Welcome to the Digital Lifestyle video show and today were going to have a quick look at Sony UX1, I’ve been longing for this device. Sony kindly sends it over and I had a relatively short amount of time in fact the UPS guys are going to collect this, so, let me do a quick video. But as you know I'm a big fan of UMPC and I've got my Samsung Q1 which I use a lot, specially for browsing the web or surfing. I use it for the intros with media center show with a headset on or a microphone and other stuff. It’s a nice device for browsing the web and I actually got a pen I use. It’s a nice handheld device, its nice web browsing device
So looking really at the UX as something similar to that and this is the UX. And first thing you can see its’ got a little slide out keyboard. It’s the size difference. As I compare the two devices, you can see that it's much more smaller device. First of all that will be great because one thing you don’t want about the Q1 really is you can't carry it around your pocket or anything. It’s too big for that so you tend to leave it at home more than you like. Because you just can't carry it with you all the time when you're taking the kids out. So actually the UX is good for pocketing.
First I notice really, you can see there, it is quite thick unit. It’s not really pocketable unless you really got big pockets. So that’s a bit disappointing, but the overall size of it is very nice. First thing I found while I was using it was that it’s not a one handed browsing device like the Q1 is. So with the Q1, sit there. Tap the webpage. You can read it and you can watch the TV and start surfing. And it’s not too intrusive experience at all. It’s not like PC that you got your screen sat on your face all the time, you can have it down. It feels that you're not sort of immersing in the laptop.
This device I find that I ended up using it like this because of the small screen size. It’s 4.5 inch screen so it is relatively small. I did find myself using it like this quite a lot. But let’s have a look at some of the bits on the outside first. So I said 4.5 inch touchscreen. Very nice bright screen. We’ll look at the screen in the moment. It’s got touchscreen. It’s got a mouse, which actually works very well. I'm left handed, so it’s on the wrong side for me. But I still like to use it. You can use the mouse just by putting pressure on it. So I could use a chuck sticks on laptops, it will be similar to that. And this actually works quite well. You’re left and your right mouse buttons which you need because there’s no touchscreen even in spec drives for this like I got working on the Q1. I have a box Q1 that do our Vista board. Hacks on the internet, I might find some software to get the drives on there. So that means you can hold the pen down and keep it held down, it sees that as a back click and you can right click. Where obviously with the pen down, there's no way of doing that. I have to digitize and tell the PC you can press the right click but you can't on that. You can't right click with the finger on here but you got the left and right mouse buttons on there. And we got button here to launch Sony’s applications which we’ll have a look at later. Fingerprint reader, which works really well. Really nice plug in. and actually that is one benefit on a UMPC is having a fingerprint reader. You're not going to peck at the onscreen keyboard to type your password in and you can use the fingerprint reader.
Got your camera on the front and the camera on the back. We’re going to look the specs on those later. We’ve got Sony memory stick there. We’ve got single USB port. Power. Dock station. One of the headphone. Microphone. And the battery in the back. And it comes with a little pen. Contractible pen. But like I said, don’t really use that, I use my own.
So let’s have a look at the stuff that comes with it. I mentioned about the docking station. So we got power supply cord. Then we got this, this is the docking station cradle unit for it. Slot there for it. And this has got two USB ports. Back on the side. Monitor, 5Y. And power. And internet. Okay so, get in there. Get it in like that. Power. So that fits in really nicely in there with the keyboard and mouse monitor into it and then you can use it as you may workstation. And the machine is powerful enough to use in this stuff. And we’ll go back to the specs in a minute.
Okay, let’s have a look. I'm going to show you now and possibly I’ll come back and we’ll going to look at the screen stuff. So, you can see that this stuff is nice and responsive. It’s very quick. It’s very smooth and responsive, you see guys. Now you can see about the keyboard. It’s very nice when using it in the dark environment. And I mentioned I could use the mouse.
So I got some music playing on there now. You can hear it’s got fairly decent speakers. Quite nice. It’s got a headphone sockets on there as well, so. Now this is running Windows Vista. Let me shut that out. This is running Windows Vista business edition. So no media center on here. What’s installed on here are Lynx power DVD that we installed or Win DVD. So that means that you can play recorded TV files on here.
Okay, one thing I wanted to have a look at was the touchscreen interface which is quite nice. You may get the origamic experience what Microsoft did which is kind of touch interface for your PC. Sony got their as you lodge to this button here. And let me give you close good look at that. You can see you got the nice look at there, nice interface there for touch. And what I like about this is if you tap it with your fingernail it didn’t do anything. It actually detects, you got to press it properly with a finger, which is quite nice is that you can't accidentally press anything. So if I want to launch music now, press music like that. Not quite touch key friendly. And then it launches the application. And this where the touch interface falls down. As you can see now its launch Sonic stage and that didn’t requires touchscreen. So nice idea in theory, but in practice, it doesn’t really work. It’s a bit like having media center every time you press TV or music or pictures, it just shot back out into another page. If you went to music you launch Windows media player. Great interface. As soon as you try and anything with it, it goes back to regular window.
So nice in practice, if you just carry on this to a bit more of the application this would be good. The origami experience makes a better job with that.
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