A Week with the TabletKiosk eo

I’ve had my eo UMPC/Origami for a week now and I’ve spent a lot of time with it.

At home, I used it to check my email and rss feeds from the kitchen and bedroom. At work I used it to read through resumes, bug listings and spreadsheets. In the car I used it, along with map software and a GPS, to navigate. On the train, I used it to hack on a little Ajax app. At the Ajax Experience conference, I used it to take notes and stay up to date with things back at work.

I’ve installed most of my favorite apps including Microsoft Streets and Trips, Visual Studio 2005, Notepad++, Firefox, Office 2003 (including Outlook and OneNote), Cisco VPN, FileZilla, AutoHotKey, BallDroppings, Second Life (doesn’t work), Moonbase Commander (doesn’t work), TopDesk, PowerDVD, VNC, gaim, and mIRC.

The battery life is hovering around 90 minutes right now. TabletKiosk promises a fix, soon, that will hopefully get it closer to the promised 150 minutes. We’ve all been trying to help running tests with various options turned on and off. Steve has been organizing that effort and has some documentation at his blog and there is some history over at OrigamiPortal.

The eo was a hit at the conference… crowds gathered a few times and I passed it around so people could try it out. I was careful to mention the battery life concern, but I also talked up a storm about the things I love about it. The dpad and touch point are extremely helpful. It works really well with the ThinkOutside bluetooth keyboard. The screen is vibrant. Video plays well. The resolution scaling makes a lot of apps really usable. All this great utility in a super-light package. I only occasionally wished I hadn’t left my laptop home.

In other news:

With Steve’s direction, I got Linux to boot on my eo. Nothing really works, but you can sort of make out the graphical interface. More details and a link to the Damn Small Linux disto I used are over at carrypad.

Roy at OrigamiPortal has been working on themes for the Touch Pack Application Launcher that comes with UMPCs. I’ve been testing his iPod theme – it’s great!