TechNurse.Net

All Things Technical

Livescribe is a pen that captures your notes digitally as well as the audio that is associated with your notes.  It’s not dependent on you dragging along a computer / tablet.  What I really like about it is you do not have to listen to 2 hrs of audio to find what you may have missed.  I can tap on my notes when I’m wondering what was discussed at the time I wrote the note and you can hear the audio right at that point.

This all then gets archived digitally onto your notebook so you have a permanent copy that can also be shared online.

A great balance for taking notes and recording audio as well.

I’ve been using the Sprint HTC Hero for little over a month now.  I did look at the Moment, but I liked the HTC Hero interface better.  Didn’t like the keyboard as much on the Moment.  Camera on the Moment was easier to use, but overall, the interface on the hero won me over.  The biggest thing the Hero has issues with is battery life.  This appears to plague alot of the Android phones because of their ability to run multiple aps.  I use an application to kill the tasks that are running in the background to minimize battery usage.

The other application I really enjoy is the ability to tether to my notebook to get internet access via my cell phone.  PDANet makes this simple to use.  Only issues I notice is once in a while it kicks me off and I just have to re-connect.  Not a big issue if it saves me from paying another $60/month for 3G Internet service.  Since I pay for unlimited data service with my cell phone, I shouldn’t have to pay for service I’m already paying for.

Another ap I like to use is a bar code scanner that allows me to scan a bar code with my phone and it quickly compares other products and prices to see if I’m getting a good deal.  Overall, The HTC Hero works for me.  Just wish the battery life was longer.

Well, I broke down and trying out the new Sprint HTC Hero.  It’s replacing my Samsung Instinct phone which I really enjoyed and was debating over getting the new Samsung Instinct HD or the HTC Hero.

Instinct HD advantages over the HTC Hero included: HD video and Flash.

The HTC Hero sold me on the fact there are more applications being developed.  The Samsung Instinct aps were usable, but if you wanted additional aps, the selections were sparse.

Initial impressions of the HTC Hero:

The bad:

Battery life is terrible, I’m lucky if it lasts half a day before having to charge it
Why they don’t use a normal USB connector takes me back to Sony and their power adapters.
Wish they did what Samsung had done with the first roll out of Instinct, supply 2 batteries and an External Charger so you could charge the spare battery without the phone.  What good is a phone if it has no power?

Did not come with a car charger or case.  Luckly, it fits in the Samsung Instinct Case.

All the reviewers seem to be estatic that it has a headphone jack.  What I wish it had was a cover for the jack so the internals are not exposed.  Personally I use a bluetooth headphones, so the jack isn’t used.

The HTC Sync and drivers did not install on Windows 7, so I don’t have this option.

Sprint I thought was suppose to be able to download all my existing contacts that were on my old phone to the new phone.  Haven’t seen this done yet.

Still haven’t figured out how to download / install additional aps.  i.e. meebo.

No improvements with Sprint TV or the GPS, It’s not a phone issue, it appears to be Sprint.

Can’t set up a OWA email type account.  (Instinct had this in a very user friendly interface)

Somehow, it downloaded all my outlook contacts (Actually I think it came from my gmail contact list, didn’t think I had all these in my gmail account, something I have to look into), but there’s no way to do a search that I can see and scrolling thru hundreds of contacts is not practical.  The instinct at least gave you a way to scroll by alphabet.  I know you can create favorites, but a more flexible way to search for contacts would be helpful.

The display keeps fading from bright to dim, very very annoying.  I think I read there is a light sensor, but I haven’t figured out how to disable this.  Didn’t see it as a choice under the settings options.

Wish there was actually a driver disk that included a modem driver similar to the instinct.  (note: The sync software is on the included micro SD card).

Pros:

Customizable looks for different environments: ie. home, work, play, etc.

Like the built in Wi-Fi support

The coating on the phone doesn’t show finger prints like alot of the phones.  Wish notebooks had a similar coating on their screens, keyboards and casing.

Alot I’m sure is my lack of knowledge on this phone, but these are my first initial impressions.

I’ve been using the Acer 3810T daily for the past 3 months and have been very pleased.  Real world business use, portability has been a blessing.  Going to meetings and not having to worry if I need to leave it unplugged for 2-3 hrs, the fact it’s light weight and doesn’t take up huge amount of desk space is great.

Entertainment wise, I’ve been able to hook up to a 47″ LCD using the HDMI cable and watch HULU videos of my missed episodes and quality is very viewable.

It does produce heat when viewing videos or during heavy processor use, but always just warm to the touch, nothing like previous notebooks that could burn you.

Only grip still is the finger print magnet of the glossy keyboard.  Only other improvement is if the keyboard was more like sony’s chicklet keys and having Asus’s backlit keys.

Sound is weak, but with headphones, it’s great, even with bluetooth headphones.

Only unresolved issue which I’ve gotten no responses from Asus is still not being able to burn a recovery DVD and Driver CD.  Even with the patch they send for Vista users, it still had errors.

Overall, it’s one I hope to be using for quite some time (ok at least for the next year).  Still waiting for the ultimate dual screen touch tablets.  From rumors, They should be coming out within the next year.

Well, I finally broke down and took the plunge on upgrading to Windows 7 Ultimate.  I tried upgrading to Win 7 Pro, but the only option I could do was a fresh install, not an upgrade which I didn’t want to do.

The install took a few hours, but all in all, went smoothly.  Only lost a scanner driver which I had to re-install.  Haven’t noticed any performance issues or improvements.  Some of the Win 7 Bells and Whistles are nice, but personally, if you have Vista, I wouldn’t necessarily pay $100-200 to upgrade.

On a side note: I just got an email notice that they’ve shipped my free Windows 7 Home ed.  Although I won’t be using it, I’d be interested if it allows you to do an upgrade vs. a fresh install.

Ok, I’ve had the 13.3″ timeline series for a little over 2 weeks now.  So far I love it.

Long battery life, minimal heat, minimal noise, light weight.

I haven’t had any issues with lockups, but again I did update the drivers for the bios, intel chip and audio drivers.

Only major complaint, not really major, but the keyboard’s shiny plastic is a finger print magnet.  I wish Acer kept with similar body design and meshed it with the keyboard to minimize the amount of greasiness you see.

I really have loved the muti-touch capability to zoom in on things like excel sheets, use it alot actually.

Battery is anywhere from 4 hrs using high performance, watching videos to 6-10 hrs, just surfing the net and reading emails.  When I’m watching a video or pushing the processor, I do notice more heat, but again, no-where close to the typical burn your skin heat.  Every once in a while I will actually hear a faint clicking of the harddrive or the very low hum of the fan.  But not too noticable, unless you are in a very quiet environment.

Portability, I feel very confident that I can close the lid and carry the laptop to a meeting without power cords and it will last the entire meeting.  Even those 2-3 hr ones. without plugging in.

I am able to also rotate the screen so I can use it as an e-book reader for my pdf documents.  Shortcut key is ALT-CTRL-ARROW

Annoying is the limited angle that you can open the screen.  It’s not bad, but every once in a while I find wanting to open it a bit more, especially when lounging around without a table.

I had the opportunity to watch the latest Terminator Salvation, Start Trek, Transformers 2, X-Men Wolverine and Ice Age 3 movies while in a hotel room.  Not too bad, every once in a while the video would hang slightly, not sure if it’s due to the integrated video chip limitation or the hard drive.  I’m thinking it may be the video chip.  Youtube and facebook videos were fine.  Speakers are hard to hear even with the volume up, unless you are in a quiet room, but with my BOSE noise cancelling headphones, oh the sound was great watching the movies.

Office aps, no problems.  I was also able to edit a camtasia video pulling in 4 videos and adding captions and then posting them on the web.  Didn’t have any problems.  Sometimes though, I do see some hesitation on responses, but can’t pin point an exact cause.  But hey, my desktop does that too and alot more often.

Even though I carry the external drive with me, I haven’t had to use it at all since I’ve loaded my programs.  The new ones, usually I purchase as a download anyway.

Oh the blue tooth is great for connecting my Samsung Instinct phone to it as a 3G broadband mobile modem.  I usually carry my laptop with a notepad going from meetings to meetings and that’s it.  I don’t even power down, just close the lid, re-open it and I’m back up and running in under 10 secs.

Yes, a keeper.  For future improvements I’d hope acer would re-design the keyboard to a chick let matte finish with BackLit Keys, improve screen viewing angles, improve the sound, replace the integrated chip with a dedicated chip or a hybrid that can go either way depending on the aps demands and last, add a slot loading DVD to the 13.3 model.

Well I broke down and picked up the 13.3″ AS3810T-6415.  The definitive decision was a personal one.  Dual core processor, built in bluetooth was the biggest factor.

With the dual core, I haven’t notice any performance decrease from my previous HP Tablet Dual core 64bit AMD chip.

Keyboard size is pretty much the same as the 14″ model, touch pad is slightly smaller.  Height of the screen isn’t much smaller than the 14″.  The width is the most significant at about 1/2″ narrower than the 14″ display.  Sound seems softer than on the 14″ model.

Real world use, I’ve been getting about 6 hrs at High Performance battery setting and Power Smart disabled.  That’s using it for MS Excel, Word, Power Point, Email and Internet Browsing mostly, Wireless and Bluetooth on.

Temperature can be warm, but hardly noticeable.  I can set this on a soft surface, i.e. bed and not fear that it’s going to start a fire  (still not recommended).

Screen size is fine for me, I’m use to using a 12.1″ tablet, so for those using 17″ screens this will probably feel small.

Overall, so far definitely a good decision.  Still unsure about not having the DVD built in, but it also makes it lighter.  Had the 14″ model come with dual core and blue tooth, I would of probably gone that route.  I’ve loaded Presto Instant on OS with video in safe mode and works like a charm.  Boots in under 10 secs, shuts down in under 5 secs.  Now that’s fast.

No freezing issues noted.  I did update the Bios and video drivers.  Did notice one thing that was strange and that was for a 500 gig HD, almost 50 GB was used, not sure what would be loaded on a hidden partition that would require 30-50 GB of space.  Yes I understand you technically don’t get 500 GB, but 50 GB discrepancy is a bit far fetch.  Also had an issue creating rescue disks with similar error message as the 14″ model.  Not too much of a big deal since I’m going to be creating a disk image with all my current programs and settings with all the crapware uninstalled.

Bottomline,

Love the slim line profile and light weight, low heat, along with the processing power that rivals what I was using and battery life to go most of the day.

Ok.  the good news.  Battery life lasted until 8 pm, about 10 hours of basic work tasks in balanced mode.  From a drained battery to fully charged while still working took about 3.5 hours.

I’ve been able to get my Samsung Instinct to work as my Mobile Broadband modem on Sprint’s All Voice / Data Plan with this laptop.  Yea!  No need to waste an additional $60 / month for a 3G data connection that I’m already technically paying with my current all data plan.

The bad news, I’ve experienced a few CPU at 100% incidences where I had to power down and restart.  This apparently has been a known issue with Acer and reported on support forums.  Since then, I’ve gone onto Acer’s support site and downloaded the newest Bios 1.2, the power management, audio, video, intel chip drivers, essentially any driver that was updated after my laptop was setup (sometime in April 2009).  Yes, Acer’s been updating these drivers, some as recent as a week ago to address this issue.  I’m hoping this will address the random CPU utilization freeze ups.  I’ll let you know tomorrow when I start loading MS office and all my real world aps.

I found a program called PC-Decraptifier 2.0 that’s a freeware ap that will go thru and remove most of the crapware that’s installed on a new PC.  This helped save time uninstalling MS works, MS Office, a few dozen trial games and aps.  Although I had to run it several times due to uninstall conflicts, it did it’s job.

I also like using Revo Uninstaller to make sure it removes everything out of the registery files and hidden temp folders.  It is also Free.

The only other issue I’ve had is burning my recovery and driver backups DVD’s using Acer’s Restore/Recovery Program, it keeps creating an error and I can’t create any master recovery disks.  I’ll have to contact Acer to figure out another solution.  I did test the burner and it appears to be able to burn both DVD’s and CDs without issues, so I’m guessing it has to be software specific or an issue with the recovery data that’s stored on a hidden partition.

Temperature has increased to noticeably warm with increase usage, but not anywhere near burn my skin hot.  But I do notice it once in a while.

Still overall, I’m impressed, just want to make sure it doesn’t keep freezing up and also, with the major applications installed want to make sure the CPU can handle the work load without too much effort.

On a side note, the card reader can read SDHC format.  I wasn’t sure since I only could find mentioned was SD reader, but nothing for High Capacity.

Now to hunt for the ideal case.  Hoping to find perhaps an office legal size binder that this could slip in to.  Something to maintain it’s thin appearance that can be easily carried to a meeting while still protecting it.  I thought I saw a picture of a timeline in a padded binder on one of the review sites.  Just can’t remember where.