Burning Lemons

As anyone following my Twitter over the last few days will probably know (hey if you want all the lastest news on me you need to follow. What you don’t? Oh…) my 13 month old MacBook (just out of warranty natch…) has finally died a fairly spectacular death. A conversation with the nice people at the Glasgow Apple Store has confirmed that the logic board is to blame and fixing this will cost an amount of money not disimilar to the cost of the laptop. After spending the next few hours cursing the fact that I didn’t buy Applecare I got on to the subject of what to do next. The simple fact is that I cannot afford a new MacBook and aren’t particularly keen on buying an old one off ebay. Beacause of this I have little choice but to rejoin the Windows world I left in 2006 with the purchase of a Mac Mini (which cost £500 less than the macbook and is still going strong).

So having trawled through the world of computer websites I settled on an Acer machine running Windows Vista Home Premium with 4GB of RAM. As much as I have hated on Vista I have chosen to run with it for 4 reasons

1) Its been out for two years. Therefore they must be someway towards fixing it
2) I don’t really have any choice
3) I’ve had a look at Windows 7 and it doesn’t look that bad so the option to upgrade soonish is there
4) This laptop is really only a stopgap for the next 18 or so months

So over the next few weeks I’ll be doing a comparison of my Mac OS X experience to what I find with Vista. I hope you’ll stay posted

Continuing in our series of uncalled for software reviews I’ve decided to have a stab at the latest version of Nokia’s mapping software. Nokia Maps is probably the most used phone-navigation solution in the world (Google Maps doesn’t count as it doesn’t do turn by turn) so any new development is hugely important as it will eventually show up on millions of handsets.
The first Beta of NM3 was a bit of a disaster partly because it came out before it was really ready (even with Betas if you’re going to make them public you should probably ensure their not going to brick hardware) in order to fit with Nokia’s Nokia World event in Barcelona (now do you see why Apple dumped Macworld?).

The big new feature here is Maps on Ovi yet another arm to Nokia’s nice but underused onlne offering. Unfortunately because it relies on a propriotary plugin the software currently only works in Firefox and IE on Windows XP and Vista although a version for Mac OS X is being developed. The software allows users to plan routes at home and then sycronise them to their phone which saves a lot of keypad bashing on n-series handsets all of which currently come with T9 numeric keypads. The software is like a prettier version of Google maps doing lots of lovely 3D things as well as all the usual stuff. However if you don’t use Nokia Maps don’t bother as their doesn’t seem to be any way to print out or otherwise use the routes that you plan.

Moving on to the software itself. Scrolling around maps looking for locations is now a lot smoother than in previous editions of the software. The maps now come with fairly crappy looking visualisations of well known landmarks (Tower Bridge, The Eiffel Tower and of course The Nokia HQ building) which while cheap looking would probably be a bit of a godsend in a big, unfamiliar city.

The navigation has also been enhanced and certainly from my testing seems to demand fewer u-turns and sudden crossings of 8-way intersections. The maps also seem to have been upgraded as well and now (in my area at least) reflect the world as it was in about September 2008.

Nokia Maps 3 is available from http://betalabs.nokia.com for free although navigation and traffic info is extra. Remember the software is a beta and if you’re not prepared to run in to a few problems stick with version 2 for the moment.

Maps on Ovi can be downloaded by pointing a Windows installation of Internet Explorer 6 or 7 or Firefox 2 or 3 to http://maps.ovi.com

Final Rating: 8/10

The good: Faster startup, smoother movements and more sensible routing

The bad: Prone to the odd crash - but it is a Beta

The ugly: Maps on Ovi requires propriotary plugin and only works in Windows

We know you’ve been holding off finding out about Windows 7. Ignoring the reviews from CNET, The New York Times and others and waiting for the only one that matters. OK, uhmm probably not but given that the Beta download closes in two weeks this seemed line a good time to chuck in the obligatory 2¢/1.45p

Windows 7 is the next release of Microsoft’s inescapable Windows Operating System. It follows on from Windows Vista which (rightly or wrongly) received a lukewarm reception from both the tech and mainstream media which has put many users off upgrading. Indeed many people continue to specify Windows XP (an operating system released 8 years ago. It would be the same as turning down Windows XP in 2003 and demanding Windows 95 instead)

So now we come to version 7. Windows 7 at first glance appears to be a far less radical change as far as The UI goes from Vista as Vista was from XP. However one of the changes made has a huge impact on day to day use of the system. The taskbar now takes an approach to application management not a million miles away from The Mac OS X dock (we’ll leave the fanboys and possibly Bertrand Serlet of Apple to argue over who stole off who.

As a Mac convert I find the change intuitive and easy. It also stops the previous madness whereby applications names in the taskbar would become unreadable if you had more than 5 open. All the change is doing is basically enforcing The Windows XP option where all your windows in one programme were grouped into catagories.

One of the main complaints about Windows Vista was that it was slow even on mid-range hardware and that the glass effects and general UI - while pretty - were overkill for the average user. 7 keeps the effects but somehow tones down the amount of system power used to execute the effects. In my test (a Parallels virtual machine allocated 512MB of RAM on a MacBook with crappy integrated graphics) the virtual machine performed well, only showing strain while running multiple windows including a Windows Media Player visualiser.

So far (other than the usual unnecessary and inexplicable name changes) those are the main changes in Windows 7 however these along with a host of behind the scenes upgrades add up to probably the most stable version of Windows Microsoft has ever produced. While it may not win over Mac users it is certainly Microsoft’s best hope to stem the tide of Mac switching. But we’ll see what Snow Leopard brings…

The smartphone world has once again become a hive of activity and public interest following the release and success of the iPhone and T-Mobile’s Android based G1 platform. This post is a mini-predictions segment looking at where i expect the smartphone market to go over the next 12-18 months. For the sake of simplicity I have ignored the lower end market for simple mobile phones as while they are huge part of the businesses of companies like Nokia and Motorola the technology in them is less likely to change very quickly and the developments occuring in the smarthphone field now will likely trickle down over the next few years in much the same way that cameras did.

The Operating Systems

Smartphones will begin to centre around three major operating systems (for the sake of simplicity I have ignored the Blackberry os, a more business oriented system)
Apple’s iPhone OS

The Open Handset Alliance’s Androad Platform

The Symbian Foundation’s Symbian OS

iPhone

Apple will be the only company that successfully controls its own platform from end to end. No other major player in the phone market has the clout or sheer hard nose to operate the type of model that Apple does and still find partners to market, sell and use its products. Apple’s previous successes and its loyal and growing fanbase will allow it to hold the upper hand in negotiations in a way other manufacturers could only dream of. It’s model of refining existing ideas, already done to huge success with multi-touch and The App and Mobile iTunes stores will continue to pay dividends. The iPhone will continue to lack features that small groups of users consider essential including MMS, stereo bluetooth and Java and will contiune to be one of the most locked-down phones available but its ease-of-use and the sheer hype Apple have managed to build around the device will ensure a successful and profitable future barring any major flaws such as a rampant iPhone virus which given Apple’s current required pre-approval for all Apps installed on non-jailbroken phones looks unlikely. Sales will continue to grow as the iPhone is introduced to more territories and Apple’s one carrier per country/territory policy is withdrawn either voluterally or forceably (as occured in France where a court decided that Apple’s decision to only allow Orange to sell the iPhone was illegal even though unlocked models are available)

Android

The Google-backed Android platform has secured plenty of hype despite technical problems which resulted in the first phone running the operating system (The well, if not amazingly recieved T-Mobile G1) being released about 6 months behind schedule. Android’s decision to choose an open platform makes the chance of a virus striking the platform more likely than with the iPhone and a bug found in the platform meaning that all input to the phone was interpreted as system commands (since rectified) was hardly the greatest start for the platform. However the availability of the operating system on multiple phones will increase the number of consumers who could end up using an Android powered phone (someone who insists on a physical Qwerty keyboard for example could quite easilly select and Android powered phone that meets there needs but would be unable to use an iPhone). The medium-term success of the Android platform depends on a wide range of products being brought to market relatively quickly so that development of applications for the phone can continue. A little homepage advertisment from Google probably wouldn’t hurt either (Homepage advertising helped push Google’s browser Chrome onto the desktops of many non-geeks).

Symbian Foundation

Little information is currently available about Nokia’s if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em effort. The Symbian foundation only really got going at the beginning of December when Nokia completed its acquisition of the parts of Symbian it didn’t already own. The integration of the Symbian teams into Nokia is not expected to be completed until March at the earliest. This means that we would be unlikely to see any phones before about June 2010 as although the code is already there (unlike for Apple and Android who started from scratch) it needs to be checked for closed-source components. On top of that the current Symbian OS and the interfaces such as S60 which run on top of it are beginning to look long in the tooth and in need of a rewrite. That said Nokia has just finished work on its Nokia N97 its first touchscreen smartphone (pictured for lack of anything else) which looks promising although knowing Nokia it will all be in the execution (The N95 took two major software updates to become the phone it was meant to be)
So having had a look at the state of the operators what looks likely. Well my wrtings above do not take into account the economic crisis which will porbably reduce the demand for smartphones particularly phones such as the iPhone and N95 which do not offer the features required by businesses and are aimed at tech-savvy consumers. However presuming Android does what it is meant too, the operators play along and Nokia finally pushes a Symbian Foundation product out we can look forward to a future with greater choice and openess for consumers

Reports on the death of radio keep coming out thick and fast. The media has finally started to pick up on services such as Last.fm and Pandora and have begun to use them as their latest excue to declare traditional radio dead and buried.

At least here in The UK I’m not at all willing to describe the situation in that way. At the moment I’m listening to BBC 6Music, I could listen to music from my iTunes library or from Last.fm but have instead chosen to listen to a linear radio station that is not exactly tailored to my taste, why?

Firstly even though I have spent months and months training Last.fm it has still failed to get my musical taste exactly right, this is partly because I listen to a lot of podcasts through iTunes and it is apparently impossible to get it to discount them. Therefore it thinks my top 3 Artists are “Molly Wood, Tom Merritt and Jason Howell” (of Buzz Out Loud from CNET), “BBC Radio 5 Live” and “guardian.co.uk”, while this is true I want Last.fm to find music for me, not podcasts.

iTunes on the other hand is great but it totally fails to find new music for me. While the store does have a recommendation system built in it basically sucks coming up with the most obvious suggestions (You bought a Coldplay song a year ago, how about Violet Hill) or totally misses the mark (You Bought Flathead - The Fratellis, How about Toxic - Britney Spears, I’m not making this one up)

So radio still seems (to me) to be the way forward as well as music there is a huge variaty of high quality speech on BBC Radio 4 and the underlistened BBC World Service and the totally underated BBC Radio 5 Live.

One of my Twitterfriends Tales recently wrote a great blog post on What Happened to Twitter so I’ve decided to chuck in my two cents as well. The fall of Twitter has been one of the great internet debate topics over the last month or two, of course the technical problems of Twitter go way back to its first explosion in popularity in round about early 2007 when web celebrities such as Leo Laporte began to use the service.

Unfortunately the nature of a service such as Twitter where messages are recieved by a central server, archived and then pushed out to a bunch of “followers” does not lend itself to scaling. Every time Digg founder Kevin Rose Twitters the message has to be pushed out to over 48,000 people, a number which is growing on a daily basis. Twitter has also to an extent complicaed this by also pushing out messages over SMS a potentially huge undertaking. If just 1,000 of Kevin’s followers want to see his Twitter then 1,000 messages have to be sent (at Twitter’s expense) to mobiles all over the world.

The real strain has been seen since about May this year when after multiple downtime issues the IM service was withdrawn in an attempt to improve the stability of the service with a promise to return the service “as soon as possible”. Three months on the service has yet to return and little progress appears to have been made in improving the stability of the service. Important services such as being able to see posts beyond the most recent 20 and being able to view replies were also unavailable for days at a time

However up until the end of June little progress appeared to have been made in finding a successor to Twitter, Kevin Rose’s own Pownce didn’t seem to be going anywhere and the most obvious Twitter-competitor Jaiku had been bought by Google and essentially shut down with no new members being allowed to join. The someone (Leo Laporte) discovered Plurk, twittered about it and suddenly we seemed to have our knight in shining armour. As Plurk’s own blog post shows the levels of traffic exploded overnight.

But contrary to the expectations of many people liked what they saw and didn’t just migrate back to Twitter after the weekend was over. While an obvious Twitter clone plurk does have enough features to distinguish it from Twitter such as the horizontal timeline and buit in replies.

So is this the end of Twitter? The orgenisation behind Twitter just recieved $15 Million in venture funding and says it plans to spend the money to shore up the service. But unless there are any big changes over the next few weeks and months I would have to say that it is pretty much over for Twitter, before now it may have been possible for Twitter to stave off its death. But now many of its most loyal users are jumping ship the oppertunity seems to be slipping from Twitter’s grasp

A terrible thing happened today, This Week in Tech one of my personal favourite podcasts was cancelled, even wore news: it’s not on next week either. Podcasts are wonderful things especially for someone like me who spends an hour a day travelling. If you have a long flight lined up downloading a couple can really help make the time fly. Another personal favourite of mine is CNET’s Buzz Out Loud which takes a daily look at technology. What makes it so great is the hosts. Tom, Molly and Jason’s personality including the infamous Mollyrant make the podcast so much more than a daily news round up and makes you feel like you are there talking with them (which indeed you can be at 17:00 GMT daily at www.watchbol.com . You can find all the information about various podcasts Below

Buzz Out Loud - bol.cnet.com

TWiT - This Week in Tech - twit.tv

MacBreak Weekly - twit.tv/mbw

 Amateur Traveller - amateurtraveller.com

Mark Kermode’s Film reviews - bbc.co.uk/fivelive/entertainment/kermode.shtml

Enjoy

The entire tech community was shaken today by the news that a long running rumour has actually turned out to be true! Microsoft has offered $44.6 billion dollars (more than the entire GDP of Kenya or Luxembourg according to the CIA World Factbook) to buy “rival” internet company Yahoo!

Many people have claimed that this will almost certainly be blocked by regulators but since Yahoo isn’t doing great and Windows Live (despite being pretty ok in my opinion) has totally failed to catch on. MSN/Live is solely reliable on it’s popular MSN IM protocol and Yahoo’s only good decision of the last 5 years was buying flickr. Google on the other hand has had significantly fewer mistakes GMail has grown incredibly quickly, the core search business remains really strong, Google Docs is catching on (slowly), everyone seems to have Google Desktop (though no-one uses it to search) and Picasa does quite well. Vista hasn’t done well for Microsoft and no-one seems to use Office ‘07 nor has the Zune and no-one I have spoken to really likes the new hotmail and Yahoo has basically done nothing, well it’s done lots but only the core service of Mail still does any good.

So the deal could either kill them both by combining two companies with weak product development or perk them up by combining two companies with good core products and good cash reserves for future devlopment.

Dull bit: Just to clarify Microsoft has only made an offer and Yahoo! is yet to accept or decline it

Twitter took another of its increasingly frequent nose dives this afternoon. Twitter has fast become my favourite web 2.0 type social networking tool. Even though I don’t really get myspace or Facebook I really like reading 140 character updates of other folks lives. Those of you on twitter prepare for 100 ZOMG TWITTER WAZ DOWN posts in a few hours when it finally pulls out of its tailspin.