Pancentric Blogs

I got an Eee PC when they 1st came out (thanks Woody!), great concept and a good package. After using it for a while though its limitations became apparent, screen too small, no bluetooth, limited disk space being the prime ones for me. On the other hand the weight, Linux support brilliant way it scales up the display when you add an external monitor, makes it a great USB stick replacement for presentations.

We are now looking at (and typing on it at the moment) the Advent badged MSI wind, and a jolly fine machine it is. Now, let’s get this straight right from the start, if you are looking for a full on review, go elsewhere, this is a quirky personal opinion (it’s the only one I’ve got).

So, I like it, a lot the screen is a good size, some people complain about the 600 pixels depth, but I haven’t found it a real problem, yes you don’t get much of a preview in say Thunderbird, but I don’t have to resort to Littlebird as I do on the Eee. At this point I must admit to not having tried the Eee PC 900 series, so maybe the comparison is unfair, such is life.

The Advent/MSI Wind is really good to use, it is doing all the things I need it to, it bluetoothed to my P1i phone like a dream, connects to all my networks, does it all with minimum fuss and is light and easy to carry.

It has its faults though:

The hinges are not very firm, this means that sitting on a train (or even in a chair with it on you knees) the screen wobbles just enough to be really annoying.
The Eee PC has a great power supply akin to a mobile phone with the transformer inthe plug, the Advent/Wind has a big “kettle lead” that attaches with that weird laptop 3 pin plus into a separate transformer then into the Wind. Too big and too awkward to carry around in a small bag.
Windoews XP, a good Linux distro would be soooooo much better, I will try Ubuntu and report back.
It gets hot, especially on the thighs.

There will be more Atom based sub notebooks out soon some better some not, and this is not a “comprehensiv review”, however I have to say that for £280 at PC World (wow I never thought I would be suggesting that anyone buys something from PC World) it is a winner for me.

In the very best of blog traditions the end of December marks the point at which we look back and soberly (if that’s possible at this time of year) digest the events, products and advancements made in our digital world in the last 12 months.

One of, if not the, biggest events of 2007 was the opening up of the Facebook walled garden to anyone who wished to register. What this did, in simple terms, was introduce millions of people to social networking and associated tools such as RSS, content aggregation, photo and video sharing, perpetual contact and all the other tools now used on a daily basis by the 60 million or so registered users.

From a technology perspective the iPhone has shifted the usability of mobile devices forward in a giant seismic leap, where all the other vendors were just shuffling forward in an apologetic manner by adding little more than memory and increasing complexity. The inclusion of a proper browser, not a rubbish cut down version, seamless integration with mac desktop applications as well as a host of third party apps already released, not to mention the iTunes and YouTube stuff this is the first truly integrated pocket device that people actually want to use.

Services such as Twitter and Tumblr gained momentum and grew their user base and I think will see wider adoption next year, though 2008 predictions are for a later post. Jaiku was bought by Google.

RSS adoption gained pace through 2007. Google Reader came out as most used feed reader.

There were a few big headlines in the digital music world in 2007. Radiohead revolutionised the music industry (and God, doesn’t it need it) with their ‘pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth’ sales model for their album ‘In Rainbows’. What their actual revenue from sales was, the band will not say. However, what they did say was that it made more than all of their other albums put together when measured on downloads alone. Some sources put it as high as £5 per album while others as low as £2.90.

Last.fm was sold for £140m to CBS. Not much more to say other than the fact that it wasn’t the only service to either get bought or receive major investment.

Video went mental. Joost came out of beta, the BBC’s iPlayer launched and project Kangaroo was announced which will aggregate BBC, iTV and Channel 4 content into one player in 2008. Even the Queen, 50 years after her first televised Christmas Day address to the nation, has a YouTube channel.

That’s a tiny snapshot of what’s gone on this year. In a post to be published soon I’ll be looking at what excitement 2008 has to offer. As a starter for 10, video is going to be bigger than ever and the big corporates are going to get all social.

The BBC has gone and got all Web 2.0 and ‘AJAXy’ with their new beta home page design.

Announced on their blog last week, it uses the now tried and tested blend of gradient fills and large type as well as the drag and drop functionality of sites such as iGoogle, Facebook and Netvibes.

Initial impressions are good. It works very smoothly with only the odd display error here and there but hey, this is the beta launch. It utilises RSS and javascript to allow the user control over what content is displayed and where it sits on the page. There are a few things which would be nice to have and I’m sure they’re in development, judging by the number of blog comments highlighting these things.

Firstly, the ability to drag news categories around within a channel. When adding news feeds to the news panel they appear in the order in which the user adds them with no mechanism for reordering them. The only way is to remove all feeds and add them in the order in which you would like them to appear.

Secondly, the overriding colour on the page is dictated by the main hero panel selection. By swapping between the four options the entire page colour scheme changes. This is, though clever, overkill. Why should the colour of my news feed links be dictated by the fact that I’ve clicked to view the ‘Live Music’ tab on the hero panel?

All in all I think it’s a step in the right direction. Though they’re probably a year to 18 months, if not more, behind the curve as far as interaction design utilising these technologies is concerned. Aren’t the BBC meant to be blazing trails in this area having a roster of 21ish agencies and a development team of 20+ people to work on this one project?

One thing that really brought a smile to my face is the resurrection of the old-skool BBC analogue clock in the top right of the screen - a lovely touch.