Getting some apps

I have been trying very hard to like the Treo Pro. It's a solid unit, screen is good, phone good, expandable memory slot and camera. But... I guess more specifically I'm trying to like Win Mobile 6.1. (If anyone knows how to get bluetooth working with anything please comment me!) The biggest annoyance for me is IE Mobile's inability to cope with the proxy authentication at work. To rub salt into the metaphorical wound we have some HP PDA's running WinMo v6 which work flawlessly. Go figure
So this is what I have figured at the moment...

Skin it

• PointUI (Home2)
  
• iDialer
• iContact

Sync it

• Nuevasync is the bomb for syncing with GCal. I strongly suggest you try it. Between this and the microSD card the USB cable is pretty much only used for charging.

App it

• File Explorer or Total Commander lets you take control things
• Skype should be self explanatory (what rock have you been under soldier?!)
• Evernote does a great job of capturing notes, pictures and audio
• Auto Log - for the car, not great trend data but I can live with that
• Facebook Duh!

Skype and Evernote are great and with Nuevasync and PointUI I can keep calendars in sync and navigate without the stylus most of the time. It's usable. Now if I could only sort out the web browser...

treopro, winmobile, apps, PDA, smartphone

Get plugged in

A bit of love for the users of Office on Windows. Came across this in the Read Write Web feed I subscribe to.
I agree with Sara Perez (of RRW) Offisync looks super hot to me. There is much made of cloud computing but there are times when the cloud doesn't cut it. Google Gears has been a good "offline step" but why not have the muscle of MS Word at your disposal?
Unfortunately the plugin is not available for OSX so I have not had a chance to try it yet. But after I complete some mission critical stuff over the next few weeks I plan to wipe out my Windows machine and install Windows 7. Then the fun will really start...

Open for business

Webspiration the online incarnation of leading visual thinking and planning package Inspiration is open again!
They have reopened sign-ups for free beta accounts. Got an email a couple of days ago and "Audrey" also left a comment on the earlier post. (Thanks Audrey!)
Good news for those who didn't get in earlier. I make no secret of the fact that I am a massive Inspiration fan. Webspiration is a great development and I anticipate it will only get better.

Why I didn't get an iPhone (and others)

This post is way overdue and will have lost a bit of its lustre considering the events to follow in the next week or so. But what the heck, it's about me. I have been in the market for a new smartphone for a while now but decided to get serious a month or two ago. I've been using an iPod touch for a while now and being a MacBook owner I was hearing a lot of "So are you getting the iPhone soon?" But with technology (and me?) it's never quite that simple. I had been pretty happy with my Treo 650 apart from its lack of WiFi so I started to build a shortlist of features;

• 802.11g
• 3G
• expandable memory (preferred)
• hardware keyboard (preferred)
• decent camera that can capture video
• decent audio capture
• synchronise with my MacBook

If you know anything about the iPhone you can start to see the divergence. So I listed the things where the iPhone fell short for me;

• No Copy/Cut/Paste (massive for me as I use the "smart" more than the "phone")
• Ordinary camera with no video
• No expandable memory (I commute for almost 90 minutes a day so I need to store some stuff)
• and like everyone has got one? Ugh!

BUT

• it's a a super nice iPod (apart from the storage limits)
• the Safari browser is the best mobile experience you can get at the minute
• the user interface is as smooth as
• the iTunes Application Store is very compelling

You know what finally flipped me was the price. I don't use the phone that much. I hammer the productivity, documents, audio and video capture stuff pretty hard. (It's why the keyboard is an issue.) I'm on a tiny plan, no data, and I rarely go over. I don't want a larger plan that I know I won't use. You can sort of get the iPhone outright but you do so by getting a pre-paid then paying for it to be unlocked but it works out expensive.
Now when the 3.0 version comes out with cut/copy/paste that could be a whole different story.
This isn't just about the iPhone however. The Nokia E63 and E71 caught my eye. Great looking handsets and ticked all the boxes and the prices were definitely right. No touch screen though which I thought may take some getting used to. The Blackberry Bold met all my requirements on the surface as well until I was joining one to the the network at work and found the web proxy cannot be defined by the user. Deal breaker.
So I settled on the Treo Pro. Nice looking device running Windows Mobile 6.1. It couldn't be that bad. Half the world was using it. Right?

Maybe 3.0

Technology vs Evolution

This doesn't have much to do with anything. In fact "random!" may a word that shouts out in your head. Actually that's a bit of a stretch. I could link to the steady progress of technological innovation, draw parallels with evolution then leave you with dreamy predictions about "where will we be in one hundred years let alone 1 million..." Meh!
Watching a little program on television the other day (yes, it happens!) and this guy is banging on about different animals and their tres cool (as the French would say) adaptations. Now I don't usually get too excited about biology but we're talking a beetle that has this little chamber in its body where it mixes two chemicals together causing a highly exothermic (lots of heat) reaction. This raises the pressure in the chamber very quickly so the chemicals then shoot out the only hole in the chamber at great velocity. Squirt! The hole is usually pointed at a predator or something else the beetle has taken a disliking to.
The best for me though was the horseshoe crab. I did not know that its blood contains copper (unlike humans which has iron) and is hence blue. The crab not being a mammal lacks an immune system so instead its blue blood coagulates very quickly on contact with bacteria (anything that's non-sterile) of which the ocean is choc-a-block. This is extremely useful for humans as it provides a very simple way of testing solutions for sterility. The "Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) test" is used by hospitals and pharmaceuticals world wide.
Evolution beats technology hands down.
If you're interested in finding out more about the horseshoe crab...
PBS Nature episode
The Ecological Research & Development Group (ERDG)