Wizard's Blog

Sony screenshot

So apparently it turns out that Sony aren’t (completely) oblivious to public opinion after all.

Only a day after they introduced the option for you to pay them not to screw up your computer they’ve made the option free.

In the context of my recent post about my Sony Vaio UX390N, it’s interesting that Sony have started to offer an option to not pre-install tons of useless eval software (aka crapware) on your computer.

For a price of course. Whores.

There’s no explanation or excuse other than greed. They’re obviously being paid by the software manufacturers to pre-load their software, so if they stopped doing it they’d suffer a loss. Unless of course they got you to pay the difference.

Sony Vaio UX390N

I am writing this post on a Sony Vaio UX390N.

It’s expensive for such a small computer, and it’s a bit underpowered for some of the things I want to do, but overall it’s a very nice machine.

The size and weight are just about perfect.

The screen is small but amazingly detailed. I love the screen.

The WiFi antenna is very sensitive but has a bad habit of knocking every other device off the network when you power it up. I haven’t tried the WWAN – way too expensive, thank you AT&T.

The battery lasts for about 2 hours, and the bigger 7 hour battery costs about $300. Sony have you a bit over a barrel with the accessories, so they’re all very expensive.

A CD drive would be nice, but Sony’s one is very costly (about $300 last time I looked). As someone who likes to reinstall the OS every year, the lack of CD drive (or OS CD) makes me uncomfortable.

A spare power cable would be nice, but that runs $70! For a piece of wire! If you plug the power cable directly into the bottom of the UMPC it gets in the way, so using it while plugged in is harder than it should be.

It comes with a docking station which is excellent, except that you’re not supposed to dock or undock while the UMPC is powered up, which is a pain.

The built in cameras are ok, nothing special. Why are there two?

The fingerprint reader is great. It’s the kind that you run your finger across, so it doesn’t leave an image of your fingerprint on the reader – the movie trick with the play-dough won’t work. The only annoying thing about it is that the reader is directly above the screen, so there’s constantly a smudge on the screen where your finger bumps into it on the way past the reader.

The keyboard is adequate – much better than UMPC’s without keyboards, but you wouldn’t want to type an essay on it.

Like all computers nowadays it comes with an enormous bundle of useless eval software pre-installed, so you spend your first day trying to work out what you can safely uninstall and what you should leave. Simply evil. A lot of their utilities don’t work or are pointless.

The software support isn’t great. It has a nice auto-update etc. but I’ve had the thing for most of a year now and they still haven’t fixed a horrible problem.

Vista works perfectly, except that the UMPC’s 3D graphics performance is… nonexistent, so Vista is sluggish if you have Aero switched on.

I opted for the version with the SSD, and I am SO impressed – it performs more or less as good as a desktop. I’ve always hated the slow 54k RPM hard drives they put in laptops because it sucks all the performance out of them, so this was a very pleasant surprise.

Asus R2HV Ensemble

This is the Asus R2H and I want one. It’s a UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) – basically a tiny laptop with a touch screen. It has built-in wireless, bluetooth, GPS and a webcam. The V version comes with Vista instead of XP.

The performance won’t exactly blow a desktop PC away – 1Ghz CPU and 4200RPM HD, but it’s surprisingly good in some respects – 1Gb RAM, 80Gb HD.

The only real downer is the price.

Microsoft has apparently put a lot of work into making the UI usable without a keyboard and with (much) less screen space than a Tablet PC. You might remember the Origami project which failed because it was too expensive and the battery life was too low. Well this is the second generation of it and it’s still too expensive. It’s rated at two hours battery life which is about the same as a regular laptop I guess, so that’s not really an issue.

It’s about 9x5x1 inches, so I can see using it on the couch or in meetings at work or in a cafe or in a car or at an airport…

But hell that’s expensive