Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Circuit City and Motion Tablets

I've noticed over the past few months some use of tablets (Motion LS800) by Circuit City staff. Nothing real noticeable unless you look for that kind of stuff (I do).

Last week I was at the Circuit City near the Sawgrass Mills Mall (South Florida) and noticed a guy wandering around with a Motion Computing shirt on. There also seemed to be a lot more employees around than normal.

Looking closer, a bunch of the employees were carrying around the Motion tablets. Turns out there was a training class for the use of the tablets at the store. Employees from all over Florida were there to be trained on the use of the Motions.

I spoke to a couple of guys who were in the training and the seem to like the tablet. A couple were even playing with them while outside smoking.

This seems to be a perfect marketing opportunity for Circuit City and Motion. With the CC staff using the tablets, it will bound to spark some curiosity by customers. What better way to encourage sales than to have the tablets available for sale in the store?

When I mentioned this, they said the tablets may be for sale via the CC web site, but probably won't be in the store. This seems to be very short-sighted. People get tablets by playing with them, not viewing them on a web site. Even a demo model at each store would be preferable.

Come on Motion and Circuit City, take advantage of this and sell some tablets!

Vista Build 5472

Hardware - Acer TMC204 TMI 2 gig memory, 2.0 gHz

This is a new install on a new partition, no upgrade to XP.

The build installed nicely on the tablet with no issues. The time for install wasn't bad, about 30 minutes. After the install I noticed some activity where it was calculating hardware performance, that was new ( or I hadn't noticed it before).

Glass came up with no problems. It is nice, but I don't really see the value in it.

Beta 2 worked ok for me except for speed. because of that I removed it. I did an install of 5456, but had screen rotation problems. When I would rotate the screen, the screen would go black, I could see the mouse but nothing else. Re-booting would put the machine in the last screen orientation. I tried the nVidia drivers to solve this with no luck.

I was hoping this problem was fixed in 5472, but it doesn't seem to be. I need to experiment more to see if I can get it resolved. nVidia may have some updated drivers that I can install.

More to come.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

The Acer after 3 or so months

I've had my Acer Tablet for a little over 3 months. Over all I am very pleased with the tablet. The performance under XP is nice, the fit and finish is nice and the battery life meets my needs.

I bumped the machine up to 2 gig. I also moved to a 120 gig 5400 RPM drive. I was unable to use the recovery disks on the new drive, so I imaged it using True Image from Acronis.

If there is a disc in the slot, picking the tablet up and moving it makes a grinding noise. Avoid doing this.

For the battery, using OneNote 2007 and no wireless, I typically get over 3 hours of time on the machine. This is with the 6 cell battery. I don't use the 3 cell enough to know the runtime, but it appears to be about 1.5 hours.

I've installed a few builds of Vista on the machine. Beta 2 I removed due to performance issues. I just put the latest build on the machine. I need to reinstall Office 2007 to get a feel for how this build will work. One problem I had with Beta 2 was the drivers and screen rotation. Rotating the screen from the control panel applet (I couldn't get the hardware buttons to work) would cause the screen to go blank with just a mouse cursor. The nVidia drivers only show primary landscape as the option. The Glass effects were set up during the install. Previous builds I had to monkey with it to get it to work properly.

It's a good tablet and I'm glad I bought it. For the 800 or so I saved from the Toshiba, I think it was a good investment.