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!

Design and form factor

The eo is a very well designed device with a layout that makes it quite comfortable to use. The buttons and pointer control stick are extremely well positioned for comfortable access while holding the eo in both hands. The surface is smooth and well-rounded and the unit feels very solidly built without being excessively heavy.

The one fairly significant issue with comfortable handling of the device is that it gets quite a bit warmer than I would have liked during operation. When plugged in to the charger, it gets downright hot. Even when running on the battery, it still gets quite warm. It isn’t so hot that it isn’t useable, but I did find that it puts off enough heat that I probably won’t want to use it for very long in a non air-conditioned environment and I suspect I’ll want to use it on a tabletop whenever feasible.

User Interface

Some of the early pre-reviews of the Samsung Q1 (the other first-generation UMPC being released this month) have complained that its design makes controlling the mouse cursor very difficult. This seems to be a problem that Amtek (the actual designer/manufacturer of the eo) has addressed much more effectively.

While using the device, I found that controlling the cursor with the stick and dedicated mouse buttons (which are absent on the Q1) became pretty much second nature in no time. In fact, I have found myself pretty freely moving back and forth between the use of the stylus and the control stick, usually without a need to give it much thought.

Although I am very experienced with using the touch-screen interface on Palm OS based PDAs, this is my first experience with the Tablet PC edition of Windows XP. So far, I have found that it works quite well. Various icons and links respond to the stylus in a basically intuitive manner and, for the most part, it hasn’t been difficult at all to tap in the correct location. The only thing that I have found to be somewhat of a challenge so far has been selecting items without opening them. I’m having a hard time getting the hang of how quickly to tap for a single-click and have even found this to be somewhat challenging with the pointing stick and buttons. I also have found that I’m pretty used to using the control key to selectively highlight items and haven’t yet really found a good alternative on the eo.

So far, I have been using the eo pretty much exclusively without a keyboard. I haven’t really done any significant document creation yet (I admit that I’m writing this on my desktop computer…), but have found that the tablet interface works pretty well for fairly routine things like filling in web forms or registration information during software installs. The handwriting recognition generally works pretty well, but I definitely need a lot more practice with it. So far, I have found that tapping out items on the mini-keyboard is a lot faster for me. I haven’t really tried the included Dialkeys software yet.

The worst interface at this point seems to be the on-screen keyboard on the log-in screen. The taps don’t seem to exactly align with the keys (even after running the calibration program a couple times) making it a real challenge to hit the right keys. The added fact that the keys do not highlight when pressed and password entries are masked has made it a pretty big challenge to type my password correctly. I’m sure I’ll get better with practice, but Microsoft really needs to work to enable all the keyboard and handwriting recognition options on this screen.

So far, I have really just been using the standard Windows XP interface instead of using the launcher included with Microsoft’s Touch Pack. Once I finish getting all the software installed and set up, I’ll likely configure the launcher and try it out more. I have found that the standard interface generally works fine, though.

Screen

For Windows XP, I don’t know that I would want a screen size much smaller than the 7” screen used on the eo. Even with this size screen, the interface in some software does seem a bit cramped. One of the worst that I have encountered so far is the frameset used on the Windows Update website, which leaves very tiny windows at a 480 pixel vertical resolution. On the other hand, web sites and emails that I have tried so far seem spectacularly more readable on this than they did on my 480×320 resolution Palm LifeDrive.

Still, it really has been overall very useable even at the default 800×480 resolution. The 800×600 and 1024×600 modes are definitely readable in applications that require that extra screen real-estate, although the distortion is very noticeable. So far, I’ve found that I have kept it at 800×480 most of the time, shifting it to the higher resolutions only when absolutely necessary.

Performance and battery life

I haven’t run any benchmarks or even really used the system heavily under normal use, but so far it seems fast and responsive. One of the major reasons why I picked the eo over the Samsung was the fact that I could get a system configured with 1GB of RAM as well as a 5400RPM, high-capacity hard drive. They actually offer 7200RPM drives as well, but I decided the slightly slower drive probably wouldn’t affect the type of applications I run too much and I preferred to spend the extra money on higher capacity (100GB).

Battery life, unfortunately, does not seem so good. With the included 3-cell battery, I haven’t been able to get more than 60-90 minutes. I have been doing some pretty hard-drive intensive operations (software installs, file copies) as well as a lot of network access (software downloads and transfers from my desktop PC) so far, so the battery life may be better under normal use. It also isn’t uncommon for batteries to last a bit longer after a few charges. Still, I am having a hard time imagining that this is going to often hit the 2.5 hours of battery life that TabletKiosk claims.

In a few weeks, they are supposed to start offering a 6-cell extended battery for sale and I think it is going to be an absolute must in order for this to really start to reach its potential as a portable device. As a quick experiment, I did try removing and reinstalling the battery while the system was running and found that it can’t be done without the eo shutting off. That means that it isn’t possible to hot swap the battery during extended sessions. Even if you do have to power down between sessions, the combined battery life of the 3 and 6-cell batteries should be around 4.5 to 5 hours, which should be sufficient for me.

Wireless and peripherals

So far, I have found connecting to the wireless networks both at home and at my office to be an absolute breeze. At both locations, the eo detected the network immediately and all I had to do was key in the security code to quickly get connected.

Some of the other online reviews of the eo have said that people haven’t been receiving particularly good wireless reception, but that hasn’t matched my experience thus far. I have found that the eo is getting considerably stronger signals than my LifeDrive ever did and that the wireless reception seems to be pretty comparable to what I get on my full-size Compaq laptop.

My initial attempts at connecting my ThinkOutside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard using the standard Bluetooth configuration applet in the Control Panel were not successful. I couldn’t get it to detect the keyboard at all. An additional attempt to get it to detect my Motorola cell phone was also unsuccessful. I later tried again using the included Bluetooth application, though, and was able to get it paired successfully with the keyboard that way. The keyboard definitely does work, although I haven’t really tried using it for anything other than a little test typing yet. I haven’t yet tried again to pair it with my cell phone or to set up cellular network access.

In order to install some software, I purchased a Targus Slim USB 2.0 DVD/CD-RW drive. The eo detected the drive without any difficulty at all and I was able to use it to install both a couple software packages. The drive does have to actually be hooked up to both USB ports on the eo, one for the data connection and the other for power. The power connection does have a pass-through to allow another USB device to be plugged into the port at the same time. You can also use an AC adapter with the drive instead of the second USB connection, which obviously could help to prevent it from draining too much from the eo’s battery during long use.

Software

Since the eo runs a full version of Windows XP, it is just as susceptible to viruses and other mal-ware as any other Windows system. Because of this, the first software I installed was the ZoneAlarm Antivirus and Firewall software. Although I have generally used Symantec’s Norton packages on my other systems, I decided to try out ZoneAlarm mainly because they offer a package with just the antivirus and firewall for a fairly low price. I don’t need anti-spam (I use server-side filtering) or parental controls software (my son is too young to use the device), so I didn’t want to buy an expensive package with all kinds of components I don’t need. So far, I’ve been using the ZoneAlarm software in a free trial, but I suspect I will end up registering it and using it long term. It seems pretty lightweight and unobtrusive.

Another important early installation was PartitionMagic in order to re-organize the hard drive. Out of the box, TabletKiosk is setting up the eo to use roughly 1/3 of the hard drive for a FAT32 partition to hold recovery versions of the OS, drivers, and included software. On my 100GB drive, that partition was about 32GB, despite the fact that it was less than 3GB full. Thanks to helpful instructions posted by ctitanic on his UMPC Tips blog, I was easily able to re-size the partitions to reduce the recovery partition down to only 8GB. I kept the added space in order to allow me to use that partition for storage of install sets for other downloaded software.

I was quickly able to install both Firefox and Thunderbird, my web browser and email client of choice. I transferred the Firefox bookmarks simply using its built-in export command, but I have generally found it works best to install plug-ins and other configuration items on Firefox manually on new systems. With Thunderbird, though, I was able to copy the contents of my profile folder from my desktop PC and immediately have all my settings and archived email available on the eo. Both products seem to work very well on the eo and are completely useable even at the standard 800×480 resolution.

I have also installed Microsoft Office and Microsoft Streets & Trips on the eo, but haven’t really tried using either one yet. I also made an attempt at installing Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 on the eo, but something went wrong during the installation requiring a reboot. I’ll try that one again later.

Conclusions so far…

The eo definitely does have some issues, but at this point I’m overall impressed with the whole UMPC concept. Windows XP really does work rather well on a device this size and I suspect it will only improve as the OS and software are adapted to the smaller screen and keyboard-less entry.

Being an early-adopter is not for the faint of heart and I can easily see issues like the excessive heat and poor battery life frustrating those that aren’t prepared for the frustrations of a first-generation system. As these issues are worked out, though, I suspect that people really are going to start to see the value in this kind of device. I’m thrilled to have one now!