Tech In The North
I have been vacationing at my Aunt and Uncle’s cottage, in north eastern Ontario about 2hrs from Ottawa, for the last week. I was surprised to find that Telus (my cellular provider) has increased their coverage so that I get reasonable service for my mobile phone (call and data). I was very surprised to find that the local laundry mat has high-speed internet and free WiFi access. According to the proprietor the WiFi is free because of a deal he has with the municipality that provides free WiFi for the larger community that is 25Kms up the road, they subsidize his internet so he can provide it to the small community here . Now had I know this earlier I would probably have blogged about it sooner because this is spot is only 8Kms from the cottage. I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised by the municipalities providing free internet through wireless because it is easy to deploy and the area that needs to be covered (at town of only about 3000) is relatively small. Some people will see the invasion of this technology as a bad thing, people using their cellphones out on the lake and bringing their laptops into the cafes and laundry mats, but what I see is a whole wealth of new resources being offered to communities that can really benefit from them. For me it provides an easy way to stay in touch and still do the things I like from a place that I truly love.
HTC S640 Full review
I have had the Telus HTC S640 for over a week now so I thought it was time that I did up a full review of it. So here we go.
Let me start by saying that I got this phone because it was cheap (with customer loyalty and new term package it only cost me 50 bucks). The main selling feature over some of the other units was the WiFi capability, I really wanted to be able to use the phone off-line in hot-spots especially when I am in the USA so I don’t incur roaming data charges.
My main reason for upgrading at all was the mobile email capability which for me works amazingly well, using the IMAP protocol in Outlook 2007 and on the phone I can sync my Gmail account between the web, my desktop and my phone without issue.
The unit runs Windows Mobile 6 (Smartphone) and comes bundled with Office Mobile (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) and it really is great if you need to edit or approve a document while you are on the go. With Active-Sync the contacts from Outlook on my desktop show up in the phone and any changes I make in either the phone or on the desktop sync flawlessly. The phone call quality is very good and overall I am pleased with how it functions as a phone it does what you would expect. It also supports Bluetooth, and has a microSD expansion slot which will take up to a 4GB card (although I hear people are using 8GB without issue). It also has a 2MP AF camera. It ships with a stereo headset, charger and y-adaptor so you can use the headset and charge or sync at the same time.
As for the negatives about this phone, there are a few. The camera is just terrible, I have yet to take a decent picture of anything. It is very slow and without an enormous amount of light and and incredibly steady hand you get unusable pictures. I didn’t buy this as a replacement for my digital camera but I was hoping to be able to use it to snap picts to email to clients to show them things I have found or just to friends for fun, neither is really possible and I have almost given up using it. The WiFi and Bluetooth, while very useful, are brutal on your battery life, it won’t last the day if either is turned on all the time. Last but not least is sync time, it takes about 20mins to sync 2GB of songs to the microSD card which is really a problem if you decide to change over your music at the last minute.
Here’s one from my way-back machine.
This is a music video I edit years ago. It makes me laugh to see this stuff show up on YouTube. During the filming of this video Joee wiped out the moped and broke his ankle. That’s why there are so many shots from the waist up with very little movement. The glassy eyes are from the pain killers.
Joee - Arriba
Nice UI Tweak Utility fo Vista!
This was Paul Thurrott’s pick of the week last week. It’s called WinBubble and it has some really great features that I liked from the Windows XP Tweak UI utility, like being able to remove shortcut icon arrows. It also allows you to customize the OEM settings easily so if you build PC’s with Vista you can add all your own manufacturer information and your logo.
New Smartphone!
It was time. The Mike phone I had was on it’s last legs. It didn’t vibrate anymore, it kept asking me to install my SIM card, it wouldn’t hold a charge. I wanted to get off the Mike system anyway becasue it is not as useful to me as it was. I needed mobile e-mail more than anything now. SO I went to my local Telus store to see hat they had on offer and came home with the HTC S640 Smartphone…. I understand now why they say the PDA is dead.
This thing is loaded with features, full QWERTY keyboard, 2MP camera, microSD slot, Bluetooth, WiFi, Media Player. It does e-mail and IM, it has the full Microsoft Office mobile edition for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. I just got it yesterday and setting it up has been fairly easy although I did have to give up my Thunderbird for Microsoft Outlook but I will survive. I only have two small problems with the phone;
- The keyboard is very small… it has to be inorder to get a device this small so it is a trade off.
- It seems to take a long time to switch apps, not ever having a phone like this before I have nothing to compare it to so maybe I am expecting to much.
I will post a full review and my setup information after I have had it for a few days and have figured it out.
Sweet flickr Photo Plugin for Wordpress
I have been playing around with plug-ins for flickr and this one is just awesome. It does everything I want and more. You can see it in action in the side bar here. It’s by a guy named Joe Tan from Vancouver, BC Canada. You can get it here tantannoodles.com. Not only does it make a great animated stream for your main Wordpress page it also adds tools to your dashboard that allow you to easily add photos to a post or to set up pages of web albums. Its really easy to use and works perfectly. If you are looking for a way to add photo content to your blog look no further than the Flickr Photo Album for Wordpress plug-in. Thanks to Joe Tan for a great tool!
Giving Up The WoW!
I am giving up World Of Warcraft. At least for the summer months. I have really played much in the last month anyway so I guess I have found other things to occupy my time. My Level 70 Tauren Shaman has a play time of about 30 days which means… well you can figure out what that means. Don’t get me wrong I don’t regret any of it. I know lots of people what spend way more time than that on the game. I also know many more people who while away more time in front of the TV. At least in WoW you are interacting with other people even if it is virtual and somewhat anonymous. I have had a lot of fun playing the game with people that I know in the real world, especially the ones that I can’t see on a regular basis.
So WoW see you in the fall…maybe!
1st Post
Just to test out the interface.
Bye!
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