I have had a few days now to play around with my Netbook Pro.
Overall I am very pleased with it. It is a joy to use and coming from an IPAQ 4700 it has taken a bit of getting used to. Some thoughts on it.
Battery life is amazing, although I am unsure how the calibrating works. I have had a few instances of the battery having lots of juice, but the reading indicating a 0%. The only way to correct this so far that I can tell has been to Hard Reset the device. I am not sure if I am doing anything wrong, but at the moment, I am going to try and do a proper calibrate of the battery. I believe to do this, I need to flatten the battery fully, then fully charge it, and then flattern it again so it works out how long it lasts. I shall see how I get on.
Coming from a Pocket PC background, I was disappointed to find that software is relatively hard to find for CE.NET 4.2. I have tried numerouse Pocket PC programs and failed to get any of them to work due to erros about not all components being installed. I had a quick go doing some DLL tricks, but had no success and didnt want to mess to much, so I have given up. Luckily, all my main programs that I use on a day to day basis are supported
(see below for a full list
).
Syncronisation with On Schedule has been a bit problematic. My first problem arose when I let it sync with default settings and synced my Sent Items folder, which had about 2000 items in it. The device itself seemed to take ages to bring up the sent items folder. I stopped it syncing but could find no way to remove the sent itesm folder from the device so I had to manualy delete all 2000 messages. Took ages. I have also had a few times when syncing has stopped working, but this generaly happened after I had some hard resets and restored from a Total Recal backup. This must knock the desktop out of sync or something.
I was dissapointed that my device just came with the RS2332 interface for active sync considering it now supposedly supports USB activesync, but to be honest, it seems to sync and an acceptable speed, and I can always Wirelessly sync if need to. I got a Cisco 350 Wireless card of ebay for £20 it had CE 4.2 drivers and it worked a treat. It did not automaticaly pick up access points, but by enetring the info directly, it worked flawlessly.
My recommendations so far would be that this device is not ideal for someone who is not prepared to mess around. For me, I think I have had enough play with it to now know what I am doing
(hopefully
) and I wont have any more crashes
(famous last words
). It is now my main portable unit, and my iPAQ is now simply my GPS unit for in the car.
I hope this has been helpful, and I hope I have not put anyone off. The device is truely amazing, great screen, battery life, keyboard. The CE.NET OS is a joy to use, seems much better than Windows Mobile and its great to have an instant on OS that looks like proper Windows with a proper taskbar etc.
The Software I have installed on my Netbook is as follows.
CE.NET 4.2 OS
Pocket On-Schedule
(supplied PIM, looks just like proper Outlook
)
BetaPlayer
(for movies and media, Note that the Psion is not up to much for playing video
)
GAPI Setup for HPC
(I installed this but I have not really used it yet
)
HPC Notes
(this has been superseeded by PhatNotes, but I was able to download the older HPC compatible version of their ftp server and my Phatnotes serial worked
)
iSilo HPC
(great document viewer
)
Primer
(fairly decent PDF viewer, but is very slow
)
Cisco Wireless Card Drivers and Utils
NS Basic
(I fancy having a go at some development on the device itself
)
CEdit
(a great Program Code Editor
)
Softmaker Planmaker
(Excellent Spreadsheet - has to be seen to be believed
)
Softmaker Textmaker
(Excellent Wordprocessor - has to be seen to be believed
)
SpreadCE
(comes supplied, spreadsheet
)
Conduits Pocket Artist
(the closest thing to having Adobe Photoshop with you at all times
)
Conduits Pocket Slides
(Full blown presentation editor, supports Powerpoint
)
Resco File Explorer
(great File Browser and Registry Editor
)
Resco Photo Viewer
(great image viewer and slideshower
).
I think that is about it.
Some software that I really need but can't get to work
Cerience Repligo Viewer
A Macromedia Flash Player
(the PPC version does not work
)
CHM ebook reader
(I am having to convert them to iSilo at the moment
)
eWallet
( I cant find a version that works on the Netbook, I am a registered user of the PPC version 4
)
Decent Handrwiiten note tacking software
(such as PhatPad
)
My Biggest gripe is I need a decent database application. I am a user of Kaione SprintDB which allows you to create a database, create forms, queries and macros. But it doesn't work, boo hoo. I tried Visual CE but couldnt figure it out. The options seem limited in that I could not find out how to open up and existing databse stored on a CF Card and it seemed very sort of, bizarr.
Hope these ramblings will be of some help to someone.
Regards
James Hall
http://www.hallstudios.co.uk
