Now the laptop I have been supplied with here at Dennis Towers has Office 2003 on it, which is perfectly adequate, but having used Office 2007, I had a hankering to go back to it.

Bad idea. In fact, right now, I’m writing these words using OpenOffice Writer. The problem is that though I only wanted Word 2007, Equipt forces you to install the whole kit and caboodle, which includes OneCare, which I really didn’t need as all PCs at Dennis run F-Secure anti-virus, which seems to do its job perfectly fine. Having installed OneCare, my machine definately felt more sluggish, no doubt due to the overhead of having two pieces of AV software.

However, the bigger issue was Word as when it came to saving a file I received the message that, “Word cannot complete the save, due to a file permission error”, to which, drawing on my years on PC technical experience, my response was, “what!”.

Now this is the sort of thing that you might get if you’re saving over a network, or onto a removable drive and something has got it’s knickers in a twist, but simply saving a file to my local hard disk should not be beyond the powers of Word 2007.

Googling for this error finds many entries, with earlier instances of Word and with both Vista and Windows XP, but after some research the blame seems to be pointing at OneCare. Several forum posts suggested that simply removing OneCare would get rid of the problem, but having done so, with alacrity, it does not, in any way, seem to have done the trick. So I have a shiny installation of Word 2007, that I can’t actually use to save files.

So the power of OpenSource software has come to the resuce, and OpenOffice 3 Writer is currently on my system, and until I solve my little Word problem, will be my primary application. No, it’s not as good as Word 2007, but it can save files, which right now, makes it a darn sight more useful.

So while I’m too embarrassed to tell my IT department, or indeed my editor, that I’ve ballsed up my own perfoectly functioning Word installation for no good reason, I’m instead announcing it to the world right here. So if anyone’s got any pearls of wisdom on this one, I’d be most grateful.

And thank you OneCare, you won’t be missed.

Each of the three new designs comes under the ‘Product Red’ banner. Now, if you’re not aware, Product Red is a scheme where different companies produce special red versions of their products, and a portion of the profits of each one goes to a fund that supports the fight against the awful AIDS and HIV epidemic that still blights Africa. Buy one of the notebooks and Dell donates $20 to The Global Fund.

Dell has offered a number of Product Red offerings in the past, including notebooks, printers and the slimline XPS desktop it released earlier this year. Other companies part of the programme include Apple (remember Red U2 iPod edition), Gap, and Armani – so Dell fits right in there.

Of course, Product Red is a fine, noble, and unfortunately very necessary cause, so if you were thinking of buying a Dell, far be it from me to discourage a purchase.

The thing is, and with Product Red in mind I can’t help but get a little bit embarrassed when I see a company such as Dell, do something ‘funky’. It’s like watching your Dad dance – Just Plain Wrong.

In fact, you might recall, when Dell introduced those first Product Red offerings we had the launched we had the Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Bono, appearing together and grinning, like the Holy Trinity. And as far a cool goes it was truly embarrassing Dad with Uncool Uncles.

Bill Gates is well, Bill Gates (see awkward and quickly canned Seinfeld ads), Michael Dell looks like David Brent’s irritating boss, Neil, from The Office, and Bono needs those silly glasses he always wears to make sure we don’t mistake him for a homeless (as Ali G would say).

So a Dell notebook with a brilliant piece of artwork infused onto the back is great ‘n all, but when you’ve opened it up and you start working you’re still looking at a Dell (not artwork) and Windows Vista (say no more).

Is there an option on the Dell web page to donate $20 – and then go buy an Apple?

That all said, the “New World” design by African artist Joseph Amedokpo, does look fantastic, so forget the overpriced Apple and buy that Dell; it’ll be good for your wallet and your soul. And you can at least console yourself with the fact that that upgrade to Windows 7 is only a year or so away…

When you fire it up you are presented with the Earth hanging in space and as you’d expect, you can swivel round and zoom in on any location using the multi-touch finger thing, and use the accelerometer to tilt.

Overall, it’s very similar to the multi-touch table that Jeff Han, an NYU research scientist demoed a couple of years ago – only in your pocket. It integrates Wikipedia pages for points-of-interest and Panoramio pictures too

I for one am looking forward to showing it my four-year old son (nearly five!). Just the other day I was trying to explain the concept of countries to him and was thinking of getting him a globe but this is something he’ll understand straight away.

One does get the sense that this application is currently pushing the iPhone to near its limits and while it works well there are some performance issues. It’s a touch sluggish to be honest, it’s crashed several times on me, and if you’re playing music at the same time, it causes stuttering, so best not to do that.

But it’s a really nicely done application and if you’ve got an iPhone it’s an essential download.

I have to admit though – I’m wondering, is there any real use to Google Earth apart from the fun factor? Does it give you anything in terms of searching for location information that you could get from more conventional Google maps. Ultimately, I think it’s a great whizz bang type app that’ll have you playing with it, when you should be working, (not me, obviously), but I can’t see myself using it as an everyday tool.

Am I wrong?

Naturally, I was expecting the inside to be as cool as the exterior, but really it’s just a train that goes very fast. That said, it’s impressively quiet on the inside, especially considering you’re doing over 200Km per hour (130 miles per hour).

I was slightly surprised that there was no Wi-Fi access on the train at all either – after all we have Wimax powered Wi-Fi on the Heathrow Express. In fact, on my travels in Japan, Wi-Fi was as conspicuous by its absence in many places I expected would offer it. It seems that the Japanese don’t trust it for security reasons and prefer wired connections. MacBook air owners then be-warned – you”ll need to take that USB Ethernet adaptor with you to Japan, and then a USB hub if you need to plug anything else in. (So thin and portable the Air isn’t it).

And finally, while the Japanese love their mobile phones, (I saw many clamshell style models I didn’t recognise, most festooned with lights), they don’t like them to be used inappropriately. You should not use them on public transport for instance, which meant that on the bus to the airport I was spared listening to loud chavy conversations – in fact there was a refreshing lack of chav in Japan as a whole.

Japan is certainly a very different place in terms of language and culture, but there were many aspects I admired. The sense of pride they took in their work and their surroundings, with everything, from streets, to public toilets being clean and tidy.

As a people the Japanese proved to exceptionally welcoming and polite, and I very honoured to have had the opportunity to visit and would recommend that if you get the chance, you should go and visit.

Back to Akihabara though. The great thing about the place is that it shows how much the Japanese love their technology. In the age of buying online, the people here still want to come and see, to play, touch and feel their kit before committing to a purchase.

I enjoyed trying some of the entry-level DSLRs I’m was considering buying such as the Sony Alpha a200, but decided not to buy as generally prices were no better than the cheapest online places in the UK and I haven’t made up my mind yet which one I want. Aside from prices though, where Akihabara  comes into its own is that you can often get stuff here before in comes to Europe or the US.

Ironically, sometimes we get things first. As as I was browsing some netbooks, (Eee PC 900, Acer Aspire One, Dell Inspiron Mini), one very enthusiastic sales guy spotted the HTC Touch Pro I was using. I’ve actually never seen anyone who worked in a shop get so excited and he picked it up and showed it around to his colleagues and then even posed with it for a picture. His face was beaming like a child meeting Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. Very geeky, but completely charming.

Much like Japan in fact.

I had an early taste of the technological as soon as I visited the men’s room after landing at the airport. The toilet seat had an electronic appendage, with buttons down the side – ‘Toilet of Borg’ I dubbed it. To put it delicately, the buttons are there to control direct jets of water onto your, er, delicates, as revealed by the wonderful ‘Engrish’ instructions, - “Equipment to cleaning the buttocks with warm water”.

.

Moving swiftly on, we wanted to locate the nearest coffee shop while we waited for our bus, and did so using an interactive guide on LCD display rather than the conventional method of just walking around.

Later on, we were taken on a tour of a Shinto temple.Japan has two main religions – Shinto and Buddhism and apparently many Japanese celebrate both with no conflict. The temple was a beautiful place set in large and peaceful grounds full of huge trees that were we were told were all brought in my hand.

In the souvenir shop I then spotted mobile phones decorated with traditional images and symbols, such as dragons and dragonflies, as good example as any of Japan’s technological and traditioanl cultures seamlessly merging.

At the rear of each seat I was satisfied to see a display I’d estimate to be about to be about 12in in diameter but disappointingly was standard 4:3 rather than widescreen, which means pan and scan, rather than ‘as the director intended’, as purists are wont to say.

Before I got to play with the toys though I was distracted by the camera on the screens above that showed the tarmac rushing past as we lifted off and then the ground below us. Quite scary really.

Back to the seat and something I found odd was the pocket underneath the screen that was stuffed to overflowing with numerous items, including some slippers and, for some reason, a hanger. (It turns out this is for a jacket. Oh.)

It also contained a pair of headphones - in a bag, but the sort of bag one normally finds sandwiches, which I thought was a bit odd but presumably for hygiene reasons. Now, in my experience airline headphones tend to be an exercise in torture, but these, (Panasonic RP-HC150s if you were wondering), were actually perfectly comfortable.

To my further surprise they had a switch that enabled noise cancelling. This was good though not up to the level of the Sennheiser 450’s I had brought with me. The Panasonic’s however had the double plug that all aircraft headphones insist of using, while naturally the adaptor on my Sennheisers had naturally long been lost.

The remote for the entertainment system, that I discovered was called the MagicBox 3, looked like a double sided mobile phone – a fine little box of tricks it was too. It let you switch between audio and video, adjust the brightness on the display and turn on the light for the seat. The channel selection served up a decent list of movies, (Iron Man, Sex and the City), but I quickly settled down to watching Indiana Jones take on, Russians, nuclear missiles and inter-dimensional beings, which reminded me very much of what happened to me last Tuesday.

What I wasn’t expecting though was that you could actually use the remote to pause proceedings, Sky+ style, which when you have to pause to choose between the chocolate desert or the fruit is quite a boon.

I then discovered buttons on the right hand side of the seat. I like buttons. Up went the footrest, back went the headrest, down went the footrest, up went the footrest - you get the idea.

It didn’t stop there – there was a button on the seat with wavey lines on it that I wasn’t sure what it would do and only after I felt a weird pushing sensation on my back did I realise that my chair was alive! What strange massaging beast was this? I didn’t care for it so off that went.

Though the seat went most of the way back I found that it was too hard to really settle into and I had only a fitful sleep. Though the system was good enough that I never touched the films on laptop, even so, after ten hours the novelty started to pall and I was glad to disembark.

Let’s see what you’ve got Japan.

I’m heading off to Japan as I’ve been invited by Panasonic to the launch of a new Toughbook - its range of industrial strength notebooks that you can drop, throw large amounts of water over, and even drive over in a car, without any ill effects. (I know, because I done all of these). They’re designed for use, quite literally, in the field, and/or by very, very careless executives.

I’ve been to a Toughbook launch before, but this was in Germany, which is fine if you’re into sausages, but otherwise not nearly as cool as Japan.

Any self-respecting tech journo wants to go to the land of the rising sun. It’s the motherland of most of the technology we use every day and it’s a place that every tech journalist needs to visit at some point.. To get into the mood I did my research, and even watched that well known 1982 documentary by Ridley Scott. So when I get there, if I’m not rewarded by real life Transformers, flying cars and menacing androids, I’m have to say I’m going to be quite disappointed.

I’ve also got the rare privilege of flying business class, for only the second time ever long haul, and I’m hoping the techno gadget-fest begins the moment I settle into my padded Japan Airlines seat. If I’m not impressed by what’s on offer I have a couple of DVDs ripped to the hard drive of my laptop (is that legal?) and I’ll even be able to get to the end of them as I’ll have a power socket to plug my computer into. I bet George Michael didn’t get one of those.

One of the highlights though was that I often was in a good place to listen to Radio 4’s comedy half-hour, which consists of some real classics such as Just a Minute and I’m sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Also in this slot was a programme, originally hosted by David Baddiel, called Heresy, where, “opinionated panellists use their wit and wisdom to argue against narrow-minded thinking and received opinions of the day,”  as it says on the BBC Radio 4 web page that described the programme.

I mention all this because the show came to mind after a briefing I had yesterday with a Microsoft to get a demo of its new virtualisation management tool, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Now ‘received opinion’ goes like this: Google – good, Microsoft - evil but I was thrown a curve ball by the fact that the virtualisation guys, Neil and Julius, are as nice a couple of chaps as you could hope to meet. So you clearly don’t have to be evil to work there.

On a practical note it was genuinely useful to actually see a virtualisation tool in action. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t actually run a virtualised server of any description so getting a demo of how it actually works made the whole virtualisation thing, well, a lot more real.

Julius was demoing by making a VPN connection into his test network and viewing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, (which looks just like Outlook) over a remote desktop connection. In turn, the tool gives you then see a snapshot of your virtual hosts and the virtual applications running of each host. It’s all quite zen really when you think about it.

I have to say that while it’s ‘just’ a consumer phone, I think the K800i has a good chance of going down as a bone fide classic in the mobile museum. I’ve had it for two years and it has nary skipped a beat, it’s great to hold, takes fabulous pictures and does that basic phone stuff pretty well too. The thing is that internet access and email have become higher priorities than pictures and so a smartphone seemed to be in order.

Now the obvious choice was the iPhone 3G, but despite really liking using it with the three week trial I had from O2, head won over heart and I’ve resisted the urge to splurge £35 a month plus the £159 for the handset (no, the 8GB would not have been big enough). Instead I’ve taken the O2 Simplicity tariff route – as I’ve got access to other handsets I don’t need my network to give me one so instead I’ve got a tariff that essentially matches the iPhone’s – 600 minutes, 1000 texts and unlimited web access, and all for only £20 a month. Not bad.

The only downside is that I have to endure a Windows Mobile smartphone, currently an HTC Touch Diamond. Now I’m not going to rant or moan here about the frustrations or failures of that handset or indeed of its clunky underlying OS. (In fact, with its recent firmware updates the Touch Diamond hand become noticeably more responsive and therefore easier to use, compared to the device I had when I wrote my review).

No indeed I simply wanted to get my contacts from my K800i into my Touch Diamond. Now I can’t fault Sony Ericsson’ PC software, which has been spruced up since I last had call to use it. It’s fairly slick and I transferred my contacts from the phone over Bluetooth onto my Vista laptop.

The problem was that the laptop didn’t have Outlook on it and as such the contacts were imported into Vista’s new Contacts format. Now while I have no problem with this per se, the fact is that Windows Mobile and Vista contacts won’t play together – to sync with Windows Mobile you need Outlook.

Now having always had Outlook on any given system, I’d never given it much thought, but now I in this situation I realised how unfair it is that Microsoft forces you to pay for a program you might not otherwise want or need, just to be able to sync with your phone. With the Touch Diamond you get a 60 day trial of Outlook 2007 – after that you have to fork out to keep on syncing.

However, as it happens I had a copy or Office 2003 I could install, which I preceded to do. However, though it installed successfully, Outlook refused to launch – giving me a typically bizarre message that “Mapi32.dll was corrupt or the wrong version”, or some such.

Being an experience technical journalist my reaction to this was a measured, “Arrrgghhgghg!”

After much fannying about, the problem turned out to be solved by merely renaming a different file altogether to the one flagged in the error message (MSmapi32.dll) – thanks Microsoft, for that wonderful red herring routine. After that Outlook would happily launch.

However, I then had more fun. I had to get the Windows Vista contacts into Outlook. Not easy. Outlook won’t read them natively, so instead I got Windows Mail to export them to a format that Outlook can see. There are two choices – vCard and CSV. Initially I chose the former and it seems like a recognisable standard, and although it worked, when pulling them into Oulook, it opened each and every one of my contacts vCard and expected me to manually save a close all two hundred or so contacts.

Not likely. Instead I killed than and went for the more basic CSV approach and actually this worked perfectly save for some minor character corruption.

Interestingly, unlike with the non-smartphone, you can’t wirelessly sync on first connection with Windows Mobile using Bluetooth, the initial contact has to be via cable.

So after a painfully protracted process, I had my contacts on my Windows Mobile device.

What I wish was that this sort of thing could be avoided with some simple, preferably over-the-air solution. There are standard such as SyncML, and there are proprietary, and relatively expensive solutions such as setting up an Exchange server or MobileMe on the Mac. But if all you want to do if move your contacts from one phone to another so you don’t have to rekey all of auntie Mable’s numbers every time you change phone, well, there must be a better way.

Anyone know of one? Suggestions gratefully received.