as a fairly large number of tracks that I have ripped from CD at a lossless bit rate. If anything, I suspect that my storage needs on my UMPC are apt to increase, if anything.

While the new models would be more appealing to me if they used the faster, higher-capacity 2.5” hard drives, I still think that they are a strong addition to TabletKiosk’s UMPC line. More importantly, these new models indicate a definite commitment to UMPCs on the part of the company. Already, they have added several new accessories that are compatible with all of the available eo models. I’m sure that these new models will fit the needs of many potential customers better than any others currently available and overall that is a big positive for the UMPC in general.

I was very pleased with TabletKiosk’s flexibility and efficiency handling the recall. After getting the initial return authorization, I exchanged periodic emails with them until they confirmed that they had everything in stock for performing the recall work. This let me avoid sending it back before they were ready to quickly turn it around. Once they were ready, my desktop PC had gone in for repairs and I didn’t really want to be without my eo. TabletKiosk was very accommodating, immediately agreeing to hold the replacement unit until my other system was repaired.

Once I did send it back, the turn-around was about as fast as it possibly could be. I sent it back via UPS next-day delivery on Tuesday. On Wednesday afternoon, I got an email with the tracking number for the return shipment even before the tracking showed my shipment as delivered. TabletKiosk was so fast that they were able to complete the transfer and ship the unit back to me before UPS could update the tracking data on their website. I had my replacement eo by 1pm on Thursday.

The new eo works pretty much as expected. The battery life is definitely improved, with about 2 hours of use now readily achievable under normal use. This still isn’t stellar, and is still less than the 2.5 hours originally advertised, but it is a definite improvement and it absolutely improves the usability of the eo. Once the extended battery becomes available in a couple weeks, I honestly think that the battery life will be sufficient for pretty much all my needs.

Otherwise, the new eo seems pretty much identical to the previous one. I have seen some reports that the heat dissipation has been improved in the replacements, but I can’t really say that I have noticed much improvement. The device still gets pretty warm, mainly over the vent on the left side. It never had been overly bad on my eo, though, so it is definitely possible that mine simply was not as bad as some of the others from the first shipped batch.

While any recall is inconvenient, now that this one has been completed I can honestly say that it was a pretty painless experience. By transferring the hard drive from the old unit to the new one, no data was lost and there was no need to re-install anything or to do any restoration from backups. TabletKiosk’s efficiency resulted in me only being without my eo for almost exactly 48-hours, which is an exceptionally short time for a mail-in recall.

Of course, TabletKiosk certainly should have been aware of the battery life issues prior to shipping the first batch of devices and should have at least notified buyers ahead of time with the option to complete the order at that time or not. Even with the battery life issues, I have gotten nearly 2-months of good use out of my eo, thus I am glad that they didn’t delay shipping the product for this issue. I simply feel that being more up-front about the issue might have given them better publicity and, possibly, reduced the overall cost of the recall.

Based on the relatively few people reporting on the recall online, I suspect that they ended up with a lot of returns for refunds. The only other blogger that I have seen reporting experiences with the recall is CTitanic from Ultra Mobile PCs Tips. While I’m sure there were some other eo buyers that kept their unit but don’t participate in the online UMPC community, I do think this suggests that the percentage that didn’t return their systems was likely pretty low. I still think the eo is an excellent device and, after the recall, it now is very competitive with the Samsung Q1 and other similar devices in this class. I really hope that the recall hasn’t tainted the overall reputation of TabletKiosk or the eo and that it ends up selling well.

The email stated that the units will need to be sent back to TabletKiosk for the repair and that they will be shipped back within 72 hours of receipt at their facility. The email provided contact information to request return shipping instructions. I sent them a request for those instructions yesterday, but have not received a reply yet at the time of this writing. It was unclear from the email whether they would cover the cost of return shipping or if that will be the owner’s responsibility.

In addition to offering to repair the devices, the email also offered a 25% discount off the purchase of any one eo accessory purchased before the end of July. I requested that they apply the discount towards my pre-order for the extended battery.

While I’m not that happy about having to do without my eo for a few days, I am glad that they found a cause for the problem and that they are offering to correct the existing units. With the battery life improved, the eo will be a substantially better and more useful device. It is expected that any units shipped going forward will already have the hardware fix installed, which makes it much easier for me to now recommend the eo to people who believe its feature set will meet their needs.

I do hope that TabletKiosk and Amtek (the actual manufacturer of the eo) won’t simply stop here with their investigation into the problem. Various testing that has been done by current eo owners has shown that, in addition to the excessive power drain in the hardware, the units are also clearly not handling system power management with the correct efficiency. The eo clearly suffers from a known Windows XP bug that prevents the processor from ever going into its lowest power states when USB devices are connected. Since the wireless and bluetooth interfaces are internally connected via USB, this bug is a constant problem on the eo.

Other laptop manufacturers have corrected this issue through driver and/or BIOS changes, so I sincerely hope that TabletKiosk and Amtek will make every effort to correct it on the eo as well. Based on the battery life that has been reported from European versions of the Amtek UMPC (which presumably already have the hardware fix), it seems likely that the fix will add another 30-45 minutes to the running time of the eo, but that a fix for this other issue will also be necessary before the devices can truly match the originally quoted 2.5+ hours under normal operation.

I commend TabletKiosk for finding and fixing this key problem with the eo and look forward to gettin gthe correct device. I now urge them to keep working on any additional fixes needed to bring the devices up to their full potential.