larryni.me.uk

I was in town earlier and popped in to Vodafone to check out the Blackberry Storm. First impressions: what a beautiful phone!

It’s a great size and weight, the display is brilliant and crystal clear. The touch screen is excellent – move your finger over a button or a key of the on-screen keyboard and it glows blue. Press a bit harder and it activates – you can even feel it! I found scrolling the screen up/down a bit awkward, but am sure that I could get the hang of it within a couple of hours of using it. The sound quality of the built-in speaker is very decent (it also has a normal headphone jack), and the video quality is excellent. I couldn’t try out the web browser as there was no SIM inserted. Rotate the phone by 90 degress to the left or right and the screen flips into landscape mode. That didn’t always work first time though and often took several attempts. There’s 2 different layouts for the on-screen keyboard. Keep it in portrait and you get a smaller layout with 2 characters per key, switch to landscape and you get s QWERTY layout that lets you comfortable type with your thumbs.

One drawback is that it hasn’t got any wifi capabilities. You could maybe forgive them for that, but then I checked out the contracts they come with. Internet access is included in all the plans, but when I asked about the bandwidth limits I was told that all the plans include a ‘whopping’ 500MB/month. Wow, that’s lousy! I would have expected to get several GB. I asked if there was some kind of Internet add-on that you could purchase separately but that’s a no-go as well. Once you go over the 500MB limit they start charging you for any additional MB at extortionate prices. That’s just ridiculous.

Looks like I won’t be getting a Storm once the current plan for my N95 runs out in a few months. Unfortunately RIM went with Vodafone for the exclusive deal in the UK instead of a more decent carrier like 3 or O2. And I certainly can’t afford to shell out £400 or so quid for a Storm without contract. I’ll have to see if I can find a G1 phone to try out, it certainly looks like a better deal.

Until not too long ago I still had a Windows XP partition on my laptop. The only reason I still had it was to use Nokia’s PC Suite so i could back up/update my phone, I never booted into Windows for anything else. Then a bad Windows update in combination with the ext2 driver trashed my home partition and I could not log back into my Ubuntu user account. I was pissed. I just happened to have a GParted disk lying on my desk, popped it into the drive and removed Windows and made more room for my main Ubuntu install.

Since then I managed to find ways of syncing my N95 with Ubuntu – multisync works great to sync contacts with Evolution via Bluetooth, ScheduleWorld lets you sync your phone’s calendar with gCal through their Firefox extension via Bluetooth (only seems to work half the time), I can transfer files using Bluetooth and USB, and I can manage my music through Amarok.

Unfortunately all the above are far from ideal as you need different applications for each task. Not to mention that it is impossible for me to upgrade my phone’s firmware without Windows!

Yesterday I sent an email to Nokia to see what their plans were to support other operating systems, considering the amount of people who switch to Linux and Mac OS. Here’s the reply:

Dear Laurent,

Thank you for contacting Nokia Care.

I hope all is well with you. We do understand your current predicament on using the Linux operating system. However at this present time we are unable to confirm if there will be future changes to include Linux as Nokia’s supported operating system. However, I will definitely forward this as a feedback to the relevant department for further review.

We do thank you for highlighting this to us because we appreciate such as constructive feedback from our customers, Laurent.

Out of luck for the time being then.

I tried to get the PC Suite working by running Windows XP in Virtualbox (yeah, I know, but at least it’s not taking up a full partition now or mess with my Ubuntu install ), but USB refuses flat out to connect my phone and Bluetooth connected only once and now keeps giving me an error message each time I try to activate it.

What do you use to sync your phone with Ubuntu/Linux? Do you know of any Symbian applications that help with syncing gCal reliably?

I launched Skype on my mobile phone yesterday for the first time in a while and to my surprise my non-Skype contacts started to show up, before it would only let me call other Skype users. And in the Options menu is now an entry to check my SkypeOut credit balance.

I quickly found out that it is only to call landlines/mobiles outside the UK, but that’s pretty much all I use Skype for anyway. I hadn’t heard about 3 allowing their subscribers to make interntational calls through Skype until now. A quick search brought up an article on The Register saying that it started on 1 October:

UK operator 3 is to allow Skype users to make international calls with their SkypeOut minutes, bypassing the operator completely, while the VoIP pioneer’s desktop client continues its slow progress towards version 4 with a new beta release.

Punters equipped with a Skypephone, or compatible handset such as an N95 or C902 on 3, are already able to call up other Skype users for free. But from today they’ll also be able to make international calls using the Skype network with the rate being deduced from their SkypeOut minutes.

The customer will be able to choose if a call should be handled by Skype or the traditional 3 network, and will pay appropriate rates. Chief Executive at 3 Kevin Russell said: “Although 3 customers enjoy the best value international calling tariffs in the UK, we know that people are apprehensive about using their mobiles to call internationally, especially as international minutes aren’t typically included in mobile calling bundles.”

It looks like Seagate, one of the largest employers here in the North West, are going to tell over 900 workers at their Limavady plant this afternoon that the company is pulling out.

This would be a major blow for the area. So far there is only the news about an announcement online, but nothing concrete. Other sources are the Derry Journal and UTV.

The Derry News newspaper reported this morning that they learnt that Seagate has built an exact replica factory in Thailand where labour costs are significantly cheaper, and that there had been speculations about the future of the company over here.

I wonder what this will mean for the Derry plant. Didn’t they reduce their workers’ hours over the summer?

—

Update: According to a friend of mine it’s normal that Seagate cut back the hours for a week in the summer. And apparently there’s talk about announcing an investment in the Derry plant.

Update 2: It’s been confirmed, Seagate Limavady is closing.

Apple’s DRM is not about copy protection. It’s an effective way to lock you in to their business model and make as much money as possible without any regard for consumers’ rights.

The Norwegian Consumer Council, Forbrukerradet, lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman on behalf of Norwegian consumers claiming that the Fairplay DRM system acted against the interests of consumers. It said that the fact that the technology stopped songs bought from iTunes being played on any player other than an iPod broke the law in Norway.

The Ombudsman has now agreed, according to Torgeir Waterhouse, senior advisor at the Consumer Council.

“It doesn’t get any clearer than this. Fairplay is an illegal lock-in technology whose main purpose is to lock the consumers to the total package provided by Apple by blocking interoperability,” Waterhouse told OUT-LAW.COM. “For all practical purposes this means that iTunes Music Store is trying to kill off one the most important building blocks in a well functioning digital society, interoperability, in order to boost its own profits.”

And it’s not just Apple. RIAA/MPAA & co are doing the exact same using DRM – selling it to us as copy protection in order to fight piracy. But all they want to do is to sell us the same stuff over and over to milk it for all they can and line their ever growing pockets. The sooner more countries wake up to the realities of what DRM and proprietary formats are actually being used for, the better. New and fair legislation is needed to protect the consumers.

I always believed that South Koreans were rather lucky when it comes to early adoption of new technologies.

Wrong.

This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft Windows. This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation’s e-government sites online. In fact, Linux users, Mozilla Firefox users and Opera users are also banned from any of these types of transactions because all encrypted communications online in this nation must be done with Active X controls.

Read the rest of the article here. It’s quite an eye opener.