Introduced to Pace University in New York a year ago by Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, the Kindle DX was meant to be the ultimate tool for college students.  It’s very readable nearly 10-inch screen and large storage capacity were supposed to make it the ideal choice for replacing paper books with electronic ones.

But is it?

In a test program introduced to various college campuses around the US last fall, Amazon.com has been handing out the Kindle DX to students and asking for their feedback.  And so far, the answer is a resounding, “No.”

A whopping 80% of college students in the test program are saying that they would not recommend the Kindle DX  as a classroom study aid.

There are a number of complaints, but the largest of them fall thusly:

• You can’t scribble notes into the margins.
• You can’t easily highlight passages.
• You can’t view graphs and charts in the color they’re meant to be in.
• Flipping back and forth between pages is too slow.
• The bookmarking function to let you flip between important sections in a book is buggy.

Anyone who has studied in college can easily attest to these veritable necessities in using a book.  Studying from textbooks is not a simple linear read, from a page to the next page to the next.  Studying is a complex procedure in which one goes back and forth, highlights important passages, adds notes of their own, sticky-note-bookmarks important sections, and reads and re-reads and add more notes to the same important sections repeatedly.  Quickly.  Easily.

But not if you’re using an e-book reader.  And definitely not on the Amazon Kindle DX.

In theory, other e-book readers, or even updates to Amazon’s Kindle line, might eventually fix some of these problems.  Bookmarking could be done better.  Page turning could be made faster.  Notes, possibly, could even be scribbled into e-margins.  And color, well color is already available on e-book readers not using e-ink.  And on devices like Apple’s iPad.

But will this actually make these electronic devices as good as a real print book?  Can e-books ever be as good as paper for a college student?

And will Digital Rights Management (DRM), making it impossible to resell old books, be a benefit to the industry, as some propose, or a financially crippling hindrance to budget-minded students?

The usefulness of e-books at schools is very much in question.

And then there’s the price.  Maybe if Amazon’s Kindle DX didn’t have competing products that sold for less.  But even then, at almost five hundred dollars, one could buy Amazon’s Kindle DX that is basically only an e-book reader, or one could buy an Apple iPad that can run all sorts of Apps, including ones to read e-books.  Or heck, one could even buy various UMPCs and touchscreen laptops, capable of running actual software applications like MS Office for writing their papers on as well as e-book software and far more.

So given that choice why would any college student buy the Kindle DX then?

Well here’s a shocker (or is that a scorcher?) for you, yet again batteries are being recalled for being flammable.  This time it’s Fujitsu recalling some 2007-2009 AMILO notebooks (Pa2510, Pi2512 and Pi2515 models) with bad batts.

One wonders how after so much time these lithium-ion rechargeables still pose so many problems to manufacture correctly.  It’s no wonder hybrid and plug-in automotive manufacturers are so reluctant to touch them!

So Merry Christmas Fujitsu notebook owners!  Let’s hope what lights up your Christmas tree isn’t a spot of laptop-induced spontaneous combustion!

So I needed a new laptop.  As an independent software contractor, you often need portable computing.  Only I really don’t intend to use a laptop for hard-core computing.  I have my desktop for most things I do at home, especially for gaming.  The most strenuous things I’m likely to do on my laptop is email, office productivity (Open Office, not Microsoft), Python programming, internet, etc.  It’s all fairly lightweight stuff.  So I don’t need a powerhouse “desktop replacement”.  Which means I can look at portability.

Well, gee.  Portability?  That means I can look at the “toys” instead of the monsters.  It was time for a dive headlong into netbook country.

And as I scanned netbook after netbook I was hit by two main things.  First, the “good” ones are really only barely smaller than a full notebook.  What is the point in that?  And two, the “small” ones seem to mostly be cheap little buggers.  And I mean both price and quality.

But then …

I ran across the Viliv S5!

The Viliv S5 "netbook" PC running Windows XP.

It’s an “Ultra Mobile PC” made by Korean manufacturer Viliv, and as far as I know only imported into the US through Dynamism, the S5 is a snifty little bundle of joy.  It’s a fully Windows XP (no crappy “mobile” cutdown OS or Linux Lite^TM) PC with 1GB of RAM and the quaint new Intel Atom 1300 MHz processor.  Not only does it come with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but it even comes with built in GPS.  (No software for the GPS though.  You have to install your own.)  The “Premium” version I got (which is like a nice way of saying the base model) has a 60GB hard drive and no 3G modem.  But there are better versions with solid state drives and 3G modems for the true hardcore road warriors.

Though it doesn’t come with Windows Vista (which to me is actually a plus) there have been people who have already tried Windows 7 on their Viliv S5s and found it to work peachy keen, if not a bit slow.  Considering the hardware, that’s both a surprise and not so surprising.

And all-in-all, so far I’ve found it to be a handy and capable portable computer.  It’s pretty solidly built, which is a good thing for its size.  It’s a touch screen system, which is nice.  There’s no hardware keyboard anywhere on it though, which is not as nice.  But the on-screen keyboard however works fairly well, and probably better than most hardware thumb-boards actually.

The mouse is, of course, the touch screen.  But, since that’s really not good enough for all situations, there are buttons for left and right mouse clicking.  And you can even hold the “Menu” button (normally used to open the Windows Start menu) a few seconds to switch the “jog dial” (in this case an up-down-left-right cursor replacement thumb-stick) into a really painful to use mouse replacement.  (To turn it back into a cursor thumb-stick just hold down the Menu button for a few seconds again.)

And, of course, it comes with a stylus to make touching really tiny buttons easier.  Unfortunately, this “stylus” is in this case a stupid guitar pick on a wristband and not the normal pen that docks into the case somewhere like you’d expect from a PDA-like device.  For something meant to go into your pocket, this is a really bone-headed choice in stylus if you ask me.

The Viliv S5 touts the new “Haptic” touch enhancement, which basically means that there’s a little vibrator that buzzes whenever you touch the screen.  If haptic annoys you, you can also use the software to change it to only vibrate when you specifically use the on-screen keyboard, or even turn the thing off entirely.

It has one standard USB port, one multi-function port for various video-outs, one USB port meant for docking the device to any PC like an external hard drive (which unfortunately, for the life of me, I can’t get to work correctly, but will hopefully be fixed with a software update one day), one single solitary headphone jack (Meaning no using a headset to use Skype because there’s no place to plug in your microphone!), and the expected screen-lock button, power button, volume buttons, etc.

Strangely, the software for the audio ports seems to think there is both a headphone jack and a microphone jack, which makes me wonder if onboard there is, and with some hardware hacking one could fix the much lamented loss of a microphone jack.  Not having cracked mine open, I don’t know.  It’d sure be nice though.

And so, basically, you start to see that while a lot of the device is well thought out and built solidly, a lot of it is still lacking in refinements.  For example, any time I run software that tries to go fullscreen, it causes the screen to rotate, then go black, and then the drivers or Intel graphics must fail somewhere because it kicks right back out.  Meaning as of yet, no software can run fullscreen on the Viliv S5.  Bummer.  Hopefully a driver update will fix that one day.

Likewise other minor headaches include things like the onscreen keyboard for some dumb reason lets you press in between key buttons, so sometimes while typing you suddenly change the focus of what you’re typing on instead of getting the key press you expected.  But the haptic still buzzes happily away, blissfully ignorant that you didn’t just press a key.

Then there’s the lovely way in which some standard windows in Windows and common software applications (including some software installs) are actually too large to fit onto the small 1024×600 resolution of the Viliv S5, making for some very complicated maneuvers using the Windows “move” command just to do some every-day things.

One glaring feature missing is also the lack of any motion detection / rotation hardware.  The device does not auto-rotate for you if you change your orientation.  Nor can you shake it to perform tasks.  How droll.

The battery, which takes up the whole back of the device, is strangely limited to around 5 hours of runtime.  Which is okay … but why isn’t there an option to ugprade to a thicker battery with a longer lifespan?

And worst of all is the crappy software that Viliv tries to make you use.  The “Cube” UI / Viliv MID is cute, but you quickly find it very problamatic.  You can’t simply rearrange cubed icons.  You can’t easily load it up with icons from a full Windows desktop.  There’s no custom category creation option for you.  And features like the weather are very hard to get customized to your local location and in your local units of measurement.  All-in-all it seems like more proof-of-concept software than anything usable.  The same with the media player, web browser, etc.  You’ll quickly be installing your own.

And considering how much real-estate all of the Viliv pre-installed crap (including, I might add, a lot of trial version of Microsoft applications) takes up on the rather small desktop space you have, it’s really quite annoying.  They couldn’t even organize it into folders for you.  Luckily there’s the almighty magic bin (delete/Recycle) to save the day there.

So yes, there are a lot of painful details that Viliv still needs to work on.  The Viliv S5 is not quite the refined device that it should be.  But, it’s just the right size to use as a GPS in your car.  It fits perfectly fine into my pants pocket.  With Winamp it makes a wonderful MP3 / Ogg player.  I can happily use OpenOffice to edit Word documents on the go.  I can surf the net just fine with Firefox.  (Especially after adding a few plug-ins to enhance the touchscreen interface.)  I can play movies.  I can even Hulu.  And if that’s not enough, you can actually get one with a 3G modem built-in if you need the internet everywhere you go.  How many devices do you know that can fill so many roles so easily?

And if Viliv taps a clue, then the upcoming S6 (or whatever they name their S5 successor) may actually be the perfect on-the-go PC.

It’s been many a year that Apple has been running it’s I’m a Mac and I’m a PC adds which have very often held extremely questionable “facts”.  And the Apple advertisements before that have often been equally devoid of truth.  One could amost even say that Apple is better at creating disinformation than it is at creating computers.  Even if Apple is “cool”.

But now Apple’s panties are in a bunch as Microsoft finally finds a way to hit back.  Enter the Microsoft Laptop Hunters advertisement campaign.  Instead of Microsoft focusing on Windows itself, the focus is on the PC … in this case laptops, that just happen to run, you guessed it, Windows.  And in a feature-to-feature price comparison battle royale between PC laptops and MacBooks, it’s really no surprise that each commercial ends with the frugal shopper taking home a PC (with Windows) over a Mac.  Honestly, it’s a good campaign.  Even if Apple’s price changes (no doubt in response to these ads) put some of the numbers into question, the outcomes are still in no way in doubt.  Apple computers simply are more expensive than equally-capable PCs.  They always have been, and as Apple remains prone to keeping Macs closed systems, they always will be.

Just the price changes at Apple show that Microsoft has finally hit on ads that are really bringing it.

But the plot thickens.

At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner told of a phone call from Apple’s legal team, and they were thoroughly unhappy.  This cheered him up to no end, and Turner vowed about said commercials, “we’re just going to keep running them and running them and running them.”

Seems fair to me.

You’ve probably seen a video projector before.  Usually they’re used in company meetings to project the same old boring PowerPoint slide shows while someone drones on and on.  The machines that project the images are big and their lamps hot, often requiring noisy fans to cool them.

But what if it didn’t have to be so?

Lasers could project images like that as well.  Colors (from light) are simply made up of red, green, and blue.  Combining three lasers could, theoretically, produce a laser light show in the form of a projector.  And these days we have some pretty small laser devices that could do the job in something much smaller and more portable than the normal projector.  But the problem is that while red and blue lasers are fairly easy to manage, it’s the green laser that’s been hard to get that small.

Until now.

Corning has managed to produce a new line of small and cheap G-1000 green lasers.  Of which Microvision is using, combining with red and blue lasers, to produce a PicoP (Pico Projector) Display, small enough (and supposedly affordable enough) to be the next big gadgets in cell phones, PDAs, netbooks, and laptops.

Microvision PicoP (Pico Projector) Display uses lasers to project a color WVGA image from something that could fit into a cell phone.

It all sounds pretty nifty, and it has the potential to revolutionize portable computing.  We already have projection keyboards.  Now we have PicoP projector screens to go with them.  A simple PDA how has the potential to completely replace a laptop.  And traveling office warriors now have the means to bring their PowerPoints anywhere.

The Microvision PicoP has a WVGA (800×480) resolution.  It’s full color.  And yet, it’s tiny.  Of course we’ll have to wait to see just how well this innovation works and if it really takes off like the potential it has, but it’s fascinating all the same.

Take a gander over at Microvision to see how the PicoP Display works.