One year with the Nokia Booklet 3G

It was a bit after midnight on December 21, 2009 that I noticed something on twitter. Some stranded tourists needed to find each other during their road trip in Australia. I followed the links and found the location of a gas station via a geo-tagged picture. As a reward, they sent me a Nokia Booklet 3G.


N97 | My Booklet 3G

It arrived a couple of weeks later after some fun with customs and DHL. I was glad to find I got a sleek black unit. It's a pretty light machine and I love the 1280 by 720 screen resolution. Windows 7 Starter Edition was not very fun to use. The slow slow hard drive and 1GB of ram made things worse. While the keyboard was a joy to type on, it came with a Finnish keyboard. Lots of characters were in foreign places and the second alt key was needed often to get to the highly trafficked @ symbol.

I used my Booklet mainly for watching video. It is so light, I could lay in bed and have it rest on my chest. Being so small, it fit in my small day bag. The sim card slot came in handy often. I remember one time I was riding in a car and purchased tickets to a show that often sells out in 10 minutes.


N97 | What is that squiggly thing in the upper left where the ~ normally is?

When I get new gadgets, I typically try to tinker with them. After checking the Nokia discussion boards, I found that the Booklet was easy to take apart. The keyboard and hard drive were easily replaceable. I made a post to see if any one would want to trade my Finnish keyboard for an American one. After a couple of days, I got a reply to do the exchange. It took a few weeks for my keyboard to get to Finland and for the replacement keyboard to arrive.

While I was waiting for the keyboard to arrive, I bought an SSD to replace the slow hard drive. It was really easy to remove the hard drive and putting the SSD in. It was pretty hard installing Windows 7. The Booklet's chipset doesn't support the TRIM function of the SSD I purchased. I had to make a bootable USB thumb drive and then loaded Windows Vista. Once installed, I made sure TRIM was disabled by fixing some things in the registry. I then made another bootable USB thumb drive with Windows 7. This process took a whole day. The SSD made a significant change in speed.


N97 | Booklet 3G with US keyboard and SSD.

A year later and I have another netbook waiting for me at home, the CR-48 with Google Chrome. I'm looking forward to making a comparison of the two computers.

suggestions
ambient light sensor, backlit keyboard, upgradable ram, better video card,

More ado with the Nokia Booklet 3G

I've been using the Nokia Booklet 3G for a couple of weeks now and I love it. My favorite thing to do with it is watch video. With its 1280x720 screen, I can watch HD content with no black bars.

I haven't found a suitable way to download my daily podcasts. I started out with Miro, but it doesn't use hardware acceleration for playback. I tried a few other downloaders before I settled with Get Right, since it has resume support.

I had trouble getting video to playback in Media Player Classic, which has an option to open video in fullscreen. It doesn't quite support the Booklet 3G's Intel GMA 500 graphics chip set and plays back via the CPU. With the Booklet 3G's Atom Z530 processor, this turns into a sad experience.

I'm now using Windows Media Player. Video plays back perfectly, as WMP has great hardware support. Get Right feeds each download into a playlist for me. Only problem is that Windows Media Player won't playback in full screen automatically.

Life is more mobile with the Nokia Booklet 3G

This is my new Nokia Booklet 3G. The story of how I acquired it is here.

The Booklet 3G came with Windows 7 Starter edition. I plan on upgrading it to Windows 7 Ultimate soon. I bought a 4GB SD card to make a Windows 7 install disk, but that didn't work. Since the Booklet 3G only has 1GB of ram, I'm using the SD card to use for Readyboost. This has helped a lot and sped up the system a bit. I plan on getting an SSD to really speed things up.



It has a Finnish keyboard. It took me a while to figure this out and configure Windows 7 for this layout. The keys are pleasant to type on, I love chicklet keys. I'm hoping a US style keyboard pops up on ebay soon. The touchpad supports mutlitouch. I haven't picked up the hang of using it.



The Booklet 3G is really thin and light. It fits in my bag and I've started taking it with me everywhere. Since my Booklet 3G has a 900/2100 radio, it won't be recognized by AT&T and I can use the $10 Medianet plan instead of the $60 laptop data connect plan. Since Firefox is location aware, the Booklet 3G has become my social media tool of choice. I check in with Gowalla, a site that takes great advantage of the location feature and is easy to use since its designed for mobile browsers.

Last night I checked at the Egyptian Theater to see a double feature Superman and Superman II: The Richard Donner cut. I couldn't get a location while I was inside, so I had to wait until I got outside to check in. After the movie, I saw these guys out front:

I had a wonderful White Christmas

HDR - White Christmas, originally uploaded by Al Pavangkanan.

I spent my Xmas at my brother-in-law's house in Oklahoma City. On Xmas eve, it snowed all day. There was 10 inches of snow on Xmas morning.

I made my first HDR with my Nokia N97. I used a pen and the touchscreen and I think the result is a little blurry, but adequate. It would have been better if I had a bluetooth keyboard.

A few days ago, I was following @aussietrip on twitter and won a Nokia Booklet 3G for helping Kylie find where she left John on their 48 hour trip in Australia.

Today, I got a a bit of money and a George Foreman grill. I'm really looking forward to making grease free meats.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!