Galaxy Tab and its successor

I have tried a galaxy tab and immediately wrote it off after have three other android tablets and figured I could get an iPad for the same price that was a more complete product. The problem I have with the tab is the phone version of android on a tablet that looks like an oversized kiddies toy. The ipad might have its limitations but has always felt a more complete product.

I am still tempted by the galaxy as I like tinkering where this is something the ipad doesn't really allow me to do. However with the recent announcements of the galaxy tab 2 and the htc flyer combined with the price hike of £450 from a shop,o I figure the tab will either be reduced in price soon or will be left by the wayside.

I have had samsung products before and they do not support a product when they deem it as obsolete. There has not been any concrete announcements from mwc 2011 that the tab 7" will get honeycomb or if samsung will continue to support it. Samsung have announced there will be no more 7" devices and reading between the lines I am thinking an impulse purchase will be a bad decision.

The Ipad has worked 50/50 for me whilst away being flawless on battery life and good for consuming media but there is still the element that its not a full machine or something that I can switch on as a full machine when needed. I really wish that the tab could plug this gap but if my previous android tablet experiences are true, this device will also be a failure.

Which brings the topic around again- what is an appropriate device?

Any prospective iPad 2 will really need more ram as applications close too often on the ipad 1 due to low memory. On android there are really no rich applications when compared to IOS which use the tablet form. Nokia with the n900 was nearly there but again there wasq no applications that offer that real world PC experience. PsiXDA could be another prospect but then you have the problem of a PC in small form factor.

It really saddens me to say that the Psion range of machines have only ever fitted this gap and anything else is just a poor comparison. The latest devices may be ale to play media, do push mail, go online when required or route me around a city but they have never offered a complete solution out of the box. The n900 was nearly there but poor battery life and lack of rich applications made it a failure. Both Android has the interface and IOS has the applications but there is nothing available with a real mix

I know you have to move with the times and cannot dwell on the old but there is still a gap in the market that could be filled.

I can recall being able to get my email, browse the web, run full blown applications and still be able to restore my Psion without the need for a Pc. Android nearly gets there but falls down on the applications. IOS plugs the other gaps with the number of applications but is too locked down and requires a PC for restore.

Seeing nokia recently focus on windows 7 instead of symbian shows the market is becoming fashion driven as opposed to functionality. S60 was never as good as epoc or s80 but was good for multitasking and feature rich applications. Sadly if nokia had been quicker developing their UI or purchasing Palm for WEBOS I honestly believe symbian would still be a viable alternative.

However this is all water under the bridge and we are left with the blackberry, IOS, android and windows phone 7 leftovers. Android has the potential to become more rich where I believe honeycomb will decide this when the numerous tablets are released this year that have been announced. But I feel eventually they will all have the same functionality and it will be the hardware looks that will set them apart - if we are not there already?

But even after all of this I am still left with the dilemma if I should just impulse buy a tab? The issue of not having a laptop to hand is driving me crazy. But I don't want another net book and would still like to purchase the tab to try it. There has been many bloggers say it is the best thing since sliced bread and that it will replace their smartphone due its size and remove the need for a laptop or iPad. Ideally this is the device I wanted and had thought the n900 could have done this for me. I don't make many phone calls so VOIP is ideal for me and the 7" size would be suitable as the ipad is too large. But it means android again on 2.2 which hasn't really got any better since the nexus I imported from the USA whereas IOS seems to be gaining in strength.

My usual cavalier attitude is "fuck it" I will just buy the thing and get rid if I don't get on - the last contender for this was the advent vega only after one week. But then if I purchase the tab I have both and then need to decide which one to keep - the ipad or the tab.

So for the moment painful as it is I will stick with the iPad as I know what It can do. I will decide in the future that any device shouldn't really be an ipad replacement or have to prove itself that it is better in tests. This device should be able to hold its own without comparisons and just fill the niche that I want.

Previously Psion did this but who else is able to pick this challenge and just deliver?




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Backup and Restore

I am away next week in London on training and I want to travel light instead of taking my mac book, work laptop and iPad. I figured the iPad will do all of the functions I need on trip. It's preloaded with media, my course material and can certainly cope with my Internet activities. However one thought came to mind what ignite crashes. The same with my iPhone what if it crashes. I am stumped as I need a PC or mac with iTunes to restore.

Both devices are jailbroken and I use pkgbackup on both devices to backup and restore from Dropbox which works flawlessly. However if the devices die I cannot rejailbreak as I need a Pc or mac. I cannot restore as I need iTunes. I don't know what apps I have installed so I mentally need to keep a note.

Anyone who follows me on twitter I have been an android and Symbian fan.

Now I have found with psion, windows mobile, symbian on nokia and android I can take on device backups. This would either use built in functionality or a new application. I can then restore and all without the need of then Pc or mac.

So I have a dilemma, although I am enjoying iOS, have all the applications I want, can work without the Pc or mac that is until shit hits the fan.

It's as this point I get a reality check and am considering the Galaxy Tab or an android device as a backup.

Apple restores using iTunes work great but if you don't have the luxury of being able to tether or do online backups to the cloud.

You are stuffed until you can hook up again.

Holding out for a HTC Hero

Excuse the lame title but this has really been a long wait. You may ask am I referring to the review or a phone that I can finally get on with? Well the answer is both.

I had always decided to avoid Android because I wasn't impressed with the lack installation space available and because you cannot install applications onto the SD card. After beginning to get numb over Nokia and their poor release of the n97 plus the boredom of the e75. I thought that I would take a punt at android and get a phone. As there was now more choice over the g1 I was looking at either the HTC magic or hero. Again because I didn't want to spend too much and because I thought a Google version of Android would be better than HTC's implementation I purchased the magic.

At first the experience was great because I wasn't running out of space for installation. The phone worked smoothly and I enjoyed having a central location for application installs just like on the iPhone. However what I did find over time is the magic lacked RAM and was prone to slowing down. Plus the more I was reading and listening to about the hero I should have really got this phone.

I had always enjoyed playing around with a palm pre emulator with the synergy integration and out of the box experience with exchange. To get this on the magic meant purchasing applications but it was built into the hero natively. I tried rooting the magic and ran into issues with cooked ROMs so left the stock Google Rom on. Plus this meant I could get ota updates to android without having to reflash the phone each time.

But I still missed the synergy experience and multitouch so I went out and bought the HTC hero sim free from carphone warehouse. The price was acceptable over the counter considering it would only be a little cheaper online.

Unboxing the hero it feels about the same weight as the magic but the actual feel of the phone is not smooth but like a rubber texture. Also I believe the screen has a special texture that doesn't retain the grease from your fingers. Before setting up the phone I flashed it with the latest Rom from HTC. Again this was quite painless but wasn't as easy as the magic which did an ota update. I really do enjoy not being tied to a pc to do things with smartphones. Unlike the iPhone where you need itunes I do at least get some independence with Google android albeit not as much with the HTC version.

Set up was less painless than I'd thought because as soon as I entered my Google credentials mail started syncing. Whereas with the magic I had to enter the o2 apn details for internet and mms with it being a Vodafone handset. On entering the app store I could see all of the apps that I had purchased. I then spent several hours installing over the 100 applications that were previously on my magic. I was very surprised that other than copilot the apps I had bought could install again to another handset without asking for codes.

Initial thoughts were how fluid the HTC sense UI is. I have some social networking integration similar to synergy on the palm. I was disappointed to see although the hero has more RAM and it ran smoother than the magic, that the application install space was less than the magic. I have yet to get to no free space. Whilst it was a barrier stopping me getting an android handset, it still needs fixing and like symbian allow installation to the sd card. Further android needs to allow root access out of the box without the need for cooked Roms which then gives me access to tethering and more configurable options.

The whole ethos of an open os is to allow openness in my mind and I hate the sandbox approach of closing the door in my face. By all means like the n810 and palm make it a special key access to switch to the mode but give me the option. When Google removed the option of dev g1 phones not being allowed access to the app store for fear of copying is just plain stupid, but I digress.

The hero keyboard works well and responds quickly in both landscape and portrait. Sometimes if there is an app hogging the CPU it will slow the phone and the keyboard entry. But I have found that if you use a task killer app you can manage this. Android manages the applications currently running like windows mobile. Should it need more RAM it just closes applications down. All very well but I want the choice and I would hope like symbian there was a mode to run an application as a system app which ensures it always stays resident. In theory each app within android runs in its own virtual machine. You can leave a background process running for example a pod catcher which downloads your podcasts. This process uses little memory and when you want to play the podcast it will load the full fat application. Whilst this model sounds good on memory usage I have found I am never confident an app stays resident and when the phone boots it loads up everything. An application like start-up auditor can help manage the boot time applications without the need for root access but again I am not confident it works after mixed results.

After one month of use I am still enjoying the phone. The ability to share media with Twitter, Facebook or email with a few clicks is a breeze. I use twidroid for Twitter the pro version which is about the best and will hopefully soon be on par with gravity on s60.

For Google news I use newsrob which allows me to read offline and share the news. This then is picked up by feedsproxy to send to my Twitter. I am using a free app called blogaway to blog and is what I am using to type this post on. Copilot is installed for navigation and whilst it is good it lacks traffic alerts. For email and calendar I use the native apps. For web I use the native browser as it has multitouch. I use gbackup to send my sms,mms and call information to my Google mail. I have recently purchased mybackup to backup my phone to sd.

Each day is like an adventure where there is always an upgrade that needs doing via the app store or I can tweak the phone a little more. Even with this flexibility I read somewhere that people see android just for techies. Yes this is partially true but even out of the box with no tweaking the phone is usable for normobs. A friend of my who after using my hero has just got one. He had a Nokia 5800 like me back in January but returned it due to the lag during use. He is not a power user but knows a fudge when he sees one. I paid the same amount of £400 for my 5800 (as my hero) because I imported it from Hong Kong. Compared to the hero for money or let's say the cheaper magic it is still bad. Although recent firmwares have fixed some issues it still lacks RAM. This, the n97 fiasco has moved me away from s60. I still have 4 nokias but they are now back up phones. Only my e63 issued daily as a work phone.

Again I want to try the n900 but don't want to pay for the privilege again to avoid expensive disappointment.

The weak points of the hero are the camera. You need to get an app such as fxcamera zoom or snap photo pro but the latter doesn't really work. These apps improve the camera when taking pictures but the hero could do with a flash because in poor light the pictures are bad. I use an app called scan2pdf to photograph documents and convert them to pdf for emailing. A flash would brighten the pages. I use dogcatcher as my pod catcher which has a facility to stop and bookmark my place in the podcast when I turn my car engine off whilst streaming.

The built-in speaker is moderately good but could be louder. But when using the Bluetooth over ad2p for streaming audio it is terrible, but not audio wise. The phone connects to my car stereo but still insists although connected playing the sound over the internal phone speaker. This results in havoc where I either have to reboot the phone or switch Bluetooth off and back on again. The Bluetooth stack is a pain and I am slowly getting to the point of using an audio lead.

I have just bought an extended battery which claims is 3000mah where the supplied one is 1350mah. The phone is a little thicker but as I use it each day as my internet tablet I kill the battery easily. I am mainly browsing over WiFi at home and hsdpa and find it responsive. But I have found the WiFi sometimes needs manually forcing to connect just as the Bluetooth through the recycling of the option.

The browser that is built in is very capable and the multitouch is excellent and a lot better than the magic's zoom buttons.

I have documents to go installed so there are full rich apps available and hopefully more will appear such as a proper banking solution like ms money. The built-in pdf reader will read a 100mb pdf for viewing.

The phone could do with an audio and video editor and a lot more media apps like the iPhone. But like the iPhone I like the simplicity of the app store, the cheap prices and choice of apps including free ones that are available. I have bought many symbian apps and have found good ones are available for android that are free or a lot cheaper. The gaming scene is quiet where there is nothing as flashy as the iPhone but then I only play simple addictive games such as solitaire of tetris.

In conclusion the hero has been a good choice. Sure its rough on some edges and can be improved hardware wise. Whilst some issues can be fixed in software such as missing functionality and installation space (or lack of). For now Android is the future for me and has certainly been a dark horse. I will definitely sing its praises to people. I have just ordered an Archos Android tablet to see how it works in this form factor so will post a review of this soon.

The android cometh....

I have recently got back from holiday where I used Garmin maps on my E75 to redirect me around the traffic enroute to home. Garmin with google maps and occasional use of Ovi Maps was great on holiday for getting about. A quick lookup on google maps to find places then using the postcode in garmin to get me there by car. Or using the same postcode in Ovi maps for walking navigation. One wonders why we ever need maps. Well, due to the lack of 3g coverage and because I hadn't preloaded the Ovi Maps I still either needed a paper map or the preloaded Garmin maps.

On the journey home it was different because my phone required 5 manual reboots because Garmin kept freezing. I had even removed all of my memory hog applications to give it room to breathe with no luck. It worked fine taking me to my destination using this strategy until we neared the location. A swift stop and reboot fixed this, but why did I need 5 reboots yesterday. For this reason I love dedicated PND (personal navigation devices) They only do one thing of which is navigate and rarely crash. Whereas smartphones of which includes UIQ,S60 and windows mobile all have fits. If someone calls you they frustrate whether to take the call or carry on navigating to the extent they stop doing both. Then they rarely switch back to the navigation application after handling the call.

Finally I decided when I got back that I would look for an alternative device again. Whilst the E75 is a good device recent issues like this, the device slowing down (I only hard reset it 2 weeks ago) and now the slider is wobbling and the chrome surrond broken. I need a break from it so again its a good opportunity to try the competition as it will probably take a few weeks to repair, then its the usual 6 hour reinstall. I had bought 3 plastic surround cases to protect the phone but they all broke so off it will go back to the shop over the next few days.

I had rejected the thought of an android device earlier this year as there is a lack of space available to installed applications. However after listen to a recent podcast it is now possible to installed applications to the sd card if you either root the phone or installed an application to assit with this process.

Looking at the equivalent androids applications that I use on s60 the only missing ones are sms and call filter and an accounts manager like flying money. However I didn't have time to survey the homebrew libraries to see what is available there.

Looking at the phones for a little extra than a G1 I could get a G2 and recently the HTC hero is out. On reading about the hero, HTC have bastardised the Android OS for the better, but it does mean when Googke update Android you will not be able to update it OTA (over the air).

For this reason I decided to go with the G2 ie, Vodafone branded HTC Magic. I have ordered all of the accessories and it should be here over the coming days. There are several applications that I need to buy such as an Exchange sync, Ms office editors and sat nav but hopefully can test these beforehand.

The cupcake Os aka android 1.5 now looks more mature and it is possible to root (jailbreak) the phone. However there may be issues purchasing applications from market. But as usual these are all challenges ahead.

At this time I cannot comment if the device will last me. I had thought the E75 would have done but I have already said I am tiring of this. My 5800 is going on Ebay to part fund this purchase and possibly either the E75 or E90 but alas I do like the last device a lot. Nokia have really missed the boat with s60v5 so I seen no point hanging onto the device. 8 months on it is still slow, severe lack of ram and clunky to use. The G2 may well end up the same as my first iphone of which lasted only 2 months.

Later on in the year the E72 looks promising and the Pre is just around the corner. I have tinkered with the Pre Emulator and am imprest with the UI, how easy it is to set up and the general feel when using WebOS.
However there is a serious lack of applications available of which doesn't seem to be increasing in number. I am beginning to think until either the device reaches the rest of the world or if we wait another year, like android. Only then will we see more applications.

So the andoid finally cometh to me.... But how long will it stay?

Profimail Issues

For an email client on all of my 4 symbian phones I use Profimail because it provides a desktop like experience, is highly configurable and support rules for filtering. I have been using it for over a year and pride in using it over the standard nokia email client including the new nokiamessaging client.

The number of issues with nokia messgaing over the past months have had me laughing at people who use it and the number of times it failed. However today we the profimail users were the ones to be laughed at.

For some reason we could not collect email for the majority of the day and we were getting weird connection 300/301 errors please contact the application vendor messages. At one point I had a blue screen of death (BSOD) which whilst common in windows was most unwelcome on the phone. But I had to laugh at least I didn't need to reboot.

Anyway the issue was because the software we had purchased couldn't connect to the registration server to see if we had a legitimate version. Apparently there is an option to have his removed but you then lose the portability of being able to move the application to a new handset.

Eventually at the eleventh hour after the forum here was clogging up with message and after several emails the application began working. LCG responded with the email below:

Dear customer,
we acknowledge that our registration server was down today for few hours, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused to you.
We tracked and fixed the error. We'll also put more failsafe code into future version of ProfiMail, so that any problems on our side don't harm you as customer.
Once again our apologies, and hopefully you'll love to use ProfiMail in a future.

Best Regards,
Lonely Cat Games Team

So it turns out there is no acutal redundancy available in their Registration server which effectively means the application will stop working. Why on earth it needs to check in with this server each time I collect email especially after I have paid for the software is beyond belief. Then there lack of acknowledging there is an issue either via the forums or using facebook or twitter is very poor.

Being in IT I know you get engrossed in the issue at hand but you also need to remember your customers as we are the ones who pay you.

The issue of checking the license each time reminds me of the WGA issues in Windows. It is a shame when a company needs to police the ones who have purchased the software. I appreciate they have to look after their interests but there are better ways. When I purchase the software they have my imei so they can supply a key. They could even employ a check each time an update is completed to see if the install is legal. Lastly, they could even use twitter with NAGIOS or provide a simple web page providing server update statuses.

Whilst I could use other email clients available to me I will still continue to use Profimail for its featuresn and hope that they change both the way they treat their customers in not providing updates of issues and that the license check is permanently removed or a alternative is found.

Multitasking or switching

I can recall the first time I used a HP UNIX computer at De Montfort University back in 1991. The screens were huge at 21" where for back then both these machines and screens would have cost thousands of pounds. The workstations themselves had a RISC processor and 32mb of ram and a hard drive. Previously I had used a PC with Windows 3, an Atari ST and Apple MAC. All except the atari could run multiple applications concurrently but unless you had enough memory on the PC, like the apple mac it would task switch. This meant the application in the foreground would run and other applications in the background would sit and wait until they were brought to the front to continue processing. Windows had a 386 enhanced mode which would allow mutlitasking and you could set the priority times for dos applications. The HP UNIX boxes at university could multitask properly with all of the applications. I could be compiling, on IRC, doing FTP downloads, emailing and possibly some text editing all together over a 9600 baud link that was shared with several 1000s of computers at the university. Back then I could see the benefit of multitasking and when Psion brought out the 3a I eventually got my first PDA (a psion 3c) and was running many applications at once.

I recently posted on twitter that I run 12 applications concurrently on my phone. I also had to chuckle when I read Engadget where the editor was struggling to do several things on his iphone. Possibly if he had several phones with him he would have been able to accomplish his tasks more easily and quickly.

If I look at my usage I will always focus on the one task and occasionally switch between applications if I know an email has arrived or twitter has updated. But there are times such as when I am using flyingmoney to reconcile my accounts whilst the web browser is open. Or, if I am in the middle of doing something else and I don't want distrurbing then my call handling software will take control - all happening in the background and without the need to close down applications.

Apple's recent idea of using push notifications is good in principle but after hearing that people are stopped in the middle of their current task. They then have to manage the notice, then can carry on. But if they receive for example several messages they have to deal with each one separately whereas I can just ignore them.

There are many reasons why we should not multitask because not focusing on one task makes us unproductive. Reasons not to multitask. I find having the flexibility of being able to do several things together I can still focus on the task at hand and switch as the need dictates.

Mac os used to task switch where background tasks used to stay still until they were brought to the foreground. Whereas windows applications would in a round about way multitask but not really properly until windows 95. Before Windows I also tried Os/2 which was definitely more grown up. As some of you are aware some of this technology underpinned Windows Nt. I also recall seeing a piece of software called Deskview X which would allow you to run concurrent Os way back in the early 90s and I decided back then that this would be useful but was sadly too expensive for me. It is only in the last few years with virtual machine technology that has allowed me to do this properly. I would envisage that we will also will be able to do this on our mobile devices in the near future.

Many commentators have been knocking Nokia for the S60 UI saying it is outdated and not as intuitive or elegant as the iphone. Whilst there is some degree of truth behind this, I do believe that the UI of S60 can and will evolve into something better if not comparable to the iphone. Again symbian the underlying OS like the iphones OS both are very powerful, can multitask if allowed and are very robust. Whilst I would welcome changes in the S60 ui I would hate to see it limit the devices just like the iphone has, to the extent that it was too simple and it reduced the functionality of not being able to multitask. While I understand Apples approach in trying to limit the number of applications running to ensure the consumer experience and battery life are not affected. Should this ever happen to Symbian then I will be moving to another platform.

In a way the current mobile market is like history repeating itself. In the early days the Psion was the technical superior device. Because it did not evolve and change as the consumer wanted colour screens and form factors such as the palm this could contribute to Nokia's and ultimately Symbians stagnation. At this moment in time I will avoid the word downfall as both Nokia and Symbian are larger players in the market than Psion ever was. They are making structural changes to their organisations and to the partnerships for example the Symbian Foundation, Nokia and Intel partnership, Maemo and QT, Open sourcing (not Saucing.) and Horizon for application development. But what we are not seeing are new and innovative devices just rehashes of old technology.

Nokia have always had two major lines of products with E series and N series. These at some point in time may converge but again I would hope to see that any converged devices whilst simple to use, still allow power users to multitask and work with the machines internals and not like the iphone where the walled garden approach is nice to look at but you are not allowed to stray beyond the fence or walk on the grass.

Which phone next?

Well the nokia 5800xm has reached the point of another hard reset. Web has died where it will not even load mobile versions of websites. There are two other browsers available such as BOLT or OPERA MINI but these either crash or are too cumbersome with a touch screen

I am pondering the 3g iphone now it has grown up and will finally be able to do copy and paste, mms and sat nav later this year. But I will probably want to jailbreak and then it will be on ebay for sale.

The N97 is due soon and whilst I like the form factor it still has the bad s60 browser. I will need to see the reviews before I jump as I am getting tiered of buying stuff that just doesn't work.

There is windows mobile but there is not much to say on that
The G1 or G2 but again lack of software or memory kills this for me.
I have tried two devices but find it impractical and the n810 I have again has a bad web experience.
Netbooks are too large to carry around all of the time to just get out and use.

So I am on a fence as to what to do?

Some people cannot understand why the phones just fail me. Ultimately I just use their features, buy software and run it on the device as this is what they are designed to do.

So will it be an iphone? At this moment it is a hot candidate as I just want something that works. However I will look at the new phones mentioned above over the next few months before I jump!

New social media apps for 5800XM

Finally Shozu is available for the 5800XM so videos and pictures can uploaded to a variety of social networking sites including direct blogging and twitter updates.

I have also purchased a native s60 twitter client for s60v5 called Gravity which allows you to update your twitter, to follow other tweets, to complete searches and to respond to direct messages and post pictures. It only cost about £9 including VAT and is worth the money.

Shozu is free, however it is not working very well with my youtube account where I have raised a technical support query with them.

This including Fring means you no longer have to be tied to a pc and you can complete and follow updates whilst you are on the move.

Although these applications can all run in the background I have found they are memory hogs and if you are using other applications in addition, these will slow the phone down. I have found it better to close these applications when trying to use the builtin web application because of the memory limitation.

Google's answer to Push Sync

For all those who are interested I have just read on lifehacker
http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/EUyt7C_M7Qo/google-sync- keeps-contacts-and-calendars-in-sync-on-your-mobile-phone
that google has started a new sync service for mobiles.

The instructions for S60 can be found at http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=98230&topic= 15015

Currently the service only support two way contacts sync using syncml.

What is unusual that they make use of an exchange service for syncing with the iphone and windows mobile handsets using activesync. However, this does not work with Mail For Exchange but Google says it will support this soon - http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138784&topic =15014

I have previously tried services like Goosync and have found them hideous especially when syncing across several devices with different OS. Examples being All day events not showing correctly.

I will be interested to hear from people how they have found the Contacts sync using this method. Before when I have used this I have found the Google contacts to be very restrictive eg, no duplicates and as such lost a lot of information.

The next minute - I am not technical!

Well it is finally now official after several years of procrastinating I have finally made the jump and created my first post (this is my second) from my Nokia 5800 aka Tube. There are many times when one gets up and say today I will.... but that is as far as one usually gets where we find a multitude of reasons of why we should not do something rather than putting the energy into actually doing it.

I have been out of work since September last year after taking voluntary redundancy and as things globally have gotten worse I have been looking for "IT" work without much success. I have done the usual of posting my CV to several job boards, vigorously applying every week for jobs but no really no positive response. I get the occasional phone call from agencies seeing if I am available or following up applications I have made usually with a reason of why I am not suitable, I have switched Push email on my phone using IMAP IDLE with Profimail and jump each time I receive a mail hoping... However I believe it is times like these that you have to remain confident, continue looking but also remain actively doing things.

My passion as you have probably guessed is technology and people who know me will always say what has he got next, have you broken it or what are you looking at next. Since my early years I have always been interested in technology but still to this day I don't know really why. My brother was always into computers and had a Sinclair ZX81. I can remember him putting the motherboard in a proper keyboard and having the opportunity to play games such as 3D monster maze or pacman (represented by letters) on the machine. It was used on a 4 inch b&w TV and was fantastic, there was no sound, poor graphics but bloody good to play. I will never forget the time he showed me a program which produced sound on the ZX81. Those of you who know the equipment will recall how? as there was no speaker. To do this day all I can remember is that you recorded your voice to tape, stored it in the machine then it would try to modulate the TV picture in someway to recreate the sound. There were lots of lights flashing on the screen and we would turn up the TV volume and try and make out if it was our voice that we could hear.

Thereafter I had my own ZX spectrum where back then I would enter the log list of machine code programs in to the spectrum via a hex editor to produce 2 channel or more music, speed up the loading of software from tape or write simple demos but nothing what I would consider state of the art. It must have been around this time that I got urge to always push things to their limit. I had a break from computers for around a year until one Xmas where again my brother had an old Amstrad PPC512D with 1 x3.5" floppy drive, a CGA screen and would run on D batteries. This thing was considered a laptop but by today's affairs with MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) it was big! I learned about msdos and the various commands of copy files, formatting disks etc and was a real introduction to command line. Also at the time I had an Atari ST of which an old friend helped me purchase. Again, I would do my usual of pushing my machine to its limits and always trying to find a way around things.

During my entry to university I used the Atari with a Hardware PC Emulator called supercharger which would allow me to run both the Atari and PC at the same time. I learned more about DOS and someone at Uni showed me about FTP, usenet, IP addresses, the JANET network and it is here where I interested in the Internet (1990 & 1991). At University in my second year our IT lab had HP UNIX workstations with 21" colour monitors, 32mb workstations & RISC processors running HP UNIX with X Windows. These machines were like heaven where it is only recently with Linux I have been able to find a comparison..... I could email, download, compile a program, print, write or run a script all at the same time and it just worked! I had my usual fun of locking the machines up but they certainly opened my mind to what a workstation could do.

When I built my first PC I was looking for an OS. In 1993 the only choices were OS/2, Windows or Deskview X. I tried Linux but I neither had the time or resource to learn about it and when I needed to run Ms Office back then I was severely limited. In 1994 I became a Windows 95 (aka Chicago) beta tester and at one point had linux, os/2, dos and windows 95 all on one machine. I event tried to boot windows 95 under an OS/2 Dos VM although could not get it working! As I was used to running several OSes at once I could not use OS/2 as it caned the machine when I ran Windows Apps, I could not stand DOS/WIN311 as it was a fudge (or elephant on top of a mini) and I couldn't get on with the interface restrictions so and I couldn't find anymore information about DeskView X - so Windows 95 seemed the choice. Although Windows 95 was not powerful enough for me. Typically I would use a wordprocessor for assignments and whilst we were writing and testing our code I would have to do screen shots. MS word at this time could not cope with me. I would take a typical screenshot in DOS - two colours and have to reduce the colour depth from 24 million colours to two so it could cope with the picture in word. When you have several of these it grinds to a halt. I tried MS Word for NT (a 32 bit app) as I thought more address space would be available for the application to run. It worked in Windows 95 just but was slow. When you include the fact I would use word indexing, contents, header formatting and frames Word would just collapse. Back then and still now I am of the opinion word is bad for long documents when you begin to use all of its features. I originally used to use Wordstar 4 in my pc emulator (remember CONTROL KK or CONTROL KB?) and would leave a blank page, print out my screenshot and physically glue it to the paper of my assignment. This worked, whereas word would grind to a halt. I found it is easy to use word for text editing than use a dedicated DTP (my first being Fleet street publisher on the atari) to do the layout.

Part of the beta testing program was also to test Office 95 which was better than word for NT and I loved the inline spell check. So it was windows 95 for the next few years until I discovered NT 4 workstation. This through my work took my to NT server, W2K, W2k3 and even had the opportunity to use IBM AIX and build two IBM RS6000 H70 for my company. Again, the latter is a great OS that just works even allowing you to resize disks online whilst people are using them - technology of which WINDOWS has only seen in the past few years whereas I am talking about this being available in 1997.

My next venture into Linux was 2006 where I tried to convert myself from my Windows blinkers to linux 100% but it failed because I was expecting too much. Because I had two mobile phones S60 and Windows mobile (private & work) I would exclusively sync with Outlook to PST folders. I would not keep anything on the exchange server purely using it as mailbox for email. Linux has never really had any good syncing clients and it wasn't until a year later after switching my XP desktop to lighter version that I made the switch to ubuntu. I chose this over Fedora or OpenSuse because I wanted something to work out of the box but would allow me to roll up my sleeves and get under the hood if I needed to. I decided to VMWARE my pc using VMConverter. I then ran ubuntu and my old pc under VMWARE for the next 18 months until I took redundancy. This in itself was an "age of discovery" as I had the best of both worlds where I gradually stopped using the full blown MS APPs and used Open Source alternatives such as OpenOffice, Firefox and openproj etc.... There were some issues with formatting in OpenOffice but as longs as I accepted I would never get 100% compatibility I could work with it. I never really switched off my vmware PC until I left work because of the syncing to outlook and still to this day it is a bug bear of which I will post another time.

Linux whichever flavour now runs on all of my machines as the default OS. I use opensuse 11 on my server as I find it is more suited for a file server. Things for example using YAST show more options and allow me to do more detailed things whereas Ubuntu hides them from the users. I know this is a generalistic view but I want to be able to set more detailed options inside of a GUI as it is usually quicker (not always) then CLI. Whereas I use ubuntu on my desktop and laptop as it has just the right level of configuratbility I need for a desktop OS. I also have a MID (mobile internet device) a nokia N810 which runs maemo linux which I use for browsing and other things where I don't want to boot a full PC. Lastly, there is the EEE PC which started the linux adventure off at home. This is now running Easy Peasy Linux (ubuntu) which is used as a device midway between my laptop and N810.

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1525 with upgrade hard drive to 320gb and upgrade ram to 3gb. Vista lasted two days and was wiped off after installing ubuntu. I run VMWARE of XP and W2k when needed as I use MS Money but have not found a decent Linux alternative. I have tried GNU CASH etc... but cannot get on with them.

Lastly, my data is in the cloud where I use this for my diary/contacts/email. I don't use google calendar and contacts as it has a long way to go. But as mentioned earlier I will blog about this sometime later because whilst it is a bug bear, mobile tech is still a passion for me.

In conclusion, I still laugh at a comment in an interview that I had where I was told I did not come over as technical.

However I will let you decide what you think.