The Fennec Fox is “a small nocturnal fox found in the Sahara Desert of North Africa which has distinctive very large ears” according to the mighty Wikipedia. However the Fennec I refer to is of course the mobile version of Mozilla Firefox, currently optimised for touch screens with a beta version out primarily for the Nokia Internet tablets (The newer ones of course, they don’t appear to like my Nokia 770 anymore – put to the back of the cupboard me thinks). There is also a PC version available to test which I have installed on my OQO.
Fennec in itself runs pretty smoothly, I’m sure with a final build it’ll be even smoother with bugs fixed and usability issues sorted. But it’s the interface that I’m impressed with, its something akin to the iPhone browser. To get to your tabs you drag the page you’re reading to the right which displays a visual list of tabs along the left hand side – showing screen caps of the tabs you have open and the ability to add a new tab.
For navigational controls you pull the page you are reading to the left which displays the bookmarks button, back and forward buttons on the right. At the top of course is the address bar and ‘add to bookmarks’ button.
Its intuitive and all but it’s not without its faults. I’ve found that on both Gmail and Google Reader it just doesn’t sort the pages out right – I can’t scroll to the bottom of my list of mail due to the page scrolling instead of just the list, and I can’t scroll through Reader items as it scrolls the whole page rather than just the reading section.
I’m looking forward to future versions of the software which are built properly for xp etc. I’m thinking they will be a good competitor to put on mobile devices. The prospects of having firefox on my n95 is also a good thought.
If you want to try out Fennec go here

My first week with my OQO has been brilliant, to start off I shall list what I’ve installed on it so far:
Firefox – it’s a must for me
Office 03 – Outlook, word,
Office 07 – Just OneNote for now so that it isn’t slowed down a lot by the whole of 07
Popcap – Bejeweled & Bookworm – they both work brilliantly with the active digitiser as you can drag along some parts of the games
VNC – Fantastic for controlling media centre pc and also normal pc as well as checking what the upstairs computer is up to whilst you’re downstairs
Synergy – To have my PC’s mouse and keyboard control the OQO by moving the mouse to the right of my pc screen (Just like my laptop does when moved to the left)
Windows Live Messenger – again it’s a must for me, used on all devices
VLC – rather good for playing videos, If I find that media player cant handle some videos I intend on trying this to see if it gets along better.
Nokia PC Suite – to take advantage of the integrated Bluetooth with my phone.
DivX – I watch quite a few DivX videos.
And finally AVG – my antivirus of choice.

Like I say the games run rather well on the device and don’t seem to run sluggishly. Typing on the thumb board is relatively good – I’ve more than managed to have many conversations on live messenger using it comfortably and so I’m happy that it can be a good sofa surfing device for me.

I should also be fair and note a couple of downsides I’ve noticed – the heat, yes as my initial research showed from surfing the internet and reading forums, the device does get rather hot, which isn’t ideal but I think I could cope with it, its not going to burn the skin off my hands but it just gets a bit hot is all. Secondly the noise, it doesn’t annoy me so much as it just makes my mum say ‘is that thing going to take off?!’ which is a fair point, it does make a bit of noise – or rather the fan does. But I’m ok with that – it is a full computer in the size of a couple of phones tagged together.

I am really liking my OQO and will soon have my Nokia 770 up on the mighty ebay I think.

Chrome

I’d also like to talk about this small bit of news, as soon as I heard ‘Chrome’ – the Google Browser was out I instantly downloaded it. I was rather impressed – it loaded quickly and seemed to have some great functionality, the home screen with your most used websites was fantastic, however, I found that part of the comment system used by Facebook didn’t work on it (specifically the ability to comment on someone’s status – this has been adjusted by the looks of it and now works). More importantly on my OQO I found that it crashed the whole device on a number of occasions, sadly I just can’t be having that so it therefore found its way back off the device, its still on my pc and laptop to keep trying though. For the first incarnation of the browser I think it’s been very successful and could be giving other browsers a run for their money.

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?