It's been too long

Hello everybody. First of all, I would like to apologize for my posting on the 7th/8th of February.
It's been a while since I blogged on here but I'm back now. It's been a bit of an eventful month. On the first of this month, Vodafone renewed my contract and I now own a shiny new Sony Ericsson K850i. What do I think of this handset? Well what can I say.
On opening the box, I was greeted by the sight of my new phone. I carefully took that out of the box, and lifted the cardboard back to reveal the battery, charger headphones, instruction manuals and the installation CD. I followed the instructions to insert the battery and my Vodafone SIM card. The reason I followed the instructions is because instead of using a slide-off back cover to access the battery, this phone uses a flap on the bottom of the phone, similar to that of Sony CyberShot digital cameras. Pushing the flap up and then pulling it out reveals a slot for the battery, a 512MB M2 Micro Memory card which has already been installed, and a SIM card slot. To insert the battery, i had to lift up an orange catch, which was fiddly. Inserting the SIM card was easy; you just push it into the slot until it clicks into place. I removed the 512MB memory card and inserted the 2GB card that I had in my K800. I must admit that I do rather like the fact that the phone will take both M2 and SDHC memory cards, which means I can use my current memory card now and upgrade at a later date to a 4GB or 8GB card that will be cheap.

Powering up the phone went without a hitch, with the setup wizard helping me to set the date and time, and copy contacts I may have on my SIM card. In no time, I was at the main screen. Making calls is a pleasure with clear call quality. The screen is also a pleasure to look at as it is bright and has a high contrast which can be seen in just about lighting. The screen will alter it's brightness to suit the lighting conditions, so if you are using the phone in bright daylight, the screen will be very bright, whereas if you are using it in the dark, it will be slightly dimmer so as not dazzle you.

I do have one minor qualm with the phone however. When you are on the phone,, if you press it to your cheek then you are likely to invoke the touch sensitive buttons which can be a bit annoying at times. On the Vodafone branded version, the right soft key is set to Vodafone Live and that cannot be changed. this means that quite often I'm finding myself connecting to Vodafone Live when I don't necessarily want to. Also, for some people the keypad can be confusing as the D-pad is set around 2 and 5. This can take some getting used to but most should adapt pretty quickly to this arrangement.

This phone's Piece De Resistance is it's CyberShot 5 megapixel camera with a Xenon flash. I took it out to an ISA party that was happenning that night and took several pictures with it. This produces crystal-clear sharp shots - as long as you do not touch the back of the phone while you are taking the photo. Doing so produces very dark results.

For me, it is important that I can synchronize my phone with my computer. This is made easy by Sony Ericsson PC Suite. The new version of the software sports an intuitive interface which makes it easy to do such tasks as browse the phone's memory and (if one is installed) the phone's memory card. Synchronising was just a case of hitting Synchronize on the left hand side, selecting what I wanted to sync, and then hitting the Synchronize button in the right pane. I'm not too keen on the installer for Sony Ericsson PC Suite 3.x because it installs the drivers for every SE phone at install-time and this on Window Vista machines like my desktop can take a long time.

Bettery life on this phone is good if you don't plan to overly use any of the more power-hungry features like Bluetooth, GPRS and the Xenon flash. I get about two days charge from this phone, which is generally left switched on (apart from when I lose my charger).

Overall this is a good phone, and now that most of the bugs have been fixed, I can make a recommendation on this phone. To this end, I will give it a 4/5 rating.

In other news, I have been hard at work with my computer equipment. This month has seen my Ergo Ensis laptop have it's RAM doubled from 1GB to 2GB. This was done in a futile attempt to make Windows run faster when Office 2007 or Visual Studio 2008 is running, especially with ZoomText 9.1 in use. I had wanted to use Windows Vista with my laptop as it is a good operating system with lots of good features. However, the laptop had other ideas, so I recycled my Windows XP Media Center Edition license and installed XP MCE 2005 on my laptop, and dual-booted it with Ubuntu 7,10, an OS which I like more and more as I use it. Not two weeks later, my desktop computer also recieved an upgrade in the form of a Samsung 500GB S-ATA drive. This was because my 320GB HDD is starting to become full, as is my 160GB HDD. I need more space for all those episodes of Top Gear, The Simpsons and Family Guy, er I mean all that work and all the development environments I need to do that work (Visual Studio 2008 in't exactly lightweight). Because S-ATA is a serial interface, much like USB, Windows Vista thinks now that I would like to eject the hard disk on which it is installed! Duh!!!!! Well don there Microsoft! At least it won't let me actually eject it because when I try to do so (just out of curiosity, honest) it tells me that it can't stop it right now as it's in use.

In other news, I have finally bought a Macbook! The reason is because even with the RAM upgrade, my poor Ensis cannot keep up with my computing requirements with ZoomText being a RAM hog. I made the purchase at KRCS, an authorized Mac seller, which is just opposite Princes Quay in Hull. The person behind the counter was very friendly and he helped me choose a Macbook and even doubled the memory in it. The specs of my new Macbook are as follows:

2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU
2GB DDR-RAM 667MHz
120GB HDD
13" Widescreen (1280x800 resolution)
Duperdrive (8x DVD burner)
Bluetooth
AirPort Extreme (802.11b/g/n wireless)
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

I love my Mac because things just work. I love the screen magnification that comes as part of Universal Access. I take my hat off to Apple for including assisting technologies as part of their operating system which in itself is a fantastic system. If you want to learn more about how Apple helps disabled users use their software then please click here. I am going to use this Macbok for a while and see how I like it, and if I am pleased with it, then I will make a recommendation to the university to have the YorLinc who deals with assessments of needs for disabled students to recommend Macbooks and iMacs.