I went into my local Three shop this afternoon for one of the new 3 Skype phones - but the S2 won't be in stock until next week. Pity - I do so love new gadgets. The one on display looked very nice - well made and shiney!
Friday 22nd August 2008
Great news - Orange have the so lovely BlackBerry Bold on offer! Oh
and such a good offer too... "This month only get Talk with
BlackBerry® including unlimited browsing and email for just
£2.13 a month with any new voice plan" but actually the small print
doesn't read so well. What Orange mean by "unlimited" is 250Mb of data.
That really sucks Orange!
Not that the other networks - except 3 - are better. O2, Vodaphone and T-Mobile all use the word "unlimited" to sell strictly limited data packages. At least 3 tell you that they mean 1Gb when that's what they are selling you.
Wednesday 20th August 2008
You may be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but sometimes the
old grey cells forget some basic I.T. rules. I used to lecture on about
never using Microsoft Word to edit a HTML document because of all of the
junk HTML it insists on adding. Silly me for forgetting. I edited my
blog on another laptop without FrontPage and used Word 2007 instead of
Notepad! Yeah okay I know that FrontPage is pretty dated technology but
I like it better than Microsoft's Expression Web 2 (their current HTML
offering).
Word added dozens of worthless lines of advertising and a whole folder full of unused "Word" additives. It was a relief to rewrite the page using good old FrontPage - which I have defanged to my own style of plain easy going HTML.
Monday 18th August 2008
I was interested to see that O2 will be selling a Pay As You Go version
of the astonishingly popular iPhone 3G later this year. I wonder if all
those people who signed up to really long contracts will be pleased at
the news that their iconic trophy phone will be available to all and
sundry?
Sunday 17th August 2008
I.T. Professionals who use hotmail/yahoo accounts is something of a
bugbear with me. I totally get that the free Hotmail service has come a
long way since Microsoft acquired Hotmail back in the 90’s and the Yahoo
email service is excellent. Don’t get me wrong – I have Hotmail, Yahoo,
Gmail and Aim email addresses - all free accounts and none of which I
would give to a client or an employer as a principle email address. I
came across a list of email addresses for trainers on a recent contract
and 15 of the 17 had given freemail accounts. Myself and one other
person had company email addresses.
Its possibly just me, but I think your email address says a lot about you as an I.T. professional. Is there any excuse for the high proportion of hotmail, gmail and yahoo accounts? Well I guess those I.T. professionals don’t think having a company email address means anything. A UK domain costs about a fiver a year to set up and maintain... you can even forward it onto gmail or yahoo and get your replies to appear using your company address. Oh and Microsoft gave away thousands of free domains last year... check out their Live site for more information.
Rant, rant, rant... yeah it is just me isn’t it?
Thursday 14th August 2008
I updated my BlackBerry media player to the new xPlayer release from
Mobiola. The xPlayer app. was free originally but rather limited when
playing anything but MP3’s. The updated xPlayer allows you to play full
screened video, but it also introduces internet radio – great if you
have an “all you can eat” data allowance on your contract. For me it was
the full screen video that was the selling feature – I spend a lot of
time travelling in my job and to be able to watch movies on a hand held
device makes a lot of sense. The iPhone is perfect for this sort of
thing, but the BlackBerry screen is very useable too.
Well done to Warelex on this update. Warelex were recently acquired by Shape Services – who are of course famous for their excellent IM+ range – IM+ All in One Messenger and IM+ Skype. I use both applications and they are really first class.
Wednesday 6th August 2008
Cowes week on the Isle of Wight and I managed
to see some pretty amazing boats. The round island yacht race is world
famous and there is some pretty serious gadgetry keeping everyone safe
and aware of their actual location – rather like me in my Nissan
equipped with TomTom. I treated myself to a monocular from Jessops (the
camera specialists) at a stunning £6 – and was extremely pleased with
its performance. So many people watching the boats had massively
expensive and bulky binoculars while I had a tiny monocular hung easily
about my neck bringing all the action into view. The little monocular
has earned a place in my glove box and is small enough to take on a walk
or just have to hand should it be needed.
Sunday 3rd August 2008 I had a quick look at prices for unlocked iPhone 3G’s on ebay and was surprised at how many were for sale, although the asking price of £300 to £400 wasn’t as surprising. Buyer beware though – in the UK with Apples deal solely restricting sales of the iPhone 3G to O2 customers any updates using iTunes will reset the “unlocked” iPhone right back to O2.
With the iPhone 3G available free on £45 tariffs from O2 I wonder that it might not be more cost effective to get the contract – after all £400 would be 9 months free of charge!
Friday 1st August 2008
I ordered a lovely dark brown leather cover from RIM for my BlackBerry
8800 from Expansys and it arrived this morning. RIM make really
excellent accessories for their BlackBerry range and this smooth thick
leather cover is just dripping with quality. Its really clever how the
BlackBerry switches off when you slide it into the cover.
