I was recently fortunate enough to bag myself a HP TouchPad for £90 during the fire sale. I had always been interested to see the device since seeing the ‘hands off’ demos that were given at the tech trade shows. To me, the device had some really nice differentiation to the other tablets on the market with it’s wireless charging, integration with the Pre3 and the WebOS cards approach. The vibrate and light alert indicators are a nice touch also.

Having now used it for a few days, I am glad that I did not hold out for the TouchPad and put my eggs in the iPad basket!

My original hope was to migrate from using the iPad at work and move all my note taking over to the TouchPad but as yet I have not been able to find a bunch of WebOS apps that compare to ToodleDo and iThoughtsHD to make the switch.

Email integration to the work’s Exchange environment is fine and it does a great job with emails and calendaring but that alone is not enough! I need more to maintain my paperless life.

Right now I’m in the middle of see if the Homebrew Community can increase the functionality of the TouchPad but I have the distinct impression that I will be holding out for a stable Android port that I can install and have myself a Honeycombe or Ice Cream Sandwich enabled tablet.

In the interim, the HP TouchPad will live next to the sofa and act as a quick device to browse the web without making me go and dig the iPad out of my work bag.

News just out today is that Microsoft have made an unsolicited, all cash purchase ($8.5B) of Skype’s business to create a new business unit within Microsoft where Skype’s CEO, Tony Bates will become President of the business unit and report directly to Steve Bullmer.

Microsoft have communicate via a joint webcast that they are committed to continuing the delivery of Skype’s services in the same cross platform model that Skype has today. While there will be a focus on accelerating the integration of Skype into the current Microsoft portfolio for unified communicated with their Lync solution, they understand that device independence is key gaining market penetration and end user adoption.

For me the biggest reason for the purchase is that it allows Microsoft to quickly close the gap that they have in the UC market for mobile communications and of course, mobile video. Microsoft have had desktop video for some time and have recently had the option of some room based video conferencing through the Kinect launch but these have been very silo’ed to date. Skype have done a better job of getting video delivered throughout the mobile, desktop and living room spaces.

Enterprise telephony strategy/gain is still not clear, both Microsoft and Skype have struggled with their positioning over recently years and I can’t see a clear benefit just at the moment other than the Skype in/out capability.

My final thought is that Microsoft have gained a much better audio codec (SILK) with the purchase of Skype.

View the announcement yourself and see what you make of the news!

Image role of the slides presented at the announcement:

Through-out the month of January 2011, Runkeeper are giving away the Pro version of their mobile client (Android and iPhone iOS) for nothing, a saving of $9.99 for each version.

I’ve been using the free version of Runkeeper on my Nexus One for the past 9 months and have been very impressed with the service in comparision to some of the other training trackers on the Market and the Polar based gear that i’ve uses for years before now.  The things that have impressed me the most have been the social networking side of the website, the general look and feel of both the mobile apps/website and the ongoing enhancement of the size; like the recent addition of heartrate monitoring.

Downloading the pro verison now whilst it is free give you access to additional features like:

• Manual activity posts (something that used to only be done via the website) for those times on the gym machines
• Audiable coaching / pace information as you are training
• Custom playlists whilst you exercise

Depending on how far you want to take the usage, Runkeeper also has a yearly ($19.99 USD) subscription service for their Elite functions that provides a greater level of statistical data about your fitness activities and helps to generate taylored training progams to help achieve that next milestone or race event.  Something that I really like the sound of but have yet to try is Runkeeper Live, which allows you to stream live information to their website for people to follow your progress, real-time.
Download your copy from iTunes or the Market now, whilst it’s FREE!

UPDATE 1/Feb/2011: RunKeeper have seen a massive increase in the number of people registering to use their application since it was made free for the month of January.  Despite being listed as one of Apple’s top grossing apps for 2010, the team as decided that from what they have learnt and their future plans, they will continue to provide the Pro version of the RunKeeper mobile app for free.

 Not much seems to have happened over the past few months with FTTC:

• BT Openreach continue to rollout of exchange/cabinet upgrades as per their schedule
• Plus.net are still in trail mode and you can not order a FTTC service straight from the customer support team (you can however still get on their trail once out are an account holder)
• Sky still don’t seem to have their trail up and running as yet; months behind their advised dates

BT Infinity did however create a site called Race to Infinity that allowed people to register their interest for their local exchange to be considered for an update to FTTC.  The first results of this having been announce just a week or so ago.  Whitchurch was one of 6 lucky places to be added to the release schedule.  The complete list of locations being:

• Whitchurch, Hampshire
• Baschurch, Shropshire
• Blewbury, Oxfordshire
• Caxton, Cambridgeshire
• Innerleithen, Scottish Borders
• Madingley, Cambridgeshire

Winning the race to infinity means that, subject to availability the winning exchanges will be enabled early in 2012.
 
Good news is that I can one add Whitchurch to my Rightmove search list for future house location.  Like so many advancements in Internet connection speed, I don’t think that I could face the a decrease in connection speed now that I am so used to 40Mb down and 10Mb up. 
 
I did try registering my Dad’s phone number as being interested in getting FTTC but being on a small exchange, it did not even meet the minimum number of connections requirement of 1000 residential subscribers.  Now chance of me getting them up and running on a HiDef videoconferencing solution yet then!

I’ve been trying for some time now to spruce up this site to make it a little more graphical and catchy.  One thing that I have wanted to sort is the creation of an official icon that will be used by Apple products when someone created a shortcut to this site and places is on their home screen.

After a few web searches I found varying success with the tools that people have placed online to create an icon or manipulate an uploaded file.  The most common issue being that the sites out there still produce output files on the lower 57 x 57 pixel format and not the 72 x 72 pixel format that looks nice on the iPad.  Originally I was of it opinion that upping from 57 to 72 pixels really can’t make that much difference, can it?? Believe me, it is worth the effort!

So here’s the approach that I have taken to keep the logo quality as high as possible.

That basically completes getting your icon saved on the home screen of an iPad if people like your site that much.  However, there was one more thing that I wanted to change about the way Apple products auto manipulate the image you provide as the icon and goes beyond the information that I found on the LifeinTECH site.

What you will notice is that by default, the auto manipulation will not only curve off the corners of your image but it will also add what is known as a “glossy” look to the icon.  This may look good in some cases, but for me it just distracted from the effect that I was after.

After hunting through the Safari Reference Library I found that it is possible to disable this glossy finish by changing the code from step 5 above.  To disable the feature use <link rel=”apple-touch-icon-precomposed” href=”/images/apple-icon.png”> instead.  The key change here being the apple-touch-icon-precomposed part.
 

I have been more than happy with the FTTC service that I’ve had from Plusnet on trial for the past few months now; even with the 20Mbps download cap that they placed on the service to start with.

During my activation day, Dave (from Plusnet) rang me to check that everything was up and working correctly and informed me that at their network does not see any difference between ADSL2+ and FTTC based customers, Plusnet would need to implement new profiles allow user to take advantage of the additional speed.  In the mean time, FTTC trail customers would get a theoretical cap of around 20Mbps due to being IP profiled at 21000 in their network.

Over the last week, Plusnet have appoved a configuration change that removes this limit.  While it still does not show up correctly in the members web portal (it actually shows a drop in IP connection rate), FTTC users will be able to get their maximum capable speed (up to 40Mbps) and they are already prepared for FTTP customers to come online and get their up to 100Mbps connections.

It will be interesting to see where the actual contention points in the network not lay.  Is it your home, cabinet, exchange, BT backhaul, ISP, Internet or the webserver ???

For now, the new profile lift has as good as doubled my download rate through Plusnet, I’m now seeing the full IP profile speed to BT have shown me at since I took on the trial; 38717 Kbps

A small selection of the photos that I took of 14 riders during their 4 day, 261 mile charity cycle ride for Marie Curie and the RNLI from the Leasedrive Velo offices in Crowthorne to the Le Mans 24 Hour race circuit.

More info on the riders and event are available here: http://bit.ly/9Ne3Ut

But well done to all the riders, you made my life as team mechanic and van driver easy 

It was a few days ago now but I finally gave up waiting for Google to send me the update for my Nexus One that was running build number ERE27 of the Eclair 2.1 version of Android and took the plunge with a file from the Internet that would manually get me updated to the Froyo version of Android 2.2.

Lets start by saying that the upgrade was so easy, that everyone should jump on this if they have not yet had the update delivered over the air.  One point that I have not seen reported anywhere is that this update does NOT wipe your devices current data.  I spent an hour or so backing up all of my personal / application information only to find after the update that it was already still there !!

For the update from ERE27 to FRF85B I downloaded the file from:
http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-ota-42745.dc39ca1f.zip
and followed the these instructions to get it installed:

Since then, the morning after actually, Google released a security patch update to get everyone onto FRF91.  I woke a few hours after doing to upgrade to find that the patch was ready and waiting for me on the phone.  Hopefully, this will put me in a good place in the update line for the future Gingerbread release.

I have to say that the speed increase for the Internet is just fantastic, no longer do I wait for pages to render.  As soon as the information gets downloaded, it is up on the screen.  The other major point for me was around the WiFi Tethering.  I finally got around to testing the iPad’s Internet access by tethering it with the Nexus One.  I could tell you all about it but instead, here are the results in a pictorial form!

That’ll do nicely thank-you!  No longer will I be caught short in motorway service stations.

It looks like the day has final come.  Reports are surfacing amongst other less important news today (iPhone 4 release day) that owners of the Nexus One are being prompted to say that there is a system update available for them to download.  Froyo (Android 2.2) is being released to the general public!

At the moment it looks like the Over-the-Air (OTA) update is only for Nexus One phones running either build number FRF50 or FRF72, with them each ending up on FRF83 one the latest update has been installed.  I’m still on build number ERE27 and have yet to see the update (even after forcing my phone to check the update servers.

Lets hope that by the close of this week, Google have opened up the release gates to all build versions to share in the Froyo goodness.  I can’t wait to be able to tether my iPad (32Gb WiFi model) to the Nexus One when I am out and about).

When it comes time to update, you should get the icon on your notification bar and see the following message in the notification window.

If you want to force your phone to check for the update, there seem to be 3 ways to do this:

If you want to try option 3, you should load the phone dialler keypad and type *#*#2432546#*#* that’ll make the phone go off and automatically check for updates for the operating system and the Android Market apps that you have already installed.  When the check has completed, you will get a notification alert entitled checkin results with the message of success.

I’ve not tried it myself but you can apparently upgrade from build FRF50 to FRF83 manually through the file on Google’s Android Client code site.  It has been stressed that you MUST be on FRF50 for this to work, so don’t even bother trying if you have any other build number shown on your phone’s about screen.

Source: Android and Me