m3100 staying on Windows Mobile 5.0???

will Orange bend to consumer pressure or not?

Jason has been announcing updates all day  from ASUS & Samsung however a worrying conversation I’ve had with an Orange insider has cast doubt on the likelihood of the HTC TyTN update to WM6 making it to the m3100 (officially)……. which will annoy me no end.

It seems that the recent AKU 3.0 update may have distracted the product teams and that its now possible that the Windows Mobile 6.0 upgrade will not be available before the next range of native WM6 devices appears on the Orange shelves.  The overlap casts doubt on whether the project will get started or maintain the necessary focus, as obviously the MNO wants to sell more equipment.

As I’ve said before this is a big test of the Windows Mobile licensing model as,  if I remember correctly, this is the the first time there will be official (as opposed to homebrew or leaked)  major Upgrade ROMs for manufacturer versions of OEM / licenced devices.  

MNOs (and not just Orange) need to be very wary of alienating their customers. 

I’ve sent some more feelers out into Orange land and I’ll post more as soon as I hear anything, here’s hoping it’s not true.

technorati tags: Orange, m3100, TyTN, Windows Mobile, Upgrade

Is this the most expensive mobile phone ever?

names changed to protect the not so innocent

I’m not talking about the excesses of Vertu‘s range

I’m taking about this:

The ever so humble Blackberry 8800, but I can buy that for less than £320 I hear you cry, oh course you can…….. however

I’ve been discussing a problem one of my customers has this afternoon, one of his management team needs email and calendar on the move, now that bits easy but the problem my customer faces is much much bigger the problem is quite simple, Blackberry envy.

One of his senior managers , fresh back from a conference with other senior managers from other companies has had his ear bent all week about how great the Blackberry 8800 is and he NEEEEEDS one, in best 3 year old tradition he NEEEEEDS one and nothing else will do.

Now this customer has a pretty mature and well managed infrastructure, has Exchange 2003 SP2 and is actually running a handful of Windows Mobile 5.0 devices with Exchange activesync which work brilliantly the problem is this:

They aren’t Blackberries…..

OK the WM devices tried so far don’t work with the chief exec’s inbuilt German Bluetooth car kit, but some (like the s710 / E650) will and there are over 40 manufacturers and OEMs so the I like / will work will overlap at some point.

The manager in question has to have Blackberry

I’ve explained the plethora of options, the OEMs the devices, the flexibility and control that you get through exchange and Windows Mobile, I’ve even offered to drive over and show the interested parties my E650 but no, no way it’s going to be BlackBerry.

I’ve even drawn their attention to the flaws in the NOC model of delivery and the trials that Blackberry users in the states had with the extended outage they suffered recently to no avail it has to be the 8800 or nothing so the Bill ……

Blackberry 8800 Pearl = £319.11
Server Hardware etc : £1,200.00
Blackberry Enterprise Server Version 4.0 for exchange = £2,500.00
Installation: £750.00
Additional Firewall Configuration: £750.00

So that brings that little shiny Blackberry 8800 in at a whopping £5,519.11

The look on the financial directors or shareholders face……. Priceless

Five and a half THOUSAND pounds for a mobile phone…… can anyone beat that?

oh …… the cost to deploy an HTC s710 with Windows Mobile and Exchange Activesync, push email and security ……. £246 less, much less on contract.

I think it’s a little more than the challenge of the work wise workstyle that threatens British Business today.

technorati tags: Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Exchange Activesync, more money than sense

Broadband broken? – call a judge

a firm of mortgage advisors whose broadband was cut off by accident sued BT to get it back on again.

this from thinkbroadband via the Greater Merseyside Digital Development Agency.

the essentials of the story are that a BT engineer accidentally cut off a Mortgage Advisors Broadband and when BT suggested that they could not reinstate the line the company took them to court for breach of contract.

It’s an interesting proposition as I suspect it was a BT OpenReach engineer that caused the cafuffle in the first place and that the company had a contract with BT retail through BT Business Broadband so good luck to them in their compensation claim.

the widespread adoption of broadband as a cheap and plentiful source of Internet bandwidth is going to throw up a lot more of these problems.

The company I work for has deployed several thousand broadband connections both as public Internet BT Business Broadband connections and as wholesale IP Stream services and we’ve had some horror stories. the worst of which involved a customer having intermittent service disruption for several months. 

the moral of this story –

if your business relies on your Internet service buy an Internet service your business can rely on.

Multimegabit leased line Business strength services are surprisingly cost effective these days and you don’t leave your customers fighting over the limited upstream bandwidth ADSL afford them.

The problem stems from marketing, the cheap cheap cheap for more more more message really deforms customer expectation however with a little bit of thought it’s easy to realise that you can’t go to the le Mans 24 hour race in a Ford Focus and sue Ford when you don’t win.

the concept of Business  continuity with broadband is a little hopeful as well as it’s normally beyond the ken of the average customer to successfully manage the multitude of parties necessary to ensure that Business is even reasonably continuous.

the simple message is that if you want a business class service expect to pay a business class price which is more likely to be £1000 a month rather than £30. FGS most companies spend more than that on Coffee for the kitchen.

technorati tags : broadband; business continuity

Orange Broadband Upgrade

a big fat DOH from Orange

I keep getting pestered by Orange to upgrade the free broadband account that I’ve had installed in a family home in Cumbria it’s only a fiver to upgrade to 8 Meg and unlimited* downloads so I thought I’d have a look at hat speed I could enjoy…….

 mmmmm it seems Orange’s definition of an upgrade  is rather unusual :)

technorati tags: Orange, Broadband

Response Point – Software and Hardware principles

Jeff Smith Senior Product Manager reveals a little more

as I supposed Microsoft’s new SIP PBX killer is XP embedded under the lid, I missed this item  first time round but in an interview with windowsfordevices.com Jeff Smith is quoted as saying that Response Point is :

a “go-to-market” software stack based on Windows XP Embedded, similar to how Windows Mobile is a go-to-market variant of Windows CE. And, like Windows Mobile, Response Point will only be marketed directly to major device OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and ODMs (original design manufacturers).

he is quoted as going on to say

Microsoft played a role in developing reference architecture, but is not controlling the hardware design. Each OEM is building its own variation based on the Response Point reference design, explained Smith. Response Point is currently beta testing and available on a very limited basis. Beta 2 is now working, and should be released in early April.

oh well definitely no software only option then and I won’t be holding my breath to see a version in the wild in the UK  for a while… ho hum.

wonder what the UM Team’s thoughts on RP are?

technorati tags: Response Point, Microsoft, beta, VoIP, SIP

more responses to response point

Have Microsoft really grasped the telephony nettle?

Bloody hell I was looking forward to this, despite assurances from people on the inside of unified comm’s in Microsoft that they never planned a phone system,  since their acquisition of Media streams for their ePhone and Teleo I knew it was just a matter of time.

Now I’ve sat through the somewhat embarrassing response point Webcast with XD (Xuedong Huang)  and friends and frankly I’m underwhelmed.

There seems to be huge excitement in the Microsoft world about many features I’ve come to expect  in the telephony world since time immemorial,  but  they’re newbies so I’ll let them get excited.

Sorry to be dismissive but Response Point is simply a voice activated PBX with familiar proprietary hardpoint terminals

Yes voice activation is very geek chic but frankly if people don’t use the features it’s not really that they find them awkward to access it’s really that they don’t recognise their value and can’t be bothered to access them.  Making features voice accessible doesn’t help you need to tell the users that the features are there.  Avaya’s  INDeX  ( god rest it’s soul ) led the way with a context sensitive display that prompted users with appropriate features.  The system copes with accents but I wonder how well it would cope in an open plan office?

Yes it’s got an easy to use GUI based management suite ( they all have) yes it integrates with outlook (ditto) yes it’s got auto discovery feature for phones (tick), it screen pops (err?), there’s an auto attendant (wow), voicemail to email (I’ll stop now).   There’s really nothing to commend it over  current small office offerings by Mitel and Avaya, they must have been quaking in their boots but I guess you’ll have heard the biggest sigh of relief if you were hanging around Avaya central.

highpoints

up to 100 endpoints without sneezing and without the FD coughing (I’d hope, but remember those proprietary handsets)  

voice activation … has massive geek and tech company appeal 

two click backup and restore, a nice touch but the fact it’s listed will lead to questions about stability

it’s just Microsoft

lowpoints:

No OCS or Exchange integration – WHAT!!!! you are kidding right?  unfortunately not…. this is a major own goal… response point should absolutely be a branch solution for OCS ….. maybe antitrust paranoia?

Official line it’s for a different market sector … blah blah blah …….. we’ve spent years thinking about advanced applications for voice solutions  and now the application company hits the market with an application compromised telephone system. Every other PABX vendor pushes the big company features for a small company message why aren’t Microsoft?

NO software only version – seriously.. why do you need  hardware and response point optimised phones, surely you can write the ease of integration into SIP software clients?

IMHO it’s about time Microsoft stopped being all coy with hardware vendors they don’t need their help (Ok maybe they do to get buy in from customers initially), get the product out there and let people provide specialised appliances based on it if need be. The Asterisk model should have been a clue.

It’s tied to hardware vendors, (see above)  and the US ones are the wrong ones for a global product.  I’ve never seen anyone buy a dlink or quanta PBX in EMEA, I’ve seen Uniden in the distant past but I’m hoping a Panasonic, Toshiba or Samsung emerges for the EMEA market?

no points:

Seen it all before actually,  thanks for coming peeps…. a bit shocked that Bill deigned to lower himself to promote this.

Where’s the homeworking and flexible working capability? imagine this, OCS or LCS SBS and exchange 2007 for the small business, maybe even mobile twinning that would be a really powerful tool for a smaller enterprise.

It must at least be able to act as a Microsoft gateway for unified comm’s,  please say it will.

summary:

Response Point has missed the point, as an adjunct to OCS it could rip the telephony world apart as a standalone, it’s just another telephone system but with a huge amount  of catching up to do.

Chris Hates Vista a little less than he did yesterday

Absent minded pundits of the world unite

Chris is going back to Mostly Vista and using VMware to run XP…..  are we all so absent minded that we can’t remember the pain of upgrading to XP? sure XP was more 2000 alike than Vista is XP alike and we could bodge the drivers to a greater extent but I had all sorts of pain and had to upgrade a venerable graphics card and throw away a laser printer.

actually to be honest in RC 1 & 2 I was bodging logitech drivers – they worked eventually,  when I told Vista where they lived. I’ve not got my DesignJet 10PS to work under Vista but I run VPC 2007  (free) and can IP print happily from XP in that environment.

come on people find something worthwhile to worry about, don’t like it?  don’t do it,  but like Chris once you’ve tasted Vista you’ll never want to lose it 

M3100 as a Bluetooth 3G modem

My M3100 is not broken – something I installed broke Dial Up Networking

I had a suspicion that fit4cat’s Hermes tweak app may have broken my DUN so I started by removing that from my M3100 – to no avail

I could have removed apps one by one but I thought I’d bite the bullet and go for the full hard reset and rebuild until I broke it again to find the offending app 

I started by hard resetting my M3100 and after going through the interminable setup screens (why can’t I skip them) and the customisation I was left with a vanilla- ish albeit Orange customised  PDA.

I started bluetooth and made the M3100 visible to others, then went to the wireless modem app in accessories on the PDA and started the bluetooth modem.

I then went to my notebook bluetooth settings, paired the m3100 and lo and behold DUN appeared as a service –

so it was something I’d installed

I ticked it and XP detected a standard bluetooth modem over serial link#2. ( I have my c600 DUN on there for good old GPRS usage)

when the modem is installed go to phones and modems and access the new  properties of the new modem, in  the advanced tab insert this string

AT+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”orangeinternet”

(change orangeinternet to your APN)

Orange instructions:

then go to dial up networking create a new entry, use the standard bluetooth modem created as part of the m3100 detection and set the username and password to be blank and change the telephone number to *99#

you should then be able to use this DUN shortcut to get on the web at 3G speeds – HSDPA if you are lucky to be in an enabled area in  London.

technology Jam

the perils of using a popular SATNAV

I have TomTom Navigator 5.0 on my PDA and I use their traffic plus service to avoid Jams on route which to be honest is a little variable but mostly useful.

TomTom is great,  when you get held up you can hit the avoid roadblock icon and the gizmo does the rest.,

On the way back from Manchester recently I hit traffic,  punched the magic button and was off down the back streets, at one point there was grass in the centre of the road ( it’s an adventure ) and then more  traffic - about twenty cars queuing to get out of a side road onto an A road.

I was surprised and thiught I’d got caught up in some farmers secret cabal and then I noticed that all the cars I could see had a tomtom of some description on the windscreen.

a TomTom Jam and within five nimutes half a dozen further tomtom equipped cars had joined the queue behind me.

Technology in action eh?

blogosphere grammar

OK, I used to be great at English Comprehension and that kind of stuff  but I think that I need a bit of help with blogosphere grammar

correct me where I’m wrong

I have a we(blog) [NOUN]

so I am a blogger [also a noun]

when I want to tell people mostly noone about what I’m thinking I post [VERB] a blog [NOUN] entry [NOUN]

after which you can both post [VERB] comments [NOUN]

so I can’t blog as it’s a [NOUN]  in the same way I have to find [VERB]  a source [NOUN] not lazily source [NONSENSE] a product 

UPDATE: on reflection I’m not that precious – you can Google things these days and Scoble is a blogger therefore he Blogs

how limited is unlimited *

More misleading Marketing rubbish, how much data can you transfer with an unlimited data plan from a UK MSP?

the * is the give away!

I’ve posted about the rapid deployment work I have been doing and it’s lead me to take a good long look at the data bundles on offer from MSPs in the UK.   

the biggest problem I have encountered is the fact that the unlimited* data bundles just aren’t unlimited they have Fair usage Policies (FUP) attached which point out that if you exceed the FUP suggested maximum data transfer then you’ll get reprimanded, keep doing it and you’ll get a punitive tariff or disconnected.

for my application faced with a even only a handful of users accessing resources remotely I’m worried about a limit of any kind.

the common parlance is an unlimited* label for a high transfer service but the * actually hides the limit of data you can transfer, the standard unlimited* limit seems to be 1 GByte, but again I’ll summarise below

Orange mobile Data Packages:

• Orange have Orange World access MAX, for £75 a month you get unlimited downloads subject to a fair use policy maximum of 1000 Mbytes.
• they also have a less well publicised package, as in not on their website, for corporates that allows you to use your data card with unlimited* downloads for £45 a month again a 1000 Mbytes FUP limit

Vodafone Mobile Data Packages:

Vodafone have two and a half  offerings  

• Data Unlimited, with unlimited* usage which is 1 GByte a month for £45 p.c.m.
• Data Travel with unlimited* UK usage which again is 1 GByte a month but includes  100 Mbytes of roaming data on Vodafone’s preferred networks and costs £95 per month
• the half an offering is their 3G Broadband wireless router offering which provides you with up to 10 GBytes of data download and a wireless router for £149 per month

O2 Mobile Data Packages:

O2 win the prize for honesty they don’t have an unlimited* tariff they have O2 Data Max 1024 with, you guessed it a 1024 Mbytes limit for, surprise surprise £45 a month, I find this a bit of a disappointment as my first exposure to mobile data was through O2 (then Cellnet) and their 9.6 kbits dial up data tariff on my Nokia 2110, they led the pack briefly but damn are they out of touch today.

T-Mobile Mobile Data Packages:

T-Mobile seem to be leading the pack at the moment, not only do they go for the honest approach in naming (they have web’n'walk plus and web’n'walk MAX) WnW Plus gets you 3 GBytes of transfer for £24.68 and MAX gets you a relatively whopping 10 GBytes for £37.45 (that’s £45 incl for you and me) – as I said I’ll test the coverage out and report back but anecdotal evidence seems promising.

Oh and with plus VoIP is a no no – I assume they block ports on MAX VoIP is allowed

the cherry is that for a limited time ( until end of March) you get free access to all of T-Mobile’s 1500 WiFi Hotspots (plus 300 Openzone roaming minutes a month ) until your contract is up (normally £8.51) 

3 - here are their tariffs for what they are worth

In my opinion  avoid 3 like the plague because their data tariffs  have a very nasty sting in their tail. Remember 3 don’t have their own 2G network so in addition to the 1 GByte limit on their Web and Office 1GB (duh) you have a limit of  154 Mbytes  on roaming networks - roaming networks like 3′s own borrowed   2G network in the UK – not only will it be slow but over step the limit and forget using GPRS when the 3G signal fails you. Not worth the risk really

for the time being, providing coverage is what it’s made out to be the T-Mobile offering looks most promising  however surely it can only be a matter of time until someone offers all you can eat data tariffs maybe funded by advertising.

Blyk plan to offer a  (totally ?) free advertising funded mobile network to young people (37 is young right?) which is  a great idea.

There might be room for a mobile operator to try this with a sponsored browser like good old old Opera (v 5 or less I think ) or something  like this idea I had  might not work in a business environment but someone should try it.

missed a day or two

I’ve missed a couple of days blogging, for one reason or another and got to feeling itchy – thankfully things have calmed down a little so I have a little bit of time to catch up – some interesting things going on in the background

Vista desktop Icons – how to make them smaller

OK I like the look of vista more than the teenagers abominable idea of a desktop that was XP and bliss…… ahh look at the purty colours.

However I’ve been head scratching about the mickey mouse size of the icons they’re huge and I hate them – went all the way through personalize (sic) (come on guys I know it’s  the same language but can’t we have regionalised spelling appropriate to the region please?) to no avail and then I looked again – right click on desktop > view

> classic icons…. sanity returns

sometimes you can’t see the trees for the wood

there’s even a large icons option for people with enormous displays or really really bad eyesight

UPDATE:  you can also change the size of the icons by clicking on the desktop and moving the mouse wheel back and forth whilst holding down the left ctrl key ( check out the size they can get to )

live writer beta

talking of great localisation – when is Livewriter going to have an UK English dictionary ?

haven’t you guys realized yet ? ;)

how old are you?

chris is old me too but actually I’m now relabeled as al classic or classical who knows?? anyway a good way to track how old you are is throw a few characters from kids TV in and see who smiles and who looks puzzled.

in no particular order ( and you’ll get the idea)

• little old lady
• Hartley
• pocoyo (yes)
• pootle
• penfold ( a personal favourite)
• the mice on the mouse organ and Gabriel
• the soup dragon
• finistaire the dog
• gonzo (see penfold)
• pingu
• the DORIS – who knows how to protect themselves?
• muran buchstansangur
  (the spiritual twin of Norbert dentressangle)
• if you’re hardcore you’ll recognise the phrase
  no bwian is no hedge piggly
• yoffi
• Mr peavley
• penrod pooch
• parsley
• Ludwig
• the shopkeeper
• berk and the thing upstairs
• the moog
• I can cheat and throw in charley the cat

at some point and through P2P most of this stuff will come around again my sisters teenage boyfriend is a Megadrive fanboy and poo pooed me when I asked 16 or 32 bit … 16 bit all the way

Feed Reading

been  relative latecomer to blogs and liking free stuff I’m using IE7′s built in feed function, augmented with Feedsplus it all seems to work pretty well,  apart from my recent troubles which necessitated a reinstall and then rebuild of the feeds.

can someone please enlighten me as to why adding a feed is a four  click process?  why do I have to press  RSS button, choose feed, choose to subscribe, choose destination? OK I can click the feed and then choose to subscribe and then destination but wouldn’t it be better to rightclick and have a cascading menu.

I like to reduce clicks, all my machines use the one click, like a browser  feature under XP and Vista.

US UK friendly fire video in the wild

this is one of the most chilling pieces of video footage I have ever seen, we’re used to the the American pilots in these incidents being portrayed as callous gung ho flyboys acting with impunity dealing death from the sky and  in this case  these  American airman have been described as rogue pilots.  this video really puts the lie to that as what clearly killed  L/Cpl Matty Hull was a catastrophic breakdown in ICT and the two A 10 pilots are genuinely affected by the enormity of their actions.

the fact that they really shouldn’t be there makes it all the more poignant.

crashplan crashed?

I’ve been trying to try crashplan all day, I read about it whilst speed reading my feeds and can’t give the proper attribution so sorry however I have stolen this from.

they’ve  been digged (dugg maybe) and seem to be struggling under the load :(

not a problem as they purport to be an innovative online backup service that uses a friends PC or Mac or soon their Linux box to store an encrypted (phew) backup of your data.

the ideal would be  buy a USB  drive and install it at your backup buddy’s house and be able to recover your data if you have a monumental foul up.

I want to try it – now! all the family have digicams now, even my grandparents, and I’m petrified of the images being lost – here we’re Ok as I have machines all over that I duplicate files on but the idea of a backup trinity between me, my mum and stepdad and the inlaws really appeals.

I want to check how it compresses (if it does) as they’re both on  capped services (not us we have cable from the soon to be virgin media)

Zink – ‘magic’ printing

scoble has this as one of his highlights at Demo,  as far  as I can see Zink gives you  the chance to get rid of your expensive inkjets and replace it with a single patented (read monopolised) zero ink (Zink) solution – in the demo they seem intent on creating a new verb a la googling.  pretty natty and I love the possibility of a digi-Polaroid but I can’t see that I’d bump my  inkjets, extortionate though the costs are, on to this baby soon we may have paper that is more expensive than chanel no 5

standing on the toes of Giants

I posted about Feeds plus and I’ve been using it for a few days, it aggregates feeds in IE, it’s great  but it’s really opened my eyes to something I’ve long suspected. I use tabbed browsing to follow the route I got to a particular website hopefully tracking, except these aren’t routes that are developing, they’re far too often cyclical and there’s a hell of a lot of recycling,  very little original comment. Newton is purported to have  said that all science was possible because we see a little further by standing  on the shoulders of giants (although wikiP say’s it’s earlier). blogging far too often seems to be standing on the toes of our giants, it doesn’t get us much further and it just hacks the big  guys off. except when they wallow in self glory that is.

-(F)-