Benq E72 Smartphone: An exercise in downsizing...

My Toshiba Portege G910 gadget phone died last week. Its still in warranty and will be fixed, but its demise caused me to reconsider what it is I need in a phone. As I've said before, I used to have an i-Mate Jamin which I loved. Its primary failing was the lack of a keypad which made text entry on public transport near to impossible. So when, after two and a bit years of loyal service, it expired, I replaced it with the Toshiba which did all the stuff that the i-Mate did but also had 'mobile internet', GPS and a full QWERTY keyboard.

But. The Toshiba was a brick and not very user friendly in practice. It also crashed quite frequently and couldn't play videos. GPS was good (and very handy when driving through Germany last September). And although the keyboard is fantastic (best keyboard on a PDA that I've ever used) it is still quite clumsy for use on the go as it requires two-handed operation...

So. I've decided to downsize. The things I'm looking for in a phone are the abilities to:

• make and receive calls, preferably in a user-friendly manner
• send and receive texts and photo messages
• sync contacts and appointments with MS Outlook
• wi-fi for checking e-mail and basic web browsing (generally checking to see if trains are running late in the morning)
  
• playback videos (nice, but not essential)
• play music (similarly)

Also the ability to view MS Word documents and other e-mail attachments would be nice, but is not essential.

Things I don't really need in a phone:

• GPS. If I ever need this (rarely) I can dig out my Portege (when its fixed).
• Touch screen. I know this is the way things are going, but I found the touchscreen actually slowed down the process of doing most things on my previous phones. Give me buttons and well designed menus anytime.
• Mobile internet. I rarely used this. GPRS and wi-fi were fine on the i-Mate.

So. I thought a 'Windows Mobile Standard' smartphone might be more suited to my needs than a 'Windows Mobile Pro' PDA phone. Its cheaper too.

So I got a Benq E72 phone from Expansys for £99 (actually £89 as I had a voucher; I have another if anyone is interested). SIM free, so my old Vodafone PAYG sim could go in.

Initial experince is great. It does all I want it to, is tiny compared to my previous PDA phones (actually smaller than any of my previous just-phones) and plays videos fine (with freeware divx player; I never liked the pre-installed windows media player). I'll let you know how I get on...

Booting an Eee PC with Windows from SD card?

I've got one of these:

Running this OS:

(which is great for the kids)
But occasionally (for work purposes), I'd quite like it to run this OS:

(Which I have a legitimate copy of)
And I believe that the thing can be set up so that it can boot from one of these:

So why, oh why, can't I find any simple instructions on t'internet regarding how to actually go about setting this up?

Anybody got any good ideas?

Bearing in mind that I'm only a lower-level computer geek and haven't worked my way up the geek ranks very far...

Fotobook gripe

I've been compiling a photo album of all the best of my digi-photos from 2007. I decided to use the Fotobook software to create the book (can be done offline, unlike Photobox who I have used before), which you then upload to their website and they print the book and post it to you.

The book hasn't arrived yet. I'll comment on the photo quality when it does.

But I am annoyed by their software. It ate all the free space on my hard disk. Before I started working on the book, there was 19Gb of free space on my 'C' drive. I saved the file to the desktop. As I added photos (about 280 of them) the thing grew to a whopping 1.8Gb. But still nowhere near enough to clog up the hard drive.

Last weekend, while saving a near-final version of the book, the computer gave me a 'stream writing error' warning. I had a look and discovered that the hard drive was full! A bit of snooping lead me to the discovery of over ten '.tmp' files, each well over 1Gb in size, buried away in a temp directory. The Fotobook software doesn't delete its temp files! And everytime you use it it creates a new file rather than over-writing a previous one.

That is really sloppy.

My online life

My wife complained at me the other day that I spend too much time on the computer. I suppose I do, but then I thought about it. What are my hobbies?

Go back a decade or two and these were my hobbies:

• Listening to music, making compilation tapes, etc.
• Playing guitar
• Photography
• Playing with computers
• Watching TV / movies
  
• Canoeing
• Reading news, etc.
  

Only one of those actually involved a computer. But what happened? Well, computers seem to have infiltrated most of my hobbies.

• OK, so I don't use a computer to listen to music, I use an iPod. But I have to use the computer to get the music onto the iPod. I use the computer to buy the music. I use the computer to make compilation CDs or 'iMixes'.
• Computers still aren't involved in playing guitar (except for the internet being a source of guitar TAB music), but I'm sure its only a matter of time.
• All my photography these days is digital. So I use a computer to look at, play with and print out my photos.
• Obviously, playing with computers still involves a computer.
• I now rent DVDs via the internet and increasingly more TV programmes are available online, its only a matter of time before computers and TV become fused. Indeed, have a look at the newly upgraded Apple TV system - able to download 'rental' movies directly to your TV, this is the future, and its a computer (again).
• You know, I can't think of any way a computer can become involved in canoeing...
• And, of course, the greatest source of news is online.
• Oh, and at work, I spend most of my time doing things on a computer. Even in the lab, everything is recorded and monitored using computers.
  

So there you have it, my life is increasingly online.

I wonder when we'll get to the stage that the computer is so ubiquitous that we won't actually use the word anymore?

Xobni

Click on it. Please.

Xobni is an application that works with MS Outlook and makes it cooler. But in order to get the beta version demo, I need you, the reader of this blog, to click on that button and find out about it for yourself. Then you can get your own button and other people can click on that too... and so on.

Go on. Click.

Make an old style mix tape...

These are cool. They look like old fashioned tapes, like the ones we used to know and love in the 80s, but there's a little USB flash memory stick inside it instead. So you can still compile your 'mix tape' but do it in MP3 instead... and you still get to hand write the track listing, just like you used to.

I had planned on getting a couple of these for a laugh for Christmas gifts. But at £20 for a 64Mb memory stick, I think I'll give it a miss! Tapes used to cost less than a pound each, you know...

Panic!

I am frantically backing everything on my computer up in a state of panic. I logged into my (work) laptop (while at home) a wee while ago using all the usual settings and everything was different to normal. When I did CTRL-ALT-DEL it said "J Mike Davidson is logged in as rcarvel" which worried me. I hastily logged out and logged back in again. Same again. So I logged out and am now logged in as a different user. And am backing everything up to an external disc just in case.

---

It turned out that "J Mike Davidson" was an old member of our IT team and I had managed to log in or out of the system at precisely the wrong time, during an update, and my computer had got a garbled file as a result. Or something. Everything actually works fine now. And I am assured that I wasn't hacked. Whew!

Thunderbird gripe!

Aaaargh! That's twice now!

For the second time, Thuderbird has lost all my details and old e-mail messages. This is not a problem as far as work e-mails go, as they are on an IMAP server, but all my 'home' e-mails from the last couple of months (since the last time it lost them) have now also been lost.

I don't know what the issue is. I simply clicked ont he Thunderbird icon this morning and it asked me to enter new account details, etc. All previous settings (including e-mails downloaded from POP3 servers) aren't there anymore.

Anyone else experienced this?