Teach42

I wrote yesterday about how impressed I was with the Microsoft booth. Today I did get a chance to spend some time there and check itout for myself. The main things they were ‘pushing’ were Windows Vista (which I got a new beta CD for), Microsoft Student 2007, and a set of education related templates and tools that are available free to peoplewho own Microsoft Office (the name escapes me right now). To say that they were pushing those products though is kind of misleading. I satdown and chatted with a Microsoft person for about 10 minutes aboutthis and that, and eventually had to ask her directly what they werepromoting at NECC. She didn’t even come close to ‘pushing’ anything until i directly asked for it. Very unusual for a booth at NECC.

Afterwards, I grabbed a smoothie from the bar and headed to the other side of the booth where they had a bunch of Samsung Q1 Oragami devices. Smaller than a tablet, larger than a Pocket PC, and aspowerful as a desktop. Very cool, but there were a few things that turned me off. I popped open word and spent a few minutes trying tofigure out how to get the keyboard to appear. After I finally figuredit out, it was full of strange characters that made it very difficult to see the letters. While there may have been a single button thatcould have eliminated that problem, I never found it. Definitely unintuitive and rather frustrating. I tried to type a few sentancesand found it extremely difficult to type accurately on the software keyboard. I made mistakes aplenty and had to stare directly at the keys to even get close to what I wanted. The new layout is novel, butI’m not quite sure it’s really effective. I think hand writing recognition or a standard keyboard combined with a stylus would have made it much easier.

The second thing that bothered me about the device was that there was no place for a solid state memory card. No SD slot, compact flash slot or memory stick slot. That’s inexcusable for a device like that. If they can fit an SD slot on a cell phone or Pocket PC, they should have found space for it on a sub-tablet device. It just makes no sense that they would require you to use a USB cable to get the photos off your digital camera.

The final thing that threw me off big time was by far the strangest thing I’ve ever seen on a high tech device. Remember those antennae that you have on your boom box? You know, the long silver one that usually winds up getting bent or snapping completely off? Well, this Samsung device had an antennae like that. I swear, it made it look like a Sony Watchman out of the 80’s. So I figured it had to serve some sort of high tech cool purpose, like for a cellular modem or GPS. Nope. Radio. You can listen to the radio on it. They have monster, silver, fragile as all heck antennae built into the shiny new hi-tech sub-tablet device. All of a sudden it went from feeling like the ultimate geek toy to something you might find at a garage sale. It looked tacky, it felt cheap, and honestly it just seemed like a bad idea that somebody should have caught before it made it into production.

There was one major plus that I was incredibly impressed by though. Obviously the device has a USB port. Appearantly the latest version of the operating system will allow any USB memory that’s plugged into there to be used as RAM. So if you plug in a 1gb flash drive that doesn’t have anything stored on it, you’ve just added 1gb of temporary RAM to your device. That’s WAY cool. If only every computer had that feature! Basically a USB powered turbo boost. I’d love to hvae seen it in action, but major ups for that one.

I also had a great conversation with another Microsoft rep about doing many things that I can’t imagine Microsoft supporting in any sort of official way. I don’t want to share any specfics because I don’t want him to get into trouble, but suffice ot say I was very surprised to be having that conversation with a Microsoft rep in their booth. He certainly knew about many of the grayer areas of things you can do with Windows and obviously had some first hand experience with them.

On the whole, I have to admit, the booth impressed me greatly. If they were trying to change the way that people percieve Microsoft, they certainly succeeded in my opinion. For at least the next week or so, when I think Microsoft, instead of thinking about expensive applications, security holes, and blue screens of death. I’m going to be thinking of tie dyes, love seats and lava lamps. Mission accomplished!

technorati tags:necc, necc06, samsung, q1, origami

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