He sent it to the Live ID I use for my main email address, which for reasons of complexity is set to US locale and for reasons of me being a bear of little brain I can't remember the password for. I don't normally need to remember it because I have it linked to the Live ID I use all the time, which is my Hotmail address. After a couple of guesses I thought, 'let's see how smart Mesh is' and signed in with the main Live ID instead. Mesh accepted it. I could install the software (tiny) and see Simon's folder - but not his devices, so good separation. I added a folder that I don't have set up with SyncToy to replicate back to the server because the path isn't straightforward and as it has conference presentations it's useful for Simon on the road. But I didn't want to share it back to his Gmail account because I couldn't remember the email. He was in the process of linking his Live ID 's so I invited his main email account. And when he accepted the invitation while he was logged in with his other Live ID (still with me at the back?), it worked - all the linked Live ID 's have access to the Mesh they're supposed to have access to.
Now we have folders we can see and choose to sync from each other's machines. They sync quickly - and with placeholders for any files that haven't synced yet. Files are replicated into the cloud (up to 5GB) but if there's a direct path from my PC to Simon's the connection goes that way for speed and you can sync files over 5GB to another Mesh endpoint as long as it has the disk space.
If I don't want to sync the files to my PC because I don't need to have them, I just need to have access to them - I can see them online, through the Live Desktop - a browser window that shows me files and folders. I can open a file onto my PC or save it onto my PC or upload a file myself. This is the most idiot-proof syncing and sharing system I've ever seen and I speak as a bona fide idiot before my first cup of coffee.
I can think of so many ways to use this - and this is just the demonstration app. What matters is that underlying synchronisation layer. I want Flickr to be a Mesh endpoint so I never explicitly use an uploader again; I just mark a folder for sync and every image with a 5-star rating goes up (or maybe every image goes up but the rated ones go in a set). I want this to sync OneNote notes to my phone (Windows Mobile and Nokia clients are on the way). I'd quite like it as a way of doing posts from my mobile to LiveJournal - it would leave me an archive that could also be synced to the Semagic archive folder for local backup. It will mean that when Simon downloads videos he doesn't have to move them onto the NAS by hand. A universal list of the widgets I like and what basic settings I want them to have for every new widget platform to snarf up instead of me saying 'Weather: London, San Jose, Seattle, Christchurch' by hand every time.
Yep. There may be heartbreak and throwing of china in my future (What do you mean you don't like mapped drives? Mapped drives are very important to me!) but for now, Live Mesh is my new shiny.
Hey - I like it enough not to save all this until I get paid to write about it!
From nanoscale processing to measuring and simulating crowds, from phone calls inside your browser with Adobe’s Flash-based Pacifica service to Google on your phone with Android, from Google predicting the future to the Department of Defense taking nine months to build a wiki to speed up procurement, ETech looked at what might emerge next.
BT has the XP version with a Geode preocessor for £590, or bundled with a mouse and USB TV stick for £630,, though it's £800 for the 800MHz Vista version I tested . US pricing is better at $1199 with Vista/XP or $1099 for bring your own OS.
*I know the original Japanese model had a calibration issue and that the Linux drivers may not help you enough here. If I'm using a touchscreen I want Vista for the touch support.
My CES top ten for Tom's Guide including the Casio EXILIM Pro EX-F1, a camera that does more with being digital than replicating film
The MacBook Air is shiny in both senses but there was something smaller at MacWorld I liked more
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autopope was just saying. But the real reason for posting is to share the joy brought to me by the screen having two little buttons, side by side, labelled Launcher and Shutter.
(Yes, I know - shutter as in take a picture with the built-in Webcam, but it amuses me to think of an app launcher and an app shutter, for all those people who thought Start was the wrong place to look for the shutdown command).
My review of this is up at Tom's Hardware.The latest ultramobile PC from OQO really is ultramobile rather than just ultraportable. Not only does it pack a decent processor, 1GB of memory, an 80 or 120GB hard drive and a 5” screen into a 1 pound form factor, the OQO model e2 also has built-in HSDPA connectivity as well as 802.11a, b and g versions of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Differences in HSDPA - and the difficulty of getting devices approved for connection to U.S. cellular networks - means the e2 is only available in Europe and Asia at the moment. Yet, the device offers a tantalizing hint of mobile PCs to come.
In short, pricey but nice if you need the portability. There are some questions on the review page and I can't seem to post a reply there at the moment, so here are some extra details for those readers. Also, the final edit suggests the e2 is smaller than an HTC TyTan - that should read "half as big again as a chunky Windows Mobile device like the HTC TyTan" or 1 e2 = 1.5 TyTans.
There were questions about how the e2 and Eee PC compare. I'm answering those, but I'll also explain why they're not comparable - and it's not just price.
I've looked at both the OQO model 2e and the Asus Eee PC and the e2's performance, screen quality and usability when surfing are all far superior to the Eee PC. As I said in the review, the screen quality is superb. Vista performance is no problem with enough memory in* and this machine was able to deliver enough power for image editing plus running five or six business applications at the same time without noticing any slowdown at all. Watching video with Sling or decoding DiVX video files are both quite demanding and the e2 performed excellently at both. That's about the limit of what it would be useful to do on a machine with a screen this size; you wouldn't spend this much money on a device for playing games and I don't think many people would be doing video encoding or other more demanding tasks on this size of screen. For what it's sensible to do on a machine this size, performance is impressive.
I'm impressed by the keyboard compared to anything except a real notebook keyboard - and if you want to type without a table a real notebook keyboard doesn't always prove the best thing anyway. It's the secondary keys that matter as much as the QWERTY keys. The @ key is needed so much these days that OQO promotes it to a function on the apostrophe key (next to P). The euro, yen, backslash and similar symbols are functions on the other keys, along with volume and brightness controls and the keyboard light. Not everything is where you expect it to be - but it all makes sense where it is.
Not everyone wants a tablet and a thumb-sized keyboard - but not everyone wants a miniature notebook form factor either. That means I was looking at the e2 compared to the whole range of ultraportable devices I've evaluated, not just the Eee PC - they are quite different beasts and not only because of the price tag. I don't think that they're equivalent or that the same person would want both.
Do I think the e2 is expensive? Yes.
Are there people for whom it will be good value anyway? Yes.
Are you one of them? Not if you're going to say the Eee PC is better value and you're happy with the compromises it makes. (I'm not implying you are wrong about the Eee PC; I am implying the e2 is wrong for you)
Am I one of them? Borderline - but since the Motion LS800 which I consider the closest alternative is no longer available and I want to be able to write on screen on something that fits next to my plate at lunch, the e2 is attractive. For me personally the HSDPA connection is a luxury anyway, but a very convenient one. Like the vast majority of cars and consumer electronics, not everyone needs luxury but a lot of people want it.
Time to get online depends on the method you use to connect more than the PC. Over wi-fi, the e2 is pretty much the same as the Eee with Windows XP or Linux, allowing for the fact that the e2 is a more responsive machine. I didn't test the Eee PC with HSDPA because it doesn't come with connectivity built in and it doesn't have a PC Card or Express Card slot for my HSDPA cards, but again, the speed limitation is down to the available bandwidth in the network more than the PC you use - if the network has sufficient backhaul and the cell isn't full of other users, you get a DSL-like experience. HSDPA has a connection time longer than most wi-fi hotspots but that doesn't vary much between devices; I did mention that the HSDPA software on the e2 is also the best I've tried - better than the equivalents from Vodafone or Toshiba, for instance.
Screen size and surfing; again, the higher screen resolution of the e2 and the better screen give a better experience. I talk in the review about how you can scroll down with the finger-touch capacitive scrollbars without opening the keyboard - the Eee PC doesn't have the tablet format so you can't as easily hold it in your hands, you don't see as much of a Web page on screen and the screen quality of the Eee PC is nowhere near as good as the e2 (or an ultraportable Sony for that matter). With either machine you have a full PC browser so there are none of the compromises you make on a smartphone.
One reader comment asked why this got a good review - or rather suggested that my review wasn't entirely independent. I trust I don't need to say to anyone who knows me that my opinions are independent and have been for the nearly 18 years I've been writing about technology. This isn't a positive review because of the opinions of the supplier; this is a positive review because if you need something this portable and you have the budget for the e2, you'll have a good experience using it. Hope that answers some of the reader questions.
* I'm happy to discuss Vista performance. I'll discuss it with people who have used Vista and who can provide the specification on the machine they used and the figures for the performance they're not happy with. I'll agree with anyone who says Vista file copying and related operations are absurdly slow; in a couple of days I'll have an opinion on whether SP2 fixes that. I'll agree that Vista needs a lot of RAM; I use 2 or 3Gb on my machines and get excellent performance - memory is cheap enough that I'd not consider that an extreme amount. A 4200RPM hard drive is also a bottleneck and I plan to replace that on my Toshiba R400 ASAP to improve performance. I'll agree that 2007 Office is slower than it should be. Other than that, I find no problems with Vista performance personally.
"At CES Sonic Impact (www.si-5.com) will unveil the first speaker system you can love while sitting over it, sleeping on it or even standing on top of it. Their BM101 is a panel audio system consisting of two foot by four foot panels that slide between bed mattresses and box springs or underneath sofa cushions, retaining premium audio quality. The bed's box spring and couch's base acts as the system's sub-woofer, releasing a vibration through the furniture that helps you relax and enjoy music in an entirely new way."
Is the Beethoven comfortable or would you like another cushion?
"We are not expecting K-6 school children to access the source code and do their own programming in the event they have to fix a problem in the computer."
- Location:buried by cats
But one of Jon's examples is how Amazon ships everything to you using tracked services. Yes, but, as he'd say. One of our Amazon orders - quite an urgent one as it's Zorb for dealing with Horrid Beasts - was sent by Royal Mail without any tracking. So it may or may not be the item they tried to deliver on Saturday morning - when we were in - and wouldn't give us at the sorting office this morning (they were fresh out of explanations as well; the Royal Mail complaint line, for future reference, is on 08456 112471). Could the police keep an eye out for my parcel while they hunt for the CDs?
Regent Street didn't wait; the lights went on the evening we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum on HD DVD. I knew what they were going to look like because I'd already written them up but it was nice to see them in action. They're collections of LED spheres that change colour and flash on and off in response to people walking past, light levels, wind, temperature... When the Nokia Store opens next month I shall pop in, not to look at the phones but to press the buttons in the window that let you control the lights. Kinda cool...
EDIT: note - I'm curious in terms of how many people have said they want the Eee PC with a 3G card, which means I consider it fair game to price the Advantage with a data contract, reducing it significantly from the non-contract price. The comments make me think it's the price for the size that is appealing to most of you,.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-b
Plus I was pleased that the story hardly got edited at all, and that was for euphony rather than structure. Go me!
If you keep an eye on my upcoming features I have just updated the list on www.marybranscombe.com - next stage is flipping it to a scraped list rather than a static div. What's the Web equivalent of dead tree media - dead bit div's?
When you're on the move, do you want to search the Web the way you would on a PC, or rather look for what's around you? Sometimes you'll want to look up a Web page and read it, but often you want to know more where a movie is playing rather than who was in it, where to get good sushi rather than how to make it, and how long it will take to get to the theater after you've eaten. Read the rest of Simplifying Mobile Search...
Need a bigger screen? Thin and light or mobile workstation, basic budget or high-powered business features, Macs or tablet PCs; today we’re going to tell you how to choose the right notebook for whatever you need. We’re going to go through business, general-use, budget, gaming, ultra-portable, tablet and Mac laptops to show you what to look for and offer some suggestions. Pick the Perfect PC for You...
It's hard to find news on Live Search Local - the Microsoft phone search app - by searching on Google. One thing you do find is a page saying you can report local listings to such-and-such an email address. Which bounces.
Bad Microsoft. NO BISCUIT!
Feel like shouting at your PC? Or your mobile phone? Like the Nationwide helpline that lets you say what you want rather than pressing buttons? Wish you could phone up Google? I've taken a look at the current range of voice recognition services and where they're going for FT Digital Business...
The HTC Excalibur - also known as the T-Mobile Dash - is a smart, capable, lightweight smartphone with multimedia features good enough to let you keep it in your pocket out of business hours. By the time the Motorola Q finally makes it to the UK, the S620 may have stolen its market.
Read on at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/118512/h
The first BlackBerry to combine a full keyboard and camera, the 8300 Curve doesn't have the visceral desirability of the Pearl - or the slab-like bulk of the 8800 - but it does have QWERTY and trackball, spell checking and competent multimedia in a small and neat package.
Read on at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/119405/b
I like them both and I've stuck with the Excalibur for personal use to replace the Treo 750v - the battery life, the better call quality and the standard connector plus the slimmer size made up for losing the extra software features. If you're a BlackBerry fan - and you have BES - the 8300 is an excellent phone. Incidentally, I wrote the review of it on the flight from San Francisco to Indianapolis...