Into Tech

With Apple expected to dominate this afternoon’s proceedings, it was not surprising that late yesterday afternoon, Microsoft officially announced its latest Zune music players. After all, if they had done it today, the struggling iPod rival may not have gotten too much coverage.

There aren’t too many shocks - apart from that shocking blue Zune above - but there is now a 120GB hard drive version, as well as 8GB and 16GB Flash versions. There’s also a new black Zune but, it is on the software and services side that Microsoft is resting its hopes for the player.

Combining Wi-Fi with the built-in FM tuner, there’s now something called Buy From FM, which allows you to tag and purchase songs you hear on the radio. Then, when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the song can be immediately downloaded [purchased] to the Zune.

A pay as you go version of the Apple iPhone will go on sale in the UK later this month offering customers unlimited internet browsing for a year if they are prepared to top-up at least £10 a month and pay a whopping £349.99 for the handset.

O2 will be the first of Apple’s network partners to offer a pay as you go version of the phone and the news comes as Nokia today unveiled what it hopes will be the biggest seller at Christmas.

The first phone in its range of Nokia Comes With Music devices is also a pay as you go handset but is a lot more basic than the iPhone. For the price tag, which has yet to be set but will be between £100 and £300, however, users get free and unlimited access to 2.1m music tracks which they can keep even if they stop using the phone. Buying the same number of tracks from iTunes would cost over £1.6m.

The 3G version of the iPhone will go on sale on September 16 in O2 and Apple stores as well as from Carphone Warehouse. The basic 8GB version of the device will be £349.99 while the larger 16GB model - which can store about 4,000 songs - will be £399.99.

But for the price, users get a year’s worth of unlimited internet browsing, either using the O2 mobile phone network or its collection of short-range wireless broadband or wi-fi hotspots dotted across the country. At the end of the 12 months users will have to pay an extra £10 per month to carry on receiving unlimited internet access. The phone works on O2’s standard pay and go tariffs, which start at £10 top-up per month.

The price tag slapped on the pre-pay phone looks high when anyone willing to sign up for an 18 month contract, at £45 a month, will get a free 8GB version or a free 16GB version for £75 a month. But over the 18-month length of the contract a user of the basic “free” phone will pay £810, while over the same period a pre-pay user of the same phone - who will have to spend a further £60 to continue browsing the internet - will spend at least £589.99.

Contract customers, however, get extras such as visual voicemail and large bundles of texts and minutes which pre-pay customers will not receive.

Archos has been churning out the best PMPs on the market for some time now, managing to stay ahead of the crowd by constantly updating with new and improved features.

The latest series undergoes a major overhaul with radical ultra-thin styling and upgrades that fix many of the niggles consumers had with previous versions.

The basic concept stays the same. It’s a portable that allows you to view files on the move, stream media from your computer to a television and surf the internet via the built-in Wi-Fi connection.

While the FCC and certain broadband companies like to insist that there’s real competition in the broadband market, right here in the heart of Silicon Valley, there’s little evidence that this is true. If there were real competition, they might take customer service seriously. In the past few days I’ve had two separate issues with AT&T that suggests that the company treats customer service as not just an after thought, but something to effectively be shunned. Given my long history in killing off broadband providers who give me service, perhaps it’s only fair that they do their best not to serve me, but these two experiences seemed worth shining some light on.

First, a quick history. That link above goes through all the broadband providers I went through (and killed off) in the 2001 time frame. After that, I ended up with Comcast cable modem service until 2004. In October of 2004, Comcast turned the cable modem service to my house off every day at 10am for no clear reason. Every day I would call, and the response would be: “Oh, this is scheduled maintenance. Service will be back by 4pm.” I would ask if I should expect the service to go down the next day as well, and be told that they had no idea. Apparently, the “schedule” for scheduled maintenance was a tightly held secret — but it went on, every single day, for at least the month of October. I moved in November of that year, and swore off Comcast after that experience. My only other option was AT&T. I ordered AT&T DSL and was promised it would be installed within a week. A week came and went, and I called AT&T. They told me the order had been canceled because (despite what the first person told me) DSL wasn’t actually available at my location (right in the middle of Silicon Valley). Why they didn’t call to let me know of the cancellation was not explained.

I asked why the first person had told me service was available, and the woman told me to hold one while she checked her other computer. That computer told her that DSL was available at my location, despite what the first computer said. Apparently, AT&T does not have a single map of DSL availability, preferring to load a series of different local availability maps on every computer.

A year ago I moved again, and DSL has been working more or less okay at the new location. However, last Thursday it died in the afternoon and was down until around midnight. When it came back it was super slow — maxing out around 64 kbps. I waited until Friday afternoon and decided I should call to ask what’s up. That’s when I discovered that AT&T makes it damn near impossible to find a phone number. The AT&T website has no phone numbers listed at all. When I clicked on the “contact” link, I was given a one-line form to discuss what my problem was. When I hit submit, I received a blank page. No matter how many times I tried, I always got the blank page. Eventually, and I don’t remember how, I got to an error page that listed a bunch of phone numbers. I called the one listed with “Residential: 1-877-737-2478″ since this is a residential account.

Thus began a rather insane process. After waiting on hold, the call proceeded as follows:

• Automated system demands I enter in my account number and asks me to describe my problem. It doesn’t recognize “slow internet” service, so I just say “can I speak to an operator?” It asks me more questions instead. Eventually (after a long hold) it sends me to a live human being.
• AT&T Rep asks me for my account number (despite having punched it in already). She tells me she cannot find my account. Then she asks where I’m located (which, I would think would be obvious from the area code of the account number). She tells me she needs to put me on hold.
• Rather than putting me on hold, she actually transfers me. I get an automated system that demands I enter in my account number and asks me to describe my problem. It doesn’t recognize “slow internet” service, so I just say “can I speak to an operator?” It asks me more questions instead. Eventually (after a long hold) it sends me to a live human being.
• The woman asks me (again!) for my account number. Then she asks why I’ve called her. She works in sales. Tells me she needs to transfer me, but tells me in the future to call 888.321.2375 for tech support. She transfers me.
• I get an automated system that demands I enter in my account number and asks me to describe my problem. It doesn’t recognize “slow internet” service, so I just say “can I speak to an operator?” It asks me more questions instead. Eventually (after a long hold) it sends me to a live human being.
• The next woman asks me (again!) for my account number. She tells me she cannot find my account. Then she asks where I’m located (which, I would think would be obvious from the area code of the account number). I say California, and she says she doesn’t serve California, only a region of 9 southern states (hasn’t it been more than a year since AT&T & BellSouth merged?). She transfers me — after personally promising me the next person I speak to will be the correct person. She also tells me that, contrary to the earlier person (and the AT&T website) the real number to call is: 800.310.2355.
• I get an automated system that demands I enter in my account number and asks me to describe my problem. It doesn’t recognize “slow internet” service, so I just say “can I speak to an operator?” It asks me more questions instead. Eventually (after a long hold) it sends me to a live human being.
• By the way, at this point, I’ve had the “hold voice” repeatedly pitch me on upgrading my service, mentioning that if I do, I can get access to “AT&T’s award-winning customer service.” I am getting curious as to exactly what “award” this is.
• Before the next woman can say much beyond hello, I explain the saga, and mention that she is the 4th person I’m speaking to and ask her please, if she is the right person to help me fix my slow DSL in California. She says she will try, and (again!) asks for my account number. She does some searches and then admits: she really wants to help, but she’s in billing, not tech support. She promises to transfer me (and kindly gives me a small credit on my account). She also tells me that the proper phone number to call in the future is none of the above, but 877.722.3755.
• Unlike the last few people, she actually says on the line and answers the same exact questions in the automated system for me. This is something of a consolation, though I’ve gotten good at entering the info.
• Finally, tech support! I give the guy my account info (again!) and he logs into my modem and he diagnoses: your connection is slow. I could have told him that. Wait, actually, I did tell him that. He doesn’t know what to do, but says that tech support will call me back later. I thought he was tech support, but whatever.
• An hour later, I get an automated call from AT&T tech support, telling me to call them back at (yes, a different number): 888.312.2450.
• I call back, and amazingly am put in contact with a competent tech, who doesn’t treat me like an idiot, who even gets me logged into the DSL modem myself, explains the different system readings, and notes that my modem seems to have capped itself at 64kbps. He says it could be a few different things, but the most likely is a broken phone cable from the jack to the modem. I switch the cables, and voila, it’s working again.

Total elapsed time since the first phone call, about 3 hours, but only about 1.5 hours total on the phone. It was definitely a bit of a hassle, but eventually I found someone smart and competent, and I figured that maybe I just had a bad experience with AT&T. Little did I know. By Monday evening, my Friday experience would seem fast and simple.

I have some travel coming up, and was realizing that I may not be in EVDO coverage for some of it. So I thought it might be good to make use of the AT&T WiFi that’s included as a part of my account. It’s supposed to work at McDonalds, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble and some other places as well. While I had signed up and used the WiFi service a few years ago, it’s probably been at least two years since I last tried. On Monday, I figured I’d hit up a McDonalds at lunch and test it out, to work out any “kinks” if there were any. I honestly figured it would be fine.

I got my chicken sandwich (sans mayo) and sat down to login. Yippee. I even was sitting next to an outlet, but quickly discovered that the outlet had been turned off (boo). Okay, so I get the (extremely slow) proxy server that asks me to login. I type in my login info, and it gives me a message: “We’re Sorry - Your Login Has Been Rejected.” Then it tells me to call: 888.888.7520 “for further assistance.” So here’s how that call went:

• Dial the number from my mobile phone. It rings for a while and then says “I see you’re calling from…” and repeats back a phone number I don’t recognize, starting with a 512 area code (which is Austin, Texas). I’m in California on a California mobile phone, so I have no idea where that comes from. I say no.
• It asks for my account number. I’m not at home, so I don’t have my bill to read off the account number. I don’t have internet access so I can’t log in to get my account number. The system tells me my only options are to say my account number or to say I’m trying to sign up for service. I say “neither” a few times, and the system gets impatient with me, and then demands I answer from a specific list of problems what my issue is. All of the issues have to do with home DSL, not WiFi hotspots — which seems odd, given that this is supposedly the WiFi hotspot support number.
• Finally, it transfers me to a human who again asks my account info. I give it to her. She cannot find my account. She puts me on “hold” which again is actually a transfer. I again go through the dance with the automated call system — which demands I choose between giving my account number or signing up for service, followed by a list of service options that have nothing to do with WiFi hotspots.
• After a while on hold, I get another person, who also insists my account does not exist. She transfers me to tech support (or so she says).
• I go through the same pointless questions, and speak to another person. I explain the situation, noting that she’s the 3rd person I spoke to. She explains that she’s not in tech support, but in customer retention.
• I have now come to the conclusion that AT&T’s “call transfer” system is actually a big roulette wheel that will dump you on any random person with a phone. I doubt most of them even work for AT&T.
• I am transferred again. The fourth person I speak to, after going back and forth, tells me that she does not handle California customers (this sounds familiar).
• I am transferred again. More messing with the annoying automated system, and I eventually get a guy who tells me that he cannot help me unless I can tell him my account number. He insists that when he looks up my user name, he gets a different account owner and a different address than the one I tell him. That’s comforting.
• Rather than transferring me, he says he can only give me the phone number to call for billing, where I should see if they can actually tell me my account info over the phone. Phone number: 800.288.2020. I ask him what number I should call after that to get back to him once I have the account number. He says to just ask to be transferred to DSL tech support.
• I call the billing number, and speak to my 6th person of the day. After a great deal of effort, she finally reveals to me what my account number is (thank you!). She then, as requested, transfers me to DSL tech support.
• My seventh customer support person of the day, after I’ve been on hold and have entered the proper account number, asks me for my account number anyway — and then explains to me that DSL tech support has nothing to do with WiFi hotspots, but he will transfer me.
• My eighth customer support person tells me that the WiFi access on my account was canceled twice. Once last September and once in January. Why twice when I don’t think I ever canceled it even once? He has no clue.
• Well, can I sign up to have the service included on my account? No. That’s not his department. He needs to transfer me to customer support instead of tech support.
• Transferred again. On hold again. Enter my info again. Now speaking to my 9th AT&T rep. After explaining the situation, I am told that it is impossible for them to add WiFi hotspots to my account over the phone. Instead, I need to (get this) sign up via the web at home.
• I hang up, and notice another open WiFi network — so I login, and go to the website he pointed me to: FreedomLink.com to sign up. Once there, I am directed to a page where I am told: “AT&T Wi-Fi Basic service is FREE and already included if you subscribe to AT&T High Speed Internet…. No ordering required! Simply use your AT&T high-speed Internet membership ID and password at any AT&T Wi-Fi Basic hot spot.”
• That seems to conflict with what the last few folks told me, so I pick up the phone again and call. After the same old process of entering info and being put on hold, I explain my situation to the 10th representative I am speaking to. She says she will get everything solved and puts me on hold. Every five or 10 minutes she comes back and says she’s “getting the info I need” and will be back soon.
• I begin to notice the batteries on both my laptop and my cell phone are on their last legs.
• After nearly half an hour on hold, the woman comes back and tells me that she has found the phone number I really need to call. It’s 877.722.3755 (the second time I’ve heard this number!) but that when I reach it, I need to ask for “Tier 2 support.” She promises that she will take care of this part for me and will get me to the right person.
• I mention to her that my batteries are almost dead anyway, and she says “Isn’t that always how it is?” to which I respond: “No. Normally, it does not take 2.5 hours and 10 people to get me the info to log into my account.”
• Eventually, she gets me on the line with another woman, and tells her I need Tier 2 support and then hangs up. This new representative (the 11th I’m speaking to) asks me to repeat the whole situation to see if I really need Tier 2 support. I tell her my batteries are dying, and I really need Tier 2 support, and I need it as fast as possible.
• She puts me on hold for 25 minutes — where the hold message is pure silence, punctuated ever 10 seconds by the most annoying voice in the world commanding: “PLEASE WAIT.”
• She finally comes back, says: “I have connected you to tier 2 support” and hangs up. Except she hasn’t connected me to Tier 2 support. She has transferred the call, so I’m in another hold queue.
• Ten more minutes go by and someone finally picks up. As he finishes saying hello, the battery in my mobile phone dies and the call is over.

This is now 4:10pm. I had arrived at the restaurant at 1pm.

• I drive home. I pick up my home phone and call one more time. After waiting on hold and inputting my information, I speak to my 13th customer rep of the day. He insists that the information is wrong on my account, and that I have the wrong username, though it’s the same username that I had used to log into my AT&T account as I was speaking to him (now that I’m on my home WiFi, which since Friday, has been working fine).
• He says that my username is actually different, but he refuses to tell me what my actual username is. Apparently, that’s not allowed. Instead, he has me dig out my last AT&T bill, and buried on page 4 there is a username which is different from my regular username. He insists that this username will allow me to log into the WiFi hotspots
• I’m no longer at McDonalds so I cannot test it, but perhaps I can now log into WiFi. I will have to go back to McDonalds later this week to try.

This is AT&T customer and tech support at work. I am left wondering if anyone who works at AT&T has ever called its “award winning” customer service line to get actual support. If there were actual competition in the broadband market here in the heart of Silicon Valley, I would switch providers. But my choice now is to go back to Comcast, who might kill service every day for a month for unscheduled scheduled maintenance or deal with AT&T’s roulette wheel of customer and tech support.

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After the PSP Slim & Lite, which managed to put the PSP on a major diet and add some really useful features and tweaks like better Wi-Fi, a video-out port, more memory etc. there’s been a lot of excitement over the new PSP.

But, according to final filings for the new PSP with the FCC in the US, no one is doing cartwheels. In fact, the PSP 3001 is looking decidedly pedestrian so far. The FCC tested for 2.4 GHz 802.11b on the new unit - which is no secret - but there is no mention of GPS, Bluetooth or even speedier Wi-Fi like the 802.11n draft.

I’ve now tried five of the new mini-notebooks, and the Acer Aspire One is one of the best. It offers good quality at a low price. But the Linpus Linux Lite version 0.5 that came preinstalled almost drove me batty, so I’d go for Windows XP instead. The Aspire One is very similar to the Asus PC Eee 900, with its 8.9in screen, but the case is almost an inch wider. This is enough to transform the keyboard from being very hard to use to one big enough for fast touch-typing - though it’s quite not as good as the one on HP Mini-Note.

The Aspire One feels much nicer than the Asus machines, with rounded corners and a glossy top. It has plenty of connections, including three USB ports, two SD card slots, an Ethernet port and an external monitor port. It also has an 8GB Flash drive and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, though not Bluetooth. But at 249 x 170 x 29mm, the Aspire One is still small and, at just under 1kg, light.

I was apprehensive about the performance, given its skimpy fixed 512MB of memory, 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor and built-in Intel 945 graphics. However, I found it worked very well for the sort of tasks subnotebooks are aimed at, such as word processing, email and browsing. It had no problems playing videos, including .wmv, DivX and YouTube.

Acer’s Linux has a simple front end for instant access to a dozen applications including the Firefox 2 browser and the OpenOffice.org word processor and spreadsheet. Several other applications are sourced from Acer, including the media player, messenger program, calendar, contacts and Aspire OneMail. The simple file manager is horrible. I’d much rather have had Thunderbird, VLC etc but there is no obvious way to change them, and I couldn’t find any help on Acer’s website.

My main problem was that hovering the cursor over things activated them very quickly. It should be easy to fix, but I could find no way to slow it down or stop it. Constantly worrying about the cursor position was no fun at all. Also, the Aspire One didn’t suspend/hibernate on closing the lid.

At Amazon.co.uk prices, this base version looks very good value at £219.99. The more attractive top-of-the-range model has 1GB of memory, a 120GB hard drive, and the more familiar, more capable, Windows XP Home for £299.99. There are several options in between.

Pros: Small, attractive design, good screen and keyboard, light, cheap

Cons: Short battery life, 0.3MP webcam, hard to change

acer.com/aspireone

With mobile Internet access becoming more popular, O2 is aiming to capitalise by offering free home broadband for a year to anyone signing up for its £20 per month Mobile Broadband package.

The new Broadband Home And Away [is that a whiff of Aussie soap I smell?] package means that anyone with the Mobile Broadband [that's 3GB of data per month and unlimited Wi-Fi access] also gets O2’s Home Broadband free for a year, offering unlimited downloads, a free wireless router and 24×7 UK-based customer service. Unusually, O2 says the offer is open to existing O2 Mobile and Home Broadband customers too, not just newbies.

Sally Cowdry, marketing director, O2 UK said:

New portable PCs are in flood at the moment, with announcements from companies such as Lenovo, HP, Sony, Toshiba and Acer. This is not a coincidence. It has been triggered by Intel’s announcement of the new Centrino 2 platform, codenamed Montevina, which is being used in more than 200 new laptops.

Five years ago, the launch of the Centrino platform had a big impact on the market, and led to most notebooks having built-in Wi-Fi. Montevina is the fifth iteration of this platform, and calling it “Centrino 2″ suggests that Intel has similar hopes for it. However, that doesn’t seem likely. Montevina is an upgrade worth having, but you may not notice you’ve got it.

The main change is the inclusion of faster Core 2 Duo processors, codenamed Penryn, based on a new 45nm process technology, instead of 65nm. The new processors use less power and emit less heat, which should result in thinner notebook PCs with better battery life. They will also work with faster (but pricier) DDR3 memory chips.

Vista buyers will be pleased to hear that the new chip set includes Mobile 45 Express graphics, which Intel reckons is roughly 70% faster than the X3100 graphics in the previous Santa Rosa platform. You also get some video-processing in hardware, which should help with playing DVD and Blu-ray movies on the widescreens that now seem to have taken over. As usual, the graphics fall short of top gameplaying standards. However, Montevina lets you switch between the built-in graphics and a separate graphics processor without restarting the PC. Using the built-in graphics for word processing, web browsing and similar tasks saves battery power.

The one thing that could make Centrino 2 revolutionary is its support for WiMax, or Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, the 802.16 standard. This is, to put it crudely, a long-range version of 802.11 Wi-Fi. One of its aims is to deliver broadband speeds - perhaps 10Mbps - to mobile users. Wi-Fi works over metres, whereas WiMax works over kilometres.

However, Mobile WiMax will only become compelling when two things happen. The first, expected “later this year”, is the release of Intel’s Echo Peak - the codename for a card that supports both W-Fi and WiMax. This could make WiMax as common as Wi-Fi is today. The second thing is the arrival of WiMax services.

If you live in the US, you can be reasonably hopeful about both of those things. If you live in the UK, you may not get either in the near future. According to the WiMax Forum, “currently there are more than 305 deployments of WiMax services in 118 countries worldwide”. Some are being rolled out in the UK - one is in Milton Keynes - but most mobile users will probably have to wait until Ofcom auctions its “4G” spectrum and the winner(s) get round to installing transmitters and developing service platforms.

I think WiMax should be a global standard, like GSM. However, Ofcom is selling off our 2.6GHz wireless spectrum on “a technology and service neutral basis”. This means phone companies will be able to buy it and use it for something else - such as LTE or Long Term Evolution - instead of WiMax.

LTE, the next version of 3G telephony, is still under development and won’t appear for years.

This doesn’t mean WiMax is doomed. I’ve already seen an LG home router that provides both Wi-Fi and WiMax, and cybercafes could adopt them. With WiMax, you should have no problem getting broadband in your garden, or several streets away.

Not so long ago, the BBC did a scare-mongering show about the supposed “threats” of WiFi radiation on children. Never mind the fact that it was later pointed out that the program used horrendously bad science, that actual scientific tests have shown the fears to be totally overblown (the amount of radiation is minimal, and double blind tests find that people cannot tell when WiFi is on, despite claims to the contrary) and that even the BBC later admitted that the show was poorly done and presented only one side of the story (the fear mongering one) while blatantly making the one reasonable person on the show look bad. It also left out some of the conflicts of interests concerning one of the scientific “experts” on the show (the guy who sold anti-radiation products and has a clear reason to build up fear mongering around WiFi radiation).

But, no matter, anti-WiFi hysteria has been in full bloom since that program aired. Despite all the studies showing little to no impact from WiFi radiation, the UK’s Daily Mail is running yet another fear mongering piece about how WiFi in schools is harming children and wants a moratorium on WiFi in schools. Apparently the fact that a year’s worth of WiFi radiation is the equivalent of 20 minutes on a mobile phone hasn’t been explained to these people.

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There’s a growing pile of subnotebooks by the side of my desk, and so far, Hewlett-Packard’s HP2133 Mini-Note is the biggest and the best.

It’s a full-spec ultramobile with a lovely brushed aluminium casing, excellent screen and a keyboard that you can actually touch-type on. As a Wired blog headline put it, it’s “what we really wanted the MacBook Air to be”.

But it’s quite a lot wider and chunkier than an Asus Eee PC900, it’s heavier (from 1.3kg), and it tends to be slow - at least with the Windows Vista running on the version loaned for review. (SuSE Linux is a cheaper option.)

The Mini-Note’s Achilles heel is the 1.2GHz Via C7-M processor, which rates a 1.7 on the Vista Experience Index. In other respects, the machine fares well, with graphics rated 2.9 and the 120GB hard disk scoring 5.2. With the new Via Nano processor, it would be a great machine. An Intel Atom would at least be competitive for its class.

HP knows this, of course. But it’s pitching the machine for educational use (RM is selling it, downgraded to XP), and it had to make deadlines for evaluation purposes.

Waiting for Atom might have meant missing a school year. However, HP may offer an upgraded version when new chips arrive in volume. The Mini-Note is very slow to boot and slow to load programs, but once up and running, the performance is good for its intended uses: word processing, email and web browsing. Vista’s Aero graphics system worked well in 2GB of memory.

The scratch-resistant 8.9 inch screen (same size as the Asus Eee PC900) shows 1280 x 769 pixels, which is in effect the same as the 1280 x 800 you get on the 13.3 inch Dell M1330 or MacBook Air. Everything’s smaller, but that’s fine for younger eyes. The keyboard is a big improvement on rival machines, but should be even better. The Mini-Note keyboard measures 10 x 4 inches, which is only slightly smaller than my IBM ThinkPad X31 (10.2 x 4.2 inches), which has a 12-inch screen. It is far better than the Asus’s 8.3 x 3.1 inch keyboard, but it should be as good as the ThinkPad.

The selection of ports includes ExpressCard (useful for 3G) and SD slots, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and an external monitor port. The Mini-Note also sports Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi .

HP’s website lists the starting prices as £299 plus VAT for the Linux version, and £349 plus VAT for the Vista Business version tested. Judging by appearances, you’d expect it to cost a lot more.

Pros: High-res screen; good keyboard; big hard drive; well made

Cons: Slow processor; big power brick

View the HP2133 Mini-Note here