Polarized 3D glass I'm going to try with my EliteBook 2530p
Not long ago, I was going all out to look for a multi-touch solution for my HP business notebook and less than a year after that, I finally found this magically HP-provided Synaptics universal multitouch driver; a driver which I continue to use to this day.
I’ve been enjoying chiral scrolling, two-finger left-right/up-down scrolling, pinch zooming, three finger swiping and three finger activated application launching, even to this day. So if you’re on a pre-2010 non-multitouch notebook, you should really go and download the driver above if you haven’t! Install at your own risk, but I’ve personally seen it work on an array of HP notebooks and all my friends love it! Multi-touch has become a part of life on my EliteBook 8740w and EliteBook 2530p, though I’m torn between the multi-touch touchpads on my EliteBooks and my new Logitech G700 hybrid wireless/wired gaming mouse these days (and I shall talk about the G700 another day).
Anyway, back to the topic on hand, now that I have multi-touch, I’m going in search for the next big thing to “pimp my EliteBook”: 3D output! And I’m sure 3D gaming and movie watching on the EliteBook 8740w’s 1 billion color DreamColor screen is gonna be pretty sweet… So I heard one can install a custom Nvidia driver for most modern Nvidia cards (3D capable or not), put on a pair of red/blue glasses and magically transform any non-3D display into one that pumps out and displays everything in 3D, and I’ve finally got down to ordering them colored 3D glasses. My colored glasses are being shipped to me as we speak and I’m looking for the most stable Nvidia graphics driver I can find for 3D; and I’ll have a review and tutorial up (if it works well!) in March!
Also, I’m going to take things a step further, by trying 3D on the EliteBook 2530p using a pair of Sony polarized Real-D glasses and a polarized privacy screen. I’m not sure if anyone’s tried something like this before… if not I’ll be the first one to do it and I’ll report my results here.
I’m thinking of trying to get the touchpads of a few HP notebooks to support multi-touch and gestures, via unofficial solutions of course. Thanks to two of my best buds who volunteered their PC’s, my lab rats at the moment are a HP Pavilion dv2 running Windows 7 and HP Compaq 6510b running Windows Vista, which use ALPS and Synaptics touchpads respectively. Today I downloaded an unofficial driver modified to give certain Acer (gasp!) models multi-touch, but the app author said it should work on any Vista computer… so I tried installing it on the 6510b and it works, sort of – Pointer momentum worked 100%, multi-touch two-finger scrolling worked for a few minutes but suddenly stopped (for unknown reasons) and since then, I couldn’t get two finger scrolling to work again. Pinching and chiral scrolling didn’t work at all.
I figure that the Pavilion dv2 MAY have a better chance at working since its rather big touchpad fitted into its slim profile hints at it being ‘new hardware’ (hopefully multi-touch and gesture enabled?) but I need to find and try more drivers first. I’ll post results of my findings as we go along.
HP iPAQ Data Messenger and iPAQ Voice Messenger
Right, as everyone knows, HP announced two nice iPAQ devices last month, the iPAQ Data Messenger – which is like the iPAQ 612c with a slide out QWERTY keyboard, flush touchscreen (so it’s easier to reach the “Start” and “X” buttons at the side of the screen using your finger, instead of a stylus) and 2.5 mm headphone jack – and the iPAQ Voice Messenger, the direct successor of the iPAQ 510 with a larger screen and “half QWERTY” keyboard (as in QW-ER-TY, RIM Blackberry style). Both offer welcome updates over their respective predecessors.
Both the HP iPAQ Data Messenger and Voice Messenger Pocket PC phones currently list 2.5 mm headphone jacks built in. For the Data Messenger, the 2.5 mm jack a nice change from the “mini USB headphone jack” (can you believe it?) on the iPAQ 610 and 910 phones whose adapters to 3.5 mm were hard to find (HTC’s adapters are shaped with a slight difference and don’t fit). I don’t really have a big issue with 2.5 mm headphone jacks since I’ve been using a 2.5 to 3.5 mm adapter (see the picture above) with my HP iPAQ hw6915 to plug in my own set of headphones, and such adapters are easy to find…. but here’s an idea.
The 3.5 mm headphone jack is probably the most widely used port in the world for headphones (that’s why they’re also known as “the standard jack”) and allow users to swap out the pair of “in the box” earphones for another pair they love. Not everyone likes the “hang from ears” headphones usually included in the retail packaging of their mobile phone (I don’t!) and usually would want to swap it out for a pair in-ear headphones or “over the head” headphones.
I’m not complaining about 2.5 mm jacks since plenty of 2.5-to-3.5 adapters are available out there, for only 2-3 bucks too! As long as there’s a way to plug in my own set of headphones, I’m happy… But won’t it be more convenient if someone actually built that 3.5 mm headphone port right into the device? The old iPAQ h6310 phone (you know the one with the huge 3.5 inch touchscreen launched back in 2004?) had a 3.5 mm headphone jack, so why can’t the latest iPAQs have them too?
In addition, including a 3.5 mm headphone jack built right into a phone opens up the ability to tout the device to the public as a “music phone”, as what other manufacturers have been doing lately. So yeah, not only does it benefit users in terms of convenience, it also makes marketing sense to the company! Equals more sales.
Seeing that the iPAQ 910 announced last year had tweaks from the initial press picture, to the pre-production unit, to the final design when it was finally available in June this year; I hope HP does some tweaks for the better… at least on the iPAQ Data Messenger which is their current flagship iPAQ phone (based on specifications). Fingers crossed =)
