Client taming
Taming the clients vision into either their budget or time scale...
Tuesday 9 January 2007, 10:14 PM
That new iPod phone thingy
So Apple have launched the "iPhone"[1], it's half the thickness of my current Windows Mobile based phone (a T-Mobile branded HTC Tytn) but otherwise it's the same size.
I'm presuming that the network throw in around a £200 subsidy on the phone and with a current price being talked of $599 (so call it £300) thats a £500 phone retail if you want it SIM free. (I paid that much for a grey market P800 phone)
So the big question is will I buy one (assuming it turns up just before Xmas)? Not with this version. Why? Well the biggest issue is the missing 3G radio system, I'm surprised how much I miss it when the cell I'm in doesn't support it. I think I would also miss the real keyboard I have on the HTC. In the missing items I don't care about pile is there is no front side camera for doing video calls.
In terms of "iPod" goodness I'll presume the Music player is good but the one I've currently got with 2GB of microSD card goodness does fine for me. Camera phones never really work well and there doesn't seem to be a flash included either.
I know the phone I want and the iPhone isn't it, what I want is the "onehandness" of SonyEricsson P800 with the original jog wheel which meant making calls from the contact list was easy, the smooth integration with Outlook of a windows mobile solution, the connectivity of the HTC and the screen from the Nokia 9500 (640x200) which means that reading documents in landscape mode actually works (shame no one makes it).
So is the "iPhone" a killer phone? In terms of looks yes, in terms of features not for me. Perhaps a MK II version will add those missing features but until then I'm still a little underwhelmed.
One interesting question that the software developer in me is asking just how crippled and different the version of OS X and how hard will it be to write code?
Finally what are Microsoft going to do to compete?
[1] iPhone is a Cisco trademark so what it's really called longterm might be an issue.
Friday 24 November 2006, 2:10 PM
Well done Belkin
Belkin have gone up in my estimation by leaps and bounds, I have one of their small wireless routers at home (cost around forty quid).
Recently it's started to give up the ghost, sometimes it works all day, othertimes just for half an hour, it hangs and drops the wireless connection while making the wired connections drop to 10Mb/s. So after this started to happen with greater regularity I phoned up their support line (not expecting much). After a conversation with a nice guy in a call centre (I'm guessing in India but no complaints over his english) they agreed to ship a replacement router which has just arrived.
To be honest when I phoned them all I was expecting was an updated version of the firmware, but I got a new router with a later version of the firmware, all in all excellent service especially when consider the cost of the product.
Tuesday 14 November 2006, 4:53 PM
Live.com (it's worth a try)
Recently I've changed my IE home page over to live.com for me it seems to give more relevant results. Amazingly it seems like Microsoft may actually now have a better search engine than google. It's only missing one big feature for me, the google news page which I periodically glance at during the day, although live will search through news pages it doesn't give me that catagorised list of highlights to look through.
Sadly I still come top of the search rankings for certain terms (such as my laptops brand with Vista) which is a bit weird when you're looking for help (it's happened three times recently) One hidden thing is that although live.com can be limited to look only at certain sites (by adding site:xyz.com) to the search finding this requires a good rummage through the help (It can be found from the contents)
In a similar vein I've now stopped looking at Robert Scobles site http://scobleizer.com/ for my microsoft centric tech news and now use Mike Gunderloys site at http://www.larkware.com/ now this isn't entirely fair as Scoble no longer works for Microsoft but he seems to be trapped in that narrow Silicon Valley Web 2.0 bubble and seems to get less relevant each time I visit his site.
Times they are a changing....
