Category: Gadgets

I did it, I bought an iPad

MarcLeave a comment

I have been tempted by the iPad for a while now, it seemed to offer the power of a laptop without the inconvenience of a laptop. A long battery, yet always connected and always on. I knew full well about the downsides and I didn’t expect to be typing large documents on it, but for browsing the web, checking email and chatting on instant messenger it seemed perfect. So was it?

Not prefect, but very good

The iPad 2, despite considerably lower specs than my laptop on paper feels snappy and rarely do I have to wait for anything to happen. Unlike a laptop, there is no fan – so I feel comfortable leaving it on my bed, or on the carpet knowing I’m not to come back and find it with fans whirling while it melts. The device seems durable, whereas the iPod has a an easy-to-scratch surface, the iPad won’t get scratched under normal use.

Lack of apps

One thing I have found is the lack of iPad specific apps. It’s still quite a new platform, so I can forgive app developers slightly – but the big hitters such as Spotify and Audible still make you use the iPhone versions of the app, which only work in portrait mode and look pixelated. The keyboard layout is also different for iPhone apps, which is rather confusing. While I can type pretty fast on the iPad, the lack of any blogging software as good as Windows Live Writer means I still prefer to fire up my laptop to write anything substantial. An iPad version of Google Chrome would be nice, or at least a way to sync your Google Chrome bookmarks easily (it can be done now, but involves using a 3rd party service and isn’t worth the hassle in my opinion).

Quality not quantity

Having said all that, the apps that come with the iPad are of a very high quality. The Mail, Calendar and Contacts app are very impressive. I was surprised Apple didn’t include an alarm clock and weather app, seeing as there is one available for the iPhone but it’s not a big deal as 3rd party apps have filled the gap.

For casually browsing the web or responding to emails, iPad wins. Booking a holiday? Then I’ll want 30 tabs open at once, and the iPad isn’t good at context switching. Overall I am impressed, it really does fill the void between a smartphone and a laptop. Tablets won’t replace laptops in my opinion, but they will take on many of their roles relegating laptops to the more comprehensive tasks.

Highly recommended.

Goodbye iPhone, Hello HTC Desire S

MarcLeave a comment

So it’s nearly 2 years since I got my iPhone 3GS, and I decided I wanted to change. Not because the old 3GS was feeling old – it still felt snappy and the battery lasted 2 days. What made me change was those ever-so-annoying “if you don’t have an iPhone” adverts. The thought of being associated with a brand that came across as self-obsessed and narcissistic had slowly been eating away at me, and when I read this story my decision was made.

image

Compared to iOS, Android has a very “home brewed” feeling to it. The interface is much more complex and far less intuitive. On the flip side however, that means everything is a lot more configurable. In this respect, Android reminds me of Windows Mobile and Symbian more so than it does iOS, I can schedule my work email to only push new items during work hours for example – something I missed from my Nokia, that the iPhone did not offer. The home screen is far superior to that of the iPhone, but it falls down on simple things: Renaming a folder was surprisingly difficult to work out, it turned out I needed to click and hold on the folder name in the folder’s popup. Dragging widgets is awkward as you can’t seem to have more than one floating at once, so rearranging them when the screen is full is impossible.

Unlocked Doors

While the software does have a “rough and ready” feel to it, this has benefits as there is virtually no vendor lock-in. I managed to stream music from my DLNA NAS box quite easily. Apple will let you do this, but only within their ecosystem. There is free satnav (although the phone doesn’t come with a carkit), voice input and a whole host of good quality apps available from the app store. One really useful feature is HTC Sense Online, which lets you locate your phone, make it ring, and lock it remotely – great when you think you may have lost it.

image

 

Battery Life

I am disappointed with the battery life. My iPhone (when new) would be at about 70% at 5:30pm when I left work, with average use. The Desire S was at about 40%. It is doing a lot more however, and just proves how little battery technology has improved in the last few years.

Part 2 of review to come soon.

Gadget Review: Iomega NAS Media Server

MarcLeave a comment

I have a lot of media on my various computers, music, photos, videos and the like, but I’ve never found a satisfactory way of storing them all. My solution was to put them on my main laptop, which has a large hard disk, and then share the folders to my other laptop and Xbox 360. This is fine, except I tend to reformat my laptop quite often, and don’t keep it at on all the time at a desk, instead it’s packed away in its bag when not i use, making playing some music from my Xbox a bit of a hassle. So I decided a NAS box was what I needed. My only consideration really was price, I really don’t care about speed since most of the time I’ll be using 802.11g to access the files and so the Iomega 1TB drive is what I picked. It cost £120 from PC World, which I thought was good value. I’d read a few reviews, but since these reviews Iomega has released a new firmware (which came preinstalled on mine) and so a lot of the drawbacks have been addressed.

NAS BOX

I have to say, I am very impressed. The drive is fully accessible via SMB, meaning the software that comes with the drive is not essential (I only needed to install it once to find out what IP address my DHCP server had assigned it). The drive is actually a very small computer (probably running Linux, though I can’t be sure) and so it offers extra functionality. So called “Live Folders” allow you to create a folder that’s contents gets uploaded to Facebook, YouTube or resized for example. The NAS box can also act as a bit-torrent client, but unfortunately can’t be set to download a large file over FTP/HTTP. The device is also an iTunes server as well as a DLNA server (this is an open standard that the Xbox 360 uses to stream music and video over a LAN). If only TV shows purchased from iTunes didn’t have DRM, I’d buy a few, since being able to download a series of 24 straight to this device and watch it on my Xbox would be amazing. Still, having all your media always available via Media Centre/Xbox/ITunes is great.

The downsides to this device are the hard disk appears to be FAT32 (according to another review I read) – this means it’s not journaled and in the event of a power-cut the drive/data could be corrupted. There’ is only one hard disk, and 1TB of data is a LOT of data to be held at the whim on someone spilling something on it, or a cat knocking it over, so I will still be keeping the stuff I value most in two places. Anyone wanting a proper backup solution rather than a media server solution would be wise to get something that has RAID. It’s also quite noisy and doesn’t spin down the hard disk when it’s not in use.

Overall, I am pleased with this purchase and would recommend this media server to other looking for a good value solution.

Update:

I found the following information in the manual that states the drive actually uses the XFS filesystem, which was one of the first journalled filesystems. Hooray!

The Home Media Drive shares files using the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol and stores its files on XFS (built-in), FAT32 (external), and NTFS (external) hard drives.

I didn’t mention this before, but you can also plug in a USB drive and share it, or you can plug in a USB printer than share that instead. Shame there’s no SSH access however 🙂