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Silly Issues With the Sony UX390N
The Sony UX is pretty nice despite it's problems that I've talked about. However, there are some very silly design choices.
For instance, when it's on the little plastic stand you can't use the bottom ports. So, what's in the bottom ports, you ask? Well, both the adapter port for the VGA dongle and the power plug! That means you can't be charging while using this stand. Oops!
More annoying, though, is the SIM card slot cover on the left side. This is uncomfortable for lengthy thumb typing. It's made worse by the fact that an EDGE modem just isn't very useful these days. Oh well, that's what the UX91 is for. :)
It would have been nice if the cameras both had covers. I've seen fingerprints on both of them. The 1.3MP camera isn't that useful for me, anyway. The front facing webcam isn't bad, though, as far as usefulness goes.
Yet another silly annoyance is that of the already small 32GB SSD a full 6-7GB is allocated for the recovery partition. Why not ship withan 8GB bootable USB key to more than double the available space, whic is under 6 GB in shipping form? Seriously, of 32GB you end up with maybe 6GB of usable space and 26GB of cruft that you may or may not need.
Although the fingerprint reader is very useful, the swipe path makes it difficult to not come in contact with the screen. Although I'm careful most of the time, there is a nasty looking smudge mark under it right now. I can see that getting worse with time or even scratching the screen if dust was on the reader.
I'm sure there are more items that are just plain silly. Hnowever, most of these one can become accustomed to (aside from lack of drive space) or work around. As I started with, this doesn't prevent the Sony UX from being a great little computer!
Posted by Shane on March 29, 2007 7:56 AM | Permalink
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Comments
I went on a mission to clean up my ux390n. Sitting here now with 17G free. That's after upgrading to Vista Ultimate, installing a registered copy of Office '07, OneCare, the full version of MS Streets & Trips, and a few other necessities like SlingPlayer. It is noticably faster without all the Sony crunk on it, too. But it took a full wipe and rebuild to get here. After you generate the recovery disk set, there is an option to recover the 6-8G of backup partition. From there, it was simply a matter of redoing the Vista installation and exiting before the Sony crunk got added. Took about 6 hours, start to finish.
Posted by: Gil | March 30, 2007 5:16 PM
Hi Gil,
It sounds like you were pretty successful in cleaning up your UX390N. I've been wanting to make the recovery disks, but the tool doesn't seem to be on this one. ?!
It's good to hear that it can recover the space, too. I'm also glad to hear that the performance is improved by getting rid of the Sony crud.
Thanks for the report,
-Shane
Posted by: Shane Conder | March 30, 2007 10:05 PM