racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

My first notebook computer was a Thinkpad, and so reading this post on Yugatech made me wax nostalgic. It’s not that Lenovo hasn’t been releasing Thinkpads since it acquired the brand from IBM. But what I find interesting are the form factor and price of the latest Edge and x100e series.

Yugatech cites the x100e to have the following specs:

AMD Athlon Neo single and dual core processors or a Turion dual core. It comes in an 11.6″ form factor, a multi-touch trackpad. Aside from black, it’s also available in color red. WiFi 802.11n is standard but Bluetooth and 3G is optional.

The retail price of PhP 28,990 is particularly attractive, I think. Thinkpads used to be quite expensive (think PhP 100,000 plus expensive). I guess with the popularity of smaller, inexpensive computers, they need to compete. Thinkpads are, after all, geared toward the business market rather than the consumer market. Maybe that’s why I’m so attracted to it.

When the Asus EeePC 701 first came out in the Philippines, I snapped up my own unit. Never mind that it was a PhP 18,000 impulse decision (I guess I had a lot of spare cash lying around at that time), but in hindsight it was well worth it. The EeePC 701 had a tiny seven-inch screen, a very limited storage of 4 GB. But it was very portable—something a road warrior like myself (or so I think) would definitely find useful.

Since then I’ve had two other netbooks. One was an EeePC 900, the “upgrade” of the 701. And the other was an HP Mini note 2133. Both the 701 and the Mini note have since been sold, with only the EeePC 900 left with me. I actually sold the Mini note to finance my planned purchase of the newer HP Mini 1000 (only a couple thousand pesos to add to the price I sold the Mini note for). But after much thought, I decided to postpone the purchase. For some reason, netbooks have lost their novelty, at least to my eye.

While I still carry the EeePC in a small neoprene tote bag, I rarely bring it along when I step out of the car, unless I expect to be doing some heavy typing while on the run. I do have other, smaller, gadgets with me I can use to email when the need arises, including my Nokie E series phone and the Xperia that was generously given to me by SonyEricsson. But at my home and home office, I’ve found it more comfortable to work on my relatively bigger laptop, which is actually still small by today’s laptop standards, at 12 inches.

I’m not discouraging anyone from buying and using netbooks. They’re great pieces of work. Five years ago, a ten-inch notebook computer would cost an arm and a leg. These days, these ultraportables are getting cheaper and cheaper (unless you count the Sony Vaio P). They’re making portable computing more accessible to the masses. And they’re saving the backs of folks like me who like to bring around the Internet wherever we go.

But for really really serious stuff, I don’t think I can rely on a netbook 100%, particularly during those times when I’m not very mobile anyway. Sure, portability is great, but when you’re just working at your desk, you’d rather have a more comfortable keyboard so your fingers would work at a more natural position. You’d rather have a bigger screen, so you don’t have to squint just to see things clearly.

Yes, netbooks are still great. But in a way, the novelty of cheap, ultraportable computing is beginning to wear off.

Or perhaps that’s only the case until my next netbook purchase!

I recently received a review unit of SonyEricsson’s latest Xperia X1 Smartphone. As a disclosure, SonyEricsson has actually given me the uniit gratis, meaning it’s a review model, but I don’t have to return it ever (like some other laptops, cars, planes and boats I’ve reviewed). Thanks to Buensalido & associates (SonyEricsson’s PR agent) and Mad Crowd Media, who selected the Xperia recipients—four from the blogosphere and about 10 from traditional media.

I know about the implications of reviewing stuff given for free, but let’s leave that to another discussion, like a post I started on Performancing.

First impressions

And so my first impression of the Xperia is, of course wow! It’s been a long time since I owned a SonyEricsson phone, and boy have they gone a long way. Sony has always been great at style, and they’ve styled this phone well. The phone comes in a brushed-metal (aluminum) casing, which is sure to be durable and stylish at the same time. One look at this phone and you would think it means business.

Hardware

The Xperia takes the form factor of a slider phone, but the sliding mechanism is not what you would normally see with phones like Nokia’s N-series, with a numeric keypad revealing when you slide the screen up vertically. The Xperia slides sideways (when the phone is standing right side up) and reveals a QWERTY keyboard. So the screen actually slides up when the phone is lying down on its side.

This form factor is common in the American market, I would think, with the popularity of email there, and with their preference for typing SMS through QWERTY rather than multitap or T9 (T9 being my preferred method). This makes the phone difficult, if not impossible, to use one-handed while typing on the QWERTY keypad.

Out of the box, the Xperia is designed to be as pleasant to use as possible. The package includes a USB cable, which doubles as the charger when plugged into the mains-to-USB adaptor, stereo earphones with mic, and an extra stylus.

What’s great with the earphone is that the mic attachment plugs into the Xperia using a special 3.5-inch plug. But the earphone extension comes with a regular 3.5-inch plug, which means you can plug in other, possibly better, earphones to listen to music.

The Xperia comes with a 1500 mAH battery pack, which usually lasts me a day of regular use—WiFi turned on all the time, some 3G use and web browsing and replying to emails. I wouldn’t trust these kinds of phones to last longer than a day and a half because of the high power requirements of the hardware. So don’t leave home without the charger or at least the USB cable, which can charge the phone when plugged into a computer.

The phone’s touch screen is a bit on the small side, at three inches. The iPhone, for instance, gives more screen real estate. But the Xperia has a resolution of 800×480, which is actually the resolution of my old seven-inch netbook (the Asus EeePC 701) so I think that’s sharp enoguh. This might cause those with less than perfect eyesight to have to strain from the small text.

The screen is really bright, though, and very usable even when under direct sunlinght. The phone also features adaptive lighting, which adjusts the brightness of the screen and the keypad to match ambient lighting.

Software

The Xperia’s main feature is its touch-screen interface. This is a highlight of Windows Mobile phones, and shares much of the interface features of its Windows Mobile-powered PDA brethren such as the HP iPAQ and the like. This can be an advantage for people who are used to Windows Mobile or Windows CE (wince?). But for those who are used to Symbian, there might be a bit of a learning curve. Do note that previously SonyEricsson used Symbian series 90 in its smartphones.

As for me, I come from the Symbian Series 60, but I’m not entirely alien to Windows Mobile. The main advantage of using Windows mobile is that it’s supposedly easier to sync with Windows-powered computers and over corporate servers that run Microsoft exchange. Email setup is a cinch, especially if you use Outlook. For folks like myself who run everything off Gmail, the phone’s built-in Internet Explorer browser is fine. Actually, the phones comes bundled with Opera Mobile, which is, in my opinion, a better mobile browser.

Connectivity

The Xperia has a plethora of connectivity options, including the now-common GPRS, but the phone features 3G and HSDPA (or 3.5G) and even HSUPA for higher-speed broadband access. You can also connect to your home or office network, or public hotspot using the built-in WiFi radio, which can help save money, in case your data plan is not unlimited. The Xperia X1 also has BlueTooth EDR and even Infrared, in case you plan to go old school and beam up contacts and files to other folks who still have Infrared.

There are some gripes, though, when it comes to the WiFi connection interface. With the Symbian Series 60, I’m able to tell the system to ask me where to connect each time it needs to connect. That way, my phone (a Nokia E51) does not needlessly connect to the cellular network when there are other options, or when I simply don’t want to connect. With Windows Mobile 6.1, apparently the system does the thinking for you and automatically connects to the Internet via the cellular network when no WiFi access points are detected. For instance, you have Skype for WM turned on, but you leave the hotspot you’re currently connected through. The phone will automatically log in via cellular, or whichever network is available.

This is actually a feature, as it guarantees uninterrupted Internet connection. But the software does not give you an option to do otherwise.

You can find yourself bleeding money from being logged in to your cellular provider’s 3G network even when you’re not actually using the phone’s Internet capabilities, and even when your phone’s just in your pocket. In contrast, Symbian will ask explicitly where to connect before it does any connecting.

More to come

There’s more to come, as I publish my experiences with the SonyEricsson Xperia X1 in the next few days.

I recently got a review unit of SonyEricsson’s latest Xperia X1 smartphone, and I plan to review the gadget one day at a time. In the meantime, here are a few unboxing photos. Please feel free to click and view the larger images.

The Xperia X1 will be launched locally on November 28th. Pricing is yet to be announced, but tentatively, it could be anywhere from PhP 40,000 to PhP 45,000, based on the current exchange rates. Retail price elsewhere is about $900.

Smartphones are not exactly alien to me. My main mobile phone is my Nokia E51, which runs the Symbian Series 60 v3 operating system. The X1 is my first ever touchscreen and QWERTY phone, though, so it does come with a learning curve. Also, the X1 runs Windows Mobile 6.1. The latest Windows-powered Smartphone I used was the “Tanager” by HTC, or which was more commonly known in the Philippines as the “Smart Amazing Phone” running Smartphone 2002.

I’ll be writing about my experiences and observations in a series of posts through the next couple of weeks.

Some impressions of the Xperia at Jayvee’s and Abe’s blogs.

I’ve been on the lookout for a contingency connection for those times that my main Bayan DSL account lets me down (which is oftentimes these days). I do have a 3.5G (HSDPA) enabled mobile phone, which I can use as a modem via BlueTooth, but somehow I have found that option to be cumbersome. First, it causes my mobile phone battery to drain quickly, and so it’s not exactly an elegant solution as I would have to worry about notebook/netbook batteries and mobile phone batteries discharging. Also, it’s a bit expensive when used heavily, at PhP 5 per 15 minutes on the Globe network. Sure that’s cheap enough for on the go browsing, but when you’re using your internet connection the whole day, you end up spending more.

Smart recently announced the availability of an unlimited plan that comes with a USB HSDPA modem for PhP 1,500 per month (about $30 per month) and so I decided to visit a nearby Smart Wireless center to inquire and possibly apply. As I submitted my application form I was told that the modem that came with postpaid plans was still the old white Huawei-supplied one, and this reportedly had many connectivity, compatibility and reliability issues. And I was told approval would take two to three days.

I decided to pick up a prepaid kit for the meantime, to evaluate Smart’s service. I’m primarily a Globe user, and so my 3.5G-enabled mobile phone runs on the Globe network. Best try out Smart’s service this time.

Great things about the prepaid kit are:

• It came with the newer, black USB modem that looks just like a pen drive. This means no dongles to mess up your otherwise wireless set-up.
• It’s cheap at PhP 2,800 net (you have to pay PhP 2,500 for the modem, which includes the SIM card and PhP 100 prepaid load, then you have to purchase a PhP 300 prepaid card).
• It’s prepaid, so there is no need for contracts, lock-ins, or proof of identity/income, as is usual with postpaid plans.
• If you have an existing Smart prepaid or postpaid SIM, you can also use these to connect. Standard rates apply.

So far, so good. It’s been a reliable mobile connection for me, for those times I need to connect while out of the office, or when my home-office connection is simply too slow.

I do get slow speeds when the cell site I’m connected to has non-existent or weak HSDPA signals. With this, it tops at 300+ Kbps. Where there are no 3G signals, it tops at 200+ Kbps (EDGE) or 56 Kbps (GPRS). It sucks, but when it’s your only option you will take it. So far I’m able to access most services and ports I need, including instant messengers, FTP, cPanel and the like, where previously these wireless networks imposed some prohibitions with non-HTTP ports.

The provided software was a breeze to install. The USB modem itself has read-only storage, so the drivers for Windows and OS X (Tiger and Leopard) are included. You may have to download drivers and do some tweaks for Linux, though.

You can always just dialup using your OS’s dialer, but the bundled software gives you more options, like the ability to detect what kind of signal you are currently getting, and the ability to lock connection to certain types only (the connection moves across HSDPA, 3G, GPRS, and EDGE depending on signal strength and availability).

Speedtest results

168 Kbps down on EDGE.

1.2 Mbps on HSDPA

Some photos

The retail kit:

Contents:

With the SIM card:

With a USB pen drive (to compare and illustrate size):

With the SIM card just peeking out:

Attached to an HP mini note netbook:

The main advantage, as I see it, is that this takes out the necessity to bring an extra phone or to use your extra phone just to connect. The main disadvantage is that you do have to shell out some money for the unit itself. But at PhP 2,800, that’s already a steal. A couple of weeks ago, this was still retailing at PhP 3,800 (PhP 4,500 farther back).

I do hope my unlimited plan gets approved soon. When that time comes I’ll really get to put the system to an abuse test—whether it can take sustained speeds, and whether it can serve as a reliable connectivity option full-time. Of course I cannot share it among my various computers simultaneously, but again my purpose is for backup connectivity that I can also use while mobile.

When I get that plan approved, I would use it instead with this black modem and I would probably sell the white one (along with the prepaid SIM) or keep it as backup.

Updates: From research, I discovered that the black USB dongle sold with this prepaid pack is the LongCheer WM66. I believe that’s a relative newcomer, compared to Huawei and ZTE, which supplies most other dongles out there. Huawei is usually un-lockable, while ZTE dongles are more difficult (if possible at all) to unlock. But at PhP 2,500 for a prepaid kit, these things are cheap already!

Also, I have a Globe Visibility prepaid kit review upcoming!