I'm wondering how well the pogoplug web site and the Windows drive app work on limited screen sizes, like netbooks.

My mother is having trouble using a touchpad on a her laptop and I was thinking about getting her a touch screen tablet PC or such.

Since HP cancelled their Win7 slate project and there doesn't seem to be any suitable large screen (10+ inch) Android tablets yet, I was thinking about getting just a touch screen netbook.

Like maybe the Asus T101MT, which has a 10 inch touch screen.  However, the resolution is only 1024x600.   (To be honest though, if it was a higher resolution, I'd probably have to reduce it to this or 800x600 or such so she could see it.  A 10 inch screen isn't all that big and high res screens just don't make much sense.)

But I was concerned about how usable PogoPlug is with such a small screen....

As a test, I set my laptop to 800x600 (it doesn't have a 1024x600 setting) and the drive app is unusable.  It wont fit. It's too big for the screen.  And there's no way to resize it etc.  (Plus, the plug app never seems to reconnect automatically after my laptop wakes up.  I have to manually tell it to reconnect.  Definetly not convenient for my mom to have to remember that.)

The web site also has problems, ranging from not enough width for all the stuff the web page wants to display (and no horiz scrollers or adjustable frames) to the videos themselves being unplayabe due to the player being too tall and hiding the controls!!

That last part was a bit surprising.  It's way too tall.  Even when playing a smaller video, there are a couple big black bars on the top & bottom of the video player screen.  The player doesn't even *try* to adjust itself to fit the video, let alone the screen.  (Although in all fairness, trying to play a flash video on a netbook is a bit of a joke, so I would probably set up the drive app instead.)

Obviously, the developers gave no thought to creating stuff to work on the standard 800x600 screen.  Which is just good web design practice, since that's considered the minimal reasonable screen res.

My question is....

Has anybody actually tried PogoPlug on a real hardware limited screen resolution, rather than just telling the computer to display a lower res?

MAYBE, just maybe, the app etc. just isn't noticing that I'm using a reduced screen resolution and thinking I'm using the real hardware resolution.

I know, it's a bit of a stretch, but I'm just having trouble believing the developers really screwed up usability this badly for the unofficial 'web standard' 800x600 design size.

Also, what about cases where in Windows you adjust the DPI settings to make text larger?  A lot of people do that.  Either vision problems or they are trying to use a netbook....

Or in a browser where you do a Zoom-In / Zoom-Out to try and adjust web pages to fit better?

It's looking like if you don't have at least a 1920x1200 screen, you are out of luck....  (yes, exageration for effect.)