Black and Blue
Can’t afford a Blackberry? Well, you might just be able to run to a Blueberry @9500, just don’t expect it to be compatible with Blackberry’s email service or apps. Yes, it’s a fake, and a pretty shameless one at that, and it’s not the first time the Malaysian company CSL has had a pop at Research in Motion, the Canadian manufacturer of the genuine article. On paper the spec is quite impressive, it has dual SIM slots, a Micro SD card reader, camera, optical trackpad, a number of ‘Islamic’ features, wi-fi and the cheeky beggars have even fitted it with an analogue TV tuner. It’s priced to sell, at around £120 but there’s not much danger of you getting hold of one in your local high street, at least not above the counter…
Windows in the Dock
Okay Apple fans, I know desktop docking bars are old hat on Macs but there’s no reason why Windows users can’t join in the fun as well. In case you’ve just tuned in, a docking bar is simply an on-screen graphic, usually always in view, containing a strip of shortcut icons to your favourite applications, so there’s no need to mess around with the Start menu or minimize open windows to get at the desktop. There’s plenty of docks to choose from but this one, called Nexus, is one of the better ones, with more configuration options and eye catching features than you can shake a stick at. All you have to do is download the program, run the installer and it’s good to go. It comes pre-loaded with popular options, like a clock, CPU and RAM meters, browser and email client icons and a weather gadget to get you started so all you have to do to make it your own is drag your preferred icons on to the bar, set the size, transparency and position and it’s ready to use.
Nokia E63 Review
The Eseries from Nokia continues to spawn new devices on the handset market, this time a cheaper version, but with enough up-to-date features to have some success. The Nokia E63 smartphone competes with its more rich-featured brother E71. If you’re looking for a business phone and do not have the amount to acquire the top of the line E71, then the new Nokia E63 can easily take its place. While there are some design and feature differences between the two, the latter is definitely excellent value for money.
Announced in November 2008, Nokia E63 was made available on the market just in time for Christmas, in December 2008. The price of the smartphone is pretty cheap compared to what it can do – 250USD. The phone was launched in three colors: Ultramarine Blue, Ruby Red and Black. Read more
Nokia E71 smartphone review
Nokia’s E-range is aimed firmly at corporate users, with the E71 offering a full QWERTY keypad to make emailing easier, and loads of features that help to make it a great out of office tool.
Build quality is among the best that we’ve seen to date on a smartphone, with aluminium used on the front and rear to create an incredibly stylish yet robust finish. The most surprising aspect of this handset is just how thin it is, however, making it appear a lot smaller than it actually is.
It’s also narrower than rivals such as RIM’s Blackberry Bold, leading to a keyboard that may be too cramped for some users. Raised centres to the keys make it easy to get up a good typing rhythm, however, striking a good compromise between portability and usability. Read more
Windows Live Essentials for Windows 7
On the path to Wave 3, the Windows Live collection of services and applications debuted into Beta earlier this year, and has been crawling toward RTW ever since. As of December 15, 2008, Windows Live made yet another step forward, but still managed not to lose the Beta tag. At the start of this week, Microsoft introduced the Windows Live Essentials Beta Refresh. A number of Windows Live applications, including the company’s instant messaging, email, and photo viewer clients are now available for download as Beta Refresh builds.
“About three months ago, we released public betas of the Windows Live Essentials – our suite of downloadable programs for your Windows PC, including Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety,” a member of the Windows Live team revealed. “Since then, we’ve received a ton of great feedback and we’ve been using that information to update these programs. We’re getting very close to the final release. But before we get there, we’re refreshing the beta versions one more time, to make sure we’ve ironed out all the kinks.” Read more
Elonex One T+ £99 PC, First Impressions
You may recall me mentioning the Elonex One PC back in February, a pocket PC that would sell for the astonishingly low price of £99. Well, at that time no samples were available but I was intrigued enough to send off my £10 deposit, on the promise that it would be delivered in July. Needless to say it never arrived and not only did the delivery date slip, in the meantime Elonex produced an upgraded design, called One t+ (almost certainly a rebadged CNM Minibook), which they offered to those who placed orders, at no extra cost. – the One T+ now costs £120 online. (The original One, with its quirky ‘upside down’ design always looked a bit suspect…) To cut a long story short, involving several unanswered emails and even more delayed delivery dates, mine has just been delivered. Read more
The Phrase That Pays
If you do a lot of typing then you can be pretty sure you constantly repeat yourself, especially when writing letters or replying to emails. Here’s a way to save yourself a few seconds each day, so you don’t have to keep typing things like Dear Mr…, it was a pleasure to meet you…, thank you for the… , and anything else you can think of. Phrase Express integrates seamlessly with your word processor, text editor and email programs, inserting common phrases at the click of a mouse or simple shortcut, it expands abbreviations, auto completes phrases with predictive text, enters dates and times, even a quote of the date if you so wish and as an added bonus it checks your spelling. It’s easy to use, highly customisable and yes, before you ask, it is free for personal use.
Windows Live Hotmail Joins Windows Live Messenger
Windows Live Hotmail has joined Windows Live Messenger in order to extend the support of the “i’m” initiative. Microsoft debuted “i’m” back in 2007 as a way to enable Windows Live Messenger users to have a say as to where would a portion of the Redmond company’s advertising revenue from its instant messaging client would go. A year after the initiative was launched, no less than ten social cause organizations around the world received a total of over $1 million because of the users who started Windows Live Messenger conversations with “i’m.” As of May 5, the “i’m” initiative is no longer restricted to Windows Live Messenger, having migrated from the instant messaging client to Windows Live Hotmail. Read more
Free Video Capture Makes its Debut
If it moves and it appears on your PC screen then you can capture it with this freeware application, called Debut. Now don’t get too excited, it can record streamed video (and audio), like You Tube and iPlayer, but the unless you have a blisteringly fast PC the frame rate will probably be quite slow if you don’t want to sacrifice too much picture quality, but it’s definitely worth experimenting and its certainly good enough for a quick and dirty archive. It’s just the job for making tutorial videos, showing someone how to do something on a PC, by recording everything that happens on the screen. It also has a built in timer and it can be set to email or upload your movie by FTP. You can even get it to burn directly to DVD with an optional add-on and there’s a facility to record from external sources like web-cams and USB capture devices.
Simple Email Backup
Over the years I must have written tens of thousands of words on how to copy, transfer and backup email messages. With Outlook Express backing up the Message Store folder is not too difficult but it’s all the other bits and pieces – account settings, signatures, rules, blocked senders and so on – that make life difficult because they’re all over the place. Now it looks as though I won’t have to go through the rigmarole again.
Presenting Amic Email Backup. It’s a small freeware application that backs up all of the vital files and info in most popular email clients, including OE, Outlook, Eudora, Pegasus, Incredimail, The Bat, Poco, Netscape, to name just a few. Read more
