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Some time back I mentioned an idea I saw on another forum : a sleeve made for carrying two table tennis rackets. Costs next to nothing, sturdy, not neoprene, has a small side pocket, and fits a 10″ netbook just fine… not to mention original 🙂
Tried it just to take a look but didn’t like it much. A lot of stuff wasn’t working. Mint is just as nice and a lot more functional (but then it isn’t experimental either 🙂
It does. I even finally installed Mint as a double boot on my sammy, after trying scores of distros. This one fits just fine.
I’ve heard that this is mostly urban folklore nowadays. Charging electronics in modern notebooks make it unnecessary – even ineffective – to pop the battery in and out all the time, not to mention the tear and wear on the connectors and the fact that you lose the UPS and current filtering abilities.
A lot of new notebooks (including netbooks) don’t have a removable battery anyway.
I don’t know about others, but both mice I’ve had (Trust and V470) had an on/off switch underneath.
My guess however is that these are mostly so they don’t turn on and empty their batteries during transportation and/or storage. In normal use they also know to put themselves to sleep when they’ve not been moved around for a while, even though they’re still connected to the laptop.
In such cases you can feel the split-second delay when you move the mouse again, before it wakes up and the cursor catches up with the movement.
Being the fool that I am, I suddenly decided this week that the black BT mouse I had with my previous (black) netbook just wouldn’t do with my blue sammy… although it worked just fine (a Trust MI-5700rp, see here : http://www.sammymobile.com/plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?9853.post ).
So I ordered a blue Logitech V470, also Bluetooth, from Amazon for 39€, and received today. Here is a short overview after trying it out for a short time.
One post in this thread qualifies it as “ugly” – I don’t really get why. It has a very simple, pure, fluid shape, and to me its design fits the sammy quite well.
It also fits the hand nicely, being compact but not too small. No frills, just the two buttons and the wheel, but it has that overall Logitech quality feeling about it, far over and above the Trust, although the price difference is much smaller now. As noted above, clicking the wheel acts as a middle button, as expected. Wheel action is smoother than on the Trust.
Using a laser pointer instead of regular opticals it feels sharper, faster and more precise. The gliding material underneath is also better, movement is more fluid. There is almost no light emission from underneath, making the little diode on the upper side necessary to show if it’s on or off.
Although it is smaller than the Trust in all dimensions, the V470 is nevertheless noticeably heavier. Mostly this is due to packing a pair of AA Duracells, where the Trust came with two no-name AAAs. This makes for good handling, and probably long battery life. It also comes with an adequate travel pouch.
All in all the main and only criticism I have at this point is that the clicking sound of both buttons is a lot louder than on the Trust, which could be a problem when trying to be inconspicuous in a meeting or classroom… otherwise I’m quite happy with my new toy.
And of course it is blue… not the same hue as the sammy of course, but blue nonetheless 🙂
[quote1238793267=nacy333]
Can anyone tell me if the VX Nano or the V470 allow for a 3rd button click when clicking down on the scroll wheel? From what I’m reading, it appears that it changes modes from freewheel fast scrolling to the normal ‘click’ scrolling.
Thanks!
[/quote1238793267]
It seems the Nano and 470 are different. The scroll wheel on the V470 acts as a regular third button when pressed, as on most mice nowadays.The PDF-XChange Viewer by Tracker Software is quite nice too, has a couple of features lacking in Foxit :
Here’s a fun tip I got from another forum :
If you’re after something on the cheap, look for a shop or site that sells table tennis gear. Some of those “sleeves” made to carry your rackets and balls in are a surprisingly good fit for 10″ netbooks, have side pockets for accessories, and are much less overpriced than computer aftermarket stuff…
I posted this answer to a question in Freddy’s “tweaking” thread (NC10 General Discussion).
I’m deleting it there as it’s off-topic, and reposting it here where it is at least relevant 🙂[quote1234301693=Edsta]
I’m curious…does Open Office have some of the same advantages that say, Firefox has over IE? Like a much smaller footprint, using less system resources, and having faster speed? Or is its appeal entirely because of the fact that it’s free?
[/quote1234301693]Honestly, none of the above. The main point (that many still fail to grasp) is that it breaks the infernal Microsoft mandatory upgrade cycle, and the artificial obsolescence imposed through purposely incompatible file formats. OpenOffice uses Open Document Format (ODF), which is an international ISO standard that any other office suite can freely use. It is well defined, meaning that documents can be generated, or opened and used, by third-party programs – like enterprise applications.
Given that it reads and writes MS-Office formats (even the new OOXML), and that its own native formats are open, you only upgrade if you feel like it, or if you really need some new functionality ; if not you just keep what you have and it continues to work. No more forced upgrades from Word 2 to Word 95 to Word 2000 to Word 2003 to Word 2007 just because everyone else suddenly started using the new version and its file format has intentionally been made incompatible with the previous ones – although you basically still use the same feature set as before.
For individual users, who often did not pay for their copy, this is not really an issue. For small shops the migration effort often proves too much, which is what keeps MS alive. But for large corporations with huge seat counts, the cost of deploying those new versions over and over again is so high (in license fees AND IT staff grunt work) that it becomes worthwhile to shake off old habits, retrain users once and switch over.
Where I work we have replaced MS Office with OpenOffice over a two-year span (2005/2006) on about 50,000 seats spread across some 1,500 sites nationwide. We have a mix of almost all versions between 1.1 and 3 installed. It is estimated that in public administration alone there are close to 500,000 OOo users now, and more switching every day : the truth is, we didn’t have the money to upgrade out of Office 2000 anyway…
But if it didn’t work, we’d know.
PS: there is one similarity with Firefox though, in that OOo has a plugin/extension architecture, which is producing an ecosystem of all kinds of third-party enhancements, small and big, much in the same way as for the Mozilla products.
This can be useful if you want to share your 3G connection with a few people inside a meeting room or such… but for personal use it’s a bad idea, because using Wifi instead of BT will drain batteries much faster on both devices, especially on the phone which is already drawing much power for the cell data link.
I only use the touchpad in cases of dire emergency, otherwise I have a BT mouse, so…
As for the new battery, it will probably fit our sammies just fine, and become available separately, so who cares ?
I’m curious though about the announced jump in autonomy, compared to the actual increase in capacity (in mAh). Let’s wait and see the real-life tests…
Seems like this model is finally coming to market as an “NC10 Mark II” upgrade… with larger touchpad, higher-capacity battery (6 cells, 5900 mAh, 9.4 hrs), but also a glossy screen (bleh) and a 50€ sticker shock. News here (in French, sorry) :
http://www.blogeee.net/2009/02/08/un-nouveau-samsung-nc10-en-approche/
