Saturday, October 31, 2009

‘In Other News…’ November 1st

Here’s the weekly rundown of items that we posted to the middle column on UMPCPortal, our ‘Other News’ section. It’s all good UMPC and MID-related stuff that, in most cases, we didn’t write about as a main news item.

Shared… Related posts:
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  2. ‘In Other News…’ November 1st Here’s the weekly rundown of items that we posted to...
  3. Motorola Droid Preview from BGR The Boy Genius Report has their hands on a...

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Mobile Device Categorization at Mobile Dev Camp, Munich.

On Saturday at the Mobile Dev Camp in Munich I'll be talking about the subject of device categorisation with a bunch of devs to try and stimulate some discussion on the subject. Do we really believe that everything should be converged into a 24/7 pocketable device or are their opportunities to improve the experience for the customer and to break out into small, but significant, niches. Does everything hinge on the mobile OS and it’s success in primary markets? No related posts.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Verizon Droid. Android 2.0 MIDPhone…with Google Maps Navigation Beta.

Encompassing much of what the MID market stands for and reaching out in terms of screen size and CPU power to become a very interesting contender is the Verizon / Motorola Droid. $300 + a 24 month commitment brings you the ‘phone’ and you’ll get $100 back if you remember to mail-in the coupon. Related posts:
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  2. Motorola Droid brings another interesting Android device onto the radar It is just me or does it seem like...
  3. Phone Arena are Testing a MiFi 3G/Wifi Gateway. There’s a lot of excitement around the MiFi ‘personal...

Monday, October 26, 2009

385 Million ‘UMDs’ in 2014 say ABI Research

A UMD, as defined by ABI Research, is a netbook, MID, UMPC or mobile consumer electronics device. I like that definition as it’s almost exactly the scope of the devices we cover on UMPCPortal, MIDMoves, and Meet:Mobility.


385 Million is a…

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Saturday, October 24, 2009

‘In Other News…’ October 25th

Here’s the weekly rundown of items that we posted to the middle column on UMPCPortal, our ‘Other News’ section. It’s all good UMPC and MID-related stuff that, in most cases, we didn’t write about as a main news item.

Shared… Related posts:
  1. Motorola Droid Preview from BGR The Boy Genius Report has their hands on a...
  2. Motorola Droid brings another interesting Android device onto the radar It is just me or does it seem like...
  3. N900 pre-order…for 599 Euro. The good news is that my local online Nokia shop...

Friday, October 23, 2009

Motorola Droid brings another interesting Android device onto the radar

It is just me or does it seem like Android is the hot thing right now? Motorola and Verizon have been teasing the internet for the last few days about their upcoming Droid phone which is powered by Android (of…

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Thursday, October 22, 2009

Dell Streak 5-inch Android MID with 3G

It looks like Dell will be following Archos into the MID market with a 5" touchscreen 'pad' called the 'Streak.' There's no official word from Dell but this certainly looks like a winner to me. Related posts:
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  2. Dell pulls back from the 12″ Danger Zone. A couple of interesting points come up from this Techcrunch...
  3. Archos 9 priced in the UK, Android powered 5” device in September? Trusted Reviews seems to have gotten some info from...

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The Highs and Lows of Installing Android on a UMPC

Those Android-powered tablets from Archos are pretty neat, but if you've got a UMPC (like Samsung's Q1UP) lying around, you can try Android thanks to the Android-x86 project. The catch: despite great performance, there are still a few major limitations.


The good news is that you can run Android from a USB drive or Live CD, so you don't have to nuke your current OS.


Kevin over at jkOnTheRun has a Samsung Q1UP, and was able to install an Android 1.6 port originally intended for the Eee PC 701. He says "Android is blazing on a 1.33GHz Intel Core Solo" and suspects the battery lasts longer, too. He was also able to use Wi-Fi, and the Samsung's QWERTY keyboard without problems.


The major glitches Kevin ran into were on the hardware side of things—no touchscreen, sound, Bluetooth, or button mapping support. That's bound to happen when the port isn't specifically geared for the device, but he says he's chatting with developers to make it happen.


An interesting experiment, but I'd be interested to know if other mobile/netbook OSes, like Jolicloud or Intel's Moblin, fare any better. [jkOnTheRun via SlashGear]

Monday, October 19, 2009

On Holiday with the Archos 5 Android and Nokia N900

I’ll be back to work on Wednesday but until then I'm taking a break with my family over in sunny (really!) England. Thanks to Three UK I've got 3G connectivity both on the smartphone and via my Mifi and it has given me the ability to really test the Nokia N900 [info] and Archos 5 Internet Tablet [info] in real-world mobile and home scenarios that have ranged from a night out with the lads to car-navigation, photography, Skype, sofa and bed-surfing, presence and day-to-day email and website management duties. Related posts:
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Sunday, October 18, 2009

Blogger Writes Building a Professional Learning Community

Bill Ferriter offers a quick summary of his and coauthor Parry Graham's new book "Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year." Congratulations, Authors, for a noble effort!


What you’ll see if you decide to pick up a copy is that we’ve started each chapter with the story of Steve — the fictional principal of Central Middle school — and his colleagues who are working to restructure their traditional school as a professional learning community.


Bill's an articulate public school 6th grade language arts teacher who self-reported on his blog over several years his angsts about taking part in teacher team building activities. Looks like he figured out at least enough to suggest how other teachers might approach similar tasks.


He a teacher techie who tries to generate discussions on his blog by taking controversial positions on variations of teacher talk and political issues about schooling. I monitor it as one of the relatively few teacher blogs that sometimes suggests how teachers can intentionally increase learning rates promptly, sometimes with PCs and desktops.


Keep up the good work, Bill.


Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year.


Bill's blog, The Tempered Radical

Saturday, October 17, 2009

‘In Other News…’ October 18th

Here’s the weekly rundown of items that we posted to the middle column on UMPCPortal, our ‘Other News’ section. It’s all good UMPC and MID-related stuff that, in most cases, we didn’t write about as a main news item.

Liked… Related posts:
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  2. Archos: Sept 15th Android Tablet Event. Tablet news is on a real high this month and...
  3. Ubergizmo reviews the Archos (Android) Internet Tablet Update: Our own unboxing video is now available. I...

Thursday, October 15, 2009

The 6 Things I don’t like about the Nokia N900

The Unwired View have just published Part 2 of their ongoing N900 coverage which covers 6 ‘things I hate’ about the N900. I agree with most of those points and want to re-iterate the issues of portrait mode and navigation again…

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Wednesday, October 14, 2009

7K+ Years to Count Teachers' Salaries and Benefits Value

At the rate of counting one dollar per second, it would take more than 7,000 years to count the $225 billion of salaries and benefits paid by local, state, and Federal funds to U.S. public school teachers in a year.


It would take more than 24,000 years to count the estimated cost $829 billion of the Baucus health bill just voted out of the U.S. Senate committee he chairs. That's longer than there have been human civilizations on earth.


Wow! That's a different perspective from the ones I've seen before.


Given this frequency count procedure, it appears possible to calculate the dollar cost of academic performance increases in classrooms.


I wonder, then, what it costs for a student to learn /a/ and then how much more to learn /b/? When that's known, we can calculate the distribution of costs across teaching methods and instructional material teachers use, including costs of Tablet and other mobile PCs.


In turn, I think I see a way then to figure teacher performance pay increases based in part on allocating part of the learning cost savings to teachers. I wonder if I can include this line of logic with aLEAP? I wish I'd had something like this as a way to monitor instruction/learning cost ratios while instructing.


First, did I calculate the length of time correctly, Math Teacher?


Second, I wonder if anyone else has followed the same or a similar track?


References


Sagan, C. (1997). Billions & billions: Thoughts on life and death at the rink of the millennium. New York: Ballentine, p. 10.


Five myths about paying good teachers more


Heiny, R. A Learning Efficiency Analysis Paradigm Abstract

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Nokia N900 Live Session Notes, Impressions, Videos (2.5hrs)

The first thing to note from last nights N900 session is that there we didn’t find any show stoppers. Sizing is clearly an issue for some but within the bounds of the size of the device, Nokia have done an incredible job and married it with a software stack that is fit for the next-generation of ‘computing-first’ handhelds for both the geek and consumer community. More notes and videos of the event are available in the full article. Related posts:
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Monday, October 12, 2009

A “TEACHER’S DASHBOARD” FOR A HIGH SCHOOL ALGEBRA CLASS

"Networked Tablet PCs have great potential in classroom settings, including use in small group in-class problem-solving activities. It is possible to obtain substantial amounts of data about student activity during a lesson: what they referred to, notes taken and erased, bursts and lulls of activity.


The raw data is necessarily low level: time-stamped pen strokes, deletions, navigation to and from pages, and such. This data can be used, among other ways, to enable a teacher to monitor learning activities as they happen in real-time.


We call the display of student activity the teacher’s dashboard. We describe the use of a dashboard in several sections of a high school algebra class.


We found that the teacher came increasingly to rely on this display to see how the students were progressing, and the students felt they were getting more timely feedback.


We discuss the challenges in making dashboards that can work in a variety of classroom settings."


Kamin, S., et al. Abstract. A “TEACHER’S DASHBOARD” FOR A HIGH SCHOOL ALGEBRA CLASS. (Captured October 12, 2009, 7:00 AM.)

Sunday, October 11, 2009

N900 Web Browsing (+Video)

One of the key focal-points of the N900, and one it does better than any other smartphone I’ve seen to date, is the browsing experience. Fast, reliable and supporting a full flash plugin on an 800×480 screen with finger-focused controls…

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Saturday, October 10, 2009

‘In Other News…’ October 11th

Here’s the weekly rundown of items that we posted to the middle column on UMPCPortal, our ‘Other News’ section. It’s all good UMPC and MID-related stuff that, in most cases, we didn’t write about as a main news item.

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Friday, October 9, 2009

Update on Fennec from the Maemo Summit

Mozilla are here at the Maemo summit and are presenting information on Fennec, the weave, plugin and awesome bar-enabled mobile version of Firefox. Related posts:
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Thursday, October 8, 2009

Walt Mossberg: OS X no longer “much better” than Windows


In an online review yesterday of Windows 7, Walt Mossberg makes a surprising–or not so surprising admission: that it’s “no longer true…that Apple’s Mac OS X operating system is much better than Windows.”


Mossberg still gives the Mac OS a “slight edge,” but he does believe that Apple has their work cut out for them in part becuase of “better previews and navigation right from the taskbar, easier organization of open windows on the desktop and touch-screen capabilities.”


Notice that? Touch capabilities. Yep, Windows 7’s Smooth Touch gets the nod.


Later in the review he goes into further detail:


Touch: Some of the same kinds of multitouch gestures made popular on the iPhone are now built into Windows 7. But these features won’t likely become popular for a while because to get the most out of them, a computer needs a special type of touch screen that goes beyond most of the ones existing now. I tested this on one such laptop, a Lenovo, and was able to move windows around, to resize and flip through photos, and more.


He doesn’t sound like he tried touch within IE, but then again I’m not sure if the Lenovo he used really supported multi-touch or not. He doesn’t quite make it clear. Multi-touch is, after all, a necessity for a great Windows 7 Touch experience.


He also didn’t mention the Math Input Panel. I guess that makes sense. It’s more for students. Mossberg is more mass-market minded than that I guess.


Anyway, congratulations to the Windows 7 team for getting a near-equal billing to OS X from Walt Mossberg.



Related posts:


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Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Impressive Nokia N900 Web Demo

Nokia are leading into the Maemo Summit with a fresh marketing push this week. I've already heard that there's a press event tommorow evening and at the same time I see that they have released a very impressive video showing details on the browsing performance. Related posts:
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Tuesday, October 6, 2009

New Kohjinsha PA series convertible MID/UMPC

In interesting device popped up at JKKMobile yesterday. A new Kohjinsha device that, according to JKK, could be based on the existing UMID M1. It looks a lot deeper than the UMID, about the same size as a netwalker. Should perform faster than the netwalker too. It's based on the Menlow platform and will be running XP. Related posts:
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Monday, October 5, 2009

Flash 10.1 and smooth online video coming to…everything?

It has been clear for some time that Adobe were working with the ARM and Intel community and would eventually acknowledge that there are components on many devices that can decode H.264 better than a CPU. The Menlow platform has…

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Sunday, October 4, 2009

WVGA ‘Pads’ (Pic) What form factor interests you?


wvga tablets, originally uploaded by umpcportal.com.

All of these, from the 3.5″ Samsung Omnia Pro to the 7″ SmartDevices Q7, are 800×480 resolution devices. Three of them have hardware keyboards (N810, Omnia Pro, Everun.) Only one of them is based…

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Saturday, October 3, 2009

‘In Other News…’ October 3rd

Here’s the weekly rundown of items that we posted to the middle column on UMPCPortal, our ‘Other News’ section. It’s all good UMPC and MID-related stuff that, in most cases, we didn’t write about as a main news item.

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Friday, October 2, 2009

Archos 5 Internet Tablet (Android) Unboxing Video.

Here's the Archos 5 Internet Tablet (Android edition) Unboxing video. So far i'm really liking what I see. No flash support in the browser but YouTube plays vie the built-in video player in excelent quality and the general browsing speed is really impressing. I threw a load of videos at it and they were all recognised (some need an HD plugin) and there's a bunch of exciting apps in the app store. It's early days but I'm feeling really positive about this. If only it had 3G! Related posts:
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Thursday, October 1, 2009

Live session announcement. Archos and Sharp: Our first ARM-based MID session. Friday. 2100 CEST.

On Friday evening at 1900 GMT (check your timezone here) JKK and I will be LIVE again. For the first time ever it’s an ARM-only show featuring Cortex CPUs from Freescale and Texas Instruments. The Sharp Netwalker will be there and, if Mr DHL does his job, the Archos Internet Tablet (Android version) too. Related posts:
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