Yesterday Expansys had a deal on the OQO Model 01+ whilst the model is a few years old I couldn’t resist on the cheap price of £300 for a umpc, it arrived this morning and I’ve been installing all my usual applications on it and I must say that I love it. I’ll state the down sides first - the heat is a bit high, it gets rather hot to hold, but when its on the dock I dont really mind that. Its not running xp tablet edition meaning a few missing features but the in built keyboard should be better than handwriting recognition in theory for me (any good free handwriting recognition apps out there??), It has an active digitiser instead of a touch screen which is a bit awekward and annoying but it saves me getting loads of finger prints on it.

Its got 512 mb of Ram a 1Ghz Processor and a 30Gb harddrive all of which are a bit outdated but for the price (£300) its not too bad for the size - just a bit bigger than the Nokia 770 internet tablet that it’ll be replacing for me. I think its going to be a great icebreaker type device with people asking what the hell it is due to its small form factor and appearance of full xp which is brilliant and fun to use. Its surprisingly snappy too (that is until I get all my applications onto it knowing my luck)

The pro’s definately include using VNC with it - controlling my media centre tv / pc combination was brilliant and will make controlling it a lot easier, and checking on the status of the upstairs computers whilst downstairs a lot easier and fun. Browsing the internet on it is fun too - its able to run flash etc (however youtube videos have a bit of lag which I’m sure wouldnt affect watching small clips too much) this means its got the full internet (none of that reduced rubbish I had to put up with on the internet tablet) and as its xp it’ll have pleanty of available applications for it along with normal office suites.

In conclusion - I love it!

Any questions?

I’ve recently started learning to drive and after only 8 hours of lessons I still don’t love it, don’t get me wrong its going to be brilliant once I’ve passed but I just don’t enjoy it as much as perhaps I should so its got me thinking – at what point in the future are we expecting cars to drive without the aid or hindrance of humans like in I-Robot.

I know that you can already get the system which parks for you but does this mean we are not that far from a completely automatic car? – just imagine it – potentially less traffic jams due to cars being smart enough to figure out where to go and avoid them, faster safe speeds and perhaps less accidents – if any at all?

Either way it would be a bit easier for me if cars drove on their own.

Yesterday (admittedly almost today as it was at 11pm-ish) I updated my Nokia E65 to the latest firmware version, now this was released ages ago but I never installed it on my phone as I didn’t see the need and I didn’t want to risk loosing all of my applications.
So I went through the process of backing everything up through the Nokia PC Suite which looks very nice now, this took quite a while but I found afterwards that it also backed up my applications which I was pleased about. I then went about installing the latest firmware which worried me a lot as I was using a slightly dodgy cable which concerned me as it could have corrupted the data or lost the link at any time which could have bricked the phone if I’m right?. Gladly it didn’t and  I now have the latest version of the firmware on my phone.

And … I’m amazed! – it seems to run much quicker and crash less now, every time I’d go into my phonebook previously I had to exit out of it again after going into a contacts details as the contacts just froze, This problem seems to have gone now. The main menu also appears to load faster.

Whilst upgrading firmware normally doesn’t worry me, it did on this occasion but not anymore, I’m pleased I did it though as its great. Now I’ve just got to get a modern phone so that I’m not installing firmware updates that are months and months old. Once I start my full time apprenticeship I’ll get a contract and therefore a nice new shiny phone (I’m thinking of the N65 8gb, E66 or E71 depending on cost)