In the anticipation of getting my N73 I’ve been shopping for accessories - and have speculatively purchased a few which are now pending delivery.

I personally find the normal phone keyboard of number keys + t9m, handwriting to be both too awkward and slow to accurately use - you certainally can’t type a long doc on them.      Blackberry proper qwerty keyboards I personally prefer - and I have used blackberryies in the past to jot notes down while doing prep work for acquistions (normally equating to several pages of a4).

So.. what have I brought?   A bluetooth mini credit card sized keyboard.

Should arrive today, key advantage in it fixes my problem on almost every mobile/smartphone out there - allowing the use of decent phones in decent form factors… and thus not needing a brick of a mobile.

Other item I brought was a GPS receiver to allow use of TomTom on the mobile, and with a dual-use to be used when surveying wifi-hotspots on my laptop.

Very happy as I brought both on ebay for under 50 pounds combined, when they retail at > 100!

What mobile gadgets do you use with your mobile?

As reported in arstechnica - Upgrade Licenses for Vista now appear not be also to be fresh installed.

In my opinion this is wrong in so many ways - it certainally is making me reconsider my personal Vista upgrade (I was going to buy a new home PC with XP MCE, with an upgrade license to Vista included in the next 3 months.

I don’t think I’m unusal that when I install a new OS, I move all data off the box, install fresh copy, then reinstalled needed SW only. Gnerally I find this gives a significant performance boost. Installing XP, patch, installing Vista will make the whole process nasty and take longer.

Microsoft need to sort their lcensing system - to be fair, I wouldn’t even mind if my license checked to the Internet before it trying an install. All these draconian measures though just alienate me, and make me less likely to use Vista.

On a futher note, the choice between 32 bit and 64 bit Vista doesn’t appear clear to me. In my opionion, all Vista should be made to be a common platform - this 32bit/64 bit devide that exists right now is annoying - and M$ should supply both to all purchasers - as I see it right now, I have a choice.. Fact is, ideally both should be installed with option at boot as to which you want to use. Now Solaris has been able to do this for years (choice of booting 32bit/64bit kernel of OS is quite an easy procedure on Sun boxes that are 10 years old) - why can’t microsoft?

In the like of the iPhone, I thought I may hold off on a new phone… then the inevitable, my old workhorse SE T630 died..

My dilema was get another cheap phone or buy new….

Now background:
I already have a very old Blackberry for mobile email in addition to the T630 for voice, so this isn’t that important, calling, and other features are far more important to me.

Last week I was pariculararly impreseed with the 3 network, as several friends have several N series (N80’s) Nokias on 3.     I was impressed mostly with the speed… and level of content it terms of music etc available on the handset.   Also impressed tom-tom can be loaded so phone becomes sat-nav with suitable bluetooth gps reciever fitted to car (30 quid off ebay).

In the end, I decided new phone has to be 3 as they have abolished roaming charges, and luckily for me, there are 3 networks in most of the places work sends me typically - in Italy, Sweden, Denmark and HK (only exception really being the USA).   3 have abolished all data and roaming fees if on a “3 network” abroad.   Amazingly useful.

So once this was decided, investigated what I needed.    Now when travelling work pay for wi-fi for the laptop, and nowadays that means can work pretty much everywhere.   I don’t need data on the handset to link to the phone - as Blackberry covers email use abroad cheaply (work pays) as well as other basics.    What I need is a personal handset that does Internet etc from the inevitable bus/train journeys to/from airports and to/from London every week.

X-series from 3 on a Nokia N73 at this point became the only option, so I’ve ordered one with the gold pack for TV on the move from my Skybox at home.   Its luxurious yes, and probably won’t be used that often, but I realised the other day when stuck on the train for the upteenth time missing the start of a football match that actually you can do something abuot this today.   X-series includes 80 hrs of tv, lots of skype minutes (yes skype on a mobile!), msn messanger, in addition to 1Gb of bandwidth for use on stuff that isn’t the above!   I’ve never been bothered with podcasts as actually connecting mp3 player to computer every day to download seems annoying - now I can get them on the move direct to the handset, and look up new ones.
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I will update with what my actual impressions are of using the handset month in/out next week.

Apple’s new phone looks nice.

I had an Ericcson P800 which had a pen-driven approach and full mode (you could remove the flip alltogether). The screen tech does appear unique and the interface an improvement over the P800.

What bugs me though is the lack of software support. 3rd party software may crash the phone, but it won’t break the network!

The other thing is its a GPRS phone… too slow.

I’ll wait for iPhone rev:2 which will probably allow 3rd party software and be 3g. In the meantime, I’ll probably end up buying a Windows mobile phone.

I’ve just finished a very large project building a major network then moving a few thousand servers across the atlantic (using all kinds of clever tricks so users dont notice the performance hit - which I will likely blog about later), which is the main computing environment for ~ 10k people.

Issue is the project is now “officially” done, as the top 100 applications have been moved.    Okay, so what about the 600 non-top application that are used by 10-15 people each on average.   Are these not important as they havn’t been done yet, and ~400 servers actually remain running live apps..

More importantly what about the decommisioning of the old place - that is the removal of all actual kit, racks etc (build-new as part of move was the process) - conservatively we have already estimiated moving the 100 remaining servers into a new room (management etc boxes) after moving the above 400 servers to US.   remaining, removing/moving all fibre, coax, copper etc will take longer than the actual project to move the main football pitch sized room.

As is typical in such progress a lot of people got made redundant in the work.    So now we have less people, no official project (right now in limbo), and more work.

If this wasn’t the first time this had happened to me, I’d be surprised - it has happened in every large project I have ever worked on so far in multiple large companies.

That is the important tidy-up work gets pushed “out of scope” and either does not get done - or you end up with a 2nd project which is cleverly worded to be different from the first, or finally the work is done very slowly (this is the route taken on the last mop-up which took 3 years).    We expect to hear in the next week which route we will be taking this time.