12/09/2008 by Gavin.

Well, this was waiting for me when I came home!

First impressions are of a solid, well made, light netbook with a very good, albeit glossy, screen.

Going to give it a good workout over the weekend.

Check out my new blog at www.gadgetspot.org

Posted in Dell, Eee and Clones | Print | 61 Comments »

12/09/2008 by Gavin.

I’m really enjoying my 3G iPhone.  However, battery life is dreadful (based on its intended purpose, i.e. a phone).  I do have it syncing with my Exchange account all day but typically if I unplug it at 8am and make 3 or 4 20 min phonecalls during the day, it is on 10% charge by 10PM.  That’s OK but throw in a 1/2 hour game of poker and maybe some time spent Evernoting or other apps and you’re looking at 4PM!

The past couple of days I’ve turned off 3G and am getting 2 days out of it, based on my initial useage description, and not really missing 3G to be honest.  I’ve surfed a bit and use my usual Apps with no real detrimental effect.  I do switch it on now and again for uploading to Evernote or downloading an App from the App store but that’s it.

I reckon that’s what I’ll be doing from now on to ensure at least a true 24 hour battery life.

Posted in Apple, iPhone, Phones | Print | 1 Comment »

12/09/2008 by Gavin.

Remember how when you were young your Mum (or Mom, for international readers!) would write little notes on the back of photos before lovingly putting them in an album.  Many years later you could take out the photo and read ‘little Johnny, age six on Blackpool Beach’ or similar?

Well, Nokia are bringing out a modern day equivalent.  From what I can gather you will take a photo and then flip it around on the screen to write notes using a stylus.  Not sure how these notes would remain embedded outwith proprietary software but let’s see.

Certainly an innovative use of touch technology and I’ll publish more information as I get it.

Posted in Photography, Nokia | Print | 1 Comment »

12/09/2008 by Gavin.

Working with Office files, especially presentations can sometimes result in bloated file sizes.  I’ve seen it with co-workers when working on presentations, the file size increases until in one extreme case I was sent a 99Mb Powerpoint presentation.  One option is of course to use Zip or Rar compression.  however, both these approaches mean uncompressing the file before each use or edit.

NXPowerLite  http://www.nxpowerlite.com works on Microsoft Office files from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint by compressing their content without changing the file format.  This is a terrific thing to have for the reasons given above.

The program lists several different levels of compression -  Normal, Extra (greater compression, lower quality), High Quality (less compression, higher quality), Mobile Device, and Custom.  I must admit I didn’t notice much difference in end quality (which is a good thing!) but of course some images may well degrade with compression.

I tried it with that 99Mb powerpoint presentation and it got it down to 3Mb!  Another presentation with general text, embedded spreadsheet and photos went down from 5Mb to 768Kb at high quality.  Yes you could do all this manually but it takes literally seconds for the program to do it’s stuff!

Where this comes into its own of course is when having to work ‘in the cloud’ or via email where bandwidth might still be an issue, on a 3G or PRS connection.

There is a trial version available on the website and I can recommend it as a very useful utility if you work a lot with Office Documents.

Posted in Utilities, Cloud computing, Microsoft | Print | 1 Comment »

12/09/2008 by Gavin.

T-Mobile May Begin Selling Google Android Phone Within Weeks - San Jose Mercury News

Rumours from ‘unnamed sources’ are that we’ll see the first Android OS handhelds within weeks on T-Mobile.

Watch this space I guess, and we’ll soon see what Google can bring to the mobile party.

Posted in Android, Phones | Print | No Comments »

12/09/2008 by Gavin.

Inside Microsoft’s new mobile browser | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News

Cnet news has got hold of  a Beta of the new ‘IE6 for Windows’.  I’m looking forward to getting a copy of this, and it is possible it may have full flash support, although we’ll see.

I guess IE6 is still pretty prevelant but we all know that MS is trying to comply with Web Standards with the release of IE8, which seems to ‘break’ a lot of exisiting sites which were cludged to work with IE6 and 7!

Having a full IE6 rendering experience on a Windows Mobile device will be a tremendous step forward, but with the push for web standards may also be a step back?

Posted in Windows Mobile | Print | 1 Comment »