For those of you using Firefox, you should already be well acquainted to the bookmark bar - a convenient little bar where you can put bookmark buttons. As a UMPC user, screen real estate is always an issue, in the case of the bookmark bar, which runs horizontally, it fills up pretty fast and starts to run off the screen. However, a little trick will probably more than triple the number of items you can have on your bookmark bar. The trick is very simple, you remove the title of the bookmark and only keep the favicon to differentiate between your bookmarks. Sorry mac users, but this trick won’t work for you, as the last time I checked, Firefox for mac didn’t put favicons in the bookmark bar.

1. Add the site to your bookmark bar
2. Click the bookmark to reload the site and make Firefox grab the favicon
3. Right-click the bookmark you just added and go to “Properties”
4. Delete all the text in the “Name” field and click OK

Now you should see just the favicon of your bookmarked site, and you will have a lot more room to add more items to your bookmark bar. Here is another tip: Right click on an empty part of the bookmark bar and click “Add Separator”, this will drop a small dragable line onto your bookmark bar that you can use to separate different favicons to stay a bit more organized.

I’ve been using this theme for a while now and I thought I should pass it on to readers. If you are using Firefox, you are probably aware that you can install different themes to change the appearance of the browser. While searching for ways to improve my touchscreen experience on the UX, I happened across a theme called Kempelton Large. This theme provides you with large buttons that make it easy to tap with a finger for touchscreen users.

Some of you may use your UMPC as a mobile device as well as a desktop unit; obviously you won’t need the large buttons when your device is hooked up to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Luckily there are two easy ways to reclaim that screen real estate that you lose when using the larger buttons. The first option is switching back to the default theme which can be done in as little as four mouse clicks - Tools > Add-ons > Themes (if already selected, eliminate this mouse click) > Firefox (default) > Use Theme. The only problem I find with this method is that Firefox has to be restarted to switch to the default theme, fortunately there is an even easier way to solve this problem. Just do the following - Right-Click (in an empty area on a Firefox toolbar) > Customize > check off “Use Small Icons”, now you have reduced the size of the icons very quickly for when you don’t need them to accommodate your finger. Combine this theme with the Grab and Drag add-on and you have yourself a very nice touchscreen browser.

Yeggster from the forums undertook the daunting task of taking apart an entire UX280 with a broken case, and putting it into a brand new case he found on ebay. Like a hermit crab changing it’s shell the UX280 now resides inside a brand new outer casing. Yeggster was searching for a few UX accessories on ebay when he came across someone selling a dock, two dongles, a standard battery, and a broken UX. Yeggster assumed that broken meant not working, he was surprised to find a fully functional UX280 arrive at this door that simply had a cracked case. Back to ebay he went, and found someone selling a UX230 casing (a lesser known model, but still with the same case) and purchased it with the intention of putting the cracked UX280 innards inside the UX230 case. That intention recently became success, and Yeggster kindly documented the internal components of the UX280 with plenty of images. Some of the images may be disturbing to long time UX owners, fear not, reconstruction goes as planned. Swing by the Wiki to check them out.

Thanks to a tip from Sull86 of the forums, we have another useful Firefox add-on for UMPC users. This one is called No Squint. This clever add-on allows you to zoom to a custom zoom percentage or use buttons on Firefox’s bar to increase/decrease the font size on the page. This may sound like the already built in font zoom feature in Firefox, however this add-on saves the font zoom that you have chosen to the website that you zoomed into. This is particularly useful for users who would like to increase the font size when browsing on their small UMPC, but require different levels of zoom for several different sites. This link will take you to the add-on page where you can download and have it running after your next Firefox restart.

New UX490 owner and MPCT forum user Sabesh has kindly taken some wonderful pictures of the UX490. These high res images (click to enlarge) really help show off the crisp design of the device as well as it’s built quality, and it definitely looks wicked in black! Don’t forget to stop by Sabesh’s informative mini UX490 review in the forums.

Have you ever wished you could have the same cool inertia scrolling on your UMPC as the ever so popular iPhone? Well believe it or not, you can with relative ease. If you use Firefox a free add-on will do just that. Its called Grab and Drag, and it will enable inertia scroll which can be toggled on or off at the user’s convenience. A comprehensive group of settings will help you customize your inertia scrolling just the way you want it. Probably my favorite feature of this addon is that the scrolling is silky smooth, even on my two year old UX180. This is a must have for any UMPC user as it truly helps you increase the speed in which you navigate web pages, especially long ones such as forums or blogs.

The real key to this add-on is getting the settings right. I would definitely recommend enabling momentum, which is really where the inertia scroll comes from. I prefer to set the drag multiplier (on the More Options tab) to 1.0 which means the screen moves exactly as much as your finger moves the cursor, if you set it higher than 1.0 when you move your finger (and subsequently the cursor) one inch on the screen, the page will move further than one inch. The setting of 1.0 keeps the ratio exactly 1:1, and makes it easy to drag the page around and stop exactly where you want to. I also tend to have a low friction setting which means the page will scroll fairly far before stopping when I give it a good fling. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the momentum sliders to get your settings just the way you’d like them.

Below is a short video-demo of the add-on in action, even in the relatively low frame rate YouTube video you can see how smoothly it handles web page scrolling (apologies for the blur).

Sull86 of the MPCT forums has done it again. This time, instead of helping you install drivers for the UX, Sull has made a guide to make it easy for anyone to burn their very own Custom Windows XP CD for the UX. Sull has taken his UX driver pack and integrated it into an nLite file which you can use to burn yourself an XP instillation CD that will automatically install every driver and application required to run the UX. This of course means a bloat free clean install of XP to help your UX run with the best possible performance. Sounds great right? It gets better - it will work with any UX model, and only takes around 7 minutes to complete. All you need to start is a Windows XP SP2 CD and a computer with a CD burner (make sure you have a USB CD drive which will boot with you UX) then head directly to the guide and get your own custom Windows XP for your UX.

Like following by example rather than reading a guide? Sull’s got your covered, here is a video tutorial (you’ll need the files from the guide before you start).

Jenn over at Pocketables spotted a great deal from Buy.com on the UX390. For the same price as Woot’s recent UX390 one-day-deal ($1,299) you can secure one of the most powerful UMPCs on the market. The UX390 comes with a 30GB SSD, 1.33GHz Core Solo (U1500), 1GB of RAM and Windows Vista Business. Most will agree that Vista isn’t exactly the best OS for a UMPC; don’t worry you’ll be able to find all of the resources here at Micro PC Talk for changing the OS over to XP (or even Mac OS X Tiger or Leopard).

The Ultimate UX Price Post has been updated to include this information, and prices have been updated across the board.

This is the VAIO Applications Uninstaller which makes it easy to uninstall pre-installed software from Sony. While it would be nice to not have a bloat installed in the first place, at least we now have a tool to help remove it. I found this software on the Sony esupport page for the UX490, and although the 490 is the only model its listed for and it is also listed as running in Vista, I just gave it a try on my 180 running XP and it installed and operated without any issues (shame on them for hiding it from us). It shouldn’t have a problem running on any UX (Vista or XP), and will probably work on any Sony VAIO for that matter. Just click the “VAIO Applications” tab and you’ll get a view of all of the software installed by Sony. Watch out though, some of the items on the list are important.

Of course this is no substitute for a fresh install (especially a fresh install of XP) but it will help remove the bloat and improve out of the box performance.

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UMPCPortal has posted a good video demo showing Linpus Lite, a mobile focused Linux based OS, running on the Q1 Ultra. The video shows a what appears to be an OS that is pretty well designed for touch screen use. The main screen has tabs across the top which gives you different categories to sort applications into. Inside each tab applications are represented with an icon and some text in a large button (as seen in the image above) that should be easily pressed with a finger.

At the moment the Q1U’s touchscreen is recognized and functioning, however it would appear as though Linpus has the touchscreen calibration adjusted for an 800×480 device. This of course means that touches are interpreted in the wrong place of the Q1U’s 1024×600 screen. Steve from UMPCPortal has also said that the WiFi card is not detected, but he had no trouble getting online through a wired LAN connection. I believe that Linpus is in a somewhat early stage so you can expect hardware support to increase in the future. Linpus is designed as a starting point for OEMs to make the OS designed for their UMPC.

Hopefully what won’t happen is that Linpus will fall prey to the same issue that I’ve seen on OS2008, the OS that runs the N800 or N810. That issue is that the upper part of the UI is well designed for touch navigation, but beyond that most applications are very basic with tiny scroll bars and drop down lists that aren’t well designed for touch navigation at all. If you watch the video demo, it doesn’t appear as though Firefox and some of the other included applications are much different from their desktop counterparts, which leads me to believe that the preceding might be the case (at lease for now).