Monday, October 29, 2007
Pigeon-holed in “Life”
Of all the cities in the UK that I haven’t visited, Manchester has been top of the list for a long while. Finally this weekend I managed to remedy this and took a train up to see Mike.
Swan met me up there and we hooked up with Zoe for some early evening drinks and food.
We ended up at some foam party in the middle of the city (something I’ve not done for a few years…) and dancing to Oasis, Happy Mondays, Joy Division and a load of other indie stuff which felt quite appropriate.
I’ve currently in the middle of a Macathon, unpacking the folk’s new iMac and installing Leopard. It’s all very, very nice. And mine is due to arrive tomorrow.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Pigeon-holed in “Life”
The first time I saw this programme, I watched for about ten minutes then switched over. The music video inside a comedy show didn’t seem to be as funny as the trailers seemed to allude to.
However, a couple of weeks later and a few more episodes caught, I now think Flight of The Conchords has to be one of the best sit-coms (although it doesn’t follow the traditional format) in recent months and years.
The current show is appearing on BBC 4 (Tuesday, 9.30pm), converting to screen after a successful run as an Edinburgh Festival show in 2003 and also as a radio series on BBC Radio 2.
If you’ve not seen it, the premise is two Kiwis living in New York (Brett and Jermaine) trying to make a living as a band (formerly New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo). They are guided by their keen but slightly misguided band manager, Murray, and pursued relentlessly by their number one fan/stalker and all round scary girl, Mel.
The dialogue is genius and the jokes are subtle, but the characters are really well formed and my advice is that if you haven’t seen it you should really have a look.
For a few clips, YouTube is a good start…
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Pigeon-holed in “Life”
We seem to have missed out on a string of sporting successes this week. What with our football hopes hanging by a thread, Lewis Hamilton’s unfortunate near miss at the F1 Championship, the rugby boys’ valiant defeat to the ‘Boks, and me forgetting to take my googles when I went swimming this evening – all in all it’s been pretty disastrous for the English these past few days.
On the flipside, we still know how to celebrate whatever the result, and thankfully last night Will arranged for his birthday to coincide with the Big Match, so we ended up down the Foley Arms before heading into Stourbridge for the night.
Tom and George made a surprise visit, and what with Gwyz over, the girls, and a few other faces it was a good little crowd. Plus we managed to talk our way into a couple of bars after they had said no; always a bonus, never a disappointment.
I can sense the next few days are going to be keeping me on my toes. There are one or two projects that need to get a good kick start at the beginning of the week and I can’t see it getting much quieter.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Pigeon-holed in “Life”
Saturday marked the beginning of the third year of the Multipack, and so to celebrate we returned to the home of the ‘pack and all round superstar town, Walsall.
It wasn’t as busy as the same event last year, but Si’s attendance being as rare as the attendance of free cake at meetings (which also showed up) made it a good little gathering which eventually stopped at the Hogs Head.
One of the ideas banded about was universally applauded and so it has been decided to have a bit of a hack day (‘Multihack’ if you will… stop booing, it’s not that awful) in the offices of OneBlackBear for the November meeting in order to get the website well and truly refurbished. For more info, check out Upcoming.
In the evening I headed over to Beth’s house for the first time in years for a rugby-fest and OSH reunion. Did I think we’d win? Well like most other people I know I think I was still stunned by the fact we were in the semis, let alone going any further up the ladder. After what was 70 minutes of mediocre rugby, finally England showed some flare and the final ten were pure gold. I was a very happy chappy.
Thankfully that wasn’t the end of the night, as there were plenty of people who I hadn’t seen in ages like Oz, Tim, Beth, Jo, Mitch, Rog, Baz, in fact, pretty much everybody apart from James and Helen. Good times.
Sunday was more for family time, and with my cousin heading off to Australia for a year, we went over to Stratford to see him before he catches his flight.
On a completely different tack, there has been one big mystery this week. Imagine my surprise when flicking through the channels a couple of nights ago I discover that directly after UKTV Gold, a new channel called ‘Dave’ has appeared, followed closely by a ‘Dave +1’.
It turns out that UKTV G2 has rebranded itself to this strange new name and although I sort of see why they did it and how they came up with the idea (I’d put money on it being a team of young graduate types who came up with it), I think it’s a little strange. It’s a little too odd, mainly I think, with a questionable amount of staying power.
Anyway, the whole channel is geared to 18-25 year old men, so plenty of Top Gear, Buzzcocks, Have I Got News For You etc etc which can’t be a bad thing, unless you are not a 18-25 year old male.
I met two girls last night who were taught Economics by the current Home Secretary. How’s that for name dropping…
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Pigeon-holed in “Reviews”
The reason this is probably one of only a handful of reviews of this product at this time is that I am lucky enough to have become one of the first forty people in the UK to own a fully-fledged, working PocketSurfer2.
This device has been in development for a number of years and trying to find out much about it’s predecessor (not launched in the UK) is fairly fruitless.
This newer incarnation of the PocketSurfer certainly boasts an impressive array of features. On-the-go, free* internet anywhere on a mobile-sized device, with GPS built in. Using a compression technology it claims it can load full-content web pages in 7-9 seconds, including Flash, Java and Ajax content as it was intended. This doesn’t sound like your standard mobile-web experience.
This isn’t a phone though. The PocketSurfer2 is a standalone unit which has a gloss-black and chrome clamshell design which inside sports a full, backlight QWERTY keyboard that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the keypad on a Motorola RZR.
The screen is an odd postbox size, but shows 640 true pixels in standard mode, or a full page using the nifty zoom button. Depending on how the site was constructed this can reduce the font-size below reading size, however that’s not really the point of the feature, which allows you to see a single full-width page at anytime.
The PocketSurfer isn’t 3G, or EDGE for that matter, but instead uses GPRS. GPRS? Isn’t that a bit 2001? Well it would be if Datawind, the company who manufacturers the product, wasn’t doing something interesting with it. By downloading the pages to their servers first, they repackage the full site (as seen in Internet Explorer 6) and send it to the device, very, very quickly. They claim that no other PDA or smartphone device is faster, and earlier in the year challenged anyone to prove them wrong. Apparently no one could contest it.
Unfortunately this still isn’t proper 3G and true streaming isn’t possible, so video or Skype calls are out of the question (there is no audio output anyway).
My usual upload/download speed benchmarking didn’t work because it measures the connection speed of the server, but suffice to say, I have been impressed with the general loading times, and yes most of what I’ve been accessing has arrived within a 9 second timeframe.
You are initially logged onto a homepage which you have no control over (it’s full of links to useful services, unfortunately you can’t customise this page; annoying as the useful services I use aren’t linked to). This isn’t a major issue, and you can see why they have done it (sponsored links), but thankfully as most of their software is based on the server and not actually on the PocketSurfer, meaning updates can be done at their end without having to go through the rigmarole of firmware updates.
The PocketSurfer essentially acts like Remote Desktop, in that you are pretty much in control of a remote virtual machine. After a little bit of playing I discovered I could get into the backend of the system and navigate around Windows on the Virtual Machine that is my user area, but most of it has been locked down, and I am assured by Datawind that is it not a security issue.
Because of this VM nature, you can open PDF, Word, Excel and other files using the native viewers installed on the server (Adobe Reader for example). Downloading other files is limited (don’t expect to install anything) but on the whole it does enough to make most normal internet-surfing tasks a possibility.
There are a few drawbacks however. The pre-release information regarding PocketSurfer2 described the inclusion of 25GB of free storage space, the ability to control your PC remotely and editing facilities for Office documents. Whilst this is true, it is all done through 3rd party online software which you have to create separate accounts with, and are not at all optimised for the device. With the more than obvious comparisons that will be made to the internet access aspects of the iPhone/iPod Touch, the lack of inclusive features (at least automatic account creation for each of these services) is a big omission. It makes the homepage links look like an old fashioned web portal from 1996, each one prompting you to sign up for their own service.
The additional apps which aren’t third party are for webmail (supporting POP3, IMAP and HTTP) and for multi IM use, and they are Java applications. Like all Java apps, a little clunky, but functional none the less.
Trying to access the facebook iPhone app wasn’t particularly successful, and I soon established that this is because the pages are not being rendered using the most up-to-date version of Internet Explorer (IE6 it transpires). Doing a little digging into the page code it’s quite clear that the current portal stuff hasn’t been ‘designed’ or put together by anyone who understands web standards, both of which are unfortunate because the device is capable of displaying it. With really great mini browsers like Opera Mini available for most phones, it seems silly to be using out of date software.
Some of the interface leaves something to be desired. Mobile web has always been patchy, but the implementation of bookmarks is just plain ugly – a concoction of firmware, web and windows backend. Support told me that they hadn’t quite worked out how to deploy user profiles without slowing the device down at boot, but to me the answer is simple. Ditch the bastardised Windows Favourites and create a fully web based system allowing users to store their list of links in with their user profiles and account information, cutting out the need to wait for windows user profiles to load.
GPS works well, but unfortunately is functionally limited at the moment, and currently their is no API to write your own apps (maybe a little optimistic). However it’s implementation with Google Maps makes me hopeful of what can be achieved, and I’m looking forward to the software update (hopefully a ‘find directions from here’ using postcode application…).
There is a slight hum when using the device, but it’s barely noticeable, and the keyboard/screen illuminates only while using the keys meaning better preservation of the battery which lasts a day on sleep. Charging unfortunately isn’t indicated as you might expect – a light does come on, but it’s internal, and you can only see it if you open the mysterious second rubber flap next to the charging slot (rumoured to accept memory cards in future models).
Functionally, I wish there was the ability to use left, right, up and down keys, because although tab is fine, sometimes I want to correct something I’ve typed without having to pick up the cursor to locate the error. Similarly, there is no use of standard browser/interface shortcuts (even though there are Ctrl and Shift keys for other tasks) so ticking boxes using spacebar, copy and pasting are all nos. The lack of right click doesn’t pose any practical problem really, so I haven’t been fussed about missing that.
Strangely and clumsily they have opted to leave a huge status bar across the top edge of the screen, which essentially only serves to display a logo and two or three indicators which are unnecessarily stacked on top of each other. Had they been placed linearly, they could have halved the size of it and increased screen real estate.
The keyboard is fantastic (apart from the space key on mine which doesn’t give any tactile response unlike the other keys) and the implementation of a 8-way mouse control (like on a SNES) is unfortunate, but I assume that might be remedied in a future model. Clearly it would have increased production costs though. That said, no WiFi seems an odd omission being as the Canadian makers admitted it would only cost them another $10 to include it.
Overall, the PocketSurfer is very handy and allows you to see more of the net, in more places, faster, for less money, in better quality than any other comparable device. However, they should have employed an interface architect and a proper HTML/CSS coder to put together their software, especially in a world where people expect as much from the software as they do from the hardware.
At the moment there is still some work to be done, but it appears that most of it can be done serverside if they are willing to do so. Hopefully this means in the next few weeks and months we will see the updates needed to make the system truly sound, and the addition of a touch of ‘user delight’ that it currently lacks. See these changes, and the rating could rise to 4/5 stars.
*Free means inclusive with the price of the unit, the �179.99 price tae includes 20hrs usage a month, or �5.99 p/m subscription to make your usage unlimited. It’s �40 for a second year with the same 20hr p/m dataplan.
