Saturday, May 21, 2011

Early days


I really wanted to buy a ASUS 121 and have a 12" windows screen with digitiser and a pen that works well, but, being a cheap skate I decided that I would buy the acer Iconia w500 instead for half the price and see how it went. So I ordered it online and it turned up two days later.


My first thoughts when I got the Iconia was that I had made the wrong decision, but time will tell.

The first thing to note is that Windows 7 on a 10 inch screen gives you very small controls and if you have big fat fingers making the device do what you want is a bit trying. So today I raced off to the shops and bought a $19 stylus for an Ipad, which works wonderfully. If the $3 pens that I ordered from ebay earlier in the week work as well I will have pens up the warzoo, but I couldn't wait. So I recommend that you order one or more pens from ebay so they arrive when you get your w500. I went to the apple shop to get a pen and no they don't sell them but all of the sales people have them on the neck strings, Mr Jobs would probably turn in his grave (if he was dead), I am sure he said something to the effect that no one wants to use pens on tablets.

So what you get is a Windows 7 tablet with a Acer skin.

The Acer skin gives you access to some games ( which I have no interest in ) the built in cameras and keyboard, quick links to social networks, a calculator and a couple of management tools thats it. If you want the tablet to be useful you have to configure it yourself.

First few things I did was plug a network cable in and connect to my home network.

Next was to setup synergy on the PC so that I could share my keyboard and mouse, synergy is neat it allows you to use one keyboard and mouse over multiple PCs. Had some dramas doing this due to the firewall on the Iconia but fixed that by turning it off. Will need to turn it back on eventually.

So you want an ereader. I tried Kindle for the PC but that only works with Kindle books so that went into the recycle bin really quick. Then I tried Calibre, Calibre is good in portrait but not so good in landscape, Calibre can handle all sorts of ebook media and fits my needs. Issues that I have with it, it is its not really designed for working on a tablet, runs ok but the buttons could be bigger but as I want the w500 as a work productivity tool the erader is secondary so it will do nicely.

Because my intent is to have the iconia primarily as a tablet and not a laptop I have maximized the icons on the workbench ( right click on work bench select view select large icons ) , this way the big fat fingers will be able to select the correct icon. Your not going to get too many big fat icons onto the workbench so I created a folder on the workbench for those apps that I use all the time and create shortcuts to all of the apps that I wanted. Click on start select All Programs and then press ctrl and click and drag a copy of the shortcut to the app to your application folder.

Skype, I started skype and found that I could not connect, fix was easy, went into Start->ControlPanel->Programs and deleted skype and downloaded it again, installed the software added my username and hey presto up she popped.

I have this thought that I will be able to replace my paper jottings at work with the w500 by using w500 pen and OneNote, so to that end I am installing OneNote 2007, I already have it installed on my laptop and I find that OneNote is terrific, will see how it goes on the w500.

Next thing to do is to try and get remote access to my desktop / laptop working but I am not sure that I will be successful, I read something that I need Windows 7 Professional and the w500 has Windows 7 Home Premium so that may be an insurmountable obstacle - I shall see.

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