I really wanted to do a proper, long and detailed wrapup post for SXSWi but I’m not going to because there was just so much going on and it’s still digesting in my mind what transpired in Austin. That and I’m really tired due to a day at the airport, flight delays and BBQ withdrawal.
So in no particular order, here’s some thoughts on what happened in Austin over the past week:
this year was way bigger than last year - lots of people guessing on the numbers so take this with a grain of salt but it’s ’supposably’ 50% bigger than last year. So that puts it somewhere between 5000 and 10000 geeks in one place. This was especially evident since previously, you’d always run into people you know but this year, I know there were people I knew in Austin and yet I never managed to see them in the halls/panels
I wished I made it to the I Can Haz Cheeseburger panel - they were actually giving out hamburgers to the audience
12 sessions per time slot does not work
10am panels are very hard to attend
there needs to be more technical panels. Of all the ones I attended, only two could be considered (by me) technical and they were incredibly well attended - as in standing-room-only-geeks-sitting-in-the-aisles-fire-hazard kind of well attended. Of course since there was 12 sessions in every timeslot (plus other stuff in and around the convention center), it’s entirely possible there were more technical sessions.
the panel rooms need to be reworked (again). Nothing sucks more than having to go from room 18ABCD to Room C - it’s like walking to Surrey from North Vancouver. I’m all for the walking but when you consider that a panel ends at say 11am and the next one starts at 11:30am, it doesn’t give you much time to actually talk to the panelists afterword, or with friends about the panel before you have to start hoofing it to the other end of the convention center to get a decent seat for the next session
Twitter stayed up during the whole conference which is a huge deal since it was probably the number one web site talked about (yes, even more than Facebook and the infamous interview). Impromptu ‘Tweetups’ happened everywhere and were awesome. Your twitter name should be printed on the badge next year (everyone just wrote it on theirs this year)
Internet access generally seemed better this year…except at my hotel which crawled. The convention center’s wifi was much more robust this year and they had a 802.11n access point which was great. Also more and more venues had free wifi so it made using Twitter and checking Google maps a breeze. My prepaid AT&T sim also got a good workout and thanks to some flaky hotel access, ended up costing more than it should have - see my $12 flickr photo for one example:
Apple should have sponsored a shuttle to the Apple Store…there was a convoy of cabs there from the convention center on a daily basis.
Canadians showed up in force this year. Not just the 20-30 Vancouverites I knew were going either….great folks from across this great land came down and had a great time
Once again, the Raincity Studios crew had the best, most coveted t-shirts (read about it in the L.A. Times) and hosted the best party at the Iron Cactus. My second favorite shirt (after the Space Invaders RCS shirt) is the “Hacking is not a crime” shirt I picked up from the MAKE booth
in Austin (and probably just for SXSW) the term ‘Ranch’ can mean many things. What I didn’t expect it to mean at the Pure Volume Ranch (home of the huge Digg party among others) is dirt floors covered in wood chips and port-o-lets. Moby and Kevin Rose didn’t seem to mind.
Finally had a chance to visit the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas (outside of Austin)…been coming to SXSW for three years and always heard about it but never had the chance to make it out there. It lives up to the hype
you can buy iPods at the Houston Airport from a vending machine
iPhones were everywhere and mine at least was indispensable during the trip. From the wifi that was available everywhere, to the Google Maps locate me feature, it was easily the most used item I brought. Using the sched.org tool to make a customized calendar of sessions/events/parties to attend, it was easy to see where to go next or what our options were if we decided to change our minds.
I was able to get a tag for my camera that I should have exploited more. Strangely, I saw all kinds of cameras (not just DSLRs) with the tag, including a tiny little lipstick-sized webcam. There also seemed to be some discrepancy as to who should get a tag as Peter was denied just minutes after I got mine.
If you don’t like Rockband, be glad you weren’t at SXSWi….every second booth in the Trade Show had it setup and many events used it as a focal point
Adobe had a sneak peak of their new Adobe Media Player in a bar with a live band and a skateboard halfpipe. Nothing kills a party faster than trying to demo your software on a projector in the middle of a bar AFTER a decent local band played while skateboarders used the halfpipe in front of the stage. Still surprised about the presentation’s inappropriateness and the fact they thought they had to explain RSS feeds to a room full of geeks. The Media player actually looks decent (if not a little iTunes-ish) but they really need to work on the promotion side of things and figure out who the people that attend Southby are
Most heard/overused word/phrase I heard this year: ‘Fail!’ or used in a sentence: ‘Epic Fail!’. #2 was ‘iPhone’. #3 was “I’ll have another Shiner Bock”.
There wasn’t as many MacBook Air’s there as I would have expected. Consensus from those I talked to about it was they were hoping for more from Apple - or technically less as they wanted a true replacement for the 12″ Powerbook in screen size (or even smaller). It definitely got a lot of looks and was asked to hold it many times. There were a ton of eeePC’s in attendence which was cool to see.
I managed to head over to BarCamp Austin between sessions at the convention center and sit in (briefly) on the iPhone DevCamp. As if the fact there was too much concurrent content at SXSWi, the fact that an awesome BarCamp AND iPhone camp was going on at the same time. Too much to do, not enough time to take it all in.
As if you aren’t already tired of me talking about the BBQ, all the food was amazing…well except maybe not that late night pizza from 6th street
That’s pretty much it for me and this post…as I said at the beginning, there is still a lot of digesting to do (bbq and otherwise) so I may add to this once I’ve had time to take it all in.
As in I’ve had it for 12 hours….not a 12 hour long review….although there are a lot of pictures.
Obviously I haven’t had it long enough to really put it through it’s paces but here’s a bunch of photos and a few thoughts.
As with all Apple products, the packaging alone is a fantastic customer experience. The MBA comes in a box that reminds you of a board game….I’m not talking something from Parker Bros, but something more elegant. The box is sturdy dark cardboard. The lid has foam glued inside that at first glance looks like velvet. It’s always the little things that make it that much better.
Once you take the lid off, you’re greeted with the MBA in a black plastic tray with a little “Designed by Apple in California” tab that you use to lift the laptop out of the tray and access the other items hidden below. Despite this packaging and computer being Apple’s greenest device yet, the plastic tray has a recycling number 6 which at least around here, isn’t recyclable - maybe it is in California.
It’s deceiving at first how thin it is because you assume the plastic tray is deeper than it really is. You can see in the picture above, the MBA isn’t much thicker than the iPhone. Here’s the MBA snuggled up to the eeePC (both are flat on the table and flush with each other):
Of course since I had the MBA delivered to my office, there was a crowd of people anxious to see it. Some wondered why I didn’t just open it and why was I stopping to take pictures of the box. They now know why.
Once you pick it up, you immediately realize that it’s more solid than you’d expect and does have some weight to it. One big concern many have with the MBA is how fragile it might be because it’s so thin. It feels just as solid as my Powerbook G4 every did while at the same time being light as a feather. It feels well crafted, not unlike a high quality kitchen knife does.
Unlike other Apple laptops, there is not much to the underside of the MBA. There is no battery indicator light which is disappointing nor is there any way to lock up the laptop via lock port. I guess there was no secure place inside to make a lock point. The port door is also much more solid than I was expecting and definitely doesn’t feel like it would break off or stay open - it’s very solid.
The backlit keyboard is fantastic and just like the new keyboards that come with iMac’s and similar to what you find on a MacBook.
Once I got it home, the first thing I did was do a clean install of Leopard with the included install DVDs. The stock Leopard install on any new Mac actually has a lot of wasted stuff including 3.4gb of unneeded printer drivers, 1.8gb of language files. It also has 240mb of space wasted by iWeb. This gives me just about 63gb free with nothing else on it yet. Leopard and iLife take up a fair amount of space and removing those unnecessary files will help once I start using the MBA.
Since my MBA Superdrive hasn’t arrived yet (expecting it tomorrow), I had to use my ‘full size’ external DVD burner which worked no problem over USB.
Now that the install is complete and the Apple pr0n has been uploaded to Flickr, I’m going to go play with it.
Leave a comment if there is anything you want to know about it.
This is already a pretty sweet little device and this just makes it even more interesting.
I’ve dabbled with Linux for a long time and only recently started using it semi-full time on my eeePC.
Now while this IS pretty cool, I think I’ve spent my gadget money for awhile. Maybe Nokia’s Blogger Relations can hook me as I’d love to check one out.
Always curious to try new things, I figured I’d try out Ubuntu (gutsy) on my eeePC. The nice thing about Ubuntu (and many versions of Linux these days) is that they are available in ‘live cd’ versions which means you just boot up the cd image that you burn after downloading and then you can take a test drive of that version without actually committing to it, meanwhile whatever operating system is actually on your machine is left in tact.
Knowing that it only takes a few minutes to wipe the eeePC and restore the default Xandros linux back onto it, I took the plunge and installed Ubuntu to see how it would run - a live cd install is slower than a normal install since it’s all running off of the cd and swapping into your system ram. Turned out there was a fair amount of tweaks that would be needed to get it fully operational on the eeePC so I went back to Xandros the same day.
Then I stumbled upon Xubuntu which has a distribution for the eeePC (surprisingly called eeeXubuntu) which you can read about (and download it) here.
Here’s a not-so-brief video (not mine) of the bootup sequence and some basic system usage:
I’ve only had it running on eeeXubuntu for a few days but so far, I’m really impressed. It is much more user friendly and consistent than the default Xandros was. It’s also much easier to add applications, customize settings and generally tweak than the other OS’s I’ve tried on the eeePC so far. Boot up is a little longer than Xandros but the nice thing it seems to remember all the session info correctly so that probably makes up for the extra boot up time. The battery indictor also works much better with a time remaining as well as a percent remaining indicator. With the battery hovering around 4+ hours with wifi on, I’m pretty happy!
I also really like the nicer user interfaces for customizing things - in some ways it feels more like a Mac than I expected it to especially when compared to other flavors of Linux.
The only real issue I’ve encountered so far is the occasional bootup that doesn’t recognize that I’ve got an 8gb SDHC card in the SD slot but that is usually resolved by a simple eject and reinsert.
Now if only Google Reader was more accommodating on the small eeePC screen - even with a compact Firefox theme and the toolbars dialed down, it’s still hard to navigate my feeds. Sure I could use the mobile version but it’s too stripped down for my power-usage.
The other night after DemoCamp, kk+ asked me about my eeePC and how it might compare to the OLPC (aka One Laptop Per Child project). I got to play with one at SXSW earlier this year at the MAKE booth and wanted one very BADLY at the time. Of course, it wasn’t available to the general public yet.
I’m a sucker for just about any tech in green and this is a green laptop! Granted it really is geared more towards kids (that didn’t stop me from getting a Nintendo DS or many other toys/gadgets), it’s still a fully working computer with a number of cool features. At that time, it was rumored to be waterproof, have fabulous battery life and even have a hand crank so that you could keep it going if you were away from an outlet.
Both are about the same price except the OLPC actually gives you two machines for the price of one eeePC - except one goes to you and the other goes to a child in need somewhere in the world - which is a really cool thing. I can only imagine what it would be like to be a kid and get one of these things.
I didn’t have much more than about 20 minutes to play with the OLPC whereas I’ve had my eeePC for just over a week now so this comparison is a little biased towards the eeePC.
Let’s start with their keyboards:
The eeePC’s keyboard is a much smaller version of a regular laptop keyboard
The OLPC’s keyboard
As you can see from the above photos, the OLPC might actually be a better keyboard for typing since it’s not quite as squished together as the eeePC’s but it’s a rubbery button style that may not be as nice to type on….I think it would boil down to personal preference. At least you could spill your coffee on the OLPC’s keyboard and still be fine. The eeePC’s keyboard is your standard keyboard - one thing that bugs me about it versus any kind of keyboard Apple makes is that you see all the metal bits and pieces underneth the keys….Apple always seems to make them disappear by either painting them to hide or simply engineering them differently like on the new MacBooks and their new aluminum keyboards.
The above chart shows the size of the physical units and their relative screen sizes. The OLPC has a bigger footprint and a slightly taller viewable screen size than the eeePC.
When I decided to get an eeePC, it was for a couple of reasons:
size
weight
hack/expandability
formfactor
price
can I upload my DSLR photos to flickr with it
availability
The last item was pretty important at the time since I had just sold my Powerbook and wanted a replacement. The OLPC had just started shipping and I figured it would be a hassle getting one up in Canada. The eeePC was available at my local computer store and they had stock. The flickr aspect was also pretty huge and the eeePC has a built in SD card slot so uploading photos to flickr is dead simple.
I also figured that while both devices are the same price, you are actually getting two laptops with the OLPC which sends one to a developing country and you get one whereas you are potentially getting more computer with the eeePC. If I had kids, I’d definitely get them an OLPC over the eeePC since it seems to be a bit more durable and geared towards them, not unlike Nintendo products (which I also love).
According to ASUS, the eeePC is also geared towards kids and seniors but I suspect the majority of their sales has been to geeks like me that want a decent notebook that travels well. I’d feel more comfortable bringing the eeePC to a meeting than the OLPC….but from a philanthropic perspective, the OLPC is definitely a better choice. If I had tons of money, I’d have both machines.
I haven’t seen one of the shipping OLPC’s around town yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long before one pops up at some nerd event. My eeePC has been pretty popular so far and it’s not even green…yet. I’ll post again on the OLPC once I’ve had a chance to further compare it to the eeePC.
UPDATE: Of course, I post this and then Laptopmag.com posts an in-depth comparison ;)
On Saturday, I attended the first MobileCamp Vancouver, held at Workspace which makes my second visit there in two days…if I didn’t already have an office, this is where I would set up shop. It really is a cool place. There was lots of things to talk about during the event - too many to blog about. I particularly liked John Boxall’s session on iUI for the iPhone which I’ve been playing with. It’s very easy to work with and works in most browsers (except IE, of course).
Decided I couldn’t resist opening the little door on the back of the eeePC and upgrade the ram (now at 1gb from the stock 512mb) and the mini pci-e port. There was some debate as to whether or not the port would actually be there or not….appears to be in mine!
Have pretty much decided to not to bother with OSX on this simply because it’s too much of a kludge to get it running and the default Linux is pretty decent…although I may try installing XP on a USB thumbdrive since it pretty much turns things into a dual boot situation.
I’ve been digging into the eeePC user community and there are some fantastic resources already out that have a TON of great info. Figured I’d give them some linkage since they have been so useful:
UPDATE: It appears that Asus has decided that users can upgrade their memory on the eeePC without voiding their warranty which makes sense since every computer manufacturer allows this practice. (via eeeUser)
Well, shortly after selling my Powerbook, I discovered and acquired an Asus eeePC - pronounced ‘E-pc’ - the three e’s stand for “Easy to Learn, Easy to Work, Easy to Play”.
I’ve only had it a few days and can safely say that it has exceeded my expectations. It’s been fun taking this $399 wonder to work and showing coworkers the device. You’d swear I brought a puppy in by the way people have been reacting to it “Ah, it’s so cute and small!”… not to mention the procession of people coming by to check it out….I think Asus owes me a commission or two.
I’ll spare you the technical specs but so far it’s done everything I’ve wanted it to do considering the 512mb of ram and 4gb solid state drive. It ships with a custom version of Linux that has really impressed me with its speed and completeness.
They’ve really done a great job in making an accessible linux variant that my mom could easily navigate. It’s pretty easy to reconfigure it for a power user as well (aka Advanced Mode).
The dvd that comes with the unit also has Windows XP drivers so you can go that way (I’m happier with Linux) or you can track down on your favorite torrent site a special build of Tiger or Leopard OSX to install. As I previously posted, I wasn’t too successful but I’m sure it’s just a simple install config that I didn’t set correctly. I’ll try it again soon as it’s easy to restore back to Linux with the included restore dvd.
Here’s my initial impressions:
Good:
it’s friggin small!
build quality is much higher than expected
onboard speakers sound pretty decent considering their size
comes with a nice, long power cord without a giant brick, just a medium sized wall wart plug with collapsible prongs
boot up and shut down are FAST
the onboard webcam is decent with a fast refresh
the Linux install is quite speedy and I haven’t encountered any performance issues really
Bad:
the keys are a little cramped (duh)
limited theme/skin choices in Linux
Skype didn’t support video chats out of the box (you had to download the beta)
the mouse ‘rocker’ switch feels like it will be the first thing to break
There are other things to talk about in future posts so I’ll wrap up this one with a ‘mini’ video review from the Dallas Morning News:
There was lots of things to talk about during the event - too many to blog about. I particularly liked John Boxall’s session on 
