Opposite me, David Bayon is picking away at his salad while watching the gymnastics (he’d like me to write that he was watching something manly, but we all know the truth). Jon Bray was watching the long jump. And to follow a whim, I fired up the table tennis highlights. We have, somehow, slipped with barely a murmur into on-demand internet TV, and it’s fantastic.
Even the resolution is high enough to impress. Bayon (now switching his attention to athletics) has just exclaimed “you can see her heart beating” as he watched one of the 400m runners stand ready for the race.
It takes something like the Olympics to show us how far technology has come. The BBC iPlayer has been around in one form or other for the last two years, and we’ve become used to it. But do you remember how you last watched the Olympics? If you’re anything like me, it was mainly via a highlights programme on terrestrial TV. I’d have been lucky to see two minutes of table tennis. If I wanted to, I could watch 50 minutes’ worth, or fast forward to precisely the match I was interested in.
Now we’re all casually firing up our browsers, streaming live or pre-recorded events direct to our display. Makes you wonder how far things will have improved by London 2012.
I thought I’d seen all of the clever methods used by those lovely people who send phishing emails in the hope we’ll click where we really shouldn’t, but today saw a new trick. It still had the tell-tale signs - “Dear customer” not “Dear Tim”, a suggestion that something had gone terribly wrong with my account - but this time the From address looked scarily accurate. Until I looked a little closer, that is.
Before I get too much grief, I’m fully aware that I’m about six months too late to start jumping on the slam-Facebook-bandwagon, but it’s starting to annoy me so much I can’t hold in my stored-up anger any longer.
It’s not even that I want to use Facebook or even have an opinion about Facebook. The fact is, I have to use the darn thing if I want to keep on communicating with my brother. (more…)
You may not have noticed this, but Google is quite a dominant company. Chances are that almost everyone you know has a Google email account, a sign-in for Google Docs, and uses its search engine every day. So you do have to wonder how anyone is going to break its stranglehold - something I asked one of its email competitors today.
The chances are that you will have heard of GMX, but the chances are that you also won’t have used its services. (more…)
To create a fully featured sub-1.5kg laptop takes a fair dollop of money: the lowest-specced Z-Series costs £1,404 exc VAT. But Sony wanted to have a sub-£1,000 offering that also weighed less than 2kg - which is where the SR-Series fits in.
Two models will be available in the UK, the SR19XN and the SR19VN, and they cost a very reasonable £849 and £999 respectively (more…)
While three out of the four VAIO ranges announced by Sony yesterday are squarely aimed at businesses, the FW-Series has one mission in life: to entertain.
The chief sign of this is its 16.4in screen, with 1,600 x 900 pixels to help make high-definition movies look great (it’s also enough to view two programs side by side with ease).
And, from my brief encounter with the Blu-ray version of Spider-Man 3, they do (more…)
The Z-Series sits near the top of Sony’s VAIO range, aiming to attract executives who want to cut a dash in the boardroom.
And it certainly does make for a fine figure of a laptop. Weighing just under 1.5kg - thanks in part to a carbon fibre chassis - it measures a mere 33mm tall.
The screen is more interesting than most too. (more…)
Aimed at mainstream and, dare we say it, slightly conservative business users, the BZ-Series - which replaces the BX-Series -Â doesn’t come with some of the features boasted by the rest of the new VAIO range.
There’s a theory in the office that I’m insane, because I use Outlook in a very particular way. It’s mainly due to the fact I can’t stand a full inbox; it makes me anxious in the same way that some people can’t cope unless their desk is clear.
As such, as soon as I receive an email - providing I can break away from what I’m doing - I take a look at it and try and deal with it there and then. If it needs to be saved, I file it away in a folder. If not, I delete it. As a result, I generally just have a handful of emails in my inbox, compared to the thousands of my colleagues*.
The end result is that my inbox becomes my to-do list. A constant reminder of the bigger things I have to do.
But what I’d like to know is if anyone else uses Outlook in this way - am I alone? Maybe you use that odd system where you declare certain ones urgent, certain ones two-minuters, others to sort out when you’ve got half an hour free?
* Though right now I’ve got 86 due to six days away from the office… and that’s after weeding out all the junk.
I’ve been using the HTC Touch as my regular phone for over a year, so I won’t deny it. I jumped up and down a bit, such was my excitement to hear about the new “improved” version - the HTC Touch Diamond. And I was almost buzzing with anticipation when it arrived in the office yesterday.
But I’ll be honest. My first few experiences with the phone have dampened my ardour. It looks quite nice, with its diamondesque back and glass-dominated front, but it’s so slow it makes a British tennis player look nippy around the court.
For example, the 3D animated menus don’t keep up with your commands - there’s a full half-second lag on occasion. When you try and use Windows Mobile rather than HTC’s TouchFLO interface it’s also slow. In fact, everything’s slow.
There are lots of nice touches that may yet win me round. The built-in gyroscopic accelerometer, which detects whether the screen should be in portrait or landscape mode (and the clever marbles-down-the-hole game that HTC has bundled to show it off).
The web browser, based on Opera Mobile, which makes viewing websites a pleasure. The already-mentioned TouchFLO interface, which means you hardly need to use Windows Mobile at all anymore (an improvement we desperately called for when originally reviewing the Touch). The rather nice on-screen keyboard.
