Last Friday I had my Harley serviced in Oxford. I booked it in for first thing in the morning and was going to wait while they did it which they estimated at 2 to 3 hours.

So I thought I would put my new Sony UX180P to the test and took it along so I could catch up on some forum and blog reading while I was waiting. The only thing that put me off was the cost. Data costs via a GPRS network tend to be expensive unless you have a special plan which I don’t and could cost anything between £3.00 to £5.00 per megabyte depending on the network.

Luckily I stumbled across an offer which Orange was doing where on pay as you go you can get unlimited internet access for £1.00 for a whole day. Now the unlimited access is if you are using their GPRS or CSD but it turns out they are also doing a special offer for 3G data access for £1.00 a day as well albeit limited to 25 megabytes which would have been ample for me. Strictly speaking on the 3G data access you aren’t supposed to use it for modem access for computers.

Anyway, when I went to order my Orange World Daily Access for a £1 it didn’t actually give an option for GPRS or 3G. When I connected my PC through the built in 3G modem it connected to the 3G network by default rather than the GPRS network so I was happily surfing away at thoroughly useable speeds. The battery in the Sony UX180P lasted just long enough for them to carry out the service which was good as at least it drew my attention away from all the goodies and new bikes that they had there and temptation couldn’t prevail.

Unlocking the Cingular Edge card in the Sony UX180P is actually an easy task. All you need do is make a note of the IMEI number, call Sony Support at 888-476-6972 (United States) or 239-768-7676 (International). They will give you an unlock code and you then need to the Sim unlock procedure.

Follow this procedure to unlock the Sony Ericsson EDGE module after obtaining the SIM unlock code. This involves connecting to the card using HyperTerminal, entering a few commands and your unlcok code and that’s it. They even provide instructions on the internet to do this.

Some things they don’t tell you (or at least I couldn’t see) in the specifications is what networks the Edge card will work on. When I unlocked mine and placed a new sim card inside there is an option to choose a network. All I got in the UK was Orange and T-Mobile which both work on the 1800 frequency. Vodafone and O2 were not available and they use the 900 frequency in the UK. I must admit I hadn’t even considered there could be a problem here but luckily I use T-Mobile anyway.

I don’t really know how this EDGE or 3G data works to be honest and whether different networks are using different frequencies for their services.

What you can do though is if EDGE is not available in your area use the GPRS network or even dial up (very slow) to get a connection.

Now I have had my Sony UX180P for about a week now and am still learning all the things it can do. When it first arrived my initial thoughts were Wow!

It’s just so tiny about the size of a PSP. I bought it primarily because I am a man who likes to travel light. When I go away I still want to be able to keep in touch with the world and keep an eye on my websites and email. My previous sub-notebook was a Flybook which served me well but when I originally bought it on Ebay from a German seller it never crossed my mind that it would come with a German keyboard and Windows XP in German. For the most part that wasn’t too much of a problem as I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP on it and set the keyboard to English. There aren’t too many differences and if you use a keyboard often enough you get to know where all the keys are. It is only the special characters I have a hard time finding sometimes.

Anyway, back to the Sony, the first thing you notice is the screen. It is just amazing and although it is a tiny 4 inches it is so clear there is no problem reading it at all. They do provide zoom buttons to enlarge what you are viewing but honestly I haven’t found them necessary.

Its also so bright that you can use this pc just about anywhere except for in direct bright sunlight. This is something that I was never able to do with my Flybook. Even in a bright sunny room indoors you wouldn’t be able to see the screen.

I wouldn’t recommend using this as your only pc or even only laptop if you need to do a lot of typing as you can imagine the keyboard is only just big enough to type with two fingers or thumbs and will slow you down considerably. I know you could use an external keyboard but that really defeats the object of an ultra-portable pc. The other option albeit still slow is to do what I’m doing now and use some handwriting recognition software. I am using EverNote’s ritePen 2.5 which works really well.

I managed to get the Cingular Edge card unlocked so can use it with a UK network card and with the built in wireless I am able to connect into my home network and hotspots without any trouble.

The test of time will be once this Sony UX180P has lost its initial novelty factor. I am pretty confident I’ll be using it regularly way after that happens. I’m still learning what all the buttons do and once I’ve figured it all out and been using it a while I’ll give an honest opinion to what I really think to it in an everyday world.

Just ordered a Sony UX180P to replace the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet which is now on Ebay. It’s amazing what Sony have done with this. Its a full fledged PC running Windows XP Pro with built in wireless, bluetooth and EDGE so you can connect to the internet pretty much anywhere. Looks really cool and hopefully it will arrive tomorrow. I’ll say one thing for the US, they certainly know how to deliver things quickly.

Promises so much, delivers very little. I bought one of these a while back thinking how cool would it be to wander around the house but still keep in touch with the outside world.

The idea being I could check my emails away from my PC either in the garden, the sauna, on the jetty or even during the adverts on TV in the lounge. At first it looked great but I found that once it had downloaded your emails, unless you read them straight away they would just disappear and there was no way of getting them back. I’m a man and men don’t usually read instruction books so at first I thought I was doing something wrong. I tried to find information about this in the instructions and also Nokia’s website but just gave up in the end.

My Nokia 770 Internet tablet was confined to it’s box and later put up for sale on Ebay. Perhaps someone will have better luck with it than I did.