I had an opportunity to try the new eo mcirophone driver update today. It works!

Installation with Setup.exe failed, so I had to uninstall the device from the device manager and then do Add Hardware, selecting a .sys file from the drivers/WDM directory along the way. Pretty painless! The microphone works great now!!

TabletKiosk says they will be releasing the driver soon.

Summary of a conversation with Martin from TabletKiosk about the eo battery life issue:

1. Martin wants to talk to JKK, because Amtek is having the same trouble as TK – they know of no production machines that can get the battery life.
2. Some preproduction units may have been able to get that battery life, so Martin would like to track down JKK and find out where his device came from.  (JKK’s device has a much longer battery life than other Amtek/eo UMPCs)
3. They are working on a driver fix for the microphone.  It’s not a hardware issue.  They are getting close to a fix.
4. They have not identified a specific component (to Martin’s knowledge) that is drawing a lot more power than it should.
5. They do see the whole thing draining the battery too fast, though.  VIA, Amtek, TK and the battery manufacturer are all working on the problem.
6. Martin is still hopeful for a software/firmware fix for the battery problem.
7. The FCC version of the board does not look like the production version, so it’s not a surprise that JKK’s does not look like the FCC version.

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!

Chippy asked me to try and here’s the error message:

“Can’t find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry.  Dropping you to a (very limited) shell.  Press reset button to quit.”

I used the KNOPPIX_V4.0.2CD-2005-09-23-EN.iso livecd.