"Mini-me" the HP 2133 Mini-note UMPC

Friday was an exciting day. My wait was finally over. 9:30 AM a knock on the door. Mini-me had arrived!

For pictures, I think my new mini-note compadre, steelisreal, has the best unboxing photos so check out his post "My HP2133 Mini-note Unboxed". He also found the installed distro (Suse 10) lacking.

This is where the trouble begins. Out of the box, it works great. (No webcamera software, and the included CD of guides contained broken links) but I was able to access wifi and navigate around straight up.

The last time I fiddled with Suse was 1999. I cannot really give a decent review of it, other than say, my unfamiliarity with it made me want to jump ship pronto. Nothing, current, can beat Debian's packages and Ubuntu is the leader of the pack.

So the first day I played with the system as delivered. The best part--It read my SDHC card and (OH YES BABY!!!) let me preview Nikon's raw (NEF) file format. That pretty much wrapped it for me. All my primary needs were met.

Now back to the trouble. I wanted to test out the webcamera. SUSE didn't have any apps for it. I also couldn't find anything for twitter. Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy -- "Get in there!"

First problem in the install process--normal install doesn't support the Chrome9 graphics. No problemo, switch to "Safe graphics mode" and let 'er rip!

Install complete, let's makes some improvements, like change the background, add webcamera app "Cheese" and...hmmm no network?

Check that, wired works just fine. Wireless hardware vendor Broadcom likes it's profit proprietary secrets. The driver is NOT available for Linux. There was no trouble finding all the necessary tools to convert a windows driver, but after 18 hours of this and that, Mini-me is still deaf to the wireless world.

<rant>
When will companies learn? In this day and age, there is NO way to protect your secrets. Think about it. You're going to spend millions on development and half that time and $ will be in methods of protecting you're investment. You have one or two (maybe a dozen bright minds) against the world (thousands of bright minds). All your doing is creating bad vibes for the casual user that is forced to do it your way. Within days, the tech savy have cracked your protections and invalidated the millions $$$ spent on that protection.

Broadcom's of the world, design with openness in mind and

1. you'll save $$$
2. might even be able to tap the collective brain power to help make your product better
3. won't have people like me cursing your name and blogging about your evilnes

</rant>

Fortunately for me, there is at least one other person that has switched to Ubuntu, and at least for him, it's running, but he also had to really work for it.

Wifi was working and there are people out there that have made it work so I am hopefull.

Other thoughts, this lil baby runs hot. I mean H. O. T. hot!

Sitting on the couch gets a little unconfortable with it burning my legs. The battery life is also not great. I was getting about 1.5 hours with wifi (when it was working) on a charge. There is a 6 cell battery but not yet available as an accessory. I will definitely be getting one when they are.

The touch pad has scrolling control on the side, which until I figured it out, was confusing. Now that I know, I really like.

Keybaord is small, but not too small. The layout will take some getting used to. I keep hitting the '~' key instead of the ESC and delete is a small key above the backspace. The pageup and down are functions on the arrow keys.

All of these are learning curve issues and I'm more then willing to deal--it's a prefect fit for my needs.

Bottom line, if you NEED one, expect to wait for it. HP is pushing back delivery dates. If you WANT one, wait. It's a rushed and incomplete product. Wait for the next rev.

Had the Asus EEEPC 900 come out earlier, I may have gone that route. I'm still considering the 2G for simple surfing stuff, but it was the storage that I needed.