Month: February 2006

Build 5308 Tastes Great

Lorin Olsen

There are an amazing number of Windows Vista (February CTP) reviews available on the net. I won’t try and cover as much ground as everyone else has done. So if you want a good review, just on over to Paul Thurott’s SuperSite. And if you want some great screenshots, PC Mag has a slew of snapshots. And there are hundreds more.
So I will tell you what I’ve seen and found.
1. My pragma on interim builds is simple. I don’t have mulitple machines. So I have multiple primary partiitons (thanks to Symantec’s Partition Magic). I installed 5308 in my second partition. I’ll try the “upgrade” from an existing partition at a later date.
2. I installed from my running WinXP SP2 system. The install routine loaded many gigabytes from the DVD before rebooting and installing. But the install process was simple and fairly automatic. I love that. I still remember when I installed systems from mag tapes. But the worst installs took several dozen 3.5″ disks. I remember my first OS/2 Warp install. It took forever because I had to sit there the entire time while the install program greddily demanded more disks. One DVD sure beats feeding disks. But I will say that the progress bar moved very slowly. And there were a couple of points where I thought the install was hung. It wasn’t. And the install was relatively seamless.
3. On my first official reboot after install, I was expecting a beautiful display highlighting Aero Glass. Nope. My video wasn’t supported with the drivers from the DVD. Fortunately, nVidia released drivers on Friday. So once I downloaded and installed them, I had a beautiful display featuring full transparency. It is very cool indeed!
4. I still have to download the audio drivers for my Toshiba. And the rumor has it that we might even see some functioning Bluetooth drivers at any time. But for now, I’m connected via WiFi, And my new laser mouse worked from its initial installation. My fancy new phone connects w/o a single problem. I will need to install Office in order to have full synchronization. But for now, my phone doesn’t mind the new system one bit. Too bad the Bluetooth drivers aren’t available for the M4. It would be nice to sync w/o wires.
5. I really like the sidebar. The widgets seem to work very well. And I can’t wait for the client community to develop a library as rich as the Yahoo! Widgets library.
6. I am finally getting used to the features in IE7. I use IE7 in WinXP. But one of the key featurs wasn’t really visible until this build. The new IE uses a completely new RSS feed store. And there are many other applications [in Vista] that now use the consolidated feed store. I think I relly like the RSS sidebar widget. I was able to spin through all the feeds that I had previously subscribed to within IE7. Oh well. I guess I’m a sucker for gizmos.
There is a whole lot more that I need to explore – including all of the features that will excite the enterprise security and management crowd. And I really want to dig into the multimedia experience (ala, Media Center capabilites). But for now, you can color me impressed.
-CyclingRoo-

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“Always On” With Windows Mobile 5

Lorin Olsen

Phew. It’s been a hectic (but thrilling) couple of days. First, I lost my phone earlier this week. Yup. After having a mobile phone for over a decade, I’ve lost my first handset. Apart from the frustration of needing to trace my steps for a six hour period, there was one good thing that happened: I needed to buy a new phone.

So my first challenge was selecting a carrier. That was simple. I chose Sprint. First, I was an employee for 18 1/2 years. Second, my retirement will be, in part, through Sprint. So I care about their success. Third, I do like their service. I’ve never had a problem with service. But this time, I get to experience the “full-on” user experience. And it wasn’t bad at all. They deactivated my service w/o any questions. OK. That’s not a high bar to hurdle. But they were very helpful in cleaning up my old service and transferring my phone number to a separate account (so that I could separate business from family expenses). And the staff in the retail store were great. They were polite and informed. And they seemed to be working for me and my best interests – not just the maximum revenue opportunity.

Once I decided to stay with Sprint, I needed to select a new phone. I chose the Sprint PPC 6700. I love this phone. First, it runs Windows Mobile 5. Yeah, I hear the groans. But WM5 is really quite nice. It has a good phone interface. And it has exceptional integration with Outlook. For me, these two facts are reason enough to buy a WM5-enabled phone. I now have all my contacts synced with my phone. And I can single tap a call from any contact. Just wait to I voice-enable the dialing!

In the meantime, I’ll settle for having my IM presence surfaced through my phone. It’s odd to know that I am “available” as long as I have my phone turned on. I will really have to remember to set my IM status before and after every meeting – lest I get an IM message at an inopportune time.

So I decided on the service and the phone. And the purchase experience was excellent. But I really am dissatisfied witht the Sprint web management experience. The system is complete, but disjointed. You have to know where things are in order to change your plan, service and features. That is a terrible distraction for end users. The interface should be mercifully intutive. Strangely enough the Virgin Mobile folks seem to know how to do this end of the phone business. But I am digressing….

Likes/Dislikes
————–

PPC6700: I like it. I have heard horror stories about repairs. I hope I missed out on that aspect of the early-adopter experience. 7.5 points

Windows Mobile 5: I love it. It’s simple and intuitive. Since my life is on a Windows system, Windows Mobile is a natural extension of what I do every day. 8.5 points

Multimedia: Ausgezeichnet! My biggest joy is that I can take any WMA file and use it as a ringtone. This is great. I have a huge library of MP3 files. And I use the Sony Acid Music suite. So I can convert any/all of my music to useable ringtones. 9 points

Retail Store experience: Great people; extremely helpful (including finding ways to lower my monthly bill w/o losing features/functions). 8.5 points

Sprint’s Web Presence: The low point of the experience. But I knew this going in. After three years of outsourcing development, the web presence feels old and creaky. It needs a face-lift. 5 points

All in all, I’m happy with my new setup.

-CyclingRoo-

Tags: ,

"Always On" With Windows Mobile 5

Lorin Olsen

Phew. It’s been a hectic (but thrilling) couple of days. First, I lost my phone earlier this week. Yup. After having a mobile phone for over a decade, I’ve lost my first handset. Apart from the frustration of needing to trace my steps for a six hour period, there was one good thing that happened: I needed to buy a new phone.
So my first challenge was selecting a carrier. That was simple. I chose Sprint. First, I was an employee for 18 1/2 years. Second, my retirement will be, in part, through Sprint. So I care about their success. Third, I do like their service. I’ve never had a problem with service. But this time, I get to experience the “full-on” user experience. And it wasn’t bad at all. They deactivated my service w/o any questions. OK. That’s not a high bar to hurdle. But they were very helpful in cleaning up my old service and transferring my phone number to a separate account (so that I could separate business from family expenses). And the staff in the retail store were great. They were polite and informed. And they seemed to be working for me and my best interests – not just the maximum revenue opportunity.
Once I decided to stay with Sprint, I needed to select a new phone. I chose the Sprint PPC 6700. I love this phone. First, it runs Windows Mobile 5. Yeah, I hear the groans. But WM5 is really quite nice. It has a good phone interface. And it has exceptional integration with Outlook. For me, these two facts are reason enough to buy a WM5-enabled phone. I now have all my contacts synced with my phone. And I can single tap a call from any contact. Just wait to I voice-enable the dialing!
In the meantime, I’ll settle for having my IM presence surfaced through my phone. It’s odd to know that I am “available” as long as I have my phone turned on. I will really have to remember to set my IM status before and after every meeting – lest I get an IM message at an inopportune time.
So I decided on the service and the phone. And the purchase experience was excellent. But I really am dissatisfied witht the Sprint web management experience. The system is complete, but disjointed. You have to know where things are in order to change your plan, service and features. That is a terrible distraction for end users. The interface should be mercifully intutive. Strangely enough the Virgin Mobile folks seem to know how to do this end of the phone business. But I am digressing….
Likes/Dislikes
————–
PPC6700: I like it. I have heard horror stories about repairs. I hope I missed out on that aspect of the early-adopter experience. 7.5 points
Windows Mobile 5: I love it. It’s simple and intuitive. Since my life is on a Windows system, Windows Mobile is a natural extension of what I do every day. 8.5 points
Multimedia: Ausgezeichnet! My biggest joy is that I can take any WMA file and use it as a ringtone. This is great. I have a huge library of MP3 files. And I use the Sony Acid Music suite. So I can convert any/all of my music to useable ringtones. 9 points
Retail Store experience: Great people; extremely helpful (including finding ways to lower my monthly bill w/o losing features/functions). 8.5 points
Sprint’s Web Presence: The low point of the experience. But I knew this going in. After three years of outsourcing development, the web presence feels old and creaky. It needs a face-lift. 5 points
All in all, I’m happy with my new setup.
-CyclingRoo-

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More of the New Hotness!

Lorin Olsen

How many of you were wondering if I’d ever post stuff again? Well, I started wondering the same thing and realized that I was the only one who could do something about it. So here it is [drumroll, please].
We’ve been really busy rolling out all sorts of new trinkets. Some of it is beta software. Some of it is beta in name only. All of these things are part of the massive wave of change that Microsoft is going to deliver to its customers.
Here is the quick list, for now:
MSN Messenger 8.0 (aka, Live Messenger): I got my hands on this one yesterday. Its a great next step in communications. I love the fact that our clients now interact with IM tools from most other services. For example, I seamlessly communicate with AIM users, Yahoo! users and even ICQ users. You may be saying that this is not new. Well, you’re right about that. You could have used Gaim or Trillian and accomplished the same thing for over a year. But this is the first client from a service provider. No, it’s not Microsoft’s first universal client. If you’ve used the Office Communicator, you’ve been able to work with other service providers for quite some time. But this is the first time a service provider is offering gateway capabilities. [Note: In this version of the beta, I’m having some trouble with external providers. But I expect these minor challenges to be resolved shortly.] At the same time, the new Messenger featurs VOIP integration – including the ability to launch a SIP connection from the IM client. Will we offer a connection to the PSTN? I don’t know. It sure would be nice. But I do know that such connections are technically possible. We just need to decide if we will do that or leave it to VoIP services (like Skype) or the telcos. Wow! It won’t be long until the time when we can seamlessly communicate between traditional phones, computers and wireless phones. And that communciations will be via both text and audio. And with Apple beating the video drum, maybe we will start to see point-to-point video communications start to emerge. Boy, I love technology!
Windows Defender: I’ve been using the Microsoft Anti-Spyware tool since it was first released in beta form. And for those who didn’t know it, this is the product that MSFT bought from Giant. So it’s been a beta product and freely avaialble for quite some time. And now the product is in its second version. I can’t say how much longer the beta program will last. But I expect that we will continue to offer this as a core component of our Windows offering. After all, security is a key component in availability and manageability. The new version has some excellent visual touches. But even more important are the management and security aspects of the tool. The tool has additional feautres to secure against rootkits (like the Sony XCP exploit). In addition, Windows Defender is now a full-fledged service (including WMI capabilities). The tool does not yet include an anti-virus capability. But Microsoft will be offering a fee-based product/service that includes anti-virus defense as well. The first version of this will come in the Windows One Care Live offering. And a comprehenisve, enterprise version will be released as Microsoft Client Protection. But for now, the Windows Defender is one of the best products around – and it’s available in beta form today.
-CyclingRoo-

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