Review: Cingular 8525

I know I gave the Treo 680 a great review here on my blog but the truth of the matter is that like I said in the reivew the battery life sucks. And I mean it sucked, two batteries a day was hardly what I would call acceptable. So I went down to my local Cingular store and at the behest of my buddy I bought a new Cingular 8525. Up to this point I had not used Windows Mobile since the 2003 model, and since then only Palm devices running Palm OS (Garnet OS now).

To save the suspense…this is the best smartphone that I have used to date.

Mac Apps for new users.

A friend and coworker of mine is moving from Windows to Mac OS X. I have been putting together a collection of Apps for him to install on his computer when it comes tomorrow. There are many of these lists out there, but this is mine. I have also included widgets and such. NOTE: I am listing free programs as well as expensive ones.

Lets get going.

1. Adium

This is the ultimate when it comes to multi-protocol IMing on the Mac. If you must use Yahoo, Jabber, Google Talk, or MSN, you need this program. FREE

2. Adobe Acrobat Pro 8

This is expensive, but if you need to do more with PDFs than just view print and create them. Such as forms, commenting and collaboration. There are a lot of programs seeking to fill this gap for less, but Acrobat 8 is way better than most of these, for power users at-least. NOT CHEAP

Review: Samsung YP-K5 1gb

A friend of mine gave me a Samsung YP-K5 MP3 player yesterday, and let me tell you this is a sweet device. For those of you who don’t really know what this is, it is a nice little MP3 player that also has built in speakers, google it, very cool. I know you are all probably thinking, why would I want this, I have 4 iPods and I use a Mac. iPods are the best.

Well yes, iPods are the best, and still are my opinions have not changed. But this is a very cool MP3 player. You can get it in up to 4gb, and yeah it is much bigger than say my Nano, but that does not have a speaker on it. This thing is sweet. The sound that comes out of the built in speakers is very good. You are thinking it probably is not that great.

Do not get me wrong it is not as good as big speakers and does not have huge range. But clearly it is better than my laptop speakers and they are certainly worth listening to. And you do listen to them, all the time in fact. The screen also changes from portrait to landscape automatically upon flipping out the speakers.

Outlook and iCal invitations.

I have been trying to get iCal and Outlook invitations to play nicely with each other the past couple of days. There are a couple of problems with this. First I will cover the ones on the Mac side.

Mac Issues.

The way that Outlook send invitations to Macs vary, sometimes depending on the computer and version of Outlook you get them just like any other invitation, then other times it is just plain text, and still other times it is an unreadable file. You can use a plug-in for Mail called OMiC that makes this much more readable and manageable.

Quick Look: eFax

A few months back I decided to use eFax for fax purposes in the newest company that I am a part of. There were many deciding factors, mainly the fact that I would not have to buy a fax machine, nor a fax line, and that all my faxes would automatically be on my computer, nice.

So we have been using it ever since. I really like the service, it works as advertised. The faxes that come in are not the best quality, but I think that this is not a eFax issue so much as Fax in general. My biggest complaint about the service is the speed of it.

Review: Acer AL2223W

I have been having problems with the Princeton 20″ monitor I had connected to my Mac mini at work. (Original Mac mini G4 1.42ghz). So I returned it to Costco and picked up the Acer AL2223W from Newegg.com. This is a good looking monitor, and it is big. The color and crispness is far better than the Princeton one, though not as good as my Apple Cinema Display at home.

[Digg]

All in all I really like this new monitor, though I have been having one problem. And I think it may be the computers fault not the monitors.

iPhone costs vs pricing.

So bouncing around the internet, and Digg are stories that state the iPhone costs anywhere from $245 to $280 to make even though Apple is selling it for twice that. The general reaction to this seems to be either hope that this may mean the price will drop, or they are pissed that Apple is over charging for the device.

Here is the thing, if you ignore business 101 and you know the whole concept of profits there is one thing that you should remember. And it is this:

When will the Cell Phone take over?

When will the cell phone take over as the single communication device that people need?

That is a question that I have been posing to myself for a while now, and it seems that the answer changes almost on a monthly basis, if not sooner. Technology is changing everyday and with that the cell phone usually takes steps forward in this direction, but sometimes it does take a step backwards. For me I have been using my cell phone as my only personal phone since college, but it is still not my only communication device.

For instance I still have a Skype Wi-Fi phone at my house with Skype in services, though I never call out with it, I give the number to banks and other such entities so that I can insure the calls that I receive on my cell phone are only the ones that I want. I also have a phone at my desk at work, it is nice, a new system (installed just a week ago), but even still I only receive calls on it, I rarely use it to make calls.

Office 2007, a bad upgrade

There has been a lot going around about Office 2007 and the ribbon interface. After seeing some screenshots of Office 2008 for the Mac I am worried, as these look ugly.

IT Wire sums up the ribbon interface well:

If we are to replace the menu interface of Office, then we should replace it with something more intuitive. What Microsoft has given us with Office 2007 is something less intuitive – and it wants us to pay for it!

No doubt, if kids grow up using a Ribbon instead of menus, the Ribbon will become second nature. However, in the meantime we adults (or at least many of us) would prefer to keep using what we’re familiar with until something better comes along. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet.

Pzizz me to sleep…

A while back now I purchased the Pzizz program energizer and sleep module, and have been loving it ever since. So what exactly is this? Well it is a program that you can either run on your Mac or generate mp3 files for your iPod to listen to when you need / want to take a nap or go to sleep for the night. They are different each night, but contain similar things.

While I have only used the nap function a couple of times it worked well and I got up at the time I wanted to with no problems.