Experimental MumScience + Children = Fun + Mess

Samsung Netbook N130

It seems I’m not alone in feeling disappointed that the Ubisurfer doesn’t live up to it’s description. I’ve had many similar comments to my review.

I’ve returned mine to Maplin and got a full refund after they sent it back for testing.

We’re about to go off on holiday to Orlando for a fortnight and as my husband are both self-employed we will need to be able to  keep in touch with our working lives while we are away.

Santa brought my daughter a Samsung N130 netbook so I’m borrowing it for the hols.

I’ve set it up with Skype, added all the POP3 email addresses to Outlook, installed Open Office and Picasa – so I think I’m set for a bit of evening catch up!

Photo Credit: John Lewis

As a Mum who works from home, I often find my working hours while the children are at school just zoom in. As the hours of 2.30pm till 8.00pm are taking up with family activities I spend most evenings on my laptop until the wee small hours.

I was therefore very interested to review Tanith Carey’s new book, “How to be an “Amazing Mum”, When You Just Don’t Have the time”. I was hoping to find some nuggets of advice that might just help me eek a few more minutes out of the day.

The book is broken down into easy to read chapters covering many aspects of living with children. I found the style of the writing, informative but witty and you really felt the tips were useable and written by someone who’d – been there, done that! Also, being a small, portable size, the book is easy to squeeze into your bag to dip into during those snatched minutes of the day.

There are some top tips in here and I’ll definitely be trying the vegetable oil on school shoe scuffs and I think drawing up some “House Rules” with the girls could be really beneficial.

Some parts made me laugh out loud, “Don’t let your child become a Blackberry Orphan” and “Beware of Smug Mummies” I found particularly funny.

Other parts of the book weren’t that relevant to me as my girls are that bit older now, but I did still find the tips in sections geared towards younger children very well thought out. I remember well the time involved in trying to leave the house with two children under three! In fact I’m going to pass on my copy of the book to my younger sister who had her first baby 6 weeks ago, I’m sure she’ll enjoy the tips too when he’s old enough to start messing up the house!

Oh my goodness, with such a busy summer juggling children and working from home, my blogging time has been drastically reduced! Like most Mums I spend many hours waiting for my children at their activities and for a while I’ve been fancying something that would allow me to work on the move.

After much “Googling” mini netbooks and smart phones, I finally decided on the Ubisurfer which I bought from Maplin yesterday.

After a pretty quick charge up time, I spent last night trying out my new toy (essential working Mum’s kit).

Here’s a review of my first 24 hours with the Ubisurfer:

What I Like:

• Seems well built and sturdy
• Small but useable size (about as big as a paperback)
• Nice shiny black colour
• Re-charges fast and charge lasts a reasonable time (about 3 hours each)
• Keyboard size is functional and fairly easy to use
• Fast and stable connection to Internet using GPRS mode
• One of payment for “free” Internet

What I Don’t Like:

• Parts of the manual don’t relate well to the product (screenshots wrong etc)
• Not all the functions are explained in the manual
• Can’t set the clock display to correct time
• Battery monitor pretty rubbish, resulting in instant death if you’re not keeping an eye of the time
• It won’t open documents from my USB stick
• File Manager not intuitive, in fact clonky and difficult to locate docs
• Strange font choices, not sure how well they’ll translate when I open them in MS Word
• Although the WiFi Internet mode, gives better resolution, viewing and functionality, it’s was slow to find my home WiFi connection and won’t save a WiFi profile
• Based on the above, not convinced it would work well with Hotspot Wi-Fi

I’ve emailed Customer Support today with my list of issues and unbelievably their email address is wrong, so my email got bounced back as undelivered. Tech support need to work on their own system!

I’ve forwarded my email to the manufacturer of the product Datawind, so hopefully they’ll be able to help.

I’m sure these niggles are due to it being a first release and I hope they are able to iron out these bugs, at the moment it smacks of a product being released a few months too early.

I for one want it to work, as on the surface it seems to do everything I’d need from a tiny netbook.