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The three main smartphone’s out there at the moment are Android, Apple and Windows Phone 7, of course there is a lot of makers of these phones (apart from the iPhone, only Apple make them). It just so happens that I have to hand three phones to compare, this been the HTC Hero (Running Android 2.1), a slow and small phone by today’s standards but it does give me a chance to compare. The wife has the iPhone 4S and I got a new work phone, the HTC Trophy, A Windows 7.5 phone. Is there a clear winner here? Will the iPhone wipe the floor with the rest? Onward to battle.
Posts in category Technology
Smartphone Smackdown
Secunia Personal Software Inspector
While Windows update does a grand job or updating the core microsoft programs, unlike Linux, it does touch the other software. Enter Secunia Personal Software Inspector, this is a free program that not only scans your machine for updates, it fixes security issues as well. Head over to the website and give it a try, its free after all.
Is SSD a must have product?
I am sure that it may have crossed your mind to replace your main system drive from the old and slow mechanical SATA drive to a faster SSD. Looking at the prices of SSD will show that that it’s about £1 per GB (give or take) and to have full advantage of the speed on offer, you need to have a SATA III Connection (6GB/Sec). The main issue will be one of space; it is easier than you think to fill a 120GIG Drive. Recently I had a new works laptop (Dell Latitude E6420) and this came with a SSD Drive installed (Samsung SSD PM810) and the boot time of 30 seconds was impressive until you realise that this is a fresh build Windows 7 and not joined the domain.
Blackberry PlayBook drops in price
Recently on my travels looking for a tablet computer, I noticed that they have dropped the price of the BlackBerry Playbook. It comes in 3 models 16GIG – £249, 32GIG – £329 and 64GIG – £409. If you were just to look at this from a normal ‘person on the ground’ view point, you could argue that at £249 it is £150 cheaper than the iPad, smaller which means easier to carry around and it all does the same thing right? While I have not bought one as of yet, this is what I found out so far about the device.
DD-WRT Router Firmware replacement
DD-WRT has been going for some time now and it is in effect a complete replacement firmware for your router. Virgin Media supplied the D-Link 615 Rev 4 and I found this to be very slow, very restrictive and missing some important features. Instead of buying a new router, I went with DD-WRT instead. You can head off to the Main site for DD_WRT and find the files for your own brand of router.
Axis M7001 Surveillance Kit
The Axis M7001 Surveillance Kit is a two part device in that the actual M7001 part is a video encoder that run via PoE (power over ethernet) and can drive two streams, one been the supplied camera and the other is ANY CCTV type camera (BNC Connection). Due to the small size and the fact you do not need any power for the external camera, you can place the CCTV anywhere you need. It scales up to 704×576 for high quality video.
TP-Link PoE Injector
Recently I was in need of a box that would supply power to a device that only works via PoE (Power over Ethernet). In companies it is standard to have this built into the core switches as they provide Telephones powered by only the network cable and also the IP Camera’s dotted about and such. I did not need an entire switch with this built-in and did not want to spend a great deal of money. My Searches took me to the TP-Link TL-POE150S this been a simple enough device in that you plug in the power brick into one end along with your network cable feeding into the switch and from the other end you can plug in your device, in my case this was an IP Camera.
Foscam FI8905 IP Camera
Recently I was in need of some CCTV for the home, I had a few choices on this, such as buying a complete kit for £300 which comes with 4 camera’s and a base unit to record everything. As I already have a Synology NAS Box which comes with Synology Surveillance Station, a feature to connect an IP camera and record 24/7, I thought why not buy myself a IP Camera? Looking through the list of supported camera’s, on that was listed was FOSCAM. The next stage was to figure out how much to spend and which one to buy.
Dynamode 2.5inch HDD SATA Caddy
Recently after fixing (or failing to) the last laptop, the person asked me to get him a caddy to house the 2.5″ sata drive so he could at least access all of his data, my goal then was to spend the least amount while still providing a half decent case. The problem with most of the online stores was the fact that once you added the item to your basket, even though it was very cheap, the price doubled with the postage added on. After some searching I came across Kenable and they had a 2.5″ sata enclose for £3.69 the postage was as low as £1.99 using royal mail. I in fact ordered two of these, one for myself as I have some spare 160GIG sata drives hanging about.
