Where's The Good Stuff?

In my own personal buying schedule its time for a phone refresh - something I tend to do on a June/December schedule. My last three devices have been the T-Mobile MDA Pro, HTC S620 and HTC MDA Vario II. The only problem is there's nothing exciting out there to replace the Vario II (AKA Hermes/TyTn) with. A TyTn 2/Vario III? Not so much. The addition of a GPS (I'm blessed with an internal guidance system to mirror that of migrating birds) and a slightly improved camera don't really sell it to me. Even the tilting screen seems a bit pointless...

The Toshiba G900 seems a possibility on the face of it, but there seems to be a general dis-satisfaction amongst current owners - it sounds a frustrating blend of unstable, incompatible and unsupported. Reminds me very much of my Toshiba e800, which suffered the same sort of fate when Tosh pulled the plug a few years ago.

The HTC Advantage is too big and worse than the Universal based MDA Pro in almost every way and the problems with Symbian 60 v3 are well enough documented to make it worth avoiding for the time being. Of the three S60 devices which have the necessary RAM to run the OS, the N82 isn't yet available, the E90 is stupidly overpriced and the N95 8GB version lacks memory expansion and I suspect 8GB will look pretty sparse in six months time.

The only hope is that imate manage to deliver some more of their Ultimate devices early in the new year - otherwise I'll just have to forego my new smartphone this winter... Now, I wonder if this OQO thing is any good...?

Palm Posts Another Loss

Palm has announced another poor quarter, posting a $9.6m loss, some $20m behind expectations. Palm blamed its poor performance on its failure to get the Treo 755p certified by the FCC.

I'm afraid that Palm's problems run much deeper than that and on its current course the only question remaining is whether it will survive long enough to launch its new operating system and see a new dawn.

Women Buying More Tech Than Men

John Lewis is claiming that more of its gadgets are being sold to women and this is a sign that the technology gender divide is finally history.

Sorry guys, I'm sure it makes a good headline, but I think the truth lies elsewere. More women are buying gadgets as gifts from John Lewis and most men wouldn't even give a second thought to John Lewis as a Tech provider.

Good way a drumming up some cheap publicity though.

Out Of Office Assistant

One of the invaluable tools that Microsoft provides is Outlook's Out Of Office Assistant (OOOA for short). With a couple of clicks and a brief message you can let your contacts know that you won't be responding to their emails for the next few days, weeks or indeed ever.

Email overload has become a modern woe. From the 'just for information' emails from the nervy underling; through the backside-covering 'you can't say I didn't tell you' email from a peer to the 'just wasted two-minutes of my life reading that' emails from your boss its become less of an enabling tool and more of a restriction on how much real work you can get through.

The OOOA has another use here that can make your day to day life easier. Most people are happy to 'extend' their away time by a few hours so that they can deal with the unprecedented backlog of email which invariably builds up when you've had a few days off. So why not allocate yourself some email free days with OOOA and allow yourself to spend more time working? Its easy, takes little effort and, together with an efficient voicemail system, effectively frees your time for working.

Think of it as a personal 'productivity boost' button, but use it wisely and remember to keep a low profile when you're claiming to be away!

Asus Eee PC Isn't Difficult

I've seen a couple of bloggers moaning about having to learn Linux so that they can use their new Eee PCs in the last few days. To which my response is 'you what?' The whole point of the Eee PC is that the underlying OS is effectively masked, the tab based interface is as simple as its possible to get and allows even the youngest of users to get an easy handle on the machine.

If you want to dig into the inner workings of Linux on the Eee you can do that. The thing is you don't need to.

One blogger even suggested that rather than buy the Eee and have to learn Linux they'd have rather bought a Palm Foleo instead...

Which of course famously runs... Linux!

T-Mobile Go Upgrade Crazy

Much kudos to T-Mobile who have released Windows Mobile 6 upgrades for a multitude of T-Mobile branded devices this week - everything from the Ameo to the MDA Mail. You'll need to visit T-Mobile's download site to get the software package.

Its good to see that T-Mobile, along with many more operators, realising that providing these upgrades benefits them in multiple ways - improved customer relations and also increasing the longevity of mobile phones which should result in fewer handset upgrades.

I'm disappointed that the MDA Pro isn't one of the machines covered by the upgrade - WM6 transforms the HTC Universal based handset - however I realise that as HTC have produced no official upgrade for the Universal platform T-Mobile have their hands very much tied.

OQO Goes HSDPA

OQO's big noise press conference in London revealed... well not very much really. The OQO model 2 will be getting a SIM card slot and an HSDPA capable radio - a fairly minor bump in specs really. Now continuous (or near continuous) connections are very nice - especially on something this pocketable, but I think OQO went a little overboard on building expectations with this one.

Take a lesson from Apple - if you're shouting about something, make sure its worth shouting about...

Aside from that PR cock-up, this looks like a worthy feature bump on the OQO, which remains the most pocketable PC, even against the latest crop of UMPCs. Unfortunately its a way more expensive device than most of its 'rivals' and the addition of HSDPA isn't such a big deal: most UMPC users are likely to be connecting through a bluetooth connected phone anyway, which OQO users will still have to carry as I'm guessing this will top the HTC Advantage as the world's least usable phone by some measure.

Office Mobile Update Released

Microsoft have made the latest version of Office Mobile available from their website. Microsoft have upped the feature count (word count and spell-check in Word Mobile, charts in Excel mobile for example) as well as including file compatibility for the new Office 2007 file formats.

For the first time owners of Windows Mobile smartphone edition devices which never originally shipped with Office Mobile can buy an upgrade. However the complete lack of support for cut and paste within the non-touchscreen Office suite makes this a pretty pointless option, as I'm sure that most users will go for the far more capable Documents To Go from Dataviz...