No longer an Orange SPV now an HTC dual, I’ve just received the device as an upgrade for free with a £10 a month tariff reduction and maintaining my father in law’s broadband…. all great but you know what’s best ?

1) you can get the touch today screen on the dual (the appalling orange one is displayed by default but you can change it easily)

2) the weather application includes Nottingham England and so many more locations by default ;) no more tweaking

 more soon

Al

I’m Back from Algonquin provincial park – still a little jet lagged about 10000 kcal down in the week not lost any weight but converted about 16 lbs from fat to muscle. feeling very refreshed revived and ready for anything.

top tips and observations:

Do not let a man with a hangover be responsible for buying your food for a canoe trip.

Do not underestimate mother nature she is very unforgiving

Sometimes a walk in the park is decidedly not a walk in the park.

do not fall for the skin so soft myth – the Algonquin biting insects just don’t notice it

Bears do sh*t in the woods :) and just because you don’t see them it doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Moose are BIG

honestly I loved it but it was damn hard – no film crew around the corner for us and we had a few hairy moments.  

I feel pretty  invulnerable at the moment  even though it’s the most physically demanding thing I have done in my life my body is suffering and I’m somewhat exhausted.

Apologies to the lovely couple who had to put up with my stench of bog water for 6 hours on the way home I had no idea until I got back to my own house.

expect normal service to be resumed shortly

Hopefully won’t get too close but I’m away for a canoeing holiday in the Algonquin provincial park in Ontario.

Scared and exhilarated at the same time  so far out of my comfort zone ( i.e. more than 10 miles from a power socket ) and limited technology allowed to be taken anyone know where I can get 11000 AAA batteries cheap ? :)

Back early in September blogging opportunities will be sparse

to see the full review go here

For the 10 second summary,  the Touch is great bit of kit, a fantastic form factor and looks really cool but a little on the underpowered side. if you’re easily frustrated by a little waiting steer clear, if you’re happy to compromise on speed for the cool factor fill your boots.

Biggest Plus: Biotouch or TouchFLO, fab for broad fingered people like myself. (battery life and size are worth an honourable mention)

Biggest Minus : resources, it could do with a bit more memory

Not Sure….:  TouchCube, great to look at but doesn’t actually do much.

well it seems they’ve done it again, those innovative people over at HTC have come up with another market beater. this time it’s the HTC Shift.

I snagged the info via Tracy and Matt who seem to be the getting the skinny first on quite a few devices these days Matt snagged it from  Hugo Ortega over at Uber tablet got hold of one of the first ones in Australia. the video is pure techno porn, minus the money shot (just)

The device specs are pretty impressive a 40 Gig HDD with HSDPA built in, Biometrics, WiFi, GPS and all in a lovely package. the shift has   dual RAM and processors – why ? you ask because it supports….

Windows Mobile 6 professional  AND Windows Vista Business

yes…   

Windows Mobile 6 professional  AND Windows Vista Business

AT THE SAME TIME!

Oh and for eye candy it supports Aero as well.

A while ago I mused on the blurring  of the line between the benefits of a full desktop OS and the rapid on off of Windows Mobile the inevitable power versus speed trade off that would inform your OS choice, well in one fell swoop HTC have blown this line to smithereens.  

Hugo describes the alternative environment as a kind of sideshow, which it isn’t, the Shift  has a full Windows Mobile 6  Professional environment, wrapped up in the HTC today skin, as seen on the Touch. With WM 6 pro of course you get Office Mobile, you get IE Mobile, you’ll get Windows Live and with exchange activesync you have near instant access to all your everyday applications, mail, calendar and contacts  in fact, all the benefits you have from a standard WM  device now with a 5 day battery life.

Switch to vista and you have a full blown operating system with all the regular applications you might need, yeah battery life drops to 3 hours but hell you’re running Vista.

The only oddity is the cellular,  apparently it’s data only, but I can’t see why using the SDK someone couldn’t write a fairly comprehensive phone application.

remember this is a UMPC but it’s a world beating UMPC, HTC innovation has done it again a unique solution to the greatest dilemma facing the mobile professional today….. Windows Mobile or Windows Vista ? ..forget it  get a Shift, I know I am and I’m going to get one as soon as humanly possible.

the only downside, I know hundreds of users that would benefit from this and I guarantee the product will be in constraint before  the day it hits the shelves.

well done HTC  very well done,  a peach of a product, a peach that’s going to have those apple fanboys green with envy !!!

it’s available for via Expansys on preorder for £740 +VAT sans contract.

Technorati Tags: HTC, UMPC, Shift, Iwant I want I want, technlogy

Matt has posted a very interesting response to  my doom laden assessment of the future of the PBX.

Here I should declare my position, I’m a big fan of  the appliance led approach to telephony, hell it’s were I came from and emotionally I’m a bit of a stick in the mud whilst intellectually I’m a technology radical,  I’d like to see the PBX survive,  the flashing lights of that dedicated box are somehow reassuring but it’s on it’s way.

Having digested  matt’s post I think some of the arguments put forward for retention are perhaps equally arguments for discarding the good old PBX.

Call centres or contact centres are a prime example, all they really are are management information systems, a true contact centre is interested in quality and  nothing else, quality of interaction, quality of the transaction and quality of the management are the key drivers, the PBX plays little part and will be increasingly marginalised as voice becomes just another route in.

The communications hub which will inevitably be a server will accept interaction from whichever source the customer chooses and deliver it to an agent, taking my teenage sisters preferences (and she is the next gen worker and consumer) the source will probably be IM followed by text followed by email followed by voice followed by fax  and the PBX is just a sideshow to that route, any dumb gateway will do.

For call handling the foibles that ad hoc groups want are pretty much impossible to accommodate in the traditional model. as a hypothetical user I want my calls to go to me then to my colleague Melissa then to John our support person then to my voicemail which  is the kind of nightmare PBX engineers are often confronted with, trying to fit that into the prescriptive environment of directory numbers and pilots and groups and trunks is a real mind bender.

Send a call to me and then let me control it with a monitoring core application that stops me setting up a perpetual loop or breaking the system. Systems should be able to tell me that the reason I can’t divert  to Melissa is because she is diverting to me and when we achieve this we’ll liberate users and remove the management headache. Having spent time in the bowels of a few PBXs I long for plain English and I’d much rather let the users administer the process.

As Matt says The little stuff you take away is always a problem but you can always assuage the user by education up front and showing them the benefits of the new system, it’s been ten years since a feature has lost us a sale because everyone knows that the 1500 features that manufacturer X  offers still boils down to the 100 that everyone uses and every manufacturer offers , gone are the days of three pages of proposal devoted to an appendix describing directed call pickup and it’s friends.

Sticking with what you know and have will usually have a benefit but what if your choice is to upgrade your proprietary PBX; add  voice functionality through an application sat on your existing network (maybe the network IS the application) or, and this is a real possibility, the inevitable upgrade you will perform on your email system just happens to provide you with a free enterprise strength telephone system?

Like Matt I believe that unified communications needs a single unified interface whichever  application delivers that successfully is going to be the winner and what if  the application that provides UC is the application that 300m of us use day in day out for most of our messaging…….  

You know I think the death of the traditional PBX is much much closer than any of us might have thought

Jason has posted about O2 releasing two new updates for their XDA range both of which include Office 2007 support. I’d been hoping to see this soon and was a little puzzled that teh WM6 launch didn’t include this support from day 1 bearing in mind how close the WM6 ad EVO launches were.

interesting support is embedded in a ROM I hope this isn’t going to be the norm as it means starting all over again with customisation or splashing out on a backup app.

Good news: Yep HTC have released the ROM

bad News: you need to validate your HTC account with a TyTN IMEI – only fair as I pointed out before but it means all the OEM and operator branded owners will have to wait or get dirty.

But this should really set the cat amongst the pigeons !!! Orange will really need to think long and hard about developing the windows Mobile 6 ROM for the m3100 now.

It’s the first time an official manufacturer ROM has hit the market for an Orange badged product it should be minimal development to provide the upgrade and if they don’t they are really letting their customers down.

The Touch is out there as an Orange  WM6 Pro handset and they are imminently releasing an exclusive HTC device so they have little incentive commercially to spend time on the m3100 ROM but if they don’t they are going to upset a fair few customers.

in the meantime if you’re curious you could always wander off to P2P land, purely for investigative purposes of course.

if you’re  a frequent visitor here and you’re security conscious you’ll notice all of a sudden there are some statcounter cookies being deposited on your PC – please accept them I’m doing a little traffic analysis and although I can’t get the full blown package ( wordpress.com says no to JavaScript) it’s of interest to me.

if you feel like you don’t want to participate just deny the cookie.

I’ll share a few nuggets over the coming weeks – interesting already is that 5% of the visitors are using Windows Mobile

I know I’m a bit late, I’ve been well beaten by Arthur,  Johann, James and Eileen but I’ve had the cricket to think about and recover from and despair about  but anyway….  

It’s out – well sort of, both Office Communications Server 2007 and it’s Uber client office communicator 2007 have been released to manufacturing ( RTM). expect full MSDN versions over the next few weeks and full availability by the autumn.

the release includes :

• Office Communicator 2007 : the soon to be ubiquitous client
• Office Communications Server 2007 : the core server product  
• Office Live Meeting Console 2007 :  The web collaboration and presentation tool
• Communicator Web Access 2007 : think of this as OWA is to outlook CWA is to Office communicator 2007
• Microsoft RoundTable 2007 : Microsoft’s innovative 360° video and audio conferencing tool
• Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server : Microsoft’s IVR server suite

there have also been some disclosures about likely pricing  as well over on the Microsoft Presspass site Gurdeep Singh Pall VP of the UC groups is quoted :

As with Live Communications Server, the predecessor to Office Communications Server, customers need both server and client access licenses (CALs). There are two types of Office Communications Server CALs: Standard and Enterprise. The Standard CAL has the IM and presence capabilities including new group IM and rich presence features and costs roughly $21 for the average enterprise. The new Enterprise CAL provides all of the new conferencing and VoIP call management features and costs roughly $97 for the average enterprise. The Office Communications Server Standard and Enterprise CALs will also be included as part of the Microsoft Enterprise CAL Suite, a bundle of several Microsoft server CALs available at a discount.

the approach is very much one of evolution rather than revolution and that the average enterprise needn’t replace that aging TDM PBX to realise the advantages that  Unified Communications can bring. I’ve still to digest the interop white paper so I can’t really comment in too much detail on the practicalities of this.

This is the phoney war before the battle that will rage between traditional telecoms providers, the IP vendors (notably Cisco) and Microsoft. things are going to get really interesting over the next few months.

This is the biggy… Communication is so much more emotional and important than the choice of browser you make. There’s a whole lot more money to be made and lost ($45 Bn by 2010)  and it’s Microsoft Pitching into a Market that it’s relatively new to with a lot of established vendors who have their share of the billions to protect. 

I’m hoping that the customer is in a win-win situation however I am a bit wary that this period of upheaval is going to lead to a bit of blood letting and I hope  the collateral damage is kept to a minimum.

I’ve been long term testing the  HTC touch ready for an imminent review and one of the interesting applications is a weather forecasting plugin that sits on your home screen and displays a localish weather forecast.

The weather plugin is great but for the UK the default list is pretty sparse,  I can only find Manchester, London or Edinburgh and living in Nottingham that’s useless.

XDA developers to the rescue, it’s through a registry hack (so usual caveats apply)  the suggestion is

just navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\HTC\HTCHome\Weather\Settings

And change the Location key to the name you want displaying  and LocationCode to the new city’s accuweather location code .

You’ll  find the codes here and all the Nottinghams here  

Nottingham in Nottinghamshire is EUR|UK|UK189|NOTTINGHAM however when i altered the code to this … it doesn’t work, you get an unable to download data error

there’s a long and complicated fix here with clever use of a generous soul’s server to interpret the data.

However with a little reg rummaging I discovered that in the registry both London and Manchester have nearly identical codes EUR|UK|UK001|cityname despite the fact that the accuweather codes are  EUR|UK|UK124|LONDON and EUR|UK|UK189|NOTTINGHAM.

So I changed my Touch code to EUR|UK|UK001|NOTTINGHAM and it seems to work I certainly get different weather from London Village and God’s own City. anyone else tried it?

I’ve been testing Toshiba’s latest Windows Mobile 6 Professional courtesy of Tracy and matt and the review has just been posted over on their site.

For the 10 second summary the G900 is not a bad bit of kit, a bit on the big size but the benefit is you get a great screen again you’ll get a great deal more out of it as a Toshiba Notebook companion.

Biggest Plus: the Screen.

Biggest Minus : now the screen’s fixed it’s size, it’s big damn big.

Not Sure….: SIPserver and TIPtalk – a nice idea  but flawed by lack of flexibility

OK I’ve had the E650 for a few months now and I’m way way past the honeymoon period so I thought I’d give you a quick catch up on my current feelings on the device.

do I still love it ? well yes …… mostly

will I part with it ? not if I can help it

are there any problems with it ?   yes a couple

go on what are they then ?

well the biggest problem I’ve come across is the fact that any screen grabbing notifications such as low battery warnings disconnect your Bluetooth sessions, a royal pain when you are driving and involved in a conversation on your headset.  I have no idea why this happens it’s just a really bugging bug.

the second problem is purely aesthetic, remember the flappy flaps, they’re made of pretty soft plastic and  with use they deform and refuse to sit cleanly in their aperture. this is a real problem for the flap that hides the extUSB connector  which annoyingly is on the bottom of the phone and is in use a lot for charging, it now refuses to sit cleanly and really spoils the lines of the device. it’s going to come off when I get round to it.

Neither of these are major problems but they are worthy of mention as they are particularly annoying in a device that is otherwise so well designed.

Orange have announced that they will be launching the  BlackBerry 8820 will be at the end of July which   will replace the BlackBerry 8800 in Orange’s portfolio.

The 8820 is a revamped 8800 that offers all the  functionality of the 8800  and combines it with UMA  (The ability to use WiFi VoIP and Cellular in the same device). The 8820 therefor supports Orange’s  Unique offering where home workers can roam onto Orange’s Unique VoIP service via the Internet through their Orange Broadband connection when in their home location.

email on the go and UMA is a great feature, HP have combined the options in the iPAQ 514 Voice Communicator (still waiting HP!!) on the Windows Mobile 6 Platform so it’s good to see RIM following suite for those Blackberry users out there

Interestingly Orange Caveat the Unique service as follows  

Please note that the Unique/Homeworker proposition offers users the ability to continue to make voice calls when in the home, irrespective of GSM coverage, using WiFi/Orange Broadband. It may however be subject to busy periods as with all broadband connections. Customers are therefore advised to trial the solution before committing to large rollouts.

Which hints that they might be having capacity problems, I don’t use the service myself but would be interested in any Orange customer experiences of problems in this service.

I’d alluded before about my dabbling with Asterisk as an open source SIP PBX and how I hadn’t mustered the energy to try and get Exchange 2007 which uses SIP over TCP to talk to Asterisk which uses SIP over UDP. at the time I was considering a patch,  well with one thing and another I still haven’t got round to it but I do get a emails  asking about it and I recently was directed to a very useful post by Ryan an antipodean IT pro who’s reluctantly dipping his data toe in the voice water. I came across Ryan’s post through Dennis over at MSGoodies.

The key is to use sipX which happily eventually acts as an intermediary with SIP over both UDP and TCP in it’s lexicon.  Ryan gives an excellent account of setting the whole infrastructure up within VMware so you can familiarise yourself with some of those novel VoIP protocols

maybe, just maybe, I’ll get round to trying it soon

Jason has posted a link to the new revised RIM v’s Microsoft TCO white paper, which has been updated to include interviews with actual enterprise users of both technologies.

The original paper’s findings  back in 2005 were validated by interviewing a very small sample of 10 RIM users and  Microsoft and WiPro have extended the interviews to 160 enterprise users of one or the other mobility solutions.

the user communities of the interviewees are large, averaging over 50,000 email users with over 10,000 mobile devices.

to be honest this revision doesn’t move the debate forward all that far, it does give some insight into actual experience of users which can be supported per server in a BES environment and there are a few assumptions I’m not all that comfortable with, such as the comparative data plan costs in either environment and the relative support costs.

One of the interesting facts is that 89% of Blackberry respondents used Outlook web access before mobile deployment with only 88% of Windows Mobile respondents, following deployment the RIM figure stayed the same (unsurprisingly) whereas the WM figure rose to 96% just shows that Windows Mobile is part of a range of portals you can use to access your messaging and diary systems.

if you haven’t read the original paper this is worth a read however I don’t see it changing many minds.

it’s a bit of a collaborative piece of work so you’ll find the full review over at Tracy and Matt’s blog.

For the 10 second summary the G500 is not a bad bit of kit, a reasonably creditable smart device by Toshiba but to get the best out of it it needs to be used as a Toshiba Notebook companion.

Biggest Plus: 3G & HSDPA.

Biggest Minus : size, it’s big damn big.

Not Sure….: Fingerprint reader, great idea poorly executed

Oh and it’s Windows Mobile 5.0

If I had a bit more time I’d try a haiku review, hopefully things will calm down a bit round here soon.

well in the blogging world at least – there’s far too much going on in the world of work, just one long go to meetings, follow up meetings and go to more meetings. blogging is not my day job, my wife will be pleased to know  so the extra mile is that much harder to tread for now. This is a testament to how imnportant blogging has become  as I have itchy fingertips, not having posted for  five days or so.

There are a few things I need to mention but they will have to wait until a couple of projects at work have been completed.

normal service will be resumed shortly

email triage is one of the most popular  uses of  Windows Mobile device, which is the processing of your inbox in quiet moments when getting your laptop out is not an option.  it’s a great way to steam through a load of emails and filter the email fluff from your inbox delegate mails not for you and generally prepare your inbox for an efficient days work.  a true example of the benefits that the flexible working 9 by that I mean location independent working) that windows mobile 6 truly supports

The new shortcuts in Outlook Mobile under Windows Mobile 6 make life a whole lot easier

simply press and hold the appropriate key and you can process the email according to your wishes.

today was the day when the balance was tipped, I came out of an extended  meeting  to find over 90 emails had arrived in the time I had been out of circulation. One particular thread needed my attention but the rest were FYIs or mailing lists ( yes I have a few where the site concerned has not yet embraced RSS), I had my laptop available in front of me but chose to breeze through the mails  on my smartphone because the shortcuts make  the process so much easier.  90 emails processed in double quick time down to the seven that really needed urgent attention. of course I penned the long responses on my notebook as the keyboard is much easier to make rapid use of however I’m pretty sure my inbox will always be processed  at the top level through my smartphone from now on.

I like my Waybacks this time it’s not just what Kevin called a mobile wayback but a whole workstyle wayback.

My family are hoarders, for me it’s trailing edge technology, for my Mother it’s old magazines which are great for those quiet contemplative moments men have :)

Recently I was perusing a copy of the countryman magazine from spring 1983, my eye was caught by the strapline ‘farming computerised‘ 

The article describes a home based business run by a Gillian Farrant of Manor Farm near Eaton in Oxfordshire.  Mrs Farrant took the enterprising step of setting up a farm data tracking business with the local vet’s wife.

The whole enterprise was run on  an apple II 

The which the author describes as  typewriter keyboard with a TV set sitting on top with a magnetic-disc recorder and an automatic printer  at the princely sum of £2000 a bargain as also unusually for a Mac  you could actually play a state of the art  computer game on the thing (ouch).  

Now unfortunately I cant find any record of Manor Farm Eaton or the Farrant brothers or Mrs Farrant and Hatch’s Farm recording Services, Farmplan are alive and well and still in the market they were in in ’83 however this appeals to my trailing edge tech interests  and is kind of on topic with a nod to homeworking.

Those were the days: the full article is copied below for your enjoyment – you can get up to date copies of the countryman from their website

Jason has revealed that Office Mobile 2007 will be available from Q3 this year – I mentioned my disappointment that even though the Windows Mobile 6 and EVO launches were so close that the docx format was not supported in WM 6 this update redresses the balance – the terminology suggests that this is an application upgrade rather than an AKU / ROM update so  there should be no need to backup / wipe and start again,  the update will support .pptx .docx .xlsx and FAX documents on both WM6 and WM5.0  devices 

I’m increasingly coming to view my WM6 device as a portal to a sophisticated back end and this will help reinforce WM6 as a handportable part of the EVO environment, I just wish that Microsoft had included office 2007 support in the initial WM6 release,it should have been an intrinsic part of the WM6 and WM6 should have been launched as a portable office portal device.

if you, like me,  signed up for the beta of office live on a premium account and you don’t want to be charged ( or signed up for a years subscription) you must go here to get instruction and downgrade your account within 30 days of the 23rd May.

I just got billed £26.44 for a service I didn’t want – I’m a bit peeved as the letter I received telling me that the beta was ending was not explicit that this would happen – oh and it also contained the same letter for a different subscriber who if I hadn’t found through the phone book would have been none the wiser.

at sign up for the beta I’m sure it was stated or at least implied that I would not be automatically charged but it seems that I have been – here’s hoping the promise to refund comes through.

caveat emptor

technorati tags: office live

this from the Unified Communications Group Team Blog Russell Bennett the UC senior program manager has promoted an alliance between Microsoft and just about everyone worth mentioning to provide interoperability between OCS and existing PABXs

no comment from Mark as yet but I’d hope to see a UK perspective soon.

this is a commitment by some major major players of the telecoms world to provide seamless ( well as seamless as possible) interoperability with Microsoft Office Communications server.

you’d think as we’re all talking SIP these days this would be a given however as always interoperability is not always so straightforward, for instance OCS uses the SIP standard over TCP and a fair proportion of other equipment uses SIP over UDP to communicate. this isn’t an insurmountable problem however it is not conducive to an easy out of the box experience.

What these manufacturers are actually supporting is Microsoft’s interoperability specification for OCS 2007 which extends the basic interoperability afforded by SIP to include transparent support  of key features found in OCS  across platforms.

we should see the ability to transparently provide

• a common intuitive user experience
• multi media interoperation of voice, video, text messaging, web collaboration
• Ad-hoc multi-party, multi-modal conferencing  ( this will be a challenge I am sure)
• Integration with business applications
• Rich Presence, so full multi modal state information shared across platforms 
• Mobility
• Enhanced security

the  main press release includes pithy statements from the big players worthy of mention

• Alcatel-Lucent
• Avaya.
• Cisco.
• Ericsson.
• Genesys.
• Mitel.
• NEC.
• Nortel Networks.
• Siemens

Which is how Microsoft reach the the 80% figure of the installed base, I think this is too optimistic for me  the installed base is a notoriously treacherous place to make promises in, Cisco found that in the early days using trad telephony protocols like DPNSS   ( having had bitter experience of interoperability or lack thereof in the past we could be chasing wild geese for months).  On the brighter side native support of the interop spec is to be extended by the use of IP gateways from AudioCodes, Dialogic and Quintum although I am skeptical about gateway traversal of a lot of proprietary systems.

I’m sure these companies can provide interoperability moving forward but I’d expect existing kit to require upgrades ( usually costly) or those gateways’s already mentioned remember PBXs last for years, the established replacement cycle  was always 7 and sometimes longer years which is way way before SIP or even mainstream IP adoption so the chances of older kit being up to scratch is slim.

I am still unsure as to what the outcome of all this is as as I’ve said before OCS is potentially a direct competitor for a great deal of the high, value added applications that the trad telecom companies rely on for big chunk of their revenue, interop seems to open the door for third party developers to get in there with niche apps, I’d expect entry level costs to plummet.

I guess for most of these companies ( with the possible exception of Cisco) it’s  a case of having to offer interoperability or be left behind at the moment and assess the impact of the erosion of core revenues. I’m pretty sure most of the players concerned couldn’t take on Microsoft so I can see them rapidly moving to call routing applications that use the OCS core as a base for their own applications.

One of the most interesting aspects is the potential for vicarious interoperability between established systems using OCS as a mediator, although I am sure this will be a licensing minefield.

exciting times ahead….

this is a first significant salvo for Microsoft into tactile computing, surface based computing as they call it and it looks very very impressive. the product team must get bored of the Minority Report comparisons but that’s the most mainstream representation of the type of intuitive tactile control Surface offers.

Vids of Jeff Han’s work have been circulating for a while now but this is a real world ish application of the technology so good on you Microsoft

The Product marketing web site is here Channel 10 ( of course) offers the best no nonsense display I’ve seen and  it’s made Steve’s James‘ and even Mark’s blog  Eileen has resisted so far  oh and it’s in a few mainstream places as well.

Multi touch is really really exciting it’s a natural way to sort and control objects things,  digital scattering is a replication of the way we all like to organise images and visual influences I can see this in publishing houses really really rapily . the opportunity for collaboration that multitouch offers is immense……… but

not wanting to pour cold water on things I am a little skeptical about the interoperability of devices, the visual tagging ( probably including Microsoft’s technicolor bar codes) seems to me to be OK but bearing in mind the pain of simple WiFi ‘standard’ integration there’s a huge elephant in the room here, and all the demo’s I’ve seen are in gloomy rooms, I suspect to compensate for the projection technology in use.

I think we are a little way off realworld here yet but the future is very very exciting

I’ve been using Livewriter as my blogging tool of choice for a while now, I’ve installed a couple of plug-ins, notably the insert flickr image plug-in and I had hoped to add tag4writer to manage my technorati tags which until now I’d been manually inputting but I couldn’t find a working link …. so imagine my delight to discover that Beta 2 has the functionality built right in oh and also in line spell check.

not sure if I like the fact that categories have dropped to the foot of the page but hey I’ll get used to it

by the way the existing plug-ins migrated quite nicely thanks

snag it via here  easy peasy