Blog du Tristank : p1610

My Next Laptop - an XT

tristank — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:24:03 GMT

A new year, another new laptop, incorporating the lessons learned from last time. Interesting choice of nomenclature for the new Dell tablet range.

My first PC (mostly-)compatible was an XT-class machine. I think we got it in 1988, maybe 89. I had no idea that 286 and even 386s were available already! What an exciting time I was in for...

Twin 360K floppy drives, it had, and a green CGA monitor. 640K and an 8088 (Turbo! 10Mhz! Compatible! 4.77Mhz!). DOS 2.0 (or was it 2.11?)

I still remember trying to use good 'ol Commodore 64 BASIC commands (LOAD *,8) before it was explained to me that these EXE or COM things were what you used, and the DIR command showed you what they were.

"So LOAD 'SPACEWAR.EXE',8 ?"

"No, you just type the name before the EXE"

"Ohhh"... so the commands I could type were actually extended by the EXEs present... wow. Cool!

The steel "desktop" case of the thing was quite possibly larger than any case I've owned since then.

Quite randomly, after about a year, I came home from school to a grinning Dad, who couldn't wait for me to turn on the computer (for a change; it was more commonly "go outside and do some exercise!").

I flicked the big red switch, and then noticed the screen wasn't green any more! Awesome! Text mode was full-colour, but I rapidly discovered that four colour CGA was graphics mode (with a choice of two strange palettes! Who knew Ultima V was actually purple, white and cyan?).

And then, just after that had registered, I heard the grinding noise of a new 40MB hard disk spinning up inside the case! What luxury was this!? How many floppy disks could I abandon!? ALL OF THEM! (except those bastard ones with turbo-unfriendly copy-protected-disk schemes).

Then I saw EGA and VGA at a computer store near school. Wow. Six months later, I'd saved up enough to replace the CGA card with an EGA card. I was hooked on upgradeability. Happy sigh. Fun times.

</memory lane>

Quite why Dell would want to invoke memories of the clunking old monster, associated with their svelte new Tablet is beyond me, but it worked, and somewhat more randomly than you might suspect, mine's on order now!

I think I mentioned before that I didn't really care if it was a Tablet per se, just as long as it had a touch screen I could jab with a finger. Re-reading what I wrote last year, I'm quite happy that I'm at least internally consistent.

I found that reviews were quite scarce, so I'll write up my e-pinions as I go, as per usual. Time permitting (did I mention I'm busy until March already?)

Idle speculation: The next version will be the "AT"... (you can laugh when it suits you. No pressure.)

Oh yeah, and Happy New Year, and all!

Anthology Of Interest

tristank — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:24:00 GMT

Okay, so there's no interest here, but perhaps an anthology anyway.

Yes I've been gone a while; another computer packed it in (this time without my own personal brand of assistance), I've been off to India (usually 5.5 hrs difference from Sydney, but we worked the night shift - 10pm to 4:30am in theory, we made it to 3 one night and faded otherwise - for a few days there before rotating back into pseudo-reasonableness of 1pm to 10pm IST, and have been jetlagged for the two weeks since returning... I know, a tough life).

Anyway, quick mentions:

Touch Ain't Just For Tablets

Mary Jo seems to think Touch is for Tablets only... Not quite. Perhaps Microsoft agrees, but why is Touch considered a Tablet feature only? It's brilliant anywhere, if you can get it.

Is it really that expensive to add to a regular laptop? Shouldn't it be a standard feature?

After having the p1610 for a year now (they grow up so fast!), I'm thinking that the tablet form-factor novely has utterly worn off (it only ever gets converted by eager demo-seekers, I use it in clamshell style only).

So, upgrading and replacing it might be on the cards sometime - an ultralight, say a 10.4" to 12.1" wide screen would be fine. Small keyboard is fine, I've adapted perfectly to the 1610's 3/4 size keys. Give me long battery life and light weight, and I'm happy, mostly.

But, mandatorily, any future laptop I buy must have a touch screen.

I don't care if it's landscapo-portraito-tableto-converto-capable, or if it does handwriting recognition (I have issues recognizing my handwriting; how's a computer ever going to get it?), or any of the other (actually very cool) Tablet-ty features; it just needs that if-you-push-a-spot-on-the-screen-something-happens capability.

I made my last purchase decision based on the device being one of the few that had a touch interface (as opposed to a Special Pen interface, which not only makes the pen sound challenged, it's a challenge to fish the pen out and cause of repeated heart-stopping "I forgot the pen at the client site!" moments, before you discover it's in your other pocket, or caught up in your belt, or whatever) and it was, in retrospect, a winner.

Both long-time readers will know that I don't put a lot of faith in my gut feelings (without lots of testing), but this one panned out brilliantly.

Jabbing at the screen with one finger is brilliant.

As an LCD purist that actually puts a "THIS IS A FLAT SCREEN NOT A TOUCH SCREEN - FINGERS MAY BE LOST" label on his precious (fingerprintless) LCD monitors, I can honestly say I'd convert every single one to a resistive touch screen covered in finger goop, if it got me proddability. It's the very definition of intuitive. You see a button, and you push it, physically, no mouse-hand-translation, no infinite widths or screen edges required.

Your finger is the original pointing device. (Er, arguably. Let's not go there.)

If every laptop came with a touch screen (not an active digitizer, remember), just imagine how much less frustrating plane trips could be? Instead of scratching like a chicken at the pad, or nudging nervously at the "pointing stick", you'd poke your way through dialogs and drag your scrollbars down directly.

Happy sigh. So as you can probably guess, I'm very interested in any laptop sporting a touch screen (active digitizer too for bonus marks, sure, but it's primarily about the convenience - having 1024 pressure levels is a secondary concern to me, most of the time). But I want my fingertip (or pen, or ice cream stick, or knuckle, or tightly-coiled tissue) interface first.

Laptop makers: you know it makes sense! Make it so!

You Know It Shipped When...

Visual Studio 2008 shipped a while back now (er, belated yay!) and installs with the .Net Framework 3.5, which includes 2.0 SP1 and 3.0 SP1, in case you didn't know.

So: installing 3.5 doesn't just do a bolt-on installation, it does actually upgrade the core 2.0 and 3.0 binaries. The SP releases are available individually too.

Have a great holiday season!

A Tiny Measure Of Progress

tristank — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 16:16:11 GMT

Prompted by Joseph's lamentations, I thought I'd check on how Tiny was doing in the performance index stakes. Not that I was planning on any schadenfreude or outright gloating, of course.

The post from December 2006 has the following details:

Original score: 2.0 {2.7,2.9,2.0,2.4,3.7}

Re-test today: 2.4 {2.7,2.9,3.8,2.4,3.7}

Driver upgrades look like they've been trickling through; today's score looks like it's as good as I'm going to get it with the current CPU:

2.7 {2.7,4.3,3.9,2.8,3.7}

The 1GB RAM upgrade made the little dear noticeably faster in most respects, but with the latest graphics driver updates, now the low-voltage low-speed CPU is the limiting factor.

Still, I've convinced it to run Glass happily enough, and it's still the best laptop I've ever owned, so all is good. It may not do point five past light speed, but I got point three better, and that satisfies me. It's not like it can do the Kessel run in less distance than the Kessel run, though. Bum.

(reaches for the drill and the overclocking tape)

P1610 Drivers for Windows Vista make Tristank Happy

tristank — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 11:32:02 GMT

I'm in Seattle at our TechReady conference (actually, it's over, I fly back tomorrow), and just noticed that my p1610 has a bluetooth logo on the case, but no driver. Not that I have anything I'm dying to use it with here, but, you know, principle and all that.

JK to the rescue - looks like the Fuj drivers for Teh Vistar are done!

I'm looking forward to working automatic screen rotation. Yummy!

My First Tablet-ish PC

tristank — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 17:24:46 GMT

Back in 1998, I bought a Cassiopea Windows CE 2.0 Handheld PC.

It was just under half the size of my current infatuation (the P1610) used a fold-out form factor with a 640x200 screen (CGA hi-res!) had a small and fiddly QWERTY calculator-key-style keyboard, used an awkward serial port connection, was as monochrome as a gameboy, and had a touch screen built in.

It was amazing. At the time, I remember raving about the touch screen to my friends. I just assumed that In The Future, all laptops would have touch screens. It was inconceivable that they wouldn't. It was convenient, speedy, generally pretty good to use. The Cassiopea has long been left uncharged in a drawer (I ran across it yesterday, prompting this post), but I remember gradually becoming disillusioned with it when it became obvious it would never quite be that ultraportable windows PC I really wanted.

Flash forward eight years, and I now own an ultraportable Windows laptop with a touch screen, all in a pleasantly small form factor.

But I've never seriously considered owning a laptop before this one. One of the reasons was that since using the Cassie, I wanted a touch screen - to be able to jab menu commands and icons directly with my finger, and not have to use a scratchpad or mouse. (Ideally I'd like to be able to move the cursor with eye tracking, but that's more in the future.) The other major reason was that they were just too big.

So why did touch screens take so long to "take off"? (a follower of the "laptops aren't real computers" religion actually buying a laptop would seem to be a sign of the end times, and is cited as my evidence of "taking off")

Did having a separate TabletPC edition to this point somehow redirect demand for touch screens in all laptops towards the high end? Did TabletPC have a stigma attached to it?

Is it just the swivel that puts people off? I'd buy a non-convertible laptop with touch before one without.

Active digitizers (only) tend to annoy me by requiring me to pick up the (special) pen before being able to point - it's the same problem I have with a mouse, which is that I have to engage another intermediate device to interact with something on the screen, with no option. Lenovo look like they're taking a step in the right direction with the Lenovo X60 - it squeezes in both an active digitizer and touch capability, if I'm reading that right.

If Windows XP Pro supported touch screens without any hullabaloo, would more laptops sold today have them?

Guess I'll have a chance to find out now that Windows Vista supports the tablet stuff in all the non-Basic SKUs. It also looks to have a bunch of new touch-specific features I'm eager to try out.

If you're someone that bought a non-Tablet laptop - why? Did you consider a Tablet? If a passive (aka resistive) touch screen had been an option on your non-convertible, would you have gone for it?

Windows Vista Performance on P1610

tristank — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 14:52:00 GMT

How does a half-size PC perform, you ask? Let's find out what Windows Vista thinks of the setup:

Original score: 2.0 {2.7,2.9,2.0,2.4,3.7}

Re-test today: 2.4 {2.7,2.9,3.8,2.4,3.7}

I wonder what was behind the jump in perf between Setup and now... perhaps it was just busy, or there's been a driver update?

P1610 First Impressions

tristank — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 16:19:00 GMT

I got my Fujitsu P1610 Lifebook care of Hugo on Wednesday, and I have a rather long post on it coming (I know, I could do a bunch of shorter posts, but that'd wreck my quality-is-not-quantity posting metrics for the month!).

For now, I'd just like to say that it's the best laptop I've ever used for what I want to use it for - a small and highly mobile note-taking notebook, with good battery life and enough power to use for Real Things. Not a desktop replacement, a desktop adjunct. A replacement for pen and paper.

It's light enough to use on the couch, and to carry around in the office - the battery life is such that I don't constantly need to be near a charger or suffer an anxiety attack.

The touch screen needs just a little more pressure than I was expecting, but I'm adapting, and as JK pointed out, no vectoring issues.

I jammed Windows Vista straight onto it, and the experience hasn't been flawless (missing software and drivers - sure it'll be rectified in short order), but it's certainly on the "good" side of usable, and I'm not needing to boot back to XP. Basic functionality is all there, and it'll only get better (pen flicks and "proper" Vista touch support are what I'm most interested in).

So, at least after three days: very happy with my purchase. Needs more RAM, but it's exorbitantly overpriced locally at present (1GB micro SO-DIMM: $US850, but $AU1999 !? Might have to get some when I'm stateside next...)

Fujitsu Lifebook P1610 - The First Day (and a bit)

tristank — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 15:42:00 GMT

On Wednesday, my care package from Tegatech arrived - a brand new P1610!

I thought there must have been some sort of mistake when the Mail Guy handed me the package, as it was obviously far too light to be a laptop and included bumf. Plus, it was just one box, and it wasn't big enough!

Well blow me into a tissue and call me catarrh, yes, it was! It was just a very small, well put-together box. None of this cardboard brown no-frills stuff, it was a glossy printed black box with a glossy red accessories box dominating the top half of the interior, a healthy padding of styrofoam and a tiny little Tablet PC making up the difference.

Size Isn't Everything

When I said "tiny", I really meant tiny - comparing it to my normal-sized keyboard, its entire width reaches from the left edge of the keys to the outside of the right-hand Windows key - it doesn't reach the left side of the Enter key.

The keyboard is miniaturized, and might be problematic to the Big Fingered, but I find that after a day of pecking at it here and there that I'm adapting to it quickly. My fingers are small-to-medium for a man. Finding that out was a useful exercise in "how not to approach another man about the size of his fingers". My delicate little fingies can be seen in the shots above.

The other small-yet-major item of interest in the package was the power adapter - small and very light, works internationally (untested, natch) with a figure-8 power cord.

I named it "Tiny". But it's still an "it" for now.

First Boot

Switching on, the first thing to happen was a Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 OOBE.

It looked like a couple of things might have gone wrong towards the very end (lots of DllInit failures when preparing for the first reboot, as if apps were trying to start while Windows shut itself down). If I hadn't noticed the dialogs, I might not have worried - it seemed that everything was pretty well there, and stuff generally Just Worked.

It's probably worth mentioning that I needed to run the Fujitsu screen calibration utility to get touch to track correctly - running the Windows calibration utility alone didn't focus it quite right, but the Fuj utility uses 9 points of calibration rather than 4, and seems to work well when used in conjunction with the Windows one. Without it, the calibration would be noticeably out by different amounts in different quadrants.

The screen packs a whopping 1280x768 into 8.9 widescreen diagonal inches. If you leave it at regular DPI settings, be prepared to sit close to it! It's bright, though if you're looking closely at angles, it has tiny transparent dots in a grid just visible through it - the touch screen digitizer thingy, I'm betting. Two days on, and I don't notice it at all.

Touch sensitivity seems low at first, but you adapt quickly to using a fingernail - I'm just going to have to grow one or two a little longer than "bitten right off to the quick, and some of the quick might be missing too" so I can peck at the screen reliably without using the stylus or a thimble.

While I think of it - the smell of the fresh machine burning itself in was intoxicating. Top marks for "nose".

But TabletPC 2005 was a bit "been there, done that", after my experiment running it on my desktop for a while last year. I wanted the new hotness. I wanted Teh Vistar. I knew there might be a few bumps. Didn't care.

Windows Vista uh huh uh huh

Fuj had thoughtfully partitioned the 80GB hard drive into two partitions, so I simply ran setup across the network and Custom Installed a copy of Windows Vista onto the D drive, keeping the C drive copy of Tablet PC as a fallback.

It's mostly great. If I had one wish, it'd be more RAM. If I had two wishes: more RAM, hybrid hard drive. And extended battery!

Networking worked out of the box, and Windows Update found a bunch of Fujitsu drivers for various devices, such as the touch panel.

Yes, for those peering closely, that is the full Aero Glass experience (just with transparency turned off and a custom shade of boring grey). The Intel 945 video card rates a 2.0, but it's enough to get it working if you want. It's not enabled by default, but if you open the display properties window, you can pick it, and it works! In my last unscientific test with a few apps open and high dpi enabled, DWM was chewing 40MB RAM over non-Aero, bringing the total in use to 400MB, so it's off until I can get some more RAM... More on the RAM situation later.

Good time to address it: Not all of the software included with the OEM copy of XP worked under Vista. And a bunch of Vista features either aren't implemented or don't work yet. That said, seeing as the device is "Vista Capable" logoed I'm hopeful of updates in the near future, I'd guess sometime around the Jan 30 general availability date. ( Unless some nice Fujitsu mole wants to send me beta drivers to test, hint hint? :) )

If you were thinking of making the jump early, here's my short list of problems / issues / niggles / drawbacks under Vista:

FJRotate auto-screen-rotation utility seems to have particular trouble (eg, crashes every time it's invoked), but I've defined the Tablet buttons to toggle between the two primary states I use, and that's fine with me for now.
Vista doesn't enable the Touch features that the Help describes, which probably means that the input device isn't considered a touch screen, just a digitizer. Hoping for a Touch-enabled update soon.
Pen flicks don't seem to work either, possibly for the same reason (in reverse).
While talking about input, I'm finding that there's just a little input jitter - sometimes my letters look like they were written by polygraph, and scroll bars jump up and down about two pixels in the same way while dragging. I'll be re-calibrating and re-inking some stuff next time I remember. Update: did that, seems better now, much less jinking, though it seems to come back when the screen is re-oriented.
Can't get SD slot to do ReadyBoost, but can use the same SD card in USB mode (it's one of those Sandisk flippy ones with USB built in).
Microphone didn't work until I reinstalled the XP audio driver, though output worked fine. Mic now works brilliantly.

Anyway, I'm surviving. Well, not just surviving, I'm finding it really good. Vista might cost more in RAM terms, but it makes it back in overall responsiveness on this little puppy, I've found so far. I mainly use OneNote and IE, and it's more than capable at those.

On The Road

The acid test was today (er, Thursday, it's Sunday as I fix this up for posting), a scant 24 hours after receiving it. I'd got Office, Acrobat Reader, Netmon 3 and Ethereal installed, and headed off to a customer site, for what was intended to be a short meeting at 4pm with another colleague.

At 8pm we were leaving the site, and the battery reached the "you should please turn off sometime quite soon" level while scribbling notes on the way back to the office in the taxi - I'd been using it quite a bit while there to review traces and take notes.

Here's why it was fantastic: I was able to do everything I needed to on it without taking the charger with me, and that's on the standard "3 hour" battery. It was light and small enough to be almost as unobtrusive as a paper notebook, but had all the store-and-search capabilities of a real Windows PC.

I'm not using half the Tablet capabilities to their fullest extent yet (with time (and drivers), I promise to do better!), but when I get it together and work out what's what, I expect this will work out to be the most useful and most-used laptop I've had.

Back on that RAM

512MB. The Fuj US site provides a lot of customizable options, but at the moment in Australia, the 512MB model was all I could get my hands on.

I asked Hugo if I could upgrade to a gig, but sticker shock at the $1999 (yes folks, $AUD2000, $USD1,577.90) price tag of a 1GB micro SO-DIMM put me off.

I'm hoping the market prevails and I'll be able to pick up a cheaper set in the future. I figure it has to be getting more common now, at the dawn of the UMPC...

Sunday Verdict

So, it's Sunday as I'm editing the photos into the article, and the answer to the unspoken key question is: yes, I'd buy it again. Very happy with it so far, and I expect my happiness to increase :)

Now, I just need 2 more chargers and an extended battery...

Searching For A Better Notebook

tristank — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 13:49:00 GMT

Back from Fiji. The resort and the people were lovely, the snorkeling amazing, and I'm told the diving was pretty good too.

Right back to business: I need some serious retail therapy. I went away with a powerful laptop I barely used (I actually set a personal record for "least PC use in a given week", which is amazing for one of my holidays), and decided what I was really looking for was something... smaller. Yet more generally useful.

I've mentioned wanting a UMPC before, but I always get hung up on the lack of an inbuilt keyboard, at least in the v1 series - apart from doodling, I'd want to be programming, and for that, a keyboard is useful.

Out of the blue, I stumbled across what could be the answer to the "umpc with a little more power" dilemma: ladies and gentlemen, it's the Fujitsu Lifebook p1610.

The size - 232mm (W) x 167mm (D) x 34.5 ~ 37.5mm (H) - seems close to perfect (I mean, obviously 100 times lighter and wafer-thin wouldn't hurt, but we're not yet living in the future. How do I know? In the future, there will be robots). There's a keyboard, it's convertible, and best of all - a touch screen. No reaching for the stylus, just peck at the screen with a fingernail. That works for me. That improves the convenience factor up to near-paper-notebook levels, and retains the functionality benefits of a real PC. Combine that with the small size and ~4 hour battery life, and you have something small enough that it's not constantly in the way.

Hugo Ortega (yes, the Hugo from UberTablet blog and Tegatech) suggested they'd be around Real Soon Now in Australia. I think I'm sold. I think I must have one for the couch. And the office.

I'll let you know how it goes. And if it doesn't pan out, there's always the Asus R2H, with GPS! (I've been trying to work out whether GPS is useful to me - I think it probably is, so I can tell whether I'm on the couch or the toilet without having to look up).

Fingers crossed...