Viliv S5: Great Size, Great Battery Life, Hard to Read

The 4th of July in our home this year was not the normal. I , William, was under the weather from an illness that kept me in the house for the better part of a week straight, and the one day I start feeling better, the 4th of July, it rains all day. So there was no better time to break in the Viliv S5. I signed on the net about 2 p.m. and stayed on until around 7 p.m. surfing all day. Tammy had one laptop and Ashley had the other so that left me with the MID. I guess FaceBook is quite the conversation piece, however I am not sure they said two words to each other during that time and they were 4 feet away on the same couch. Weird.

I don’t like to complain much, but my first complaint using the MID is the small screen with a complete desk top of icons and data. However, after a discussion with Rob and an email from on of his Gottobemobile friends it was recommended that I do some updates to several items after some adjustments on my own didn’t seem to help. The first being the Viliv specific drivers. I started with the mviliv.com support page. I updated the Bios to ver .106, the i-viliv to v 1.2.1 and the soft keyboard. I still seemed to have a problem adjusting the font both in Windows XP and in the Fastweb application. I decided to also update the Fastweb app to v1.30.e and then the Cube UI to v1.1.0. Here is where my problems started.

I am not sure what I did wrong but the installation of Cube UI v1.1.0 really messed up. I lost all my icons and I could not get the application to start on its own and only half the time when selecting it from the menu. I worked with the installation for about an hour before having to cry ROB! Rob Bushway looked at it briefly and determined that we just need to start over and restore Viliv S5 back to it’s out of box condition and start from the beginning.

After scratching our heads for a few minutes we finally figured out that on reboot you hold the tab (joy stick pushed in) to get to the a American Megatrends (AMI Product Services) screen. This screens gives you two options, normal boot or AMI Rescue. After selection of rescue and few restore option prompts the MID was off and rebuilding it’s self.

I laid it down for about an hour and let it do it’s thing. Upon return it had completed the rebuild of the XP operating system and restored the original Viliv drivers. I picked the device up and in about 5 minutes I was back on the internet exploring. This time I did not try any of the updates, I will wait for Rob to assist me with that. However I did upgrade to IE 8, Adobe 9, and Itunes. All the normal stuff you need for browsing.

I settled down in my big chair and continued the day with what I call peaceful browsing. I love to surf the net for old cars, new cars, car repair ideas, and of course the local car classifieds. After the reboot the MID seemed to be quicker and easier to use. I used the Desktop Display Properties in XP to make viewing a little easier with some XP Desktop settings.

I set it to use large fonts, and under Appearance - Advanced Appearance I set Item “Caption Buttons” to 40, “Menu” to 35 ish, and “Scroll Bar” to 55. Using different combinations of these settings I was able to get the IE menus and scroll bars larger and easier to use with stylus pointer. I still favor the IE and Mozilla Firefox browsers over the Viliv Fast Web browser just because I am  comfortable with them.

Tonight I will reattempt to update the Viliv drivers for the bios, keyboard, and Icube drivers. But being a Windows based person I think there are still many tweaks that I can make to the Windows applications that will give me tools I need. Windows has Accessibility options that I have yet to try. Things like its own soft keyboard that will allow me to set the font size of the keys and move it around on the screen to where I want it docked and a magnifier that enlarges items under the pointer in the  top of the screen.

Either way I still have more to play with but I am enjoying the small size of this Viliv S5.  It is small enough to go in my wife’s handbag, small enough to lay on the tray with my food at a hot spot and not require me to clear the table or hold the lap top in my lap, small enough and durable enough that I feel safe putting in my back pack an taking with me on a motorcycle ride. It feels like a truly mobile pc. Did I also mention that the battery on this thing has yet to fail me? I used it for about 5 straight hours with out running out, wow! I recharge it nightly but I have yet to be out and the battery die. Maybe soon I will charge second battery that came with it just in case.