Saturday 30th May 2008
A good week for gadgets - I got a THB Bury car kit installed for my
Blackberry 8800 and I bought a Bank Holiday bargain PC. I love it when
companies have sales on gadgets. My old desktop was starting to look a
little tired after 18 months use and when I saw the spec of the new
desktop my friend
bought I had to get a new one too. I've ended up
with a tiny little HP tower - with a nice Dual Core and 4GB RAM and a
terabyte hard disk. Kind of geeky but it's been good fun
reinstalling old applications and updating some
to run under Vista. I've updated Paintshop Pro from the JASC version -
v.9 to Corel's version 12 and been enjoying the new features all week.
Another update has been moving from FrontPage 2003 to Microsoft
Expression Web - a rather bigger step but it's enjoyable learning new
tools.
The THB Bury car kits been brilliant. My Blackberry clicks in nicely
and connects to the cradle by Bluetooth - which I think is weird but
hey. The cradle powers my Blackberry which is great and the sound
quality through my cars speakers seems excellent. The installation was
really good - a nice leather holder "merging" the cradle into the
leatherwork of my cars central console.
Finally I ordered a HP 2133 Mini-Note - a tiny Eee PC clone from HP.
It has an 8.9 inch screen covering a keyboard that's "nearly" full size.
The big selling feature for me was it's 120GB hard disk - a bit more
impressive than the 4GB on the Asus Eee PC huh? I've been checking out
the HP 2133 for ages and it's finally in stock with MISCO so I thought
why not? Call it a birthday present.
Saturday 17th May 2008
Just checking the news again and a picture of Yves Rossy (the
"Fusion man") caught my eye on the BBC website. Yves was flying over the
Alps with genuine jet wings! Ok now that's pretty close to the ultimate
gadget ever! Personal powered flight! I've wanted to try that since I
saw the jet pack in the James Bond movie. They had it on Tomorrows World
in the 1970's and were confidently predicting that one day people would
have personal jet packs and be able to fly to work. I would so love to
have a go!
Friday 16th May 2008
I read an interesting bit of "news" in the IT Pro
newsletter (to
which I subscribe). The introductory paragraph - which caught my eye as
a good by line should - was: "The UK is being flooded by thousands
of
unofficial or counterfeit mobile phones through online auctions,
according to analysis of eBay."
Now that's pretty big news to a person like myself who absolutely adores new mobile phones. Reading further however the determination of whether phones sold on eBay were genuine or counterfeit was whether the phones were unlocked!!! The IT Pro article quoted as follows "It found that there were 2,250 sellers of the Nokia N95 with many offered as unlocked, showing that the auctions were of unofficially sold phones with the possibility of being fake". In the UK mobile phone companies are mandated by Law to offer an unlocking service and it is totally possible to buy mobile phones quite officially that are unlocked or "sim free". A really high proportion of the phones I have bought over the years come from Expansys in Manchester and I have bought them sim free. Does that make them fakes? No at all. It is ridiculous to extrapolate from unlocked to counterfeit! Although the article did not say who commissioned the "analysis" the comments included the likelihood that the items sold were not genuine or would contain non-standard components like batteries. I was left wondering who benefits from scare mongering?
Not blaming IT Pro at all - they simply report the
news. Check out the excellent IT Pro website using the link below. My
favourite section is the Wireless and Mobile section.
Friday 9th May 2008
The excellent Mobipocket.com have brought out an "Over the Air" or
OTA version of their Mobipocket reader for the Blackberry. I have been a
big fan of eBooks since my first Palm (m500) and the really nice eReader
site. Trouble with eReader is that is doesn't support modern phones -
they gave up on Symbian four or five years back judging by the
compatible phone list and they don't support Blackberry. Mobipocket
constantly update their excellent free eBook reader and always have the
latest books to purchase at a very reasonable comparison with paper
based books.
The Blackberry OTA version allows you to access the online bookstore from wherever you happen to be and buy new books on the go! I already have a considerable eBook library and the OTA reader has been working perfectly and is great fun. Never being without a book (since I carry my Blackberry everywhere) is great for a book lover! Wholly recommended... check out the Mobipocket.com website using the link below.
Wednesday 7th May 2008
I thought I would try watching a TV show (in full) on my iPhone last
night and was really pleasantly surprised at how watchable the
iPhone is. I've watched movies on the Nokia E61 which has a 320 x 240
screen and been quite content with the experience. There is quite a nice
media player for the Blackberry 8800 but I haven't really used it much,
although I have the very good Makayama DVD converter for the Blackberry
and have a few movies queued up for viewing. The iPhone is in a class of
it's own when it comes to video.. the 480 x 320 screen is bright and
clear and the sound from those tiny twin speakers is really good in a
quiet room. I watched a couple of episodes of the "Big Bang Theory" and
was quite engaged by the iPhone.
Sunday 4th May 2008
Still with the new iPhone... I had some trouble trying to create a
ring tone using iTunes. I keep getting the same error message so I
turned to Google to find out what was up. Unlike my lovely Blackberry,
which allows me to use any MP3 as my ring tone, the iPhone needs a
specific type of ring tone which apparently can only be created using
iTunes - correct me if I'm wrong there. Anyway I reasoned because the
tracks purchased on iTunes have been paid for, and can be played on the
iPhone anyway - they would make idea ring tones. I found a thread on the
Apple forum that explained that ring tones can only be made in certain
countries and a lot of sturdy defence of Apples policy of running iTunes
differently in different countries. I have to assume that the Apple
defenders don't live in the UK because we pay a lot more for our tunes
than the Americans do. Anyway I posted a response and this morning had a
reply saying the Apple forum moderator had removed my message. Well I
was shocked and somewhat annoyed. My message wasn't dripping in acid (or
praise) but wasn't anything that a tolerant company shouldn't have on
it's forum. I decided to post Apples email in full below (in green) so I
could have my say.
Apple removed your post on Apple Discussions titled "Re: iTunes Error 11556" because it contained the following:
Discussion of Apple Policies, Procedures or Decisions Off-topic or non-technical posts Non-constructive rants or complaints
We are including a copy of your post at the end of this email for your reference.
Our terms of use, which include helpful information about using Apple Discussions, is located here: http://discussions.apple.com/help We encourage you to continue using the Apple Discussions while abiding by our terms of use.
If you would like to send feedback to Apple about a product, please use the appropriate selection here: http://www.apple.com/feedback
As part of submitting feedback, please read the Unsolicited Idea Submission Policy linked to the feedback page.
Kind regards,
Apple Discussions staff
++++++++++
A copy of your message for reference:
It's a pity that Apple feels the need to charge more for customers in the UK. Also interesting to see the "jump in and defend Apple brigade". I have a feeling that the cost per track being higher in the UK has more to do with corporate greed than copyright issues. I can't think of any reason why Ringtones would be available in the US but NOT here in the UK.
Another little thought - if error 11556 (which I got too) means you can't access that feature because we're in the UK, then why doesn't Apple make it specific?
This message is sent from a send-only email account. Any replies sent to this address are deleted automatically by the system.
Friday 2nd May 2008
I have a lovely new shiny iPhone and spent a lot of the evening
messing about with it. First thoughts - lovely interface, nice build
quality and oh my god doesn't it pick up finger prints quickly!
Connecting to my WiFi at home was brilliantly simple and the Safari
browser is definitely the way to go. I also loved how it checked my
Outlook email settings and just sorted itself out for email. Very
impressive. I synched a huge number of music tracks and a dozen episodes
of my downloaded TV shows using iTunes - after all one of the reasons I
went for the iPhone was that I was heartily tempted by the iTouch. The
screen is perfect for videos and the sound quality without earphones was
very good.
I had a little trouble understanding how to add new applications using the Installer programme, but a quick Google later and I had it sussed. Likewise it wasn't obvious how to rearrange the home page icons but I had it sussed after another Google search. Okay so I'm not big on reading manuals but the documentation provided by Apple was laughably absent. I advise any new iPhone user to do a little Googling to get the most out of their new toy. One of my colleagues with an iPhone was disappointed with it and said she didn't really understand it - down to the quality of documentation again I think.
I soon had a number of applications loaded for free -
including very nice versions of backgammon, sudoku and pool. One of the
best finds I made on Google was how to add Fring to my iPhone. Fring is
a smashing piece of Freeware which lets you connect to Skype, MSN, Yahoo
etc. I downloaded my copy and made a few calls on Skype using my WiFi
connection and the sound quality was excellent. Skype from the PC
is really good but it's even nicer on the iPhone. I highly recommend
Fring - check out their website at
www.fring.com. Also available for Symbian S60 and UIQ, and Windows
Mobile phones.
