Welcome to the Unwired Mind

Okay, I am not exactly sure what the title means, but I need to crow about Dell.

But first, some Dell bashing.

I bought a laptop from Dell a few years ago. It came with Vista and it was slow as drying dog do-do. I hated the machine and subsequently passed it onto my unsuspecting father who uses it with W7 now and plays VCDs because his mac does not…

It even came with a stupid gigantic remote control. The ‘touch’ buttons that control the volume on the laptop are practically useless.

WHAT A WASTE OF MONEY.

I bought it with a monitor. Not the biggest one, but one of the cheaper ones on special. I don’t even know what size it is.

This was at least 2 years ago.

So let’s fast forward to today.

Today, I bought my wife a 13″ Macbook Pro and I thought I would set up a mini docking station.

So, since this would be her main computer, the mini docking station had to be a bit special.

I grabbed the Dell monitor and to my surprise, it has not only a webcam (which I knew of), it has 4 USB ports and is basically a hub in itself.

I ran this off of a Targus 7 port hub so she would only need to plug in one USB plug into her laptop (the main Targus plug). I then ran two Western Digital USB 1 TB drives (one for use and one for the Time Machine) off of the monitor.

The monitor has a soft switch, so I was a bit worried about the drives not powering down to sleep when everything was off. Another pleasant surprise! When I switched the monitor off (via the soft switch), the drives powered down and went to sleep!

You would not believe the troubles people have had trying to get a third party webcam to work on their mac mini… and Dell’s old monitor’s webcam… just works!

Okay, so what does this do for you PC-phile? Due to this monitor being old and superseded, nothing.

What will do something for you, are the amazing array of monitors that Dell have.

Check out this one for example. TOTALLY NOT mac compatible.

This must be in the upgrade line of my old monitor and I must say… WOW.

You cannot get mac drivers for this… so sad… but hey, it just works with W7 (and W7 seems to just work nowadays…). If this was mac compatible, I would buy this in a heartbeat.

I have to admit to you out there, that I do love Apple and what they produce. What can I say? I am a designer and they do it so well. I haven’t  looked to go around converting people to the ‘church of Apple’ or anything, but I do rave on about Apple a lot.

Where do the majority go if they don’t want to buy into the Apple juggernaut? Seriously, you want an mp3 player but don’t want an iPod? You want a media device, but don’t want an iPod Touch or iPad? Where do you go? Is there a company out there that is the equal of Apple in terms of design, engineering and beauty?

For this reason, I have created a category called ‘Awesome and not Apple’ and in this first post, I present to you an almost equally expensive product line to Apple’s that is not Apple.

The thing is… when you boil it down, the iPad is not the first ‘media product’ on the market.

If you want something very similar to the iPad, but do prefer Windows 7, you have seriously got to check out a little company called Archos. They also have a range of MP3 players as well.

I hope to do a follow up article on Archos, just go check out their website.

You may just be impressed!

www.archos.com