Yes, this phone is not exactly new; I’ve had it the past year.

In that time, while it has not been as frustrating as the two Moto Q’s I went through, it certainly hasn’t been a fun trip.  At this point, it is nicely functional but I basically use it to call, text, check the web for the next approaching buses, and use Google maps.  I’m on Sprint so fortunately, I have the more powerful version of the Touch.  Full specs and features can be found here.  Don’t get me wrong, the hardware itself is actually pretty nice,  it feels good in the hand and is quite capable.  The real problem here is Windows Mobile itself.  After using the smartphone version of WM on my Moto Q, I realized the Professional (touch screen) version was the only version worth having because smartphone was pretty restricted in terms of apps and the control you have over them.  It was definitely an improvement and opened up the use of a lot more apps to me, but it is still the same OS with its inherent slowdowns, lagginess, and outdated UI.

What it does well is everything you’d expect from a WM phone, especially if you’re a corporate customer.  Yet, at the same time, it may drive you crazy to use the onscreen keyboard, which uses a Blackberry Pearl style two letters per key qwerty layout.  I installed the best full qwerty that is available for free, but typing is often frustrating because it’s so small and a resistive touchscreen (responds to pressure).  Finger typing on the iPhone can be frustrating too, but having an iPod touch as well, I can assure you, the Touch is a whole different beast in terms of frustration.

The phone is very prone to dropping.  I haven’t ever dropped a phone as many times as I have the Touch.  It’s so rounded like a pebble that it’s really easy to lose your grip, at which point, it drops, the back and battery explode out.  As a result, its mediocre camera has been rendered not very useful with a few lines on pictures due to damaged sensor pixels.

There is a very large developer community for the Touch, the best of which can be found at www.xda-developers.com and www.ppcgeeks.com.   There are many good apps to install and I would definitely recommend flashing your default Sprint ROM to one that’s a lot more customized.  The home screen with the flip clock at the top is called M2D which is a developer driven knock off of the M3D interface on newer HTC phones.  It works quite well when integrated properly and although I’m not totally happy with some of how it works, it gets the job done.

Battery life is a contentious issue for me.  On the whole, I can get through about a day and a half to two days without charging.  However, occasionally it’ll start draining in a day or less and keep doing this for a few days, even after rebooting the phone, there is no clear source of the problem.

It was definitely good to move from WM Smartphone over to the Professional edition, but at the cost of a real keyboard.  However, as the experience wears on, the same problems that plague WM keep popping up.  I have little hope for it until version 7 which will not be out for a year or two.  The promised 6.5 version for later this year appears to merely dress up the same old terrible UI and lagginess that plagues this platform.  As my Sprint contract is about to expire, I will either get a new phone on Sprint or switch to an iPhone.  I really like the looks of the Palm Pre, so if it is compatible with my plan, I’ll be jumping to that.  No more Windows Mobile for me.

The Aspire One is not a multimedia powerhouse, but my primary use for it is to take it to school and work with me as an alternative to lugging my Macbook Pro around.  However, it isn’t my primary machine, which brings up the issue of how do I keep my data together without having to swap files around on a flash drive or something?  Most of these apps I use the most address this issue.

Calaboration

Calaboration is a tool to synchronize your Google Calendar with iCal.  I have struggled for quite some time to find an easy and efficient way to migrate my iCal to Google Calendar without much success.  However, Google recently released this tool and it led me to move my calendar off of my computer and into the cloud.  Now, I can easily sync any of my Macs with Google Calendar as well as my phone.

Crossover Mac

This is an evolution of Crossover Office, a commercial WINE application.  This allows you to natively run Windows applications without rebooting to Windows or running a virtual machine.  This is important as the Atom processor in the Aspire One does not support the Intel VT technology, which makes virtual machines speedy enough to be close to native speed.  Aka, it would be dog slow to run a VM on an Atom processor.  So, this allows you to individually install supported applications such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Quickbooks, and other non-supported applications many times may work.  I got a free copy when they gave them away in the fall, but the package normally costs $40.

Dropbox

Oh, how I love Dropbox.  Dropbox is an application that allows you to sync files and folders between computers with ease.  Basically, it creates a dropbox folder on your system, and you can create folders within and files all as if it’s on your computer, which it is.  However, Dropbox also syncs it with their servers and even creates revisions, not only keeping your changes up to date, but old revisions should you need to go back to them.  Sync with another computer, and the files are once again stored as local data, only to be synced when updated.  Even better, you can share folders and files with other people which has become critically important for collaborating in one of my classes.  Oh, and did I mention it works on Linux and Windows too?

Evernote

Evernote is your new best friend if you are working on projects.  It is one of the best GTD (getting things done) applications because of its flexibility.  It is an application that can capture images, web pages, documents, and just plain text notes into a notebook and make it all searchable.  You can organize notes into diferent tags and categories for different projects.  Best of all, it syncs with the Evernote server so, like Dropbox, all of your notes are available and searchable if you log into the Evernote website!  And of course, you can sync it with multiple computers; not just Macs, PCs, iPhones, Windows Mobiles, and more are invited to the note syncing party.

Automator

Wait a sec, that last thing is called Mount Music?  Well, it’s basically an Automator workflow I put together to, with the click of a button, log into my windows server, mount the music share, and allow me to fire up iTunes right away.  Automator looks scary at first, but it uses a pretty basic language structure to allow you to create a workflow with no programming experience required.  If you want to demonstrate an activity you want to automate, you can even just click the record button from the workflow menu and your Mac will watch you do something and be able to replicate that task with the push of a button.  It may not seem too useful but once you begin to play around with what you can automate, it can definitely make mundane tasks much easier.

Andrew Bird’s latest outing, Noble Beast, hits stores tomorrow.  Somehow, my copy was shipped to me two weeks early.  I got the deluxe edition that also includes the extra disc of b-sides and instrumentals, Useless Creatures.  The two discs feature vastly different sides of The Bird, but both have their charms.  Noble Beast itself is a fascinating collection of some new sounds as well as some old, but significantly different than his last outing, Armchair Apocrypha.

Noble Beast

The album opens up with Oh No, a catchy little tune, but far softer than Fiery Crash was on Armchair, setting the stage for one of The Bird’s folksier albums in recent years.  Yet, it still captures the witty and creative lyrics he always has had a knack for.  Masterswarm is filled with beautiful guitar pickings and sweet violin strokes following a catchy clap beat, and of course, a good dose of whistling.  Fitz & Dizzyspells feels a lot like an Armchair track with its flaring guitars and good rock vibe.

Effigy is probably one of the most interesting tunes on the album as he opens up with a layered violin melody and then transitions into a acoustic tune that really reminded me of an Irish or Appalachian folk song.  Tenousness continues a similar sort of sound through to Nomenclature, where he opens up with some stronger electric riffs.

Not a Robot, But a Ghost first starts off sounding somewhat like a Radiohead song.  However, it quickly diverges into a more instrumental track while still retaining that very scratchy beat.  The lyrics are really great and it’s probably my favorite track on the album.  Unfolding Fans has a cool Asian flair to it and serves as a nice bridge into Anonanimal.  This was probably the first song off the album that I heard at a concert and it’s definitely evolved but still a great track with its picked and soaring violins in the background.

Natural disaster reminds me a lot of the tunes on his first solo album, Music of Hair.  It’s another one of those pretty folksy tunes and definitely more memorable than the following track, The Privateers.  This one just falls flat for me and I can’t put my finger on it.

The album closes with Souverian, a long but pretty nice tune, giving a strong close to a strong album, followed up by the instrumental On Ho!

Overall, I really enjoyed the album and it feels very cohesive in its sound.  At the same time, it seems like a little too much of the same sound, but this may well be as much a product of its production and how it was mixed than the tracks themselves as there is some great variety in there.  I would recommend picking this up.

7/10

Here’s the really fantastic art the deluxe version comes with…scroll down for the Useless Creatures review!

Useless Creatures

This special collection of all new instrumentals comes only with the deluxe edition, but if you’re a big Andrew Bird fan like me, I recommend picking it up too!  It opens with Master Sigh, a tune mostly made with hums, whistles, and violin that gives a feeling of sitting in a field on a summer evening.  You Woke Me Up! is a fantastic piece of violin work that harkens back to Weather Systems.  Nyatiti is a fun instrumental stomp with flaring violin plucks and tambourines.  The Barn Tapes is a trip into 10 minutes of waves of sound and drones, primarily of violin, that are nice to let wash over you, but not interesting enough to hold my attention when I’m not in the mood.

Following up The Barn Tapes is the equally long, but much more interesting Carrion Suite.  It’s a slow and swaying tune with sass that has a beat to keep the swaying violins in check.  Spinney is a short, feedback filled guitar piece that somewhat moves in waves similar to The Barn Tapes, but as soon as it starts, it’s over.

Dissent is another one of his tracks that sounds similar to things we’ve heard before, but its dischordant wails of violins really don’t catch my interest very much.  Hot Math reminds me of a lot of Armchair era guitar tunes, with The Bird experimenting with cycles of guitar riffs and improvising in between.

Finally, he closes with Sigh Master, the follow up to Master Sigh.  It again takes a very natural tone and he adds whistles for birds and other creatures, giving a more foresty and morning sound.  I would definitely say this collection of instrumental tunes took me by surprise in terms of their variety and great sounds.  I think this is a must have for any Andrew Bird fans and highly recommend it if you can plunk down the cash for the Deluxe edition!

Non-Fans: 5/10

Fans: 8/10

The goal of getting this Acer Aspire One was to create, in essence, a Macbook Mini that would be light, fit my daily needs at work and class, and have great battery power.  While I love my Macbook Pro, I can’t deny the battery issues…in one year of ownership, the battery capacity has dropped to 50%, giving me barely a 1:45 hour runtime with lowest power settings.  Also, lugging it around all the time with books can’t be good for my back.

Enough blabbing, onto the install!

Basically, I followed the instructions provided by the geniuses on aspireoneuser forums: click here

Here are my notes on that install.

I decided not to use an external dvd drive, and instead used my 4GB USB drive.  There are instructions here for preparing your flash drive and putting the install image on it. NOTE: The diskpart step I could only get to work in Vista as in 2003 and XP, it couldn’t see the drive’s partition when setting it active.

I would follow the instructions for the majority of the install, but I definitely recommend using the Voodoo kernel.  While it means you can’t use Software Update for OS updates, 10.5.6 isn’t a huge change over 10.5.5, so I wasn’t concerned.  Voodoo will be releasing updates soon to make this possible anyway, so I determined the performance jump of having hyperthreading and not having to set a boot flag was the way to go.  Also, note that sometimes the progress bar appeared stuck, don’t worry, it’s moving, for some odd reason it doesn’t always show!

As for the wireless card, there are some flakey ways to get it working, but instead, I got a cheap Dell 1390 PCI Express card off of eBay and put it in following this walkthrough.  While I was in there, I bumped the RAM to 1.5GB.  One thing I will note is that you don’t need to freak out too much about the keyboard, if you pop the pins in too far with a screwdriver, you just have to pop them back into the slots from the back of the case top.

From there, you have a well-working copy of OS X.  I’ll provide some more tweaks and steps to do them soon!

Sleep does not work and due to the nature of having to reverse engineer video drivers in the kernel, the current conensus on the aspireoneuser forums is that it is not a priority..

About This Mac and Airport working:

Hyperthreading isn’t dual-core but it does speed things up:

I recently have been thinking about the sudden surge of Netbooks we have seen and how nice it would be to have such a portable device with great battery life.  The recent realization that my Macbook Pro’s battery in one year has become barely able to get through a single hour and a half class made this clearer than ever that big, powerful laptops have their place but are not a catch-all.  So, after some eBay hunting, I found a sweet deal on an Acer Aspire One:

2.3 Lbs, 6-cell battery for a rated 6 hour battery life, Intel Atom 1.6Ghz Processor, 1GB RAM, 8.9″ Screen

Clearly, not a speed demon but powerful enough for most non-gaming or video needs…

It ships with Windows XP Home on it, which I promptly decided I was going to wipe and set up XP Pro to dual boot with OS X.  However, this Netbook, like most, does not include a CD drive…so it was off to the fun world of USB drives!

After some hunting, I found a great guide on the Aspire One User Forums, which are my primary resource for help with this device. http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=8151

Basically, it involves making a flash drive bootable and then copying over the contents of the XP install disc so that you can boot off of it and preform the install.  Once I had that all set, I grabbed the drivers off of Acer’s website and got my XP install all set.  At this point, I needed to shrink my XP partition which I decided to do by downloading Hiren’s boot disc (google it) and using another set of tools to make my flash drive bootable again with the Hiren’s disc image.

A key to having a dual-boot OSx86 install is to make sure you partition it as well as formatting it because the MacOS installer can’t format free space on a volume.

Having done all of this, I started preparing with the actual tools for installing OS X.

Recently, my 3rd generation iPod has been acting
finicky and it seemed the hard drive was dying. I had
been looking at the 5th generation iPod as a possible
replacement until I came across the Pontis MX2020, a
PMP with a bigger screen and for $100 less than the
iPod! It’s 20gb, with a 3.5″ touchscreen, and A/V
inputs and outputs for playing/recording from a TV or
other source. I read a review on osnews.com and I was
intrigued by the fact that it runs on Linux. $200
later, I had it in my hands and I began to play around
with it. You navigate primarily through the joystick
which is pretty responsive and felt surprisingly good
in my hand.

In terms of video, it supports a plethora of formats
including MPEG2, DivX 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, ASF, AVI, Xvid,
and some MPEG 4. Playback was for the most part, quite
smooth and enjoyable, although the screen did have
visible lines that almost made it look interlaced.
Overall though, it was quite enjoyable and usable.

However, the reason I bought this, was as a replacement
for my iPod. Alas, the audio side of things were
atrocious. Sure, the playback quality was good, but
that’s about as far as it went. Overall, including the
audio section, navigation is quite laggy, which with
time, may be forgivable. However, while playing songs,
to skip to the next track, it takes 4 seconds from when
you hit next for it to stop playing the current song,
and then an average of 6-8 seconds for it to load the
next song. For someone who’s used to quickly shuffling
and skipping through their music, this was a major
dealbreaker.

The player shows up on your computer as a removable
hard drive, so as you may expect, you must organize the
music yourself. However, once the music is on the
player, you can only play sequentially through a
folder, you cannot play multiple folders at once, nor
does it get organized by ID3. Even more frustrating is
while playing a song, you cannot get back to your music
to pick something else. With a firmware update, this is
enabled, but it only allows you to get to the folder
you’re already playing in, which you can just fast
forward to anyway!

Overall, if you want a way to carry your videos around
with you and use it to record, the MX2020 is up to the
task. However if you intend on using it as an mp3
player at all, avoid it at all costs.