Tag: products

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We made the move… to the Cingular 8525 Windows Mobile 5 phone

After weeks of considering different phones, including the new T-mobile Dash and latest Samsung BlackJack Windws Mobile Smartphones, we decided on the new Cingular 8525 with Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC Phone Edition. (CNET has a review of the phone here.)


We both like the form factor of the Cingular 8525 (also the HTC Hermes) and the feature set: the 400MHz processor and 64MB of RAM, bundled Office Mobile applications and Windows Media Player 10 Mobile make for a good customer experience. The unit is supported by Cingular’s 3G network, and I’ve seen the difference this week in sync’ing email and web sites. The support for both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 is very solid, with my BT headset and USB adapters working right out of the box.


The ergonomics and design of the device is good and feels solid in your hands, and the key travel for thumb typing is IMHO better than I found for my fingers on the Dash or the BlackJack: controls are easy to use and access. And as it’s essentially a Pocket PC, I find that the addition of a stylus and touch screen makes it easier to navigate around. 


The clincher on this deal? Over the holiday shopping weekend last week, Cingular offered a “Buy One Get One Free” deal and the phones were essentially half price: not only was Cingular’s family plan comparable to what I had on T-Mobile, their pricing on devices was better. (The lowest tier of Internet access is a couple of dollars more a month than T-Mobile’s WAP access, but affordable.)


Also, we both like the 2-megapixel camera, which takes nice shots and is easy to use. 

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Ribbon, ribbon… Where did my favorite commands go?

As Richard posted today, no school in the Puget Sound area today. I’m thankful today for Outlook Web Access and Live Meeting today as it allows us to dial in for broad meetings that we’ve had on that schedule for months now.


Now back to our regularly scheduled programme…


The Office Help and How-to site has a section on using the new user interface in Microsoft Office 2007 and how it can help ease the way you work.


As we dogfooded Office 2007 this summer, the only thing I added to the quick action tool bar was “Save as…” given I needed to save docs in the Office 2003 format for those who hadn’t yet made the leap. I don’t bother with it any more: nice to see that I’m now receiving documents in Office 2007 format from some of the last teams to move. 😉


From the Office site:








Where did my favorite commands go?

Find familiar commands in the new Ribbon. Use our interactive guides to find your favorite commands in the 2007 programs and learn how to customize the toolbars and menus.

 

More information on…

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Zune: What’s the “out of box experience” like?

The opening of the Zune.


I went through the “out of box experience” (“OOBE” as it’s called) tonight on a new retail Zune.


It was like opening an origami box, ‘though this one was made in China and used four pieces of adhesive tape as I counted. 


I was impressed by the packaging as I was the unit itself: opting for a matte black unit, it has a little more heft than my current music player, but certainly less than the Portable Media Center.


Zune01  Zune02  Zune03  Zune04


Zune05  Zune06  Zune07  Zune08


Zune09  Zune10  Zune11 Zune12


Now recharging, so my commute may be an all new and different experience.


Although machines at home are running Windows Vista, happy that I have one machine running in a dual-boot configurations with Windows XP Media Center and Service Pack 2, as “Windows Vista is not supported at this time.” (If your computer is running Windows XP, it must have Service Pack 2 (SP2) installed. Click here for information about Windows XP SP2. Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 PCs need to have Update Rollup 2 installed: click here for information about this update.)


Side note:  Interestingly, most retailers locally are sold out. So was Buy.com when I checked today, where I was served an interesting video clip ad in the product listing, for the Apple iPod.


Added 111506: RE: USB on VPC: USB devices are not supported in VPC 2007. But it works fine in a dual boot system.


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Article, videos: Linux Linkup for Microsoft, Novell

Businessweek offers their coverageon the Microsoft-Novell announcement., which the WSJ said “makes it easier for customers to use both the Linux and Windows operating systems.“



“In a surprising development, Microsoft (MSFT) on Nov. 2 entered into a broad partnership with longtime rival Novell (NOVL) and agreed to provide some support to Linux, the open-source operating system that competes with its own Windows operating system. Linux, which is developed by a community of software developers who share their code, has long been viewed as one of the most serious threats to the lucrative Windows franchise.


“Under the agreement, Microsoft will offer sales support for SUSE Linux, a version of the operating system sold by Novell. The two companies have also agreed to develop technologies to make it easier for users to run both SUSE Linux and Microsoft’s Windows on their computers. “They said it couldn’t be done,” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said in a prepared statement. “This is a new model and a true evolution of our relationship that we think customers will immediately find compelling.”  


More info: the Video Press conference on the WSJ web site


Has Novell gotten the memo? See an example of Novell’s humour, which they term as a “public service announcement.”

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Dr. Who & Exchange: CDO fix for time adjustment

Apparently Dr. Who isn’t the only one capable of controlling time.


As noted in support article 910268 this week, there’s a code defect when you use “Collaborative Data Objects (CDO) to create meetings programmatically in Microsoft Exchange Server 2003: meetings are unexpectedly moved one hour ahead in the last week of October with Microsoft Exchange Server. CDO causes the daylight saving time adjustment to happen at the wrong time. This impacts Outlook, which as The Register in the UK reports “will turn the clocks back a week early, plunging Britain’s Blackberry-weilding suits into a thundering whirlpool of temporal bedlam.” 


For more on the hotfix, here’s a link to the KB article.


Come to think of it, a TARDIS has been reported outside Dave Thompson’s office on occassion.