Now that the smoke on the mobile computing battlefield has cleared, though, one can pick through the remnants and find a good deal on what is interesting technology. It’s easy to be discouraged by all the lemons and genuinely weird micro-PCs, but I’ve also found a little gem in there. And that bulky, funny looking gem is the Vaio UX.

The Vaio UX is the type of PC you would imagine you find in small, bustling gadget shops in Tokyo’s Akihabara district. At a glance, it doesn’t even resemble a PC — most UMPCs at least attempt to retain a laptop-like form factor or assume a ‘slate’ like shape — but it has all, if not more of its features. When it was first introduced, at the cost of over fifteen hundred dollars, it did raise a few eyebrows. Unfortunately for Sony, it didn’t create a new market.

Inside the one-pound UX is a 250+ DPI (‘Retina Display’, anyone?), 4.5″ touchscreen packing a resolution of 1024×600, as well as internals that are very similar to the first generation Macbook Air: a Intel Core Duo ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) processor with a single gigabyte of RAM and Intel GMA 950 graphics. More on that hardware semblance later on in this post. It also came with either EDGE wireless or a CompactFlash slot, a Memory Stick Duo slot, 802.11b/g wireless, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a Fingerprint reader, one front and one back facing (!) camera and a tiny little SSD or HDD.

As a real PC, it even had one USB port and audio in/out ports on its sides, but once set down into its cradle, it has a total of four USB ports, a FireWire port, a VGA port (yes, powering another display) as well as Ethernet. Quite a lot for such a tiny device.

Of course, it had the typical pitfalls of PCs: the UX struggled to get over three hours of battery life on its stock battery. The $120 extended battery brought it up to eight hours, but such a premium was a lot to ask when you were paying almost two thousand bucks for a PC already. Its huge price, short battery life and thickness and bulk didn’t appeal to the mass market, and we all know that the iPad and netbooks took its intended niche by storm.

Despite all that, I picked up a European model with the catchy name VGN-UX1XN on eBay for a fraction of its original retail price and upgraded it with an extremely tiny 1.8″ 64 GB SSD. Why did I get it, you may ask?

Drawing:

The Vaio UX has a resistive touchscreen. You know, those old takes-effort-to-push-things screens without all the multi-touchy goodness we have grown accustomed to. What they do have going for them, though, is being sensitive to regular old stylus pens. And the Vaio UX comes with just that: in a little compartment on the back you find a little pen you can use to tap things on the screen and draw. I use Autodesk’s excellent SketchBook for Windows 7 to draw on it, and it’s quite good. Thanks to the external screen rotation key, I can even hold it like a little portrait drawing pad. A really bulky, slightly warm drawing pad.

Good Old Game Console:

My favorite games are still the 1990-2000 era strategy games and role playing games. In particular, the Infinity Engine games like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape Torment are titles I enjoy playing every year. They still offer new experiences to me and are immersive and emotional stories I can lose myself in. Thanks to community fix packs, mods and patches, I can play them at the UX’s native resolution, and the UX seems to be almost made for these games: they control great with the ‘thumbstick’ and mouse buttons, and with text-size patches reading the lengthy dialogues between characters is pleasant. I’ve put at least sixty hours into Baldur’s Gate 2 on the Vaio UX, and I’m all the way up to the final act of Shadows of Amn.

I made a video about gaming on it:

Thanks to Good Old Games, I will never have a shortage of excellent games to play on it: point-and-click adventure games like Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey are already in my queue.

The Smallest (real!) Mac:

Ah, yes, about that Macbook Air hardware resemblance. Since the chipsets are so similar in the UX and Macbook Air, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to install Mac OS X on it ( — I haven’t tried Lion, yet) and of course I had to do that. My 64GB SSD is split in half and at startup I can easily pick an OS to boot. OS X works quite well thanks to third-party touchscreen drivers. I installed an Atheros AirPort card in the UX so I even have full BlueTooth and Wi-Fi support. It’s not the best experience (the memory card slot doesn’t work, as does the fingerprint reader), but it is quite usable and fun to have a small Mac in your backpack. A Mac you can draw on.

UI Prototyping:

I have been working on an interesting UI / UX proof of concept in the last few months that uses some of the ‘advanced’ hardware in the Vaio UX, and it’s been absolutely perfect for it. I can test Quartz Compositions under OS X, full interactive Flash and HTML5 / CSS3 mockups in full-screened Chrome on Windows, and even use hardware like the camera and fingerprint reader in them. I hope to show more of my work on it soon — probably at a conference or similar presentation.

The UX is one of the few UMPCs to have gathered a true cult following. A group of people dedicated to modding it have gone as far as to solder in new, faster dual-core CPUs, integrated full 3G HSPA wireless and more crazy upgrades.

If you have any questions regarding this fascinating little piece of PC history, let me know. It’s been a fun hobby to spend some hours on for me.

The Captive Planet is a planet rich in natural resources, a valuable asset in any star system that’s just begging to have its riches extracted. Appearance-wise, it’s somewhat similar to Mars, but with its denser atmosphere and extremely hot temperatures, that’s about the only similarity they have. It’s mined by Hephaestus, a ‘wall’ that spans the entire circumference of the planet, and contracts into itself as it scrapes layer after layer off the surface of the planet, leaving behind little more than dust. Hephaestus is a crawling city, inhabited by miners and their families.

In the game, the player gets stranded on the Captive Planet at some point and is presented the harsh realities of living in ‘the Wall’ and choices that will determine the future of the planet and its inhabitants. I’m having lots of fun with this assignment, and I hope to keep you guys in the loop with several other very cool environments and designs I’m creating.

I’ve never really had the time to spend a week on a painting, so this, too, is one in a series of speed paints. But it was my first actual ‘commercial’ painted work on my tablet. These days, I’m spending a lot more work on design work for games for iPhone and other platforms, and I’ve actually been using my tablet a whole lot. Painting is very different from my usual approach to designing, which involves making vector shape layers for everything. I’m far from actually painting for a living, but I can recommend designers to try doing more ‘free’ artwork design as well every now and then.

Quite a fun departure from my usual work: I’ll be able to show off a lot of cool stuff in September! Also, this month I will resume my regular posting schedule, including releasing a few more wallpapers and icons.

The lineup of speakers:

• Delicious Monster‘s Wil Shipley
• 280 North‘s Francisco Tolmasky
•  Dirk Stoop from Sofa
• Joachim Bondo of Cocoa Stuff
• and me. Perhaps an excellent chance to give away a shirt?

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It’ll be held Wednesday June 10th, 7-9PM, at the Stockton St. Apple Store in San Francisco.

I’m really looking forward to WWDC this year. Hope to see you all at Cocoaheads or elsewhere during the week!

And yes, those are little Xcode hammers in the smoke.

I know, I know, I totally promised to update weekly or at least biweekly on my tablet progress, but life’s not always easy that way. Right now, I’ll try to do something monthly, because it’s a lot of fun to do.

So, my Airport was an obvious choice. But I soon found that it’s not that hard to see a little guy in an iPod Nano either:

Would be pretty neat if it actually did that.

Obviously, these were all drawn in about 20-25 minutes each over the course of last week. I prefer to do quick drawings, because actually turning one of these into complete ‘paintings’ would probably take me all day. The devil’s in the details indeed.

And there’s my primary workstation, the Mac Pro. I did a few sketches and ended up with stuff that looked more like a Jawa Sandcrawler from Star Wars, so after a few more drawings I found a look I really liked. Sort of like a jellyfish on your desk.

My Canon digital SLR camera made a good subject for the last speedpaint. I always wanted it to be smart enough to zip around on its own and follow me through the office so it’s there when I need it.

Come on, Canon, just put some wheels in those side grips. It’d make for an excellent little transforming tank-camera combination.