Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

I don’t always have access to my WordPress dashboard whenever I have an idea for a blog post, so I tend to rely on my tablet (which is always two feet away from me) and Microsoft’s awesome OneNote 2007 application to tag any cool thoughts or ideas that come into my head. As far as digital notebook applications go, OneNote is hard to beat. It support various levels of navigation; you can have any number of notebooks, each with its own set of folders/tabs; each of those can have any number of pages and subpages. It handles just about every content type under the sun, as you can embed audio recordings and files into your notes, and most documents support being inserted as a ‘printout’ so you can write directly on your PowerPoint slides or what have you. You can also use the built-in clipping tool to grab screencaptures of specific applications or parts of a web site, something I do often.

You might have also noticed that I occasionally post entries in ink. While my setup using Windows Live Writer and the ink plug-in isn’t quite as robust as Sumocat’s build 51 implementation (which supports making inked words into links),I think it makes for a nice change of pace from the massive amounts of text (and the occasional image). I think ink adds a more personal touch to posts, even if my handwriting is terrible!

Some other cool tools I’ve found include InkSeine, a Microsoft Research prototype geared towards searching(and organizing the results) with ink alone, the Physics Simulator (included in the Microsoft Tablet PC Experience Pack), and Crayon Physics, a puzzle/physics game that’s more-or-less perfectly suited to the input methods on a tablet.

…in saying some stuff about the release of the new iPod lineup. While I will contest that the shuffle still is, and will always be, utterly useless, the rest of the lineup looks pretty solid. Apple’s managed to extend video playback across all of their players now that the nano is sporting a bigger screen. The classic looks nice. 160GB of storage is totally ridiculous in a good way. You have to understand that I thought I had a lot of music with around ~1500 songs (6.10GB), so something like that would give me nigh-infinite expandability. I’m a fan of quality materials, so I was pleased to see the move to an all-metal casing for the classic. Should be a bit more damage resistant as well.

The real kicker here is the touch, and after hearing on digg that it runs the same apps as the iPhone, I’m sold. A great music/photo/video player coupled with WiFi, an awesome interface, browser, and potential for SSH and other nifty apps is a winner in my book. It has great potential as a thin client! The 16GB of storage doesn’t bug me, as all of my photos and music could fit on it with room to spare.

Also, I hear that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to iPhone owners, offering $100 in store credit to everyone who bought an iPhone before the announcement yesterday. There’s some good PR for you.

Obligatory jab at Microsoft: The Zune came up today in our conversation during MK399 - Marketing High Tech Products and was met with a fair amount of snickering. “It would be good if you could find another Zune user to share songs with!” said the audience. I didn’t think it was a bad device when it was launched; it just didn’t do enough to differentiate itself from the competition.

Also, I finally managed to get ActiveRotate working on my tablet, which re-orients the screen based on how you’re holding the machine. No more manual rotating when I go from laptop to tablet mode!

What do you guys think of a device that can switch between being a standard tablet UMPC and a handheld device with a week of battery life in handheld mode? The HTC Shift has dual sets of hardware, one for the tablet and one for the Pocket PC, that give it this unique ability. You can check out Hugo Ortega’s Inkshow at GottaBeMobile.com for some more information and an excellent review of the unit.

I think devices like this could have a solid position in the mobile device market!