Daily Archives: November 28, 2006

New Cell Phone

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Normally I wouldn’t get really excited about a new cell phone. That was until yesterday. Over the past couple of months I have often wished I had email when I was in meetings or on client visits. I finally took the plunge yesterday and upgraded my phone to a new Blackberry Pearl!

I was hoping to get one of the Windows Mobile based devices so that I could sync the device with my SBS 2003 server, but the poor battery life of these devices available through Rogers kept me away. Enter the Pearl.

Rim released this phone in Sept 06, and it didn’t have the typical Blackberry look. It was sleek, didn’t have the standard keyboard and the track wheel was gone, replaced by a white trackball that lights up (the pearl)!. The form factor is like a chocolate bar. This phone is very light and the display on it is nice and bright. Reviews I read on the Internet all raved about the phone.

So I broke down yesterday, added the email plan and purchased the phone from Rogers (did you know you can now upgrade your Rogers hardware every 12 months). With the plans comes the Blackberry Internet Service which allows me to add up to 10 email accounts to the phone. One of the nice surprises is that I can add an exchange server account that has access to Outlook Web Access. I liked this because I can keep the email server from having to run as a pop3 mail server. Unfortunately without the BES (Blackbery Enterprise) server I cannot update contacts or calendar items using this method like Activesync does. Hower I can connect the phone to my PC and sync it.

Voice Dialing is a cool feature that I think I will use a lot as well. I can give the phone a command and then say a name or a number and the phone will dial.

IT also features a 1.3 MP camera with 5X zoom and Flash and the ability to play Mp3. There is a slot under the battery for a Micro SD card.

I still have to try to connect my laptop using the phone as a Bluetooth wireless device to the internet, but it should be possible.

So far after a day and a half of playing with it I have been impressed. If I find other thigs about it (good and bad) I will post them here.
Stephen

Vista and Office 2007 available now!

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Yes it’s true. Vista and Office 2007 are available right now to Microsoft SA (Software Assurance) Clients. Last Friday after returning from the Microsoft Launch Event in Edmonton I logged into my eopen site to check an agreement for a client and noticed that there was a new link to download software. Immediately I checked it out and was able to download RTM versions Vista Enterprise and Vista Business as well as Office 2007 Professional Plus and Office 2007 Standard. I have started the testing process on the RTM versions so that I can start the planning of deployments for my clients.

I can report though that on my test machine (AMD 3000+, 1GB Ram and integrated ATI Display Adaptor) that the RTM version of Vista Enterprise runs much quicker than the RC1 version did with the full Aero interface. A little warning though with the new version of Office the file format is not backwards compatible with earlier versions of Office. If you share Office documents, people using earlier versions of Office have to install a converter to allow them to be able to open the new document format. The other option is that you can download an add on for Office 2007 that will allow you to save documents as Adobe PDF documents. This at least gives you another option for sharing, unless of course those documents have to be edited.

 Want to see if what version your PC can run of Windows Vista? Download and run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor from here.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/upgradeadvisor/default.mspx

New PCs sold by Sysguy Consulting now until March 31st, have either free or low cost upgrades to Windows Vista 

Stay tuned for more information.

Stephen