propstm.net

So I’ve been home from college on Holiday Break for the past few weeks. Of course I brought home my UMPC as well as laptop. On the second day home, I went out to CompUSA and picked up a wireless router for the family so my brother and I could both use our laptops (and UMPC) wirelessly. So after the rather painless setup of the wireless network, all went well. I was able to take my UMPC with me, and my brother could surf the web from his bedroom.

Now my dad’s computer needs have always been rather simple. We had owned only two computers throughout my childhood, he first being an Apple Performa something or other, and a 400mHz Compaq Presario. It wasn’t until last year when I was home for Holiday Break that I managed to convince the family to upgrade to a faster, more powerful, machine. Now my dad however still being a man of simple needs (eBay, email and stock quotes) still uses that 400mHz Compaq Presario.

These past few weeks he changed a bit. At first it was surprise when I showed him some of the stuff he’s listed on eBay, while standing in the kitchen. Then he picked up the UMPC and asked me how to use it (navigate around, enter text, the whole routine). Over the next week on at least 5 different occasions he was sitting in the living room watching football bowl games and using my UMPC.

Now my dad isn’t one to be an early adopter, as gadget gurus often refer to themselves, neither is he one to spend more than what he has deemed an appropriate amount of money on new tech gadgets, but I think that we can still call him a UMPC user. Whether he knew it or not, he was using my UMPC the same way as many of us do day in, and day out. At the very least he’s become a couch web surfer.

Wired has its “Wired Test 300+ Products Rated and Tested” You’re getting a summary of the device what Wired likes, what they don’t, and a basic price of the device. They’ve included 4 UMPC’s in the mix. They’ve reviewed the ASUS R2H, Samsung Q1, Sony VGN-UX180P, and TabletKiosk EO v7110. It is really cool to see a comparison of these main players in the UMPC market all being done by a widely read magazine.

Some time last week a daily read of mine Ubertablet written by Hugo Ortega was asking for suggetions for their next podcast, so I put my two cents in. A few days later the latest podcast by Hugo Ortega and Dr. Neil Roodyn just so happened to be using my suggestion as one of their main topics!

Hugo, you and Dr. Neil were talking about what applications you use often with your UMPCs, i’ll add mine to the list:

IE7 – decent at saving real estate, most times it doesn’t give me memory useage problems.

Notepad++ – Very nice lightweight application that is a very minimal text editor with color tag identification.

xampplite – another small application that with the push of a button allows me to use my Q1b as a PHP server to test websites.

Microsoft OneNote – I use this one on about a daily basis to keep up my daily schedules, as well as notes for my classes.

Also i’ve found that portableapps.com is a great source for quality applications that are fairly light weight.  They have many useful applications listed there.