Archive for October, 2007
Early thoughts about Leopard
I installed Leopard on monday and overall I’m really happy with it. I won’t go through all the new features but will rather point out those that matter to me.
- A2DP is finally supported, now I can select my Plantronics A2DP headset out of the box without the need of a jack adapter
- Mail got smarter, it understands the contents of your mail and grabs a phone number or date and let you create a new event in one click
Finally, Time machine rox and Safari still sux 
Week-end !
I’m the king of the connected devices world ! On Titanic at least
Technorati Tags: secondlife
Today’s connected devices
The postman arrived today with a couple of toys :
Firstly the latest NAS from Linksys, called NAS200, it features 2 slots for SATA drives and manages raid 0/1, plus two usb2 ports to connect a external hard drive. Press the backup button and your internal disks gets backed up on the external one… sw33t… the good solution for semi-professionnal data management for SMBs + the firmware is under Linux and provides UPnP capabilities. The design is pretty neat and could quite well hide in your home too. 150€ wo hard drives
Secondly, the I-Mate Momento Wi-Fi photoframe. Pretty disappointing experience - the software is really slow, setting up live feeds from flickr is limited to entering a rss url - which is really limitative - finally it took me about 30 mins this morning to set it up and it wasn’t able to connect to my main WiFi network for some reason. Last but not least it’s a Windows SideShow devices and works like a charm with Windows Media Player - that is when you have a Windows media player (viva iTunes). 150€ and a lot of deception. The 7″ screen is pretty bad qulity, way behind the Philips frames which remain the standard for that kind of devices.
Waiting for Leopard
I preordered the Family (office) pack last week… hope to get it tomorrow ! I’m especially waiting for the Bluetooth A2DP support
Anyway… can’t wait !
WiMax Mobile - a couple of thoughts
As you may have already read throughout the entire Web, the technology behind WiMax Mobile, called OFDMA, has been integrated as a standard of 3G telephones. That means that in Europe, a mobile operator ( Orange, BT…) could now deploy a WiMax Mobile network legally. Jus to remind you the promises of WiMax mobile extend to a 70Mb/s data rate and a IP oriented protocol providing QoS and everything you need to create true data services based on mobile devices.
Well … so what ? Although Franck, my CTO, is convinced that this opens up a whole bunch of new opportunities for new devices, I really don’t see any gain compared to HSDPA/HSUPA already available on regular operator’s networks. I only see optimisations but no real breakthrough as imho the mobile Internet is already a reality - only the unlimited data plans are truly missing to make it come true. And still there is no real breakthrough in term of service, HSDPA modems are slowly making their way into laptops, maybe instead of being HSDPA there will be WiMax chip instead ( haven’t compared their specs in term of power consumption) but still 3G is really enough for mobile access, and 3g+ is really fast enough to browse any video savvy web service or to upload a tons of stuff…
To read more check this doc from the WiMax alliance
Not blogging too often lately…
Sorry about that but as some of you may now, we have huge operations going on @ WaveStorm, both financial and technical/online services. You iPhone owners will be the first served and I’m sure you’ll love it ! Anyway with all that workload + baby to take care of I’m spending just as much time as before reading the news but can’t take as much time to give you my insights on the hundreds of items marked on my newslist 
bear with it, I promise this will get back to normal in q1 (as things go I expect Georges to be able to blog in a couple of months :p )
Technorati Tags: georges
Wii browser comes with Flash
You might already know that, but just for fun I bought the Opera browser for my Wii game console (only trying to play zelda on it… and I progress really really slowly, in 2 months played 3 hrs anothed 47hrs to go == 1year ). Anyway, what a surprise to see that it comes with a flash player and thus lets you see YouTube , vpod, & others online video clips !
What I’m really missing on this console is a way to stream media to it, just like Sony is proposing with its SonyHome platform. If one of my beloved readers know an entry point @ Nintendo, let me know
Technorati Tags: game+console, nintendo, wii
iPhone opened to third parties apps … at last!
Major switch from Apple… iPhone and iPod Touch are finally getting an official SDK, here is an excerpt from the press release :
We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.
We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.
S\|\|33T !
Nokia upgrades its S60 UI
It’s been announced yesterday at the Symbian S60 Show
This includes multi-touch support (like iPhone UI), Accelerometers, Flash 3 (supporting YouTUBE Videos).
Vodafone on Second Life
Vodafone just launched the InsideOut service in Second Life, and thus outrunned BT who was racing ahead….
I’m gonna review the service tonight, it basically lets you place calls and send sms from within Second Life. It’s an awesome example of how to bridge the two worlds which goes pretty much in the direction taken by SL-Messenger.
Technorati Tags: mobile, second+life, vodafone
