This is a bit of a placeholder, since I linked to this post from another post before I'd actually written this one. There should be a longer review along soon - no more than a few days.

Like most people, I've been through a bunch of mobile phones in the past few years, keeping at least somewhat up with technology - when I was in the UK, it was funded by subsidies from the operator once I signed a contract, but I've been buying phones retail in HK and been quite happy on a no-minimum-term contract, in particular one which gives me a decent amount of included voice minutes and unlimited GPRS. I don't actually talk on the phone that much, since most of my communication is either online or face-to-face nowadays, but having an always-on connection terminating at a smart device in my pocket is quite nice.

It's small, it's sleek, it's got a smaller but brighter screen than my Treo 680. The interface is a little slow, but the individual programs are fine. The world of UIQ3 software seems very small, even compared with the sadly shrinking PalmOS world. The built-in email software is usable, even if it behaves slightly strangely - Chatter Email for PalmOS is nicer, but that's a dead end now anyway since the author was hired by Palm. The signing thing complicates things a bit and probably contributes to the shortage of third-party software, as does the UIQ/S60 split. The built-in media player is quite nice, even if it doesn't do Ogg - or for that matter, AVI. Getting used to handwriting recognition and a phone-type keyboard rather than a qwerty keyboard is taking a bit of time. The battery life is almost certainly longer than the Treo, but I haven't really stress-tested that yet. I wish they'd just use a USB connector. Full Java support is nice, and makes the software situation a little less disastrous. I'm waiting for the first OS update for what is a pretty recently-released phone, which will apparently have some Flash support - I don't care too much for Flash, but it would be nice if it gets delivered with a newer version of the Opera Mobile browser. Alternatively, there is some work going on to put together a webkit-based browser, which should be able to handle most/all iPhone-targeted sites, which would be nice. I might do some hacking at some point to remove the Chinese support, which might make some of the input quicker. I wish it had the hard soft buttons of the G700, rather than the soft soft ones, but I think the wifi and better camera are fair exchange. Wifi on a phone is nice, but I haven't really had a chance to use it on a public network yet, rather than at home. My mobile network are offering access to their affiliated wifi network for almost nothing if you are already paying for a data plan, so I've signed up and will try it out sometime soon. It's a 3G phone, but my (current) phone network is 2G-only, so I can't comment on 3G at all. It cost me $3780, standard Hong Kong retail price, but I've got a year's interest free credit so I'm paying around $315 per month and the shop threw in: (deep breath) spare battery and charger, screen protector, SE gym-sized bag, a voucher to get some crappy stickers for the phone, a 2GB memory card, a couple of pads and fridge magnets in the shape of the phone, two cans of Coke Zero and a large metal retro-style Coke thermometer. They call it dark brown, but it's really just a slightly 'warm' black.

How's about that for a brain dump then?

I live in a medium-sized apartment, in Hong Kong terms. We've got a reasonably large living room, two comfortable-but-not-roomy bedrooms and smallish kitchen and bathroom. During the change of flatmate, I moved from one bedroom into the other, because the new one is slightly larger and has more storage. Our broadband connection comes into the living room, where there's a file server in the corner and an 802.11n wireless router box thingy, but unfortunately, that puts the bathroom between the wireless box thingy and my bedroom. The bathroom which has thick concrete walls which do a pretty good job of blocking 2.4GHz signals, apparently. In the bedroom, there's a weak, slow and unreliable signal from the wifi box which is only really a few meters away. I'm not entirely happy about this - I've got quite used to having wireless in my bedroom for things like watching TV in bed, late-night IM and so forth, particularly with the EeePC and my new wifi-enabled phone thrown into the mix. Incidentally, a little testing shows that my GSM signal strength also drops significantly between the living room and the bathroom.

So how to solve this problem? I tried moving the wifi router box thingy around a bit, which didn't make much difference, so I decided to throw a bit of money at the problem. I went down to Wanchai and bought a couple of no-name cheap Homeplug boxes for $500 the pair (approximately £32 or US$64). There are more expensive brands and more expensive standards - there are three generations of the technology in use, analogous to 802.11b, 802.11g and 802.11n for wifi. There are strict warnings in the short documentation for the homeplug boxes saying that you must only ever plug them directly into the wall, not into power strips, but that simply wasn't going to happen - I'm a techie living in a flat with a real paucity of power sockets and it would be impossible to dedicate two of them to networking. So, I plugged the boxes in and they work - really not that much more to say that that. They are pretty slow, comparable to 802.11b, but that's okay because that's all I paid for. They have some support for on-the-wire encryption, but you need to load up some Windows management tool to do that, so I'm running them unencrypted.

Phase 1 complete - I have a working network connection in my bedroom.

Unfortunately, I'm greedy. I don't just want a working wired connection, I want a working wireless connection. The next thing I tried was to repurpose my old Dell laptop, which has been almost completely replaced by the Eee, as an access point. That was... not a great success. Without a wifi card and driver which supports running in Master mode, you're stuck with an ad-hoc network, which is a lot less reliable than Infrastructure mode, particularly in a dense urban environment where any channel is going to get interference from other wifi devices, not to mention microwaves, TV signal senders and so forth. One notable thing I did find while trying to get this to work was parprouted which does virtual bridging between networks using ARP, rather than actual bridging which doesn't work with wifi interfaces. Parprouted does seem to work, but the network itself let it down.

I finally (?) solved the problem last night. One thing which most techies have is a drawer/box/room/large warehouse filled with spare bits and pieces which were useful in the past and might be useful again in the future, and which are being stored against that possible future use. Deep in one of my storage vats was an old Apple Airport Express, possibly the first 'travel router' designed for use in places like hotels, which might provide a wired connection but not wifi, or would charge extra for it. It can also do streaming audio and run as a printer server, but I've never used those - I have used the wireless bridge before, however. After a lot of faffing around trying to get a copy of Windows XP running under kvm/qemu to see the little AE box on the physical wired network, I configured it up, plugged it all in, and I seem to have a nice reliable wireless network in the corner of my room now. It is even happily acting like a real bridge and routing between the networks, over the virtual cable supplied by the homeplug boxes, rather than doing NAT and running its own DHCP server, which is the usual mode. In the end, I've got two little boxes lying on the floor in the corner of my room, and all is well!

There's also a bright blue network cable running right across the middle of my living room, but there are always sacrifices...

There have been a couple of interesting questions asked recently on LUGRadio, and I thought I'd make a quick stab at answering them for myself. No, nobody has shown any interest in my answers - and I don't really expect them to - but I'm going to inflict them on you anyway!

LUGRadio Top Trumps

For this segment, the LUGRadio blokes scored themselves on a number of attributes, representing the factors which bring them into the free software arena, and showing each of their biases towards certain benefits or features of free software. For me, the scores are:

Freedom crusading: 7
I care quite a lot about freedom, but in a practical way. Over the past 12 years or so, I've got used to having complete control over my environment, to doing things the way I want to do them. As an example - I choose to use neither GNOME nor KDE, sticking with Afterstep, which I've been using for something like 10 years now. Also, and this will come up again below, I'm very used to not worrying about buying licenses for software, to just assuming it works. In my current project, we have some complication because the tools being used were purchased as a bundle - which ends up meaning we can't use one tool unless we also install the others on the same machine. That's just alien to me.

Cheapness: 6
I don't care about paying for software, as such. What bothers me is the idea of saying "I can't use tool X because my company won't pay for a copy". Again, I've got very used to the idea that if there is a tool I need, and someone has already created it, I can use it - I don't have to worry about buying a copy, about time limits on trial licenses, anything like that. One way to look at it is that I'd be reasonably happy in a world where all development tools were free of charge, but it was necessary to pay for deployment - because then the cost of software gets bundled in with the cost of actually providing a product or service, rather than the cost of creating it.

Supporting the underdog: 5
I think this was a lot more important a while ago, but frankly, Linux isn't really the underdog in my world. I just assume that Linux (or possibly another Unix-ish system) would be the normal thing for networked servers, and even in the end-user world, I think Linux is pretty much up to parity now. My flatmate and I have approximately 7 x86-type computers between us (don't ask!), all but two are running Linux, and one of the Windows PCs is almost unused, because it's almost unusably slow and overloaded with crap. She is not a techie, even if she is happy with gadgets, but owns one Linux machine herself, and quite happily uses my home fileserver and both my xbox, running freevo, and her Windows laptop to play entirely legal video files from it.

Community: 5
Again, I used to be a lot more interested in community stuff, but to some extent I think I've grown out of it. I work with computers all day, I tinker a bit at home, and use them a lot, and I'm getting less interested in hanging out with computer people for fun, if being computer people is all we have in common. Honourable mention goes to #Python on Freenode, which is a relatively smart community, and even, sometimes, has smart newbies. One problem I have with community events is that I am relatively advanced, and if I'm not going to learn anything in an event, I find it boring - I want to be a student as well as a teacher. I find I have less patience with dumb newbies than I used to, and I often can't be bothered to answer simple questions where a simple Google search would have saved both their time and ours. I should admit that this also has something to do with having moved to HK, where the community is not as strong as in the UK, and having managed to get somewhat of a real life instead...

Tinkering: 7
This is a slight cheat. I don't really tinker as much as I used to - see above about growing out of stuff, getting a life, etc. - but that's partly because I have done my tinkering and I have a system and a setup I'm really comfortable with. On my work laptop, on my home PC and laptop - I am running a very similar configuration, which I've worked out over years and, while it does change if something better comes along than I have now, that hasn't actually happened for a while. One sign of this is that I've done very little tinkering with the Eee PC - that's partly because it comes pretty well setup out of the box, but partly because I can't be bothered tinkering and just want to use the thing!

So, them's my scores. I didn't really know what scores I was going to give myself until I started writing this, and I suspect I'd have given quite different scores a couple of years ago. The other interesting question was what would cause someone to leave the community, which can be interpreted as switching to proprietary software, or just stopping any active participation in the community. I can think of two reasons why I would leave:

• Because some of the choice in the community was lessened - the particular examples I'm thinking of would be if one distribution, one desktop environment, something like that, got so entrenched that people who chose not to use it were effectively excluded. At the moment, I am not using the most 'mainstream' of free software technologies - by choice - but that doesn't mean I miss out on much. In general, I can do whatever anyone using, say, GNOME on Ubuntu can do, even if it takes me slightly more work. If that ceased to be the case, I'm not sure I'd stick around. This is quite unlikely...
• Much more likely would be because some new, widespread technology was completely unusable with free software. An example would be something like DVD decoding, or 802.11n support - if someone managed to get such a technology widely adopted, and also managed to completely exclude the free software world, that might be a deal-breaker for me. There have been times over the past few years where things like that looked possible, with things like DVD decoding, 3D graphics support and so on, although thankfully it looks a lot less likely now as Linux has become more mainstream.

Anyone else want to answer?

I bought myself a new toy on Sunday afternoon - an Asus Eee PC, technically, the 701 model, but it's the only model available on the market right now anyway. The specs are easy enough to find, but for a brief run-down:

• 900MHz Celeron processor
• 512MB of DDR2 RAM
• 4GB flash memory, no hard drive or optical drive
• Onboard 802.11b/g wireless, graphics, and sound
• 3 USB 2.0 ports, MMC/SD/SDHC reader
• Webcam
• 7 inch, 800x430 screen
• Built-in stereo speakers and mono microphone
• Keyboard, trackpad with two buttons
• Tiny and light, almost unbelievably so
Cheap - I paid HK$2998, which is £185 or US$386 at today's rates
• I'll say that again, this is a complete laptop for £185
• Runs Linux out of the box

It's quite hard to believe just how small this thing is. This photo shows it sitting on a sheet of A4 paper:

It weighs very little, but feels sturdy and solid in my hand. The slightly pearly white finish looks quite nice - wannabe-Apple, but slightly different. It comes with a slipcase in black, a white power adapter with a really long cable on it, a couple of bits of paper, and a DVD with Windows drivers on it. For the record, yes Asus will support you running XP on it, and they do provide drivers, but it comes with Linux (a lightly-modified version of Xandros), but don't don't intend to say any more about Windows here.

The keyboard and the screen are both... adequate. Neither is big, neither is great, but both are about as good as one could expect from a machine with these size/weight/price specs. The keyboard is perfectly usable - I'm not using it right now, because I happen to have a real keyboard in front of me, but I've been using it a lot for chatting over the past few days, and it's fine for that. I may end up remapping one or two keys, because I disagree with the layout, but that's a personal thing, mainly. Of course, the fact that it's running Linux, is what give me the confidence to say that I can just remap the keyboard to my whim... The screen is clear, plenty bright enough, 100dpi, but only 800x430 resolution, which just isn't big enough for some things. A lot of web sites don't fit comfortably into the screen, although OpenOffice.org looks quite good, and there's space for a couple of xterms. The wifi seems strong enough - certainly no weaker than my existing Dell laptop. The speakers, camera, touchpad etc. aren't bad - again, not stunning, but great value for money and very usable.

Did I mention it's very small and very cheap? Really? Well, just wanted to make sure.

The software is well done. It's Linux, through and through, with very little added or changed from a default install - apart from a pretty user-friendly menu, a driver or two, and a shutdown dialog. It's well-configured, and of course since they know what hardware they're supporting, that's a lot easier than a general-purpose OS, but they've put together a nice system, which really is easy enough for anyone to use. Apart from the menu, there's Skype for VoIP, Firefox for web, complete with a bunch of pre-arranged links from the front menu to things like webmail systems, Thunderbird for 'real' mail if you need it, nowadays, OpenOffice.org for office-type stuff, Acrobat Reader for PDF viewing, a few KDE tools and utilities, and a collection of games and learning tools - a nod to the 'official' market for the device, children. I mean it in a very good way, but there just isn't that much to say about the software other than I would now say Linux is ready for the desktop, and this machine proves it. I'm used to the first thing I do with a computer being installing Linux - no need here - but more tellingly, I'm then used to installing, configuring, updating a bunch of the supplied software to make it a machine I want to use - and I didn't have to do that either. I'm impressed, and those who know me will know that I don't say that often about software.

Oh, and it's quite small and cheap too, in case you hadn't realised.

One of the most interesting things about it is the reaction it gets. For a start, most people guess between 3 and 4 times too high when asked to put a price on it. A lot of people's response to being told the real price is to ask where they can get one from. My flatmate commented that she'd like one to take traveling with her, because her shoulder gets tired of carrying around a full-sized laptop. Quite a few people have thought it was a toy, or at least not a full laptop.

The other really interesting thing about it - apart from being small and cheap - is that it's running Linux. For me, that means I'm absolutely at home with it, having given the poor shop assistant who sold it to me a bit of a shock by diving straight into a terminal session to check out the internals. It also means I can add new functionality to it, either by downloading and installing extra software, or by writing my own. It has full support for a lot of additional hardware, even if the software provided doesn't know about it - so for example, about 15 hours after I got it, I'd configured it to go online using a Bluetooth connection to my phone, where there is no wired or wireless network available. I'll write up how to do that soon, once I'm happy it's reliable and friendly. As I mentioned above, I'm capable - and more importantly, able - to remap the keyboard; in particular, the right-hand shift key feels like it's in the wrong place, so I might just swap it with the Up key next door. I'm going to guess that the custom stuff was written by Xandros, not by Asus themselves, since it's also hack-friendly, and I've already worked out how to add new icons to the built-in menu, as the iPhone hackers have done. There's a lot of potential here...

It's not the perfect laptop. While it is very small and very cheap, it's also very small and very cheap. The keyboard is absolutely not suitable for lots of typing with adult fingers, the flash disk is too small to store much data - particularly multimedia data, which the system otherwise handles fine - the screen is too small for a lot of web sites, the battery life is good but not ground-breaking, and so on. It is not a replacement for a full-sized work machine, but it is a great toy, and I can see it being a really good traveling machine.

Also, it's pretty small and cheap, and it's not a complete exaggeration to say that chicks seem to dig it!