Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Looking at the new Blackberry App store it seems pretty impressive. Nice GUI, easy Nav, some good apps. For me the company behind the App store doesn’t get it though… Some things I wish my Blackberry with it’s new App Store had…

1. Affordable apps. Surprised at how many are at $4.99
2. Missing apps. On the phone. That should be free. Like an effective world-clock. Duh. You sell to business travelers.
3. iTunes. Yes. iTunes. I’m tired of multiple music systems. Just give me iTunes.

What else is missing… ?

Couple of little boosters here:

1. If you are using OneNote – and you should be – hitting the Windows+S key will activate a screen capture. Highlight the area you would like to capture and it will drop it into your notebook.
2. Download Canvas for OneNote from Microsoft Labs. If you have a big monitor this is a great way to access and arrange your notes.
3. Download “Do Not Disturb” for Outlook and do away with pesky emails while you try to focus on a task at hand.

Amazon really needs to get its social media strategy sorted out for the Kindle. Hard to get links to relevant blogs etc… and very poor community activation. Blogs you might want to read:

• Amazon’s blog – mainly focused on content and not enough on technology. Also, no links to community sites and other blogs.
• Blog Kindle
• Kindle Fan
• Kindle Forums
• Kindle 2 reviews and info

I love my Kindle. Would the simplistic brilliance of the device is limit community growth?

Terrific white paper on Cloud Computing from the team at Berkeley… BusinessWeek also covers it this week.

Having grown entirely sick of the negative coverage on Vista (how could Microsoft have let it get so bad?) it was great to see Gizmodo present a more balanced view on Vista features. Vista is a big step forward over XP. For me its all about:

• Arguably the best search features of any OS.
• Immediate start-up. The continuing broken record on slow start-up is garbage. I’ve got two systems running Vista – I touch the keyboard and my XPS-One is on. I open my M1330, swipe my finger across the reader, and its on. And they’ve been up and running for months.
• Fast. You’re nuts if you aren’t buying at least 2gb of RAM for your notebook. And for the small additional cost, go to 4.
• Office runs better. And Office is better on Vista than any other platform. Period.
• Looks great.
• Media Center is an awesome DVR and brilliant addition.

I agree that there are still problems. Just as there are problems with OSX. They are about on par when it comes to Wireless networking – which remains a pain at times on both platforms. And I wish I had more control over Windows Explorer.