Sony Vaio Pro (One of the first Haswell Ultrabooks) Teardown, Upgrade How-to, Mini Review, & Benchmark

The new Sony Vaio Pro is one of the most promising ultraportable machines of 2013 - not only is it the lightest 13" ultrabook on the planet (at ~2.3 pounds), it's razor thin with a brand new energy-saving haswell cpu (giving it ~8+hours battery, supposedly) and the radical new Samsung PCIe SSD that offers 2-3X the speed of top-of-the-line SSD predecessors.

I got my hands on it to qualify its candidacy as a replacement for the Lenovo Yoga.
Here are some takeaways you might not surmise from photos & specs.

+++

• Backlit keys (with luminance control)
• Definitely feels super light & well balanced (and can be opened one-handed)
• Pretty good thermal management (vents most of the heat to the left side instead of your lap)
• Nice sized keys + touchpad
• Pretty sturdy (I was expecting it to bend in half based on other write-ups) for as thin and light as it is
• Seemingly excellent battery
• Bright, crisp, and clear screen
• Good sound
• Slope of the machine makes it more comfortable to use
• Full hdmi out, SD card sticks in all the way (so you can leave one in for extra storage)
• Optional sheet battery upgrade

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• Touchscreen only achieves about 10% usefulness compared to a convertible like the Yoga (due to gorilla arm syndrome). With such a huge and nice screen, it's a complete shame!
• Corners are sharp! I could probably cut myself with the thing.
• Fans are quite loud - and overall there seems to be much more heat/noise than on the Yoga (which has more than most other ultrabooks, in my experience)
• No room for expansion - only one half msata slot for the wifi card and one pcie ssd slot. soldered ram
• Can only upgrade the SSD, and barely
• Power is on the opposite side as the rest of the ports (annoying if you want to plug something else in and use it on a couch/bed etc) - also, the power connector is the boring old barrel form factor

Here's how to open it up:

1. Peel off the long rubber strip

2. Pop off the middle tab

3. Peel/pop off the remaining two rubber feet

4. Remove the 12 newly exposed screws
5. Carefully pry open the case, starting in the middle and working towards the power port side first

Here's what the inside looks like:

Not much you can do to upgrade, unfortunately. 

The machine uses an uber-fast PCIe SSD, which I can't seem to find by itself online.

Your best bet for upgrading is really just throwing in a 128gB SD card.

Here are the rest of the benchmarks I took:

All in all, the pros of this machine do not make up for its lack of convertibility & lack of expandability. I'm gonna hold out for something better and stick to my Yoga + stand + support brace. What about you?

Haswell Ultrabooks, Touch Laptops, And Convertibles Available now for Order / Preorder - Which will you buy?

Eager to replace my 8gB RAM dual-SSD $999 touch/convertible Lenovo Yoga with something a little less carpal-tunnel-inducing & with battery life at least meeting if not exceeding the Samsung Series 9 (which I had been acclimated to immediately preceding the Yoga), I've spent a couple hours scouring the web for info on new Haswell machines & their availability.

TBF, I've been keeping an eye on ultrabook offerings pretty consistently due to my total and utter bewilderment at the lack of viable options - really, the Lenovo Yoga has been the only legitimate choice for quite some time now - and it certainly has its shortcomings.

Fortunately, Haswell promises to remedy the situation.

"Delivering Intel's largest generation-over-generation gain in battery life enablement in company history"1, Intel's new haswell CPU is key to bridging the gap in portability, power, and battery life between tablets and laptops. But you already knew that.

Tomorrow might hold some exciting releases for Haswell ultrabooks, but sadly, Intel & notebook manufacturers seem to be planning on a Fall launch for the majority of the first batch of Haswell machines, timed for back-to-school shopping.

However, there still are a few machines available now and available for preorder:
-HP ENVY 17"
-Several MSI Gaming Notebooks including a $1300 12gB RAM 17" w/ a GTX765M
-Lenovo's Y410P 14" for $720 and the 15.6" Y510P for ~$1000

Right now most machines available use the i7-4700mq haswell chip but there of course are lots of other flavors to go around.

I've found ultrabooknews.com to be my favorite source for succinct, up-to-date info on ultrabooks, without all the clutter of other tech news sites. If you have other recommendations, let me know in the comments.

Personally, I'm thinking the Sony Vaio Pro 13" or the Asus Book T300 look like good candidates for my next machine (unfortunately I have to rule out the Zenbook Infinity because it's not convertible). What do you think?

How to Upgrade (and fix if needed) Last Year's First Version Electree (Ulule.com) for $10

I participated in the limited-run prototype fundraiser for the coolest product on the planet, the electree, last year and thought I'd share a little hack I did to effectively increase the battery capacity & protect against the dreaded 'battery can't charge because it has no battery' bug that occurs in many devices including some cell phones, the original cr-48 chromebook, and a few first-gen//prototype electrees purchased on ulule.com.

A quick aside- electree just launched a Kickstarter today! They will be giving all Ulule.com backers (like me) a 'significant discount' on the new electree (the electree+). Scroll down to the Risks and Challenges section.

Firstly, note that you can easily jumpstart most batteries by shock-charging with a power source - in the case of the Chromebook, you simply insert & remove the power cable gently repeatedly ~10x until the light comes on, then let it charge. For the Electree, it's much simpler - you simply plug in the USB port on the underbelly to a wall USB adapter or backup battery like this. Instant fix.

While I was at it, I decided to both increase the battery capacity and prevent the charging bug by permanently installing a secondary battery. I opened up my 'chargers, batteries, and sparqs' bin and found a few options:

A little $10 Energizer that alone really doesn't serve much purpose and larger newtrent and zagg battery-chargers. I decided to put the Energizer to use, as I still sometimes travel with one of the others.

Start by removing the tree portion and flipping the base over:











Next, remove the rubber feet and unscrew the 4 screws:









Pry off the panel:

At this point I wasn't quite sure where the new battery might fit, so decided to tackle the wiring first.

You can remove the bottom-side USB port by unscrewing the 2 screws and severing the glue:
(Initially done to snake the new USB cable through)

I experimented with threading the Energizer's USB cable through the main USB panel after removing the main computer board:

But after a bit decided it would be too difficult to access the battery, and figured I'd make a more flexible solution. After removing the bottom-side single port, thread it through the inside dual USB port panel by first removing the board (it has 2 screws):

Screw the board back on, and secure the 3rd USB port down (I used hot glue)

Now you can hook up an extra battery to the electree, using the repositioned 3rd USB port to charge the electree, and one of the other two USB ports to charge the battery.

I ended up swapping the Energizer for a larger capacity NewTrent, giving me ~20,000 mAh total :)

Do Cool Stuff w/Your Phone's Built-In NFC! (You know you've been wanting to try it)

After I got my Galaxy S3, I rooted, swapped ROMS, and added Google Wallet (which you can now do on most Verizon devices without root thanks to the FCC ruling regarding tethering).

I kind of forgot about NFC until a couple weeks later when I left my wallet in the car and needed to checkout at Meijer (the better version of Target). I fired up the app, picked my AMEX from the list of saved cards, and bam. Paid. No more cutting out the RFID from my fast-tap enabled credit card and stuffing it behind the phone's back cover for me ;) ! 

But after that, without mainstream adoption (cough cough, Apple, cough cough) or NFC-enabled payment readers in most stores, I didn't really find a practical use for my phone's shiny new capability.

Most NFC writers will only encode primitive actions, such as displaying a URL, launching an app, or checking in somewhere on FourSquare. Big whoop. So I started trying to hack together a more robust solution.
Using Tasker App Factory, you can cheat the NFC writer's limitations by creating an App to perform a custom Tasker function and then encoding the NFC tag to simply launch said app. A little hack-y, but at least it opens up a wide variety of actions that can be controlled via NFC.

Still, how useful is it, really, to use NFC to launch a Tasker macro? Does it really save you time? If you have to unlock your phone, swipe past the lockscreen, then tap your NFC tag, the answer is no. But what if you could launch a task using NFC while your screen is off, and without pressing any buttons?

Imagine being able to activate your phone's LED flashlight simply by tapping it to your keychain... or to start your music or go to next track without removing your phone from your pocket! or to send a pre-written text message (to your girlfriend when you leave work, for example) just with a quick tap of an NFC dongle. All of a sudden, NFC would become a highly modular extra button for your phone that you can program to do virtually any set of actions.

Thanks to xda-developers and the enthusiastic community of Android devs in general, you can very easily force NFC to remain active even while the screen is locked and off :) Here's the original article from June, and here's a direct link to instructions for the Verizon Galaxy S3. As for Tag Writing apps, check out my favorite, NFC Task Launcher.

So where to get NFC tags? There are plenty of places online to find stickers for a few bucks a pop.

OR you can use NFC ReTag to rewrite some of your old Metro cards you have lying around :)

But I've found stickers aren't very fun. They restrict you to sacrificing the tag by leaving it in (and adhered to) one place permanently. And I don't particularly want to carry around a bunch of extra metro cards... So I thought:

Why not have an encased NFC tag (or several) on your keychain, instead?

Why not indeed. The only thing sweeter would be a way to tell your different tags apart.

I'm happy to announce, that as of today, you can now order as many NFC Keychain Dongles as you want with custom engravings to tell them apart - a world first :)

So head on over and grab the newest product from techneesh.com,
the NFC Keychain Dongle!

The first 50 buyers will get a FREE extra tag!