review – A Passion For 'Puters

A Palm Pre Review

I’ve had my new Palm Pre for about 5 days now and I finally feel comfortable in giving it a thorough going-over. First, I have to say that this was a HUGELY anticipated product for me. I’d been looking forward to getting my hands on this for quite a while!! I’ve read the reviews that others have posted and I’m ready – now that I’ve got it – here are some of my thoughts:

ConsPros

It’s freakin’ beautiful. It fits perfectly in even my tiny little hands and is comfy. I’ve heard that some have issues with the keyboard being a bit difficult to slide out, but I’ve had no problems – the mechanism works beautifully and the keyboard itself is plenty big, easy to use and backlit (another drain on battery life, to be sure, but very handy in the dark!).
The OS is REALLY well thought out, being both beautiful & usable. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of navigation (though I wish someone had told me that swiping things to the right deletes them – that one took a day or two for me to “get” – so I was opening each email to delete it…).
The applications are a *current* weakness, just because there isn’t much there, but the ones that are work nicely (mostly – my shortcovers ebook reader has been crashy today) and are universally useful.
I have:

Pandora
New York Times
Where
Tweed (Twitter client #1)
Fandango
Sudoku
LinkedIn
AccuWeather
Spaz (Twitter client #2 adn the one I’ll probably stick with)
SplashID
Shortcovers
Speedbrain

Besides the apps that are currently available, you get a few pre-set bookmarks for the web application, including a link to Facebook that is pretty easy to set up. I can’t quite figure out how to get all of the FB info through the interface they provide, but given time, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out… Speaking of the web, the browser is nice and fast – and does a great job of rendering standard web pages. I’ve yet to hit a site that gives me problems – and today is the first time I’ve fired up my computer since I got the phone – I’ve been able to keep up using just my phone!

Summary
In summary, the phone has it’s issues – there are some hardware concerns that may cause some to give up on it. The interface and the features, though, are more than enough for me to deal with any glitches that show up in this first few weeks of use.

My netbook

Now that I’ve had my itsy-bitsy laptop for about a month, I’m ready to give you all a full review of it. I love it! Ok, that’s enough, right?
No, alrighty then… The specs for my baby (the Acer Aspire One in sapphire blue) are:

Windows XP Home
1.6G Atom Processor
1G RAM
1.3 MegaPixel Webcam
2 media card readers – one multi-format, one SD only
160G Hard Drive
802.11b/g Wireless
VGA and Audio out
3 USB ports
1 free mini-PCI slot
Ethernet port for wired connections
Size (LWH): 6.7 inches, 9.8 inches, 1.14 inches
Weight: 2.2 pounds

I got the 6 cell battery option, which gives me around 6 to 6 1/2 hours of regular use between charging – which is pretty freakin’ nice! That makes it a touch bigger/heavier than it would be normally, but not so much that it bothers me at all. It’s got a standard keyboard layout with the keys at about 90% of the standard size – so my little hands have no problems and even men with larger hands seem to be able to use it easily. The sapphire blue is gorgeous – but shows fingerprints like nothing I’ve ever seen – I’m constantly wiping the cover down…
It has a quick boot time – under 30 seconds – and is pretty speedy, considering the limited amount of processor in there! The screen is 8.9 inches and it’s fairly small for everyday work (though I end up using it a lot – I only use my desktop setup for writing, and that’s just because I’ve got a dual monitor setup for that one) but absolutely perfect for traveling.
I took the netbook with me to Internet Librarian this year and found that it was just about perfect for carrying around during sessions and such. There were a bunch of folks with these tiny little laptops around, but I still got a bunch of comments about it every time I sat down and fired it up. Helene Blowers has one of the original netbooks – the Asus – and we had to set them down and compare our teeny tiny laptops – you’ll note mine (on the left) is a touch bigger, but not so much as to be really noticeable.

All in all, I love my little tiny laptop and I’m pretty sure that I have found the perfect traveling companion (at least until my phone beefs up and can start to compare with some of the specs I posted above…). For the price ($400.00 at Amazon.com), it just can’t be beat!