Tablet and Mobile

Archive for July, 2010

At around the same time as Apple brought out the iPad upgrade, along came IOS 4.1.1 for the iPhone. A simply upgrade with, for me at least, no issues at all. One assumes that this upgrade was mainly to fix the rather erroneous  signal bars which tend to over-egg the strength of the incoming 3G signal.

I have to say, I’ve noticed no difference at all, apart from the warm glow of knowing you have the latest upgrades. The big upgrade of course was from 3.2 to 4.0 which gave us multi-tasking and folders. I like folders, having been victim very soon after getting my iPhone to the problem of running out of space for Apps. Good upgrade but as for multi-tasking… well, I’m not sure I see the point. Sure it’s nice to play music in the background but now instead of applications automatically cleaning themselves up when you switch, they now just sit in the background wasting space and I’ve yet to find a utility that will simply close the lot at once at the touch of a button.

Of course the BIG opportunity here was to make SKYPE operate properly, sitting in the background with the phone off and taking incoming calls.  Skype were just about the LAST company to upgrade their products and only this week, coincide with the Apple upgrade, came the notice that Skype could be upgraded.

I was there in minutes, patiently waiting for SKYPE to upgrade and when it finally came together…nothing.. the volume control doesn’t work properly (that’s not unusual, Talking Tom ignores the MUTE button altogether) and as for the multi-tasking… well, you can run other tasks and Skype will indeed answer calls in the background but as soon as you turn the phone off…. that’s it, dead!  Now, it’s not impossible because the iPhone, if you think about it continues to read emails when turned off, it continues to take normal calls – and it definitely leaves the WIFI on because at home I have no mobile signal – and it definitely brings the mail in…  so why can’t SKYPE get their act together and make their produce accept calls with the phone turned off, which would let me abandon the need for a separate SKYPE phone??

Time will tell, no-one else seems to have spotted this yet but they will.

Having had the same difficulty as others with the iPad WIFI, which works but which tends to forget passwords on occasion and generally is not very happy with a multi-router environment, I had high hopes when yesterday I noted that an upgrade was available.

One of the biggest issues I have with the otherwise excellent Apple iPad is the notoriously bad iTunes program. It may be that my computers are all 64-bit, I don’t know, the iTunes on Windows 7 must be the least reliable program I own. It is so slow it hurts, even on a top notch computer and you never know if it’s thinking or it’s crashed. And so yesterday morning I proceeded to try to upgrade the iPad using iTunes on my main PC. Several hours later it was still working on the backup, a process I’ve never really understood because some people say backups take 20 minutes, for others like me it seems to take all day.  The PROBLEM with that of course being that most USB ports don’t have enough get-up-and-go to actually power the iPad so you’re constantly running into the problem that as your iPad is slowly backing up, the batteries are rather more rapidly discharging.

Eventually I gave up and tried again on the laptop. This time the backup took a couple of hours and then off we went into upgrading. The process itself took next to no time and before I knew it I had a brand-spanking new 3.2.1 operating system on my iPad.

The thing is, I can’t actually say I notice any difference whatsoever. In the 24 hours since then it has forgotten the password once and still prefers to stick with the router signal it has instead of hopping to a stronger one. The iPhone simply doesn’t suffer from this problem.

Don’t get me wrong, none of this is a major inconvenience, it’s just a pain when you wander around a large house with several routers (my house is made of very old, very thick stone and WIFI signals simply won’t penetrate this, so I have 4 routers, one in the ceiling, one in the living room, one in the bedroom and another in my office).

So while the upgrade was smooth and relatively trouble-free, in this case for the life of me I can’t tell you why I bothered..

After waiting what seems like years but was probably just weeks for the update for the iPhone to version 4 then after waiting half an hour to grab iTunes on my laptop (not normally used to sync the iPhone so there’s a tip for you – NO you don’t have to use the PC you original setup your phone on) I proceeded to the upgrade button and upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iPhone version 4.0 OS software – another 20 minutes and no problems whatsoever.

That done the first thing I noticed was that my chosen background now appears on all screens – that’s nice!  The second thing that’s immediately obvious is the fact you can now drop one icon onto another and make instant FOLDERS which is nice. Each folder can now hold 12 icons and with a bit of planning you can how hold 12 times as many apps on the phone as before or opt for less pages of icons. That’s a plus though you’re not going to get all your games in one folder – you CAN thankfully make identically named folders if you like!! None of this takes any brainpower or manuals.

The iPhone now also handled multi-tasking – of a sort.  By double-clicking on the HOME button you can now see active tasks and switch between them.

The big plus is the ability to play a game or whatever.. and STILL keep SKYPE running in the background – depending on whether or not you’re a SKYPE user that makes a big difference… BUT NOTE: Skype does NOT yet run in the background – despite showing demos and saying that NOW you can run Skype in the background they have not actually YET released the new version. I’m awaiting this with baited breath as I use Skype for all calls and also keep my phone in my pocket all the time so this will be a game changer for me. One issue – I’ve still not figured out how to kill all the tasks and over a period of time, you do seem to get lots of things building up in the task manager…

Another plus is the unified inbox – now if you have multiple accounts as I do (Exchange and Google mail) you have the option to read the inboxes separately or as one – nice idea – why don’t MS so that in Office 2010?

Downloaded the updated TomTom and that works a treat – many of the apps have now been updated for OS/4.

At least on the surface of it, updating is worth the effort.

For more blogs check here and also see www.scargill.net and http://scargill.wordpress.com/

Free software on the PC, £5.99 APP on the iPad, lo and behold you can have an extra monitor on your PC….  left or right – and it also works if you’re already using 2 screens.

http://www.maxivista.com/ipad_monitor.htm

Ideal for putting Skype and those pesky Windows 7 widgets onto one side off your main screen(s).

And why not!!  The iPad batteries last 10 hours so the energy requirement is hardly going to break the bank.  It’s slower so you’d not want to run a video on it but perfectly ok for other uses….

As more and more people get iPads, many of use are using these for business.. one of the major failings of laptops is that hiding behind them is often seen as somewhat unsociable – and they need power, constantly with most laptops failing to get more than 2-4 hours out of the batteries…  along comes the iPad with enough power for a full-day meeting – but what it lacks by default is decent document reading software.

Of course as the APPS are generally dirt cheap it’s easy to go online and grab a handful of document readers…. but which one is the best?

I’ve been using the iPad since long before they were introduced into the UK and without doubt the must-have document reader for me is GoodReader. It costs next to nothing and handles PDFs, WORD and other documents but so do other readers like iAnnotate – so why should you get GoodReader?

Well, for starters, any properly prepared PDF document that’s more than a few pages long will have bookmarking all set up allowing you to get to any part of the document at the touch of a button. PDF readers for PCs have long been able to handle such bookmarks but sadly, most of the iPad readers do NOT. GoodReader is the exception and that’s just one of it’s features – it can import documents from a wide variety of sources including but not limited to DropBox, FTP, your PC, web pages and more.  NO it doesn’t do tabbed document reading like iAnnotate, which allows you to instantly flick from one document to another – but no-one says you can’t have BOTH – and I frequently flick back and forth between these two excellent programs. I’m expecting that before long the people who make GoodReader will add these extra features and of course updates are free.

WELL worth getting if you’re using your iPad for anything other than game-playing, GoodReader is a cheap, solid program that will help turn your iPad into a solid business tool.

 

Peter Scargill

Couple of little items for you… for those of you who remember the old iGO foldaway Bluetooth keyboard – well it works on the iPhone 3GS (OS4) and the iPAD without any special attention. Just make sure the Bluetooth is on and searching on the iPad or iPhone and put the keyboard into searchable mode (ctrl+blue+green) – and your iPad/iPhone will ask you to key in a code into the keyboard. This was a bonus for me as the keyboard was sitting doing nothing anyway. The £ sign didn’t seem to work but everything else did.

The camera connection kit for iPad, it would appear, not only lets you connect your SD cards full of pictures, or your usb camera connector directly to the iPAD but in some cases lets you connect usb headsets and keyboards to the iPAD too… but before you rush off and pay Expansys £30 or Apple slightly less, do note that the whole thing is a rip as the US Apple store price is $29. I’m about to put this to the test by asking one of my relatives over there to grab one for me!

Always on the lookout for the next big thing… And so it was that I  come across another article today about another of the so-called iPad-killers, the copycat products that supposedly threaten the iPad.

 

Read http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20009191-266.html to learn about the Cisco tablet PC. It is claimed in the article that “unlike the iPad” this is designed for business use. Read the article….

Ok, you’re back? First off, the claim of being designed for business use is only backed up by the fact it has a camera – and that’s a good point… also that it supports Cisco’s Telepresence.  It is worth noting that GOTOMEETING which is also Cisco is available free for the iPad.. the iPad also has SKYPE which is more than can currently be said for many Android designs.

The iPad is sub-£500 whereas the Cisco product is supposedly nearer $1000.

Also I’m looking at a 7” screen that does not look high-def- so is that going to handle BUSINESS PDFs I wonder?

The article also refers to a “growing number of tablet PCs” but when you click on the link all the article refers to is an as-yet unreleased Asus tablet.

I found it interesting that the second article also quoted 60,000 Android phones a day making Android the highest selling Linux mobile platform – rather pales into insignificance with Apple’s 1.4million sales of one model of phone in 3 days!

So for now at least I think we can safely give that one a miss… the iPAD is ideal for business use – it handles PDF documents excellently, it’s long battery life allows a full day’s meetings with all your documents to hand… it manages both Skype and GotoMeeting no problem… and so on. 

If only the competition would stop WAFFLING and actually put a real, fully supported device out that competes….

Update:

The Android phone was fine until we brought it overseas. The long and short of it is, it simply does not work. Over in the USA we’re getting messages about the SIM not allowing a connection – and yet swapping SIMs with the iPhone produces the same result while the iPhone continues to work. Orange up to now have shown that they don’t have a clue (there’s a shocker) and so we’ve a fight on our hands now getting a refund of the sat-nav software we’ve installed and getting a refund/replacement for the phone. We’ve now been onto Orange – and of course gotten onto their famous Indian call centre where they haven’t a clue what it is they’re doing. The operator managed to turn OFF roaming which was already on… then blurted out that the Android isn’t meant for use internationally – can you imagine it – the thing was made in Taiwan for heaven’s sake!

Incidentally though American TV shows Skype on selected AT&T Android phones, the Skype situation for Android has not changed. I’m beginning to think that in looking to see real competition for Apple, we’ve all jumped in too soon. Maybe Google should have stuck with search engines! Links like this suggest that Android has some serious problems. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2845

I’ll stick with my iPhone 3GS while they sort out the iPhone 4 aerial mess. The upgraded iPhone now has multitasking which until Skype get their upgrade out is pretty useless but the phone otherwise remains in my opinion the best thing out there.

Original Article:

We just took possession of our first Android phone the other day, the much-vaunted HTC Desire. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that this powerhouse runs at 1Ghz or whether the Android operating system is just that much more responsive, but the phone does seem to operate more responsively than you’d expect an HTC running Windows mobile for example. The screen is BEAUTIFUL to say the least with the new AMOLED display, it really is something to behold.

And that’s where it starts to go downhill. We purchased the phone from the Orange shop and as you might expect, things didn’t go too smoothly at first, the phone continued to show no signal for around an hour, we took it back to the shop and the fellow there helpfully reset the phone, telling us that it won’t operate until it’s been reset due to the text message the phone needs to receive to activate it.  The problem with that is.. what’s wrong with a message that says “please wait for incoming message” then another that says “please reset your phone” – why does everything always have to be cryptic??!!??

That done, we took the phone for a spin. The phone sent and received calls just fine and so we took it home (where we have no signal) and hooked it into the WIFI signal at home – again no problem.

If you look on the web it’s not immediately obvious where to get APPS for the Android, looking around there seemed to be several official-looking stores with nothing but rubbish in them, however a quick look around the phone (which comes with VERY little documentation until you realise there’s an online Android manual) and we discovered the marketplace. There are TONS of apps on there.

Unlike the iPhone market where Apple control the App store with an iron rod, there seems to be no such control on the Android marketplace and so there were some pretty poor apps – but also some great ones – installation is idiot-proof. We’re still at the early learning stage and later I’ll details some of the better apps.

For now, I’m beginning to realise why Apple in their iPhone didn’t bother with multitasking. The more you use the Desire, the more it slows down – until you realise the reason why… every time you use an App and then press the home key to go find another – the app stays running in the background. GREAT for a PC, but to my mind largely silly in a phone. We ended up with something like 20 apps running.. again at first sight it is still not obvious how to finish using an App and close it!  The solution for now? We downloaded a free task handler for Android and you can simply run that and close the lot down.

I think I’d prefer the option to NOT run any program in the background unless I specifically ask (music comes to mind).

Biggest gripe so far? Would you believe it there is no SKYPE for Android yet!

A lot hot air is circulating about the iPad, often by folks who have never laid eyes on the machine never mind made extensive hand-on use of them. I’ve seen reviews talking about reliability, about it being unsuitable for business… the list goes on – and mostly from those lacking any experience of the product.

Why listen to me? well firstly you need to know I would not touch a MAC with a bargepole so don’t peg me as an anti-Microsoft type. When the iPAD was released in the USA I had one shipped across almost immediately, despite lack of iTunes support in the UK. It looked ideal for reading agendas and other company paperwork, being the first supposedly long-life battery, thin almost A4 pad on the market… and I wasn’t prepared to take the word of others… I wanted to see for myself if this was going to be useful to see if there was a future for reducing or eliminating paperwork.  So, here it is, based on daily use of the iPad since its launch in the USA (and by that I mean used almost every day since then, sometimes all day), here is some information which may be of use to those of you thinking of using the iPad in a business environment.

Firstly the issue of WIFI. The only issue I am aware of is that the iPad occasionally forgets the login password and does not seem to track the best signal if you move from signal area to signal area within a building. It is a minor issue, does not really cause me any problems and the assurance is that this will be fixed. I can see no reason to doubt this as it’s little sister the iPhone does not suffer the same issue. 

Secondly business use – you hear “It’s all games” – no it isn’t – though some of the games are excellent – no doubt about it but with 200,000 apps you’d expect a lot of games.  I have asked our head office who normally send me reams and reams of paper to simply stop – and all my papers now go onto the company extranet  (Sharepoint).  I receive automatic email notification of the availability of documents and as long as I’m within range of a WIFI signal I can download using the likes of the GoodReader program (a bargain at 59p) and store the docs locally on the iPad. The largest document I’ve had the pleasure of using was 95 megabytes comprising over 400 pages of scanned documents – just about the worse combination…. No problem. I also use another package which cost peanuts to let me scribble on PDFs and open multiple documents at once.

Thirdly multitasking – after extensive use I have to say I do not miss the ability to do umpteen jobs at once – the ONE thing I’d like is to run SKYPE constantly in the background – and that of course will come in the autumn update. Most programs start up where they left off so they may as well be multitasking – but without the overhead.

“They say” iPad is not compatible with Microsoft… rubbish – I regularly open the latest DOCX files from Office 2007 as well as spread-sheets and other documents. At least one program can SAVE in these formats.

Specifically for use in meetings, the (realistically achieved) 10 hour battery life (including watching video) makes it possible to do an all-day meeting without a cable in sight. Those who lug around heavy bags full of laptops, power supplies and endless paperwork look on with envy. Armed with properly bookmarked PDF files I can view and search through large documents more quickly than with paper.

What about FLASH – well, I’d MUCH prefer if the iPad could handle flash, but not at any price and Flash does tend to be jerky on mobiles… considering that YouTube, Blip and others now offer iPad compatibility and even the BBC iPlayer is now iPad compatible, it hopefully won’t be long before that issue goes out of the window. You can watch a good number of the freeview channels including BBC News 24, for free on the iPad given a free program to do so, not to mention most radio stations.

When in Spain, as they say… I have a (small) place in Spain and recently I was other there. The iPad can’t handle dongles but I have a 3G dongle and I simply put the Sim into a phone which has WIFI and using a cheap program made the phone look like a WIFI access point – others may prefer to get the 3G version of the iPad itself  – as I already have a phone I didn’t fancy 2 subscriptions and annoying Apple won’t let you tether an iPhone to an iPad.   Skype and GotoMeeting work well – saving a fortune in calls when overseas as long as there is WIFI available. Emails using Microsoft Exchange, Google mail and others work absolutely fine as indeed do Exchange calendars and contacts. For streaming podcasts, I generally keep them on my PC and use STREAMTOME to listen to them on the iPAD (saves filling it up with audio and video).

Do I have any issues with the product? Of course I do – why on EARTH didn’t Apple put a forward-facing camera in for Skype etc. But them the iPhone 4 has that… Also being able to read memory sticks would have been nice but why not go the whole hog and put in Windows? Erm, no! The fact is that Apple have a great niche product on their hands which is, if you believe the hype selling very well thank you. Almost everyone I know who I’ve shown it to in business and otherwise wants one – I should have been a salesman but I’m NOT.

Of course, if something else comes along that’s better and cheaper I‘m a ruthless consumer with no brand loyalty… but from what I’ve seen, hands on reviews of what would appear to be alternatives have fallen apart due to poor video or other issues. For now, Apple are onto a winner – their shares don’t look too bad either (I don’t have any of those either).