Fly Fusion Pentop

So there I was, wandering through the local Zeller’s at Bayshore, when I saw a rack of those Fly Fusion Pentop computers that came out a while back. Given that I hadn’t actually heard anything about them for quite a while, I had assumed they had simply gone bankrupt, and the fact that the pens had stickers that said $20 on them, did nothing to convince me otherwise.

But I figured that for $20, it might be an interesting toy, so I grabbed one, along with a couple of pads of paper and a new memory card, for a total (according to the sticker prices) of about $40. Of course, I had to by the extra stuff too, because it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to get it later (if the company was gone).

Anyway, I took it all to the cash, and low and behold, it was being offered at a further 50% discount, so I ended up walking away with the whole load for $20. Cool.

Now, unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse.

I brought it all home, took out the install CD and stuck it in my Mac… Nope, no mac version of the software… Ugh.

“Ok”, I think, “I’ve got my Vista gaming PC, I’ll try it in there.”… Stick the CD in, try to install, CD decides it needs to get a newer version off the net… Download fails. But I’m a stubborn cuss, so I try it again… Nope, download fails again. Ok, one more time… Yes! Everything downloads and installs correctly.

Starting the software showed it to be one of those crappy, fixed size UIs built with Flash or VisualBasic or whatever, with no apparent way to proceed. Wait! It says it will only recognize the pen if it’s plugged in and turned on. Alrighty! Plug the pen into a USB port, turn it on and…

Get the driver search dialog. Nope, no Vista drivers available from Windows Download. Offers to look on the CD… Nope, no drivers on CD. (Which clown thought it meant it made sense to ship a Windows device without drivers. Ugh.)

Check their support site, which is singularly unhelpful…

Ok, now I’m getting frustrated. Then it comes to me: I’ve got a netbook that runs XP, maybe it will work with XP. Hook up an external USB CD drive to the netbook, stick the CD in, download the new version of the software (again), start it up and… Nope, the bloody fixed size UI is too big for the netbook screen!

God, talk about ways to suck the enthusiasm right out of ya.

One. more. try… Hook the external monitor out from the netbook to another display, and sure enough, I can finally run the software. Now, just 15 more minutes of randomly filling in stuff and connecting to a website, and creating both an admin and a user account(!), and leaving personal data that I really should not have to, and…

I get a page that shows I haven’t done anything with the pen yet.

Now, all I have to do is charge it up, and I can actually try it.

*sigh*.