I’m behind the times.

After seemingly both the wax and wane had passed, I jumped on the Netflix wagon a week ago. I signed up and started my month trial of the streaming option. First impressions were fantastic; I could watch it on my computer, on my Xbox 360 and on my Windows Phone. The first movie I picked was also a doozie – Momento (great movie, watch it if you haven’t already).

This past weekend, I had some free time, so I went trawling through the IMDB top 250 for another movie to watch on Netflix.

Fight Club – DVD only.

Let’s try… City of God. Nope, DVD only as well.

Oh, The Usual Suspects looks interesting. Oh, not available for streaming either. Darn.

Pan’s Labyrinth, The King’s Speech. Not available, no. In Bruges, no. Same for Magnolia. DVD only for Gran Torino, Hotel Rwanda and Into the Wild.

At that point, I decided to cancel. Bye, Netflix. That was a brief encounter.

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

I’m once more spending time home with my family over the holidays, taking my longest and only second vacation of the year. It looks like I’ll be carrying forward vacation time, yet again. All the while, work is still going on furiously in the background, although the clatter of emails dropping into my inbox has certainly quieted in the past week. It’s been nice to put work on the backburner and spend 10+ days of peaceful, relaxing time.

Once again, there was no snow this Christmas, which still bums me out (it doesn’t quite feel like Christmas without snow), but rewatching Home Alone 1 and 2 partially made up for the weather’s lack of Christmas spirit. I’ve spent some time over the past few days doing things I said I’d do for too long, but never got to (planning a new desk arrangement for the apartment, writing some new blog posts and technology ideas down). Over the next few days, I’ll be driving around, seeing friends, which I’m looking forward to very much.

I’m getting recharged for work. The new year is going to bring some pretty exciting stuff for Microsoft, and I’m very happy and proud to be a part of it. I think momentum is building all over the company (I’m even playing with the Xbox, definitely see its value). There are very few places that have the breadth, and at the same time, cohesiveness of products and services that I see coming. It’s exhilarating to be in a market with the (in my opinion) most fearsome competition Microsoft has ever seen.

It was all looking so good. The feel of cold, smooth, brushed aluminum. The solidity of a thin form factor. Beautifully sleek design. Keys painted to match the brushed aluminum chassis. A large clickable trackpad. Good build tolerances all around. Sub-2.5lb weight.

And then I turned the thing on, and everything went downhill.

I’m writing about the ASUS UX21. I really wanted to like this fantastic looking “Ultrabook”, and it’s a really convincing rendition of a Windows-based MacBook Air-compete. However, a few critical components crippled the user experience of this unit in particular. Here are the specs of the version I picked up at the Microsoft Store.

• ASUS Zenbook UX21E-DH52
• Intel Core i5-2467m, dual core HyperThreading (1.6GHz – Turbo 2.3GHz)
• 4GB DDR3
• 128GB ADATA XM11 SSD
• 11.6″ 1366×768 (TN)
• Intel HD 3000 integrated video
• Atheros AR9485 802.11b/g/n
• 1 USB 2.0, 1 USB 3.0, mini-VGA, micro-HDMI, 3.5mm headset
• Trackpad – Sentilic
• 35WHr battery

As I alluded to at the beginning of the post, the design of the UX21 is gorgeous. Although the dimensions and components used in this machine are almost exact replicas of the 11.6″ MacBook Air, the build quality is as good, if not better, and the execution of the design makes this a striking laptop. The radiating circular brush design on the lid works well, and even the two tones of aluminium for the lid and chassis complement each other, very well. The keyboard deck is firm, is nicely coloured to match the rest of the visual style, and even the display bezel seems to be aluminum. Closing the laptop produces a confident “thunk”. Once closed, the entire laptop feels like a solid chunk of metal, with little-to-no flex anywhere. Overall, the PC is stunning to look at and hold.

The first hints of trouble are seen when setting the machine up, for the first time. The trackpad isn’t sensitive all the way to the bottom edge – I think this is so you can rest your thumb/other finger on the “click-area”, without impacting cursor movement. But that’s a lazy way of getting around the real issue; other than in a MacBook, we still haven’t seen a good driver implementation of a clickpad, which can parse the difference between contact for moving the cursor and contact intended for clicking. While the trackpad looks awfully large and feels like one contiguous surface, you can’t tell at what point the trackpad will no longer be sensitive to your finger, as you move around. In that sense, ASUS would have been better off with separate buttons. ASUS says an updated trackpad driver should solve most issues, but I have the latest version they recommend (9.1.7.7), and there are still problems.

Fortunately, performance, even with a low-voltage Core i5 is very snappy, and the solid state drive (which uses an SF-2281 controller) is extremely quick. Boot up times are astronomically low. From a cold boot, the Windows 7 start up orbs don’t even have time to group together before we’re off to the Windows desktop. Resume from sleep is essentially instantaneous. It’s a superb experience. Given ASUS’ claim that this will last 1 week+ on standby, we’re getting pretty close to consumer-electronics experience.

After setting up Windows in the first boot, I connected to my home wireless network and opened up Internet Explorer and waited for the homepage to load. And waited. And waited.

Sure, MSN is not exactly the lightest-weight page in the world, but on a 20mbps downlink internet connection, it really shouldn’t take upwards of 20 seconds. I flipped over to Engadget, only to find that it loaded just as slowly. I thought it might be a temporary slowdown in my internet connection, but everything was still very speedy on my desktop. Speedtest.net showed I had download speeds below 2mbps. Fortunately, with a USB wireless N adapter lying around, I had an easy way to isolate the issue. I plugged that in and tried browsing again. Everything was near instantaneous and Speedtest.net showed ~16mbps down.

I searched the web for issues with Wifi on the Zenbooks and quickly found numerous users having the same problem with the built-in Atheros solution. For some, installing an older version of the Wifi driver helped. For me, it didn’t. Transferring files from my Windows Home Server became absurdly slow, to the point of unusable. This is a deal-breaker.

And the rest is mostly history. The laptop is, for the most part, pretty quiet. The fan rarely spins up (although my UX21 came with the 206 BIOS – some folks have said the update to 207 runs the fan more often: bad). The display is mediocre, but gets the job done; viewing angles aren’t great, but neither is the likelihood that I’ll be sharing an 11.6″ display with several other people or needing to fit it in some crazy angle on an economy seat tray table. Battery life is right around ASUS’ advertised mark. I get in the range of 4-5 hours of browsing, before the computer wants to hibernate.

The keyboard, which some have complained about, is okay – it’s a bit stiffer and has shallower travel than most keyboards, but you quickly get used to that. The keys seem smaller than a full-size though, particularly in the length dimension, so sometimes I overshoot. I’m typing this review on the UX21, and I’m already pretty used to the layout and firmness.

This laptop is going back, and with the combination of wifi (deal-breaker), touchpad (nearly deal-breaker) and a number of smaller issues, it’s not something I’ll try another unit of. The external design and construction of the UX series is phenomenal. Now they just need to choose the right key components for a good user-experience. The UX21 is a almost a great PC, but a few mistakes were made on critical components, which completely undermined the potential of the system.

As I trawled my posts from the last few months, I was a bit surprised I hadn’t written about this already. Then, I see a few posts back that I was just on the cusp of “Exciting news incoming in the next week or two!”, then silence. Well, then, that exciting news?

I’ve moved teams (and sort of roles) at Microsoft.

I spent just over 11 months in my first real job, as a feature Program Manager in the Office group. As with any first job, it was an interesting learning experience. Having glided into that role from the prior internship, it was an easy fit. I knew the people, I knew the product, and I was very eager to build my core PM skills.

Compacted and condensed, almost a year later, I emerged from a very different team, without many of those original coworkers, working on an unfamiliar product, and longing for something that fit better with my interest and (minimal) expertise in design and computing hardware. However, without a bit of fate, I’d probably still be there. The person I interviewed with for an internship was now a group manager and had an open position. “Hey Charlie, are you interested?”

Now, I’m a partner-facing Program Manager in the Windows group, working with one of our three ARM silicon partners. My commitment? Ensure Windows has the right engagement with that partner to succeed in delivering Windows on their platform. Scope is almost anything I want to make it, from greasing the engineering cogs by defining an appropriate legal framework, to diving deep into a feature to help resolve technical challenges. As an engineer at heart, it’s stupendously exciting to get to ramp up rapidly on things from security feature set details to how one could address an engineering requirement with a button’s electrical implementation.

And I think it’s that last piece that makes me enjoy the role so much. I have the opportunity to learn and dive deep into nearly any aspect of Windows and the hardware it runs and will run on. As a role with broad scope, I’m surrounded by smart and immensely experienced people, off of whom I’ve been feeding for the past 4 months. I can feel myself bulging at the sames with learnings and growing rapidly. It’s been a crazy time since I’ve joined, with some of the toughest challenges I’ve ever faced. I wouldn’t have it any other way!