News Week of April 1, 2007

Phatware’s PenCommander, Monday, April 9, 10:00 AM PT

Learn to Use Applications Optimized for Mobile PCs

FlipStart Micro PC Ships, Bout with OQO Model 02 Begins

It's a battle royal between new Micro PC/UMPC Pro handhelds built on Microsoft's desktop operating systems Windows Vista or Windows XP.

In the near corner, weighing in at a just under pound and starting at $ 1,499, is the OQO Model O2 (follow up to the Model 01), which started shipping last week. At the far corner, available for the first time this week, weighing in at heavier 1.75 pounds and costing $1,999, is the first product from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen start up FlipStart Labs ... the FlipStart (see top image).

At 5.9 x 4.5 x 1.4 inches closed, the FlipStart is also bigger than the 5.6 x 3.3 x 1.0-inch OQO Model 02.

It also has a larger (5.6-inch) and higher resolution (1024 x 600 pixel wide SVGA) touch screen to the latter's 5.0-inch, 800 x 400 pixel type, but a hard drive that's half the size of the OQO's at 30 GB. The Flipstart also sports an external 1.8-inch, 220 x 176 pixel resolution display.  (Source: James Alan Miller, PDA Street)

Review: HP Pavilion tx1020ea tablet PC

An AMD Turion 62 X2 TL-50 powers the system. It has two cores running at 1.6GHz and is backed up by 1GB of Ram. We think this Ram is the bare minimum Vista can run on. By default, 64MB of the main system Ram is apportioned to the Nvidia 6150 integrated graphics.

Although the Nvidia 6150 is better than Intel solutions, it’s still incapable of running any type of modern computer game as a score of 424 in 3Dmark05 and 14fps (frames per second) in FEAR proved. The rest of the system scored similarly poorly - 2,395 in PCmark05 is not impressive.

At Ł799 the Pavilion tx1000ea is one the cheapest tablet PCs we’ve tested, and it shows. We have reservations about the build quality of the screen and performance is lower than other Vista notebooks at this price.  (Source: Emil Larsen, Personal Computer World)

Does your app work in 480x and x480?

When Tablet PCs were introduced people had to start thinking about portrait mode, which commonly had a minimum of 768x1024. Last year when Ultra-Mobile PCs were introduced people started thinking about how x480 impacts application design. Some of this year's UMPCs have portrait mode too, so now 480x and x480 are the minimum resolutions in which your application may be viewed.  (Source: Lora, WhatIsNew)
Posted Thursday, April 5, 2007 by ChrisD
Rating: 3.33 (Rate it) 1 Lowest 2 3 4 5 Highest Comments (0)

Confusion With Lenovo Core 2 Duo Tablet PC

After a tip from one of our GBM Forum members we reported this morning that Lenovo had released Core 2 Duo versions of the Thinkpad X60 Tablet PC. There was much rejoicing and much linking (see Engadget, Slashgear, jkOnTheRun, etc… etc…). And, as of this writing the Core 2 Duo options are still appearing on the Lenovo website. All well and good you say? Not quite.

Our sources at Lenovo have contacted us tonight and told us that this is apparently a mistake with their website and that there are no Core 2 Duo Thinkpad X60’s available as of this moment.  (Source: Warner Crocker, GottaBeMobile)

Nokia N800: It's Cool, But Is It A Game-Changer?

More confusingly, I don't understand why Nokia feels it necessary or appropriate to pitch the Web Tablet type device as a PC or notebook alternative. An alternative to UMPCs, OK, I can buy that. But even Nokia has to appreciate that the web isn't just following Moore's Law on processor speeds and memory - it's also being driven by LCD display pricing, which is why more PCs and Apples ship with 20" screens, and many laptops are similarly-endowed: it ain't for spreadsheets, it's for better Internet and multimedia display.

I'd understand it all a bit better if the N800 had a slide-out keyboard, or even a decent camera, but in its current incarnation it's not even optimised for "user generated content".

To be honest, I find Nokia's positioning of its broader N-Series smartphone devices as "multimedia computers" a little contrived too. "The device formerly know as the cellphone"...oh, please.  (Source: Seeking Alpha)

Re-usable header bar, optimized for UMPC

In his Optimizing your Mobile .NET 3.0 WPF Application for a UMPC or Touch-enabled PC sample code, Todd Landstad included a header bar that you can use in your applications. Todd wrote, "In looking at the Origami Experience product that Microsoft ships on UMPC's, I created a 'headerbar' in XAML with some C# back-end code to provide my user with information about the system. The information is comprised of items that add value to a mobile user: Battery status, network connection status and system time/date."  (Source: Lora, WhatIsNew)
Posted Wednesday, April 4, 2007 by ChrisD
Rating: 2 (Rate it) 1 Lowest 2 3 4 5 Highest Comments (0)

One careful owner

With only three weeks to the Melbourne International Motor Show - in which Audi's $265,000 R8 supercar was featured and the S5 Coupe launched - Audi turned to Ultra Mobile PC distributor Tegatech Australia for a solution.

UMPCs are about the size of an A5 notepad, weigh under a kilo and feature a stylus or touch screen. Many run the Origami Ultra Mobile PC platform: basically Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 with a few enhancements.

"Audi customers (are) quite well educated and tech savvy," says Audi Australia CRM and dealer marketing executive Noel Ryan, "A delay of four or five days in follow-up is just too long for people in the internet age." In other words, they didn't want the "wow" factor to fade.  (Source: Adam Turner, The Age)

Pen Commander Review

What is PenCommander?
PenCommander, by PhatWare is a difficult product to describe. It is an application launcher, but it’s more than just an application launcher. The idea behind PenCommander is that you issue a command by writing it into a small window on the screen. The command is recognized and if it corresponds to a pre-configured command it executes it.

The command it launches can be an application, entering some text, launching a website, opening a file, running a macro, closing applications, emulating screen taps or almost anything else you’d do on a computer.

Getting started with PenCommander
Once installed the best thing to do is have PenCommander to start with the computer. This means that it is ready for a command from you without you having to do anything to make the application run. To use PenCommander, simply write in the command that you want and watch it do what it’s told.  (Source: Darryl Burling, GeekZone)
Posted Tuesday, April 3, 2007 by ChrisD
Rating: 2 (Rate it) 1 Lowest 2 3 4 5 Highest Comments (0)

Medscribbler Lite EMR passes Microsoft Platform Test for SQL Server 2005

Medscribbler Lite is the first electronic medical record certified under the Microsoft Platform Test requirements for SQL 2005. Lite employs SQL Express and is available as a software download without charge.

Wilmington, DE (PRWEB) April 3, 2007 -- Scriptnetics announced today it has met the Microsoft Platform Test for SQL Server 2005 requirements with its Medscribbler Lite electronic medical record (EMR) software. Certified and tested to the higher SQL Server 2005 standard, Medscribbler Lite employs the freely distributable version, SQL Express, to provide a robust, stable and free EMR to the healthcare industry.

"We are excited at being one of a very few EMRs that have certified to the higher standard of SQL Server 2005" said Michael Milne, CEO. "We are also happy that by using SQL Express we can continue to offer Medscribbler Lite as a service to the industry. Those healthcare providers who have limited needs in an EMR don't have to spend thousands of dollars for clinic extra functions. Others who just want to explore the power of a full featured EMR can do so without risk."

 We are also happy that by using SQL Express we can continue to offer Medscribbler Lite as a service to the industry. Those healthcare providers who have limited needs in an EMR don't have to spend thousands of dollars for clinic extra functions. Others who just want to explore the power of a full featured EMR can do so without risk.  
Medscribbler Lite was the first EMR to be designed for the handwriting capabilities of the Tablet PC. It is available for download from a number of download websites or directly from the Medscribbler website. (Source: Press Release)

Tablet PC Battery Life: How Wireless Affects Power Consumption

Whenever we review notebooks one of the questions that always needs to be answered is, what's the battery life like on this Tablet? We all know manufacturers overstate the quoted battery life for a system, probably because they test for battery life under ideal conditions for getting a high number. For example, wireless off, processor underclocked, system idle, LCD brightness set to low, no DVD and so on. So when your notebook with a quoted 5 hour battery life actually gets three hours, you're left wondering what happened to those other two hours the manufacturer got?

The reality is, a great number of things can affect the battery life of your notebook: what tasks you're performing, wireless throughput, processor speed, screen resolution, amount of file fragmentation on the disk, LCD brightness setting -- the list goes on and on. Over the next few weeks we're going to take a look at various laptop components, how they affect battery life, and what you can do to maximize or reduce the amount of power pull that component has on the system as a whole. We'll keep it at a high level so the average mainstream user can understand and use this information, and not have your eyes glaze over when reading. A majority of the data presented will be based on research and numbers compiled by Intel in their Power Optimization: Furthering the Mobile Vision series of articles, and presentations we've attended given by Intel, but we'll extrapolate that data to give real world suggestions. (Source: Andrew, TabletPCReview.com)

Nokia's cheap UMPC alternative is future-proof

The ugly
Lacks a hard screen protection cover for safe travelling with the N800.
Doesn't run the SeaMonkey internet suite, OpenOffice.org 2.1 -ok, I'm kidding on this one, OO.o is probably too big-, nor does it run Skype -yet-.

Nobody seems to have ported the POSE PalmOS emulator to the N800 yet. That would bring an awful lot of applications to the platform, and would help those moving from PalmOS PDAs to the N800. Hey Access/Palmsource... if you're in the business of selling software, how about selling a GarnetOS "compatibility kit" for the N800 allowing people to run GarnetOS applications on it as well?. It should be all about enlarging the non-Windows ecosystem.

Lacks an official Java build. Albeit with the recent release of Java as open source, I expect one could arrive soon. Earth to Sun -Microsystems-: how about giving a few hundreds of these to your Java code hackers? I bet their productivity would improve a lot. Can't wait to run Azureus while on the tube -Kidding about that, -maybe.

Bartender's report

I give Nokia's N800 nine beers out of ten. Very impressive device with lots of room for expansion due to its Open Source software foundation.µ  (Source: Fernando Cassia, The Inquierer)

What would you do with multitouch on a PC?

Multitouch - the talk of the industry because the future Apple iPhone will allow users to use two fingers to navigate their way through apps.

How would you use it you could use two or more fingers at one time to control a PC? Would you use it for simple things like sorting photos, resizing windows? How about playing a game?  (Source: Lora, WhatIsNew)