OK, OK, so the stores didn’t get completely made over. I know that the stores I did see they were remodeled. But as far as I saw they all said Cingular. The web site has been rebranded with at&t and the web address has even been changed. so that’s that.
Archive for the ‘UPDATE’ Category
Dell has been absent from the PDA scene for a while now. Development has been halted sense the middle of 2005, when it was rolled into their to the notebook segment. This was also when Dell’s TDC (Taiwan Design Center) completed the last Axim device.
According to the sources, Dell’s TDC switched all PDA-related R&D resources to the notebook segment in the middle of 2005, following the company’s plan of reducing the number of its R&D staff at its handheld device division at the end of 2004. Dell has not announced new PDAs for almost a year and PDA products that it currently offers are old models that were introduced in 2004, indicated the sources. In addition, the PC vendor has not shown any moves in the PDA phone and GPS-enable PDA segments, the sources noted.
It would appear that Dell is not interested in the phone converged devices or GPS enabled devices paths that other device manufactures have taken. Wistron the major manufacture of the Axim X5 PDA for Dell, released in 2002, announced they would no longer be producing the device August 2004. But hey a 2 year old device is quite old. Not to mention Dell had switched to HTC for production.
As reported in August 2004, Wistron, which used to be a major PDA supplier for Dell, decided to discontinue its production of PDAs. The Taiwan supplier had been producing the Axim X5 PDA for Dell since the model was introduced in 2002, but then Dell decided to outsource its Axim X30, to HTC.
As I had previously reported (Dell Axims Done?) on, what are Dell’s intentions for this device segment? Guess we’ll have to wait and see longer.
Original: PPCT - Dell, What’s the story?
Sources: DigiTimes - Dell stops PDA Dev
Sources: PPCT - Farewell Dell
Sources: The AnderNaut - Dell Axims Done?
Beta 2 Participation:
The Windows Vista Public Beta 2 is no longer available. They have reached the number of participants need for the “public” beta testing.
Thank you for your interest in Windows Vista. The Customer Preview Program is now closed. We have reached our program capacity and no new orders are being accepted. We apologize for any inconvenience.
For registered customers who have received a Product Key the download sites will remain open until Friday, July 14.
The information on this page is intended for Customer Preview Program participants. Participants will receive an e-mail message with additional information when Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is available later this year. Thank you for testing Windows Vista.
DVD Burn issue:
There also appears to be issues when burring the DVD for Vista Beta download at max speed. Microsoft is recommending that you use 1x or 2x speed for the “highest quality” burn of the disk from the Public Beta site.
Using a DVD burner and software, burn the ISO image of Windows Vista Beta 2 to a new blank DVD. We recommend burning at the lowest speed supported by your DVD burner (1X or 2X) to ensure the highest quality. Most DVD burning software will recognize an ISO file. If your software does not automatically recognize this format, refer to the software’s “Help” section for instructions.
It is also a good idea to run a CRC check as specified in the latest release notes for the latest build, 5456.5.
When burning your DVDs please do so at 1x or 2x and CRC them when done using the CRC utility posted on the Connect site. The customer experience improvement telemetry that we’ve been getting back on Beta 2 shows that not quite three quarters of setup failures are the result of a failure to read from the media. Testing shows that burning at slower speeds greatly increases the chances of a good burn.
So there you go, keep that in mind when burring the Vista Beta DVD , there is a three in four chance that it will fail. Or, you can just use VM which just mounts the ISO downloaded and skips the whole burning process.
The robots are coming, the robots are coming…
I have the tune running through my head, make it stop. Hey maybe if I share it “Transformers more than meets the eye…”. I like the look of the logo they have for the movie, . The teaser that was released shows a very quick glimpse of Mars. Who knows if that has anything to do with the movie, but it still looked really cool. With DreamWorks as the studio it should be a good movie. It is being directed by Michael Bay who has done several other action movies.
Transformers
7.4.7
UPDATE: Here is the teaser in QuickTime format, courtesy of Movie List. Thanks for the heads up my friend Michael.
Microsoft has released a new beta of Internet Explorer 7, Beta 3, to download. There have been improvements to reliability, compatibility, user features, and security. Even though Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 was layout complete, they have made some changes based on customer feedback. The Internet Explorer Administration Kit 7 Beta 2 is also available.
It would appear that Microsoft has released an evaluation to kick the tires (in keeping with the test drive theme) of the Office 2007 System Beta. Now you don’t have to spend the time waiting to download or have the it mailed. The Test Drive does require that you have a Live ID, what they are now calling Passport accounts. The Test Drive is provided through a Citrix MetaFrame session (a software solution that allows for virtual desktop sessions running on a server), and as pointed out by the article on ArsTechica is not a display of web application capabilities of Office 2007. Once you get through the registration it puts you in queue for the next available session to open. My wait was started with 80 minutes, ended up taking about 11 minutes.
The biggest change and the item that is going to have the highest learning curve will be the Ribbon Bar. The new Ribbon Bar is replacing the nearly two decade old Button Bar implementation, along with redesign of the menu system. A brief look through the applications the core applications thing do not seem to have changed on the surface for other looks, feels, and layouts.
I am currently debating going strictly beta for a few weeks, Vista, Office, etc. to really test the waters of the applications. There was an update (SmartPhone Thoughts) to the new Device Center sync tool in Vista that will allow me to sync with my Windows Mobile devices which will resolve one of the biggest issues I was having.
As a side note it also appears that a new Vista Build was released to a select number of Beta Testers that is putting rest some of the comments about the product being ready for its planned release date, and also a bit of a new question, why this latest was not the Vista Beta 2 release.
Microsoft ships first post-Beta 2 build of Vista
Microsoft released the first post-Beta 2 version of Windows Vista last week, sans fanfare, but it does have some interesting features. For starters, it installs in 30 minutes and is more stable than Beta 2. There’s also more consistency in the interfaces, improved network detection and browsing improvements within Internet Explorer 7. Even the mouse cursor is improved, with no more rough edges. Why wasn’t this version the official Beta 2 in the first place?Fierce Enterprise - Newsletter June 27, 2006
Well I have a had a few days now to play with the new version of Minimo and to say the least I am liking what I seen so far. Minimo is now up to version .016 and coming along quite nicely. One of the first things I have noticed is the new icons for the softkey menus. The settings and action menu has a icon of a globe, the navigation has an icon that looks to be captains wheel. The menu font has been formatted for an easier read. The address bar and softkey menus now adjust to be above the keyboard, sip, when data entry is needed. As apposed to being behind the sip making it hard to enter URLs. The size of the install has been reduced a bit to make it more convenient to install in memory, or persistence storage for Windows Mobile 5, allowing it running faster and smoother. The running memory footprint has also been reduced allowing more to be running on you Windows Mobile device, as part of that each new tab opened does not scarf down the memory like it has in past versions. This reduction in memory usage allows more applications to be running or even more tabs to be open in Minimo itself. Home Bar icons have been updated to be more visible and cleaner. Running the Minimo on my i-mate JAMin was a little slow, and took a while to load when opened the first time with version .015, with version .016 it has a much snappier response time and loads up much quicker. One thing I did find that needs to be fixed was that when setting the Home Page(s) it includes the Preferences page. Thanks Doug for the hard work you and your team are putting into this.
That wasn’t to hard, importing the posts were quite easy. All I had to do was save the posts to a RSS 2.0 XML file and then import the files. And so know I am officially supporting http://andernaut.com as my primary site. Now I just need to look into what I can do for redirection option from the andernaut.wordpress.com site. I did run into one little snag, there was not a RSS entry for my first blog entry, and had to create a file by had to import.
Can’t wait to here about the feed back.
I am in the final stages of moving my site. Basically what I have left is to do is move the most and other data over to the new site. I have gotten my development site up and going so I can test and try new things without upsetting my sit. So right now the Production site is kind of bear. Thank you for your patients in this transitions.
I opened a new browser window this evening and got a glimpse of a new look for MSN. Now I'm pretty sure that I have not seen this over the past couple of days, but then again I haven't been doing much searching that I can remember. At the top they have the MSN Search bar with the going options right above the text box. Then it has a bar saying welcome, and restore defaults on the left and on the left there is a SIGNIN/SIGNOUT with five colored boxes allowing you to change the color scheme to the web site, Blue, White, Green, Orange, and red. I personally like the orange. Below that there is a box with several columns, 6 to be exact. The first one contains Hotmail, Messenger and My MSN in bold blue letters and there respective icons, the other five colums contain a listing, or directory of other content subjects from MSN. The rest of the page is a two column format normal information displayed on MSN's home page. News and information on the right and entertainment and editorials on the left. Make sure to leave me a comment if I'm just seeing things or actually not seeing things if this might be the case. I just can't remember if I've seen the MSN home page lately.
UPDATE (05/06/2006 05:47):At first the new MSN would only load every other time. So I decided to try another computer and that one continued to load the old site. The new site can be viewed at beta.msn.com. In my searching I have also stumbled across the much updated MSN Search page, where you can actually tweak your search results, just click Search Builder and then Results Ranking, come on give it a try.
