There are probably only a handful of cellphones available with hot swappable batteries. The Palm Centro isn’t one of them. Granted, this cute smartphone has a user-replaceable battery, something the iPhone lacks. (It also has copy and paste which the iPhone sorely lacks, but that is another story).

The Centro’s ancestor, the Treo 680 definitely doesn’t have a hot swappable battery. Every time you pull out the battery it does a soft reset - a reboot which takes about a minute. In fact, that is the only way to do a soft reset. Now on my Treo 680 this doesn’t bother me, because it is the designated replacement for my electronic brain, a Tungsten C. It just so happens that since it is unlocked I occasionally put in a SIM card so I can make calls.

A hot swappable battery is more of a requirement for a business notebook, or an older PDA which relies on AA batteries. With the Sony Clie PEG-S300 you had fifteen seconds to change the battery before the data was lost.

That’s Opera. It has some advanced features, but just doesn’t seem to gain market share. Possibly the Windows version has too many features, overwhelming the user with what appears to be a steep learning curve?. (I would hesitate to recommend “Opera Web Browser for Dummies” until I’ve read it myself) Up until version 5 Opera was trial-ware; it had an ad-supported free version and a paid full version. Although I know it is a superior browser, and have it installed on some of my machines, I seldom use it. Where I do use it is on Mobile devices where the only other browser is Pocket Internet Explorer. Opera runs on a myriad of mobile platforms, ranging from handhelds to smartphones and even cellphones. Here Opera really excels.

Opera Mobile, which is targeted at smartphones and PDAs is not free. On some smartphones the price of the smartphone includes the Opera Browser, but on most PDAs it costs extra.There is also a version of Opera called Opera Mini. This will run on any device which has a the Java Platform, Micro Edition installed.

Occasionally I run Opera, but then I go back to Firefox version 3. I also occasionally run  Google’s Chrome browser, it looks promising.

Prior to deciding on a 3G iPhone, I briefly considered the AT&T Tilt. It is a Windows Mobile Professional device, previously known as a Pocket PC cellphone (or Windows Mobile Pocket PC Edition). They are usually relatively big, but also quite powerful. The Tilt has almost the processing power of the HP iPaq 110 Classic Pocket PC. Hewlett-Packard has a long history of making Windows Mobile devices, both Pocket PCs and smartphones.

This leads me to the predecessors of the Pocket PC. Without going into the whole history of Windows PDAs, I’ll just highlight two of them.

The Handheld PC, an example of which is the HP Jornada 600 and 700 series, are Windows CE devices. They are clamshell devices with color screens and keyboards. They vary in size from about third to half the size of the Asus EeePC, and run Windows CE version 2 or 3, which looks a lot like Windows 95, with the familiar Start Menu. They even have a Windows key on the keyboard.

Prior to Windows CE, HP introduced a Palmtop computer known as the HP 200LX (see the Wikipedia article here). The HP 200LX was 100% MS-Dos compatible. It has is also a clamshell with a monochrome display and qwerty keyboard. It runs on AA batteries . The 200LX is available with 1, 2 or 4 MB of memory, and more memory can be added with Type I CompactFlash cards. Since DOS programs are small the memory is sufficient.

A green PC from Dell? You could easily come to that conclusion just from the name of their Dell Studio Hybrid Desktop. You would be wrong though. This is a “super small” desktop PC. The closest it gets to being green is the “Emerald” color option. There is also a bamboo shell option available, which may be even more green.

Compared with other PCs in the same price range, the Dell Studio Hybrid Desktop falls a bit short. You could get more power from a similarly priced desktop PC. If saving space is important, a notebook in the same price range would do better. A standard PC would also be easier to upgrade.

On the plus side though, the Studio Hybrid is quite cleverly designed, and the hardware performance isn’t bad for such a small package. It is also quite unique, and is one of the best looking portable desktop computers I’ve seen. This is not a toy computer; it can be configured into a relatively powerful computer.

That is the question. It is often asked about everything from Windows Updates to iPhone firmware updates.

Most large corporations don’t use Windows Update on individual machines, instead they make use of automated patch management, sometimes using a software tools like Software Update Services (SUS). This way updates are applied to test machines before being rolled out to a corporations Windows Desktops. The book “Curing The Patch Management Headache” covers this.

What about home users? If you are fortunate enough to have more than one machine, you can apply Windows updates to the least important machine first, and then to the other machine(s) after a few days. Of course this is assuming you are not running a desktop with Windows XP and a notebook with Windows Vista. The Windows version needs to be the same to do this, and in some case the processor – Windows XP Service Pack 3 initially had a bug that only affected machines with AMD processors. Sometimes though, if the patch is a critical security patch, it is better to apply it rather than wait.

Naturally that brings me to iPhone firmware updates and iTunes updates. To update an iPhone to version 2.1, version 8 of iTunes is required. The first iTunes version 8 for Windows caused machines running Windows Vista to crash. Apple had a fixed version available quite quickly. As for the iPhone firmware update, it is supposedly to fix a lot of problems. User feedback is mixed, so I think I may wait for a while…

This Tuesday was new and updated iPod day. I was most interested to see what changes were going to be made to the iPod Touch. I wasn’t looking forward to the rumored price drops, as it meant that my first generation iPod Touch would be worth even less.

First, the bad news (for me anyway) – the 16GB and 32G iPod Touch each dropped by $100. At $299 the 32GB iPod Touch is still more expensive than the updated 120GB iPod Classic. It still all comes down to functionality though. The 16GB iPod Touch costs the same as the the 16GB iPhone (initially anyway).

The extra features added to the second generation iPod Touch are external volume control buttons and a  built-in speaker. Having used both the Touch and the iPhone, I know that these are the two things I miss the most when switching from the iPhone to the Touch. The first generation of the Touch requires a double tap on the Home button to get to the on-screen volume control. External volume control buttons are much better. As for the speaker, I use it a lot on the iPhone. It also enhances the gaming experience.

The changes to the second generation iPod Touch make the hardware platform a bit closer to the iPhone.

Last week I found myself having to store over 30GB of computer files offline. They weren’t anything nefarious, mainly freeware and shareware computer programs, including Linux distributions. Writing the files to DVDs was out of the question, as I needed to be able to add or remove files. I could have used 4 cheap 8GB USB thumb drives, but it would make it difficult to keep the files organized. Then I thought of a portable external hard drive.

Less than 5 months ago I mentioned a portable hard drive in a blog entry about backups. Then I was  more interested in a cheaper, non-portable external hard drive, although the Western Digital Passport Portable Hard Drive intrigued me. Since then numerous other hard drive manufacturers have entered this market, so there are a number of portable external hard drives available.

After doing some research, I settled on a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 250GB portable hard drive. It has a number of good user reviews, as well as a 5 year warranty. While it is nowhere near as small as a portable thumb drive, it is small enough to fit into a pocket. It also cost less than 4 cheap 8GB USB thumb drives!

Some Windows experts recommend that every year or so you do a fresh install of Windows. It is the drastic action I would only recommend if a PC is running slow from an accumulation of programs being installed and uninstalled and needs to be degunked.

It is not something I particularly like doing to my own machines, but I offered to do it on a laptop which had been given to the local “computer expert” to fix. I had already removed an impressive selection of malware from this laptop, but it still booted horribly slowly and wasn’t as responsive as its hardware specs would indicate. Right then I should have made sure I had the Dell “Drivers and Utilities” CD, instead of finding it out just as I was beginning the process. Also it may have helped to run one of those driver backup utilities, but I was in a hurry to get started. Big mistake.

The data was backed up , so I booted up with the restore disk, erased the main partition, formatted it and installed Windows XP. Then I installed an anti-virus, anti-spyware and a firewall. That was the easy part.
The harder part was trying to figure out which drivers were missing, downloading them from the Dell support site and installing them one by one. Several hours later all the drivers were loaded, and I had started on the Windows updates. Finally I was finished once Office had been  installed and the data restored. I also had my fill of Notebook computers for the day.
The laptop was booting up relatively fast and was quite snappy. At least the laborious process had produced some tangible results.

The lesson to be learned is make sure you have all your backups, Restore CD or DVD, and a drivers disk before starting this. I did all but one important step from past experience but a guide or checklist is probably a good idea. You would probably find one in the book “Degunking Windows“.

A little over five months ago I mentioned Internet Browser Wars in “Browser Squabbles“.
Yesterday Google released their own web browser, called “Google Chrome”. Google used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox to develop Chrome.

Yet another browser? Was my first thought. Just recently Apple’s Safari for Windows was released, and I’ve almost completed the move to Firefox 3. Microsoft is working on Internet Explorer 8. That did not stop me from downloading Google Chrome and having a look at it. It is only the Beta version, but then Gmail has been in “Beta” for  number of years now.

The interface in Google Chrome is notably different from other browsers. Instead of the standard toolbar across the top, Chrome puts tabs across the top. The tabs contain controls like the forward and backward buttons. Each tab can be detached to become a separate window. Each tab runs as a separate process, so if one tab gets hung up for some reason it will not affect the browser. Each tab has its own address bar, which Google calls the Omnibox. The Omnibox handles searches as well as urls.

For an introduction to Google Chrome see the informative comic-book here.

Other pre-Chrome reading is “Planet Google“.