At first I thought this was a bad joke! Paul Cristoforo is the President of a PR company hired to handle communications in regards to a special game controller for disabled customers. Reading all the reports makes me wonder about a single thing: how was this guy able to survive in the business for so long?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Venturebeat/~3/8K6g1l8t0z4/

and

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/paul-christoforo-ocean-marketing-emails

Christ!

I’ve been using BT headsets for more than 7 years now. I find them more convenient than the wired ones, although it’s true, it’s a hassle sometimes: keep it safe, keep it close, charge it, try to use it when you make and receive a call – oops - disconnected/out of battery/out of reach, the usual stuff.  But all in all, a truly handy tool for long talks at the office or when driving or doing anything else  and your hands occupied.

Over the years Sony-Ericsson BT headsets were trustworthy partners. In fact, these HBH series have to be the most reliable they ever launched; they’re still in production after so many years. Great price, battery life, great connectivity, great comfort. And a little bulky – there’s no perfect solution in life!

But after 3 or 4 of these in as many years I decided I need to move on: something without an over-the-ear-hook! And something less bulky! And I chose the Plantronics Discovery 975.

Here’s why:

Hardware:

• Build quality is very good, sturdy, nice aesthetics and ergonomics. Hairpin shaped, this headset has a thin, short arm with nice, glossy, finish - yes, parts of it came off after 9 months of usage, but this is a working tool… So much for Premium quality though. While worn and stuck into the ear, the multi-function button works just fine; I need to press it a little harder in order to operate and I have to grab the unit with another two fingers, otherwise the ear would hurt. I try to interfere as little as possible with the headset while I’m wearing it. There’s also a volume button with 3 stages – they are notably different in volume, which is quite high for a BT headset. 
• Charging/protection case: the headset comes with a charging case (with a battery inside) wrapped in Faux leather, which sports a led illuminated mini-display showing you connection status, charge level of both the headset (if inside) and case. The headset itself is a little lacking on stand-by and talk time (more about that later!), so they threw-in the charging case. This one will keep your headset full at all times. Both devices have the Universal Micro-U.S.B connectors, so I am able to use the same chargers for the phone, headset and charging case.  
• 3 kinds of different spare small ear-tips for different ear sizes and shapes. I use the medium one, so the headset will fit perfectly in the ear.  There is also a lanyard for the case.

As stated here, I got the aforementioned solar charger and wanted to try it out and see if it’s a good replacement (even as emergency charger) of my hugely appreciated external 5.000 mAh battery. Because while it can charge two devices at the same time (and receive charge from an electrical outlet at the same time!), it’s quite heavy and bulky to be carried around. Luckily, I employ a big laptop bag when traveling and I do not have to carry it in my pocket.

First of all, of course there’s no comparison with an external battery. The solar charger gets its power from the sun which means it is 100% green but it also means it’s less efficient than the battery drawing its power from the electrical outlet. I won’t go into cost details, as none of the two above are used as main power source.

Hardware: 800 mAh Ni-MH battery included for energy storage, 55 grams, a short cable with 5 different tips: Mini-USB, Micro-USB, Motorola, Nokia and Sony-Ericsson. It takes around 3 hours and a half to charge it up by USB and about 8 to 10 hours to charge it completely from the sun.

The charger is small and light , with its upper part crafted in the form of a bezel allowing the gadget to be hanged or tied to something. It’s finishing is extremely poor, cheap – the plastic makes a crackling sound if you squeeze it. The solar panel is crooked, with parts aligning badly. The cable is fitting itself very well in the USB slot but very poorly with the different tips – I sometimes left the phone charging, just to check 20 minutes later to find out the contact was imperfect thus not charging the phone. It did restart after I moved it a little bit around. Oh, well, check the price and you’ll understand why this happens. You get even less than what you’re paying for.

How it works: Surprisingly well! You can see bellow the stages of the charger discharging and charging my phone:

Full solar charger battery – smartphone at 12% energy left:

70% left on the solar charger, smartphone up to 17% after 20 minutes:

50% left on the solar charger, smartphone up to 24% after 34 minutes:

It finally bogged-down after 87 minutes in which time it charged the smartphone up to 40%. Not too bad for small charger and definitely a good choice for a back-up.

It’s also worth mentioned that if you keep it in sunlight and attached to the phone, it will charge directly and sustain any activity on your smartphone, like calling or playing games.

Highly recommended for this price!

Tomorrow I’ll use the beautiful, sunny day to (empirically) test a new solar charger I got by mistake. It’s my belief that this small gadget (a cheap Chinese copycat of a Western techology probably) can and will suply some much needed energy to my phone.
We’ll see!

Just a year ago I wanted a Palm Pre. This was quite some time after the launch in June 2009, but this happens cause I’m not moving too fast when I get the new gadgets – I don’t like to Beta-test on my own money. And because competition is fierce, everybody is rushing the products out without too much fuss leaving us to pick-up the pieces behind. But that’s another story.

At that point I was buying into the “totally diff’rent, revolutionary gadget” hype! I wanted to test the wonderful, new webOS, with promises of full integration and fluid U.I. I wasn’t even considering an Android device yet; I was rocking a BlackBerry (my 2nd actually) and I thought Android is not yet mature enough. So I chose the Pre instead. It wasn’t meant to be: my smartphone got lost in the mailing process (my friend Mark had to work to get the insurance money – hope you got it all back, man!) and I ended-up getting an…Android device.

And now because I had a good chance to get a cheap, 2nd hand, unlocked Pre, I just went ahead and got it! I wanted to like it, I wanted to love it and ditch my HTC Desire HD! This one had the latest OS build, the 1.4.5. I was resting assure that by now, two years after the initial launch I would have a nicer, richer, more rounded experience of this challenger in a tech world dominated by Google and Apple.

Hardware: I knew what I was getting: the phone feels plasticky, the glossy finish is a magnet to fingerprints, scratches and the screen doesn’t make any exception. I knew about the much commented sliding mechanism/wobbly upper-part, which in my hand made the Pre to feel like an unfinished product. I know, a slider has to have a certain lateral movement, in order to accommodate hasty openings/closing or maybe some accidental slips. But this one had a 2 millimeters lateral movement which actually at times  prevented me to slide-up the phone, in order to use it! I also know about the Palm’s advice to use both fingers to push it up! Yes, because otherwise you risk to damage the phone and to separate the two slides. Why? Because that damn wobble is too accentuated!

The “Mute” button was hard to switch, moving lateral the whole upper slider with it! Again, because of that wobble! The “Power” button was recessed a little bit, but in my books that’s a good thing! Nothing notable about the “Volume” buttons. The glossy back was hard to remove; I would’ve loved a Touchstone back cover!

The keyboard was tiny but usable. I liked the clicky feedback but made a lot of mistakes when I was using it, mainly because it has a learning curve like any other gadget. I’m sure in time I would’ve evolved.

The 3.1 inch screen was beautiful, I loved it. I loved its responsiveness. I loved its colors and its resolution. Even now, two years later, it’s up to par with the others and down-right usable. The size could be an issue for some people, especially when you come from a 4-incher.

Software: I’ve been holding my breath since 2009 when they announced webOS first! I realized the power of apps in 2004 when I got my first smartphone: a P990i by Sony-Ericsson. Wow! That was the future! Then in time I found out I’m using only a handful of apps, not too many special ones: calendar, email, browser, instant messenger, a call filter, a podcatcher, a RSS feeder and some games. I thought I didn’t need more. But I didn’t because at the time (and later with UIQ 3.0 – anybody remembers that one?) there weren’t as many apps as they are today. There were no App-Stores and the big players didn’t think too much about those – well, not until Apple came along and changed the game rules.

The U.I is awesome! Period. It rivals Android and iPhone (especially the iPhone, due to the same kind of limitations!) hands-down. It’s the only reason I’d get a webOS device again…see the spoiler here? It’s a pleasant experience but from my point of view it failed to take off to mass adoption due to lack of developers’ interest. Coming from an Android device, I was expecting hundreds of free and useful apps. Instead, the only free and usable app I got was Clock Sync and that in order to correct the clock drifting forward. By a lot! Anything else I needed to pay for. And because I’m not living in an “acceptable” country, no paid apps for me. Nice! Again, without any developer support there’s gonna be no webOS!

I don’t know the processor speed and/or RAM and I didn’t feel compelled to look them up; everything felt normal . Yes, I noticed a slowness when opening up a card (an application), but it moved naturally taking into account it uses a different OS. I run a 1 Gig processor on my Desire HD and I don’t find the lack of this awesome speed a deal-breaker in the Pre.

Bugs and SW mishaps? Whoa! The clock is drifting by hours, the alarm won’t ring, the Messenger section only allows AOL and/or GTalk, no connection is available thru WiFi when registering a new user (so if I don’t have a data subscription I’m stuck!), the Facebook application won’t log-out, the email client is not allowing you to delete multiple messages at once and the device is freezing: only charging will unfreeze it but only sometimes. I had to reinstall the O.S twice in two weeks. And that didn’t fix the issue. Officially, there is no problem with the O.S thus no support is offered.

The rest: Battery life was average. As in “it won’t last a working day, unless you make almost no calls, surf the net nor receive many emails”. And once you get a smartphone, you do that all too often. The calls quality was fine, the speaker is unusable as usual for conversations but very good when rendering your favorite ringtone. Can’t comment too much on the sub-par 2.0 MP camera – I guess it’s fine for everyday use when you’re not pretentious.

Bottom line: Reading all the other Pre Plus, Pre 2, Veer and Pre 3 news and reviews, I can see improvement. And I hope for HP’s sake they’re all the way behind webOS. The original Pre is a total disappointment for me in terms of “what it could’ve been and wasn’t!”. It shows great promise U.I-wise, but I expected much more from the 1.4.5 update. Palm wasn’t even able to fix the clock? In the end, it’s not over till it’s over – I look forward to using a Pre 3 and THEN I’ll make up my mind.

I keep on playing with an iPhone 4 for a few days now. Why? I have one of the best smartphones on the market at the moment, namely the HTC Desire. It’s got one of the best OS’ in existence at the moment: Android by Google. It does almost everything I need it to do and shines-on except for a few small “unimportant” details, like battery life and the lack of pushed-email (Vodafone’s fault on this one!). Then why looking over the fence where everybody says the grass is greener?
Well, curiosity. Inquisitive curiosity. And hype. A job at which Apple’s always ace.
While I’ve only used it seldom, I’ve been able to go thru quite a few situations of an everyday smartphone user: I browsed the net, posted to Twitter, used various applications, downloaded a free application from the App Store and…fell-out of love with the iPhone 4. You take a picture. You wanna share it with friends. You can’t beam it thru Bluetooth, there is no option to do it. You can’t send it on TwitPic by uploading it on the site – the “browse files” button was greyed-out (no, it wasn’t a Flash button, works like a charm on my Desire) due to the fact that the iPhone has a security procedure in place (enforced by a password) of not allowing anything in a browser to read the files in the phone. Plain stupid? Yes, if you ask me. You can’t email it to Posterous or to other emails because for example, you have a problem with your SMTP server, like I did.
And why is this all happening? Just because Steve decided to “protect” the consumer. Who asked for this? Not the king, the customer himself. Of course, I can understand the logic and the logistics behind this great, great progressive undertaking but I’m not sure it was done in our best interest.
Looking over the fence again, I see a regulated but self propelled market of innovative, useful and mostly free apps that can be installed at user’s free will. Are the Android users less protected? No, I don’t think so. The system is different. There will always be hackers to combat and holes to plug.
But you know what they say: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Astazi a inceput la Barcelona Congresul Mondial al Telefoniei Mobile, editia 2009. Dupa cum o spune si numele, in perioada 16-19 Februarie 2009 la standuri se vor regasi cele mai importante nume din lumea “mobila”, incepand cu producatorii de componente si terminale, gigantii Internetului (Google,Yahoo si Microsoft), pana la operatorii de telefonie mobila ca Orange, Vodafone sau T-Mobile. Scopul este prezentarea celor mai noi tehnologii si produse, de a discuta oportunitati de afaceri si starea actuala a industriei de telecomunicatii.

Desi initial se credea ca actuala criza economica va goni principalii participanti la Expozitiei, in final singurul mare absent este Apple; compania a participat la  Macworld 2009,insa chiar si acolo a fost prezenta pentru ultima oara, iar Steve Jobs a trimis un inlocuitor, alimentand astfel zvonurile conform carora este grav bolnav.Site-urile majore de tehnologie si telecomunicatii mobile sunt prezente deja acolo si transmit live informatii referitoare la produsele prezentate: