1. Home-built Desktop PC: I haven’t purchased a desktop computer for over 10-years.  Instead, I build my own system from individual parts, occasionally upgrading when the pricing and my needs dictate.  My current system has an Intel 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 3GB of memory, 1.5TB of hard disk space (spread across 4 drives), NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS video card, and a Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi sound card.  The OS is Windows Vista Ultimate 64-Bit.

2. Vye S37: This is my every-day laptop.  It is a mini-tablet UMPC with a 7-inch touch-screen, a nearly full-sized keyboard, 250GB hard drive, and 2GB of RAM.  It is running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit.  I’ve written several previous articles about this device on the previous version of this blog.

3. Apple MacBook: This is primarily my wife’s laptop computer, although I do use it occasionally as well.  This is the newest computer in our collection, having just purchased it a few weeks ago after the power supply died on her old HP laptop.  I’ve never been a big fan of the Mac OS, but we felt that it might fit my wife’s needs much better than Windows.  So far, she has been very happy with it.

4. HP EX470 MediaSmart Home Server: This unit is our primary backup and centralized file storage device.  We also use it as a media server.  This system runs Microsoft’s Windows Home Server OS and I have upgraded it from its stock configuration of 500GB hard disk space and 256MB of RAM to 2.25TB of hard disk storage and 2GB of RAM.

5. Palm Treo 700P (Sprint): My current cell-phone/PDA is the latest in a series of Palm OS devices that I have owned.  I am nearing the end of my current contract with Sprint and will be eligible for the best upgrade rates on a new phone starting September 1.  I’m starting to evaluate options for new phones (a topic for another article) and probably am ready to finally move away from the Palm OS.

6. Sony Playstation 3: Although I do use the PS3 for some game playing, it was actually purchased primarily because it is generally the best currently available choice for a Blu-Ray video player.  The PS3 is located in the upstairs bedroom and is also used to stream music up there from the home server.

7. HP OfficeJet 7410: This is an "all-in-one" color ink-jet printer that also works as a scanner, copier, and fax machine.  A big motivator for purchasing this particular printer was that it has built-in wi-fi networking.  That let us put the printer up in the bedroom (out of easy reach of our preschooler) and still send print jobs to it from the desktop computer downstairs as well as from any of the laptops.  While it is now a somewhat older, discontinued model, it still works pretty well for us.

8. D-Link DIR-655: This router is the centralized networking device for our home network.  It is a fairly new wireless router that includes draft 802.11n high-speed networking.  The desktop PC and home server are both directly connected to the router, while the laptops, PS3, printer, and our DirecTV HD-DVR are all set up to connect to it wirelessly.  The router is connected to a DSL modem with service from DSL Extreme with 6000/768Kbps download/upload speeds.

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!

As I had mentioned in my earlier post, a key factor that attracted me to to the Vye was its use of a 2.5-inch hard drive and the assurance from the company that they could sell me a unit with 250GB of internal storage.  The larger hard-drive added an additional $218.60 to the base system prices that were listed on their web site.  This price came from the $168.60 price (including shipping) that Western Digital charged for the drive plus an additional $50 installation fee.  I also went with the upgraded 2GB memory option. After reviewing the various OS choices, I ended up selecting Vye’s "no OS" option since their price difference for adding Windows Vista Home Premium was actually more than the price of the OEM edition of Vista Ultimate from Newegg.com.  The total price of my system (including FedEx Saturday delivery) came to $1512.60.

My overall purchase experience was a bit of a mixed bag.  Starting with a big positive, the sales/support representative that I worked with was very helpful and seemed genuinely very interested in making sure that my order was correctly and quickly fulfilled.  In fact, my overall experience from a customer service standpoint was very positive.  I was particularly impressed by the extra effort they went through to get the hard drive upgrade installed and the system ready to ship on Friday in order to get it out for delivery on Saturday.

My only real complaint in the area of customer service was that my initial inquiry regarding pricing and ordering procedure went unanswered for a couple days due to their staff being at CES.  I do understand that they likely have a small staff and that attending that show is important for companies in that business, but they really should have made a better effort to continue responding to email inquiries from customers (and potential customers) while there.  For a company in the business of selling mobile computers, it seems particularly unusual that they would be out of email communications during the show.  At the very least, they certainly should have had an auto-responder sending an "out of office" message.

Some of the difficulty here came from my desire for a non-standard configuration.  Since the 250GB hard drive isn’t a standard option, I was not able to use the standard shopping cart on their website to obtain pricing or place my order.  Instead, they had to email me the total price for my order and then I ended up submitting payment through PayPal.  This worked acceptably, but did slow down the process somewhat, particularly due to the limited staff availability. 

It really strikes me that the Vye’s ability to take a larger hard drive than most other UMPCs on the market should be a key selling point for them. They really should start offering standard configurations with a variety of drives.  At the minimum, I would think they should offer 100GB, 160GB and 250GB configurations in addition to the standard 120GB drive.  I’d also think that some 7200 RPM options would be appropriate as well. 

In addition to making the order process more complicated, the fact that a 250GB standard option isn’t available also added a fair amount to the cost.  As noted previously, they charged a $50 "fitting fee" in addition to the price of the drive.  Since they don’t keep the drive in stock, the cost also included the price of having Western Digital overnight ship the drive to Vye.  Finally, I actually ended up paying for two hard drives with my purchase as they had no method in place for only charging me the difference between the drive that I purchased and the regular 120GB drive.  The smaller drive was actually included in the shipping box with my unit and I’ll end up putting it in a USB enclosure and using it as an external drive.

Coming up: In my next post, I’ll give my initial impressions on the unit itself and describe my experiences getting it configured.

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.