Jeez! Someone had to say it in the midst of all this doom talk. So, if you’re unwilling to get yourself a shiny, new Mac, follow these steps to eradicate and/or prevent the Conficker worm from taking effect on your Windows box:

1. Don’t use Microsoft’s Internet Exploder or Office software for any reason. Use Firefox and OpenOffice.org 3.x instead.
2. Don’t go to stupid ass sites.
3. Don’t download crap “just cuz”.

That’s it. The Dojo’s comprehensive guide to dealing with Conficker.

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When Vista was announced, it was reveled that Microsoft’s Windows team was yanking features (including WinFS, their new filesystem baby), and then its system requirements, I knew we were in for a rocky road with Microsoft’s obsession with making Windows more Mac-like. I was far from wrong. Vista has turned out to be Microsoft’s least liked OS ever (even less popular than Windows Me, though not nearly as hated as BOB).

Microsoft even stooped to tricking people into liking Vista by showing them Mojave, a tweaked version of Vista. Now, if they’re willing to modify the system to make all references to Vista become Mojave instead, what else were they willing to change… but I digress. I reported here that I would not be upgrading, and for some time I didn’t, but since Microsoft had sent me a press kit with a copy of Vista Ultimate, I couldn’t resist for long.

My fears, however, were well founded, and even on my powerhouse MacBook Pro, the best rated laptop (not Mac laptop, but laptop overall. If you don’t believe me, check it out in PC World Magazine) for running Windows Vista, I was disappointed. I had stability issues, speed problems, application crashes, random errors, and just general lack of cohesiveness, even after upgrading to Vista SP1. So, I removed Vista and reinstalled XP with SP2 back into my Boot Camp partition. I was done with Windows Vista.

But then… along came Windows 7. Microsoft had been telling us that it had been working on Windows 7. Now, my conspiracy theory explanation is that Microsoft determined that they were not going to finish Windows 7 in time to release anywhere near their announced date and so they were going to have a hard time getting rid of Windows XP the longer people used it. Its at the time, I believe, that they plucked a few concepts from their target OS and crafted a version of Windows Server 2008 with the UI elements from the upcoming Windows 7 to cobble together Vista.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. Interestingly, Vista’s release did quell the dissent which was pelting the intarwebs. It didn’t take long, though, for the issues to start cropping up and people to begin complaning. The complaints from all corners of the computing world that it seemingly pushed Microsoft to announce Windows 7 early. They opened beta testing to more developers, and word started leaking out that, while it looked like Vista, it didn’t work like it. The errors were gone, the UI pains were gone or modified to work better, the underlying core was far more efficient, and it all took less resources to do the same thing Vista had so much trouble with.

When Microsoft released Windows 7 to general beta, I hopped on over to my resource and got a copy. I did not, however, want to install it on my MacBook Pro. I already have a nearly year old install of XP SP2 over there, keep it up to date, and play my Windows games over there. Sure, I use Steam, but I’d had to back everything up and it would be a hassle. My wife just stepped on the Averatec AIO, de-tailing the mouse and gouging the screen, so that was out, so my eyes fell to the Averatec Buddy netbook which came with the AIO. I burned the installer DVD (x86, if you’re interested) image to a disc, plugged in my LG external USB DVD burner, and fired it up.

Total install was absolutely painless. It even archived the XP install into the ../windows.old directory and created a boot loader entry for it. I had previously installed Wubi’s Xubuntu, and that boot entry was retained as well. I should note for details sake that I’ve not booted either, removed them from the boot.ini file and deleted them. I wanted to focus on Windows 7 and nothing else. For posterity, Xubuntu 8.10 worked fantastically well, though I was unable to get the wireless module to compile correctly and was unable to test the webcam. Of course, XFce is a fantastic window manager, but its not resource intensive.

That’s good, too, since the Averatec Buddy netbook sports a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB drive, a 10″ 1024×600 display, an integrated webcam, wi-fi and Ethernet connectivity, and SD card slot and an anemic 3-cell 2200 mAh battery pack. Its really no different than just about any other netbook out there and its a repro of the MSI Wind series. From what I can tell, it can even take the replacement batteries designed for the MSI Wind. With less than two hours of battery life, getting a large 9 or 12 cell pack should be a priority. I also wish it had integrated Bluetooth, but you get what you get.

Installation of Windows 7 took approximately one hour, maybe a little less. The process is generally the same as installing Vista, but is cleaner. That may be my imagination. Setup was straightforward, though it wouldn’t accept my key until I entered it correctly (yeah, I’m a dork). W7 intalled drivers for video (Intel GMA950), audio, and Ethernet (everything else is Realtek except the webcam) but was unable to install drivers for the wi-fi adapter, SD card reader, and Buffalo webcam. Installation of drivers spec’ed for Vista was easy, though.

There are a number of improvements to the entire system. I’m not going to get into details in this article. I’ll save that for a full review when it actually ships. I’ve experienced it when Microsoft makes last minute changes to a product after the Beta phase has been passed, so I don’t want to miss anything here. RIght off the bat, though, Microsoft makes it clear that they knew they made mistakes with the Vista interface, so they’ve made nice changes which make it more usable. The first thing you will notice is the intergration of the Quicklaunch buttons, the Start Menu pinning feature, and the list of running tasks all into one neat, clean, tidy, and functional icon.

The taskbar also works slightly differently. You’ll note that the entire Start button fits all the way into the taskbar. This makes the pinned icons or icons from active applications larger and, therefore, easier to see. You can change this behavior by making the icons small (then the Start button protrudes again), add the title, or show all buttons for all windows, just like the old system. The new visual identification system, however, just works better. Its amazing that its taken so many years for Microsoft to get this. Apple finally got it when Mac OS X 10.0 shipped in 2000 and introduced the dock. Linux got it years earlier with various window managers.

The second thing you notice is that everything seems to run faster and more efficiently. One drawback is having to use Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s unfortunate choice for a direction for their web browser. IE7 was bad enough, but it could be tolerated. IE8 is just crap. Like most products Microsoft created based on the successes of others (like Firefox), they have taken what is good from them and created overly complicated and unecessarily obtuse versions. Don’t look to IE8′s add-ons to be anything even vaguely like Firefox’s plugins. I installed one for Skype into both Firefox and IE8, and where the former works just fine, the latter still won’t start, and there’s no clear way to get add-ons to start. Feh.

The third thing I noticed was how theming and interface tweaking has changed. Its mostly the same way as it was in Vista, but they’ve added some important changes. For one, you can now select any number of wallpaper images and arbitrarily decide when they change. Aero also apparently requires far less resources to work right. Linux distributions have proven that transparencies can be done easily on low power systems for years (I don’t count it when the console app shows the wallpaper but not the windows which are underneath… That’s just silly). Aero would not run on a MacBook (pre-unibody) in Vista, but will run on an underpowered netbook in Windows 7. Aero isn’t just some silly eye candy, either. There are subtle little behaviors which Aero can perform which improve readability and object identification.

For software, I promptly installed Firefox for web, Thunderbird for email, OpenOffice 3.0 for productivity, and, for the first time ever, Digsby for IM and social networking. All installations worked perfectly and there were no hiccups. Since I was getting the latest versions of them for installation I didn’t need to do any patching. I also went into Windows Update out of habit and gave that a shot, only to get an error. Oddly, two days later it started getting updates on its own. I don’t know why it happened, but it did. There’s been a long history of Windows fixing itself while giving no indications as to how or why. Maybe it was because I rebooted. Overall, everything I installed works just fine. I also installed Skype 4.0 beta and it works perfectly as well.

SIDEBAR: I’m disappointed and pleased with Digsby at the same time. While its very functional and has a lot of great features, it tries to trick you into installing no less than SIX freaking spyware/cashware/crapware titles onto your machine. You can opt out of each one, but its not a no-brainer. TIP: click the Decline button for everything after the first page where its deactivated (you have to install Digsby). I’d rather donate money to the project. -TCR

Working on a small 1024×600 display isn’t hard, either. Windows 7 has some new features which deal with this (or I didn’t notice them in Vista since I never installed it on a netbook). When you drag a window to the top of the display, it automatically fullscreens it. It will also move dialogs so that the buttons are exposed. They also added a permanent Show Desktop button to the far right of the taskbar. Once I had sussed all of that out, I then installed a few widgets. At first, I thought that they just made the widget bar invisible, but then I added more widgets than will fit, and it showed up in the middle of the screen. That’s when I realized you can place widgets anywhere on the display.

I haven’t tested enterprise networking, directory integration, VPN connectivity, or any of the other elements which made working with Vista a pain in the ass, but most of the crap that Vista dished out seems to have been rectified in Windows 7. Of course, its still running on NTFS and there was no sign on WinFS. I think that Microsoft may be on track to fix the problems they created from whole cloth with Vista, but I don’t think there will be a way to fix the growth Apple has made into their territory, and that’s a good thing. Microsoft needs to do a lot of growing up. It will have to innovate in order to remain relevant. Windows 7 is just a start.

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I’m not going to press for the usual in what to be thankful for. I’m far too jaded for that and I believe that there is way too much hypocrisy in the US to make being thankful even vaguely valid. What I will say, and I apologize to you Republicans who read me, is that I’m thankful to President-Elect Barack Obama who isn’t sitting on his ass waiting to get into office. He’s working now to save all of our asses. I hope and I pray that our choice was right and that he really can fix this broken country. I have faith in him and feel that he can.

If he does, that’s something I can honestly be thankful for.

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What set me off is my freezer chest. I have a freezer chest which has sit in my house for the past year not getting used. The wife had been drilling me to get one for years saying that she’d use it and that it would be great. So, I get one and what happens? Nothing. Sure, we have some stuff in there, but it consumes maybe 10% of the overall space, which doesn’t seem a good ratio to me. So, I put it up on CL today. One person queried about it and I never heard back, then some dude sends this (I’ve not edited it aside from removing the regional details):

When is a good time to show it? I live on [REDACTED] near [REDACTED], so I wouldn’t mind going in the morning or at some other time to take a look. I am seriously interested and really do want it, but I will bargain on the price because I could get one new for less than 200.

Wow! Dude! So why not go get one for less? I’m asking $150? Isn’t that $50 less? I don’t know, as I’m not a math genius! This is the kind of thing I’m starting to see everywhere, but I’ll focus on IT. My wife is endlessly combing the gigs in CL hoping to find me something to do “on the side” to make some extra money. All I’m seeing is one person wants to have all of their data recovered from their crashed hard drive and expects all nerds to have “cleanrooms” in their apartments! Oh, and the guy can only pay a few hundred. Um. If you didn’t check, which is clear, these kinds of jobs require extremely expensive equipment and time and can cost in the thousands.

How about the lady who needs to have everything plugged in for her and can only pay $20, or the dude who wants all viruses cleaned off his computer for $5 an hour, or the company that wants to hire an IT guy slash mailroom dork for $10 an hour. How about the people on eBay who are warranty obsessed! If you want a warranty that badly GO BUY IT NEW! I’d put up one of my old Mac laptops and I’d get 15 queries about warranty! Did any one of them pay attention on the note I had in there about how it didn’t have warranty coverage or even bother to notice that it was 7 years old? No!

People’s emails are getting bad, too. Its like the whole idea of foreshortened communications has grabbed hold of America’s unified intelligence quotient and ripped it out wholesale. Some guy on a website asked about how he could improve his position since he’s been on the helpdesk team for over 7 years and still lives at home. It was no wonder that he wrote in anonymously, since it appeared to be penned by an 8 year old, and he claimed to have a BS in biology! Shocking, people! Where is the pride? Where is the belief that we’re the greatest country in the world? What happened to the idea that you have to earn it to get it?!

Apparently it got flushed down the toilet with the guy who was able to trade a red paperclip all the way up to a house. Expectations, people!! Apparently its all about free these days. If you can get it free and its mostly as good why should you ever pay for it again, yes? Its sad because, as a country, we’re losing out way. We’ve lost most of our manufacturing jobs because people don’t see building cars or computers as a skill. No! That’s akin to digging ditches! We can’t build things or perform labor intensive tasks, no! We’re all in Hollywood or advertising or we work in some office in front of a computer and sit at a nice desk.

We get cappuccino’s in the office and lunch handed over cost free. We get paid well enough not to care how much gas costs and other, stinkier people from other places do the hard things. Its amazing, because the people whom we crap on, those who do the hard work and get their hands dirty? Yeah. They’re happy to have the work and to earn the money, and a lot of them… I know, this will shock you… A lot of them actually take pride in their work! They are pleased they could build a house which doesn’t fall over in an earthquake or create a beautiful garden full of flowers or make your Mercedes work again after you rammed it into an SUV while tailgating and chatting on the phone.

That nice salad you paid $20 for at Spago? Picked by someone who makes a lot less than you, and yet they have a family to feed and a car to put gas into and bills to pay and family back in their home country to send money to. They likely even have more responsibilities than we do, and yet they scrape and scrimp every last thin dime and probably don’t spend much time watching TV, much less even having to worry about their digital cable, HD TV, DVR, and big ass leather couch.

So, what about the decline of man in the modern age? We’re too advanced, aren’t we. We’ve worked hard and our ancestors died for us to have what we have today, right? We earned those SUVs and McMansions and flights to Aruba, right? We earned the right to not have to actually build or maintain what we earned, right? What we are earning is the right not to choose where our goods come from. We’ve earned the right to have our financial power taken away from us by someone who is hungrier than we are. We’ve earned the right to lose our political status in the world. We’ve earned the right to select the president we don’t want because we’re not willing to get up and vote.

We’ve earned the right to wallow in our losses and pain. We’ve earned the right to watch an entire city be destroyed by the sea and not be able to rebuild it. We’ve earned the right to watch thousands of our young men die at the hands of others because of a lie. That’s all that we’ve earned. So, next time you go looking to buy something on Craig’s List, take a moment to see where the other person might be at. Think about why they’re asking for the amount they are asking for and maybe NOT chisel them down because it all about you.

Think about someone else and someone else might just take the moment to think about you back.

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Maybe next we’ll see Microsoft trademark Toilet Paper™ when they fire up their campaign to “Wipe Away Vista” at the introduction of Windows 7. Maybe Cisco could use it to “Wipe Up After LinkSys” and get some reliable consumer gear onto the market. Is there truly nothing left to discover in computing? Has this market become so much like commodity Wheat crops that technologies individual values are nearly worthless and we turn to monetizing simple language just to make a buck? Does Dell truly expect that if it trademarks the phrase ‘Cloud Computing’ that consumers will think that only Dell is doing it? The whole concept of ludicrous in the extreme.

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Some people just move the cable to the printer from one machine to the other. Others delve into the periodically annoying and frusterating world of network-based device sharing. Others who care not to engage in such tomfoolery just duplicate some things. This is where the new Kensington ShareCentral line of device management products comes in. Kensington shipped me a ShareCentral 5 the other day, and I’ve been putting it throught the paces to see what its made of.

RIght off, I’d say its made of some pretty nifty technology. When I first received it I made the almost immediate discovery that what amounts to a 5-port USB hub is first and foremost an ingenious USB device aggregator. Here’s how it works. On the back, as you can see in the illustration, there are two USB Type-B sockets, one for each computer. There are then 5 USB ports and a power socket for the powersupply. Install tiny little drivers on the two Macintosh or Windows systems (or mix of the two) and plug them in.

My assumption would be that the driver sets up a number of virtual device ports on the host computer so that they can all talk at the same time. This is fantastic because then all you need to do is plug in a single USB cable to access all of your devices, something which could possibly allow for cleaner cable management. Of course, its a little too expensive to just use as a device aggregator, but as a device sharing tool, it strikes a fair bargain.

To test the ShareCentral 5, I set it up on my desk where I have an HP 7800 Small Form Factor PC running Windows XP SP3 and an older PowerPC-based Mac Mini running Leopard. I removed the keyboard and mouse from the Mac and installed the drivers for both Mac OS X and Windows. I was a little disappointed at the poor quality of the CD-ROM supplied. It seemed rather poorly created, but it worked well. I would have preferred a dual format CD for users who may not be as well equipped to work with technical issues as I am.

I then plugged in each of the supplied USB to Computer cables (one is shorter than the other for what I would assume to be an effort to reduce entanglement) into each of the machines and connected the wireless dongle for the Logitech LX710 keyboard and mouse combo. It popped up in Windows first. I then clicked the button with the keyboard and mouse icon on it, it flashed a few times, and jumped to the other side. Now the Mac was using it. It was seamless, though it took a few seconds.

I tested a printer and a USB hard drive formatted in FAT32 and each worked flawlessly. I even tested switching with a hard drive from the Mac to Windows without first ejecting the drive and it apparently doesn’t complain, which means that the driver must add that functionality. I can’t confirm that just yet because I haven’t tested it to my satisfaction, though, so don’t take my word for it. Otherwise, everything works as advertised.

The box comes with everything you’ll need inside, including a little rubber gromet thing which can attach to either side and act as a cable guide in case you want to plug in a laptop in front of the device. Another nice touch are the four buttons which are magnetic. If you mount the device on a wall, you can rotate the images. If you want to put on custom buttons, it comes with three numbered blanks. Very well thought out, aside from the CD, of course.

Its solid, well built, and very functional. I appreciate the Mac OS X support, as well as the seamless operation between systems. It would be nice if Kensington got really platform happy and developed a set of Linux drivers, but we can’t get everything we wish for, do we. It is now available for US$79.99 direct from Kensington and, I would presume, from their retail partners.

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What is a MID? A MID is a Mobile Internet Device, a term coined by someone else whom I don’t care to lookup. It could have been Intel. It was Intel, in fact, which coined the term UMPC, or Ultra Mobile PC, which Microsoft later called its Origami Project. Much like the Tablet PC before it, people did not flock in sizable droves to purchase UMPCs with wild abandon. This is mostly because people don’t like them or find them useful. They are large, heavy, and cannot be closed to protect their screens. The market, indeed, is telling Microsoft what it wants. They do this by calling the large number of new micro-lappies UMPCs.

That is, after, what they are. It all started in earnest with ASUS’ Eee PC, a tiny sliver of a lappy, able to do just about anything as long as it didn’t require significant processor resources or touchtyping at over 100 WPM. Since the Eee PC shipped, there are now at least eight other competitors on the market, including products from HP and Dell, all of which are sub-US$800 systems, with most of them selling for under US$400. This brings us to the MID. The MID is what falls into the space being created for the pocketable PC. That idea which came to then Apple CEO John Sculley for a personal assistant which could go everywhere with you has come around again for another shot at the big time.

This time, however, Apple has already made their successful version and now others are trying to catch up. Its not just about the iPhone, though. Its about a range of different product technologies which are all coming together and finding that the technologies have improved enough to make certain technologies viable. In this case, its the MID; a convergence of the PDA, the mobile phone, the iPod, and a desktop computer. Yes, a desktop computer. Why? Because MIDs are capable of running Windows XP, various Linux distributions, and, in one case so far, even Windows Vista, though its not recommended. I would assume that by the time MIDs hit the market, someone will have hacked one to run Mac OS X, as well.

This is a compelling idea, yes? How could it not be compelling to be able to carry a full-sized desktop OS in your pocket and use it whenever you need, you say. That’s going to be a problem, though. Desktop OS are designed to be used with a mouse and a keyboard. We already know from the Tablet PC experiement that its actually more complicated to use a desktop interface with a pen and no keyboard, especially when entering data. That’s when using an interface designed for pen interaction becomes useful, but from years of experience with Palm and Windows CE based OS, I know that there’s a very limited amount of interaction you can have with a PDA OS.

It all comes down to data entry. If its going to be hard to enter data, then it won’t be used to enter data, and the MIDs will not fulfill their promise of a more powerful, portable computing platform. It will be another larger, faster PDA which uses more battery power and isn’t as convenient. Then again, I could be entirely wrong, and heaven knows I’ve been wrong before. The MID could be that bridge device which carries us into the next decade eyeing Star Trek’s science fiction concepts with confidence and swagger. Imagine a future where we get up in the morning, check out our news and answer our spam-free email, then grab our MID (which was acting as our desktop system in a cradle) and head out for the day.

We check movie times, verify our appointments with clients, set up a date with a GF or BF, plan a trip to Vegas with our pals, and all the while feel confident that we are computing in one place, with every iota of it being backed up constantly. That one place might just be our MID, a small, pocketable module which uses an Ultra Low Voltage CPU which still runs fast enough to run all major internet and office applications and is made even more powerful when connected to the home dock which adds a CPU, an optical drive, an additional hard drive for archiving and third-stage backup, and a video card to run an HD display. This rig will also allow you to make a receive video calls either at home on your big screen or while you’re out and about enjoying the fast and freeing WiMAX network.

Sadly, this is more a PR firms descriptive text than a possible reality. This IS, after all, what we want. This is not what we get, though. Competition prevents that from coming to fruition. To make such a device reality we would need to see technology sharing pacts between Intel, Microsoft, Apple, AMD, ASUS, Vonage, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Sun, EMC, Linux, and possibly the Pope. They’d all need to get together and say, “hey! Regardless of the fact that our individual survivial and success means that we must grind 2/3rds of you into the dirt within the next 20 years, we’d like to work with you to make this global computing environment a possibility within the next two years. Sound good?”

Yeah, right.

Among all of the other issues, I could see the entire Republican party having a simultaneous coronary and the FTC’s Antitrust department having some serious issues about all of this. Most of the companies in my incomplete list simply aren’t creative and forward-thinking enough to even be engaged in a part of such a conglomeration, much less spearhead it. So, in the end, the MIDs will just be another market niche. They will likely even sell well, though I predict they will sell more and offer more variants and models in Asian countries than here in the States. Ultra portables have long sold well in Japan and personal media players (the video kind) are very popular in Malaysia and South Korea.

In the meantime, Microsoft is busy making Vista the standard in the world and Windows 7 will just be larger and require more resources than Vista, completely the opposite of what a MID market needs. The best desktop OSes for MIDs are Windows XP, Mac OS X, and the king of the hill in embedded performance, Linux. Microsoft wants to kill XP dead, though, despite the fact that the market is making it plain and clear that it doens’t want to lose XP. Microsoft is making it equally clear that they don’t care what the consumer wants. Apple listened and produced the iPhone. If they ever make a larger, tablet-like one, then their MID will be perfect and complete. Linux already works perfectly well on a range of embedded systems.

So, again we are confronted with the truth that Microsoft isn’t interested in playing the game by the rules everyone else is cotent to play by. Not only will they not take their ball home so nobody can play, but they will replicate the ball and forcefully install it into every home in the neighborhood until people accept it as theirs. The telecoms are the same. Sprint has no interest in playing with Verizon or AT&T, and the latter two could care less about the others. It is their aim to win and not taking over the entire market is losing, so you see where we’re going there.

The reality is that no, MIDs will not be the tricorder, they won’t work like KITT, they won’t be an R2D2 to our Luke, and they won’t know how to make dinner reservations for us. They will be just another dumb tool which looks nice, costs a lot of money, and takes up space. Might as well get an iPhone and be done with it.

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The Cuban government has just released restrictions on its citizens having home computers. I don’t suspect it will take long for various vendors to start getting their little laptops down there. ASUS, you seeing a market for your Eee PC yet? Maybe not, since Raul Castro didn’t un-ban the Internet. The Communist government claims that the US embargo stops them from connecting to the cable. We’re friends with China and they’re communists! What gives, Bush?

It looks like the Psystar Mac clone isn’t fake, after all. At least there seem to be a few out there that people are talking about. Gizmodo and Engadget each have at least one. Guess they aren’t fakes after all.

Kensington has a new battery charger for the iPhone, though I’m sure it will work with other dockable iPods. Boy Genius has the poop on a clamshell handset from RIM, supposedly dubbed the BlackBerry KickStart. Finally, Microsoft is no longer pursuing the deal for Yahoo so you can stop trying to come up with new names for the merged force of nature (i.e., MicroHoo!, YahooSoft!, MicroYAHOO!soft, The Yang-Ballmer Love Child or YBLC, or just plain Microosoft!).

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The HP iPAQ 110 Classic is one of those devices. Its not a phone, but it might as well be. In fact, it runs Windows Mobile 6, which behaves just like the Professional versions of the same OS for mobile phones. The only things lacking are the phone-specific functions. On the other hand, it does feature both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and 802.11b\g wireless capabilities, both of which can work at the same time. I, however, digress. I should be performing a formal review, so let that begin.

The Outside

Usually I’ll wait to start working with a new device once its charged, then I dive right in. However, in the case of the 110c, I was interested to see WinMo6, so I fired it up when I plugged it in. No harm, no foul. Since I’m describing hardware right now, I’ll refrain from OS observations. Suffice it to say, the 110c is a standard PDA format device. It has a screen on the front, there are some buttons along the bottom of the screen, and there are holes and buttons elsewhere on the device.

The display itself is a 240×320 QVGA type with 16-bit color and a touchscreen interface. In today’s hi-res display climate, the 110′s screen looks a bit pixelated, but the speed of the 624MHz CPU processes video very well, so its not terrible with video. The color is very good and the brightness is excellent. Small text sizes are also very readable, though Microsoft needs to offer more controls over how text is displayed, and it would be nice if someone (anyone?!) were to pay attention to left handed people again*

On the right side (screen facing) are the Power and Voice Recorder buttons with an inset reset button between. There is a headphone jack on the top right. The buttons work, but are maybe a tad soft. It won’t turn on, though, unless you press the power buton. The stylus is badly placed on the back of the unit next to the headphone jack and lacking sufficient notching to make it easy to locate and retrieve by touch. I’m much happier with corner mounted silos.

The case overall is two materials. The front is a smooth, smoky dark silver, shined to appear like metal. The back is a curved matte black expanse which feels slightly rubbery to the touch. I rather like it as it makes the device feel more secure in the hand, though it does scuff very easily. I LOVE the original iPAQ’s from Compaq, but they were so amazingly cool that they were slippery. The “sticky-ish” backing instills confidence. This is good, too, since the device is very, very light, even with the battery loaded.

The battery itself is user replaceable, but that’s not all. This device is USB rechargable. So much so, that you can plug it into a Kensington portable battery pack and recharge it in an hour. The interesting part is that there is a power control panel which controls whether, via USB, you charge over time or quickly. I’m sure it has something to do with quality of charge.

The Inside

It may be sufficient enough for me to say this: If you want to know what Windows Mobile 6 looks like, just use a Windows Mobile Smartphone. I have a Palm Treo 700wx and the interface, while slightly different, works almost identically. This isn’t necessarily a benefit for a PDA since people don’t use PDAs the same way they use mobile phones.

One of the issues I had with the new unified interface is the functions which, at least on a mobile phone, are performed using the contextual buttons. You know, the buttons just under the screen on your phone which do what the label on the screen says. They do that on the 111 as well, but there are no physical buttons, so you have to touch the screen to activate numerous functions or step through configuration wizards.

Otherwise, its a standard WinMo device with all of the expected applications like Office, Media Player 10, Internet Exploder, and the various tools that come part and parcel. HP decided to toss in a bunch of other stuff, too. One of the nice inclusions is a copy of ClearVue PDF. They also have a pair of utilities, two of which are Today Screen plugins. One controls wireless, both 802.11 and Bluetooth, and the other gives you quick information about the rest of the device, including a backlight control.

The Wrap Up

The PDA of 2000 is dead. The idea that you can get around without a mobile phone, a digital camera, and some kind of wireless connection to the internet is also dead. Products like the iPhone prove that. The PDA is 2008, however, is alive and is, in some small way, still a player in the overall market. HP’s iPAQ 110 Classic proves that, and its clear they now know that scads and scads of models do not sell devices. You can get yours for a mere US$299, though you may want to take a look at the more expensive iPAQ 210 Enterprise just in case.

*Not since the days of the Apple Newton MessagePad and early days of Palm were there UI elements designed to be swapped for left-handed people. You have no idea how much better a user experience can be by simply placing the scrollbar on the left side of the screen.

[Editor's Note: We made a running typo in the story which transposed the "110" for a "111". Please note that this review is of the iPAQ 110 Classic. There are no other review elements which need to be changed to correct this problem. Thanks! -Ed.]

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