The Dell XPS M1330

When I was working for Microsoft, I had a laptop, which for me was unusual because I am a complete PC user.  I thought laptops were slow and didn't really have the need for one, so I never had one.  But having one this last year has been great!  I've got so much done whilst commuting, for example, and when I left Microsoft and had to return my laptop, I noticed my level of productivity went down a tad.  So, I recently decided to purchase a replacement laptop, although perhaps a faster one (if you know me at all, you know I always have to have just about the fastest gear I can get!).  So I went in search and came across the Dell XPS M1330.

My criteria for a laptop was simple - a light-weight, small widescreen laptop with a decent spec, without a huge price tag, and the M1330 is all of these things.  After I finished kitting it out with all the best bits, it came out at around £800, and this is why:

Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 (2.00 GHz, 2 MB L2 cache, 800 MHz FSB)
13.3" UltraSharp WXGA (1280x800) White-LED Display (300 nits) with TrueLife
2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x1024]
160GB Free Fall Sensor (7200RPM) Hard Drive
128MB nVidia GeForce 8400M GS
Primary 9-cell Lithium-Ion Battery

Paris, the Eiffel Tower, the Reinne and the Louvre

Ian MacGillivray and I took a trip to Paris early Sunday morning to start work on Monday - blogging the ELF (Education Leaders Forum) conference.

Microsoft wanted both of us to go there and blog about what the world leaders in technology and government had to say with regards to tertiary education, from a students point of view.  On Monday night, they hired out the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, which was beautiful, and Michael Gray and myself managed to drag Ian all the way to the top, where we got to see some spectacular views!

We also got to visit the Imagine Cup world-wide finals on Tuesday afternoon, which was held in the Louvre - again, what an amazing venue!  Feel free to check my Facebook for photos from the events!

I have to say, the most memorable part of the event was watching the students receive their awards.  Talk about passion!  You could actually see them running up to the stage, some teary-eyed, accepting their awards and making really profound speeches about how honoured they were, and offering their congratulations to all the other competitors.

A big thanks goes to Ed Dunhill for putting us in touch with the ELF team, and of course to Dolores Puxbaumer and Greg Butler for giving us such a fantastic opportunity.

Next-gen Graphics

Well I doubt it was my ranting blog that caused this product shift, but nVidia have finally released a proper next-gen graphics card, namely the GeForce GTX 200 series.  They've used an old nVidia trick here - take a previous generation successful architecture (the 8 Series cards), and then build upon that, fixing all the original problems and perfecting the manufacturing process to leave us with a real new generation card, instead of a re-branded old one.

Fortunately, the good guys over at Tom's Hardware have put together a nice lengthy review for your pleasure, so I'll leave you with this: I'm still disappointed.

I finally managed to get my hands on the HTC Touch Dual the other day, and what a piece of kit!  I previously had the HTC Touch, which I found to be a reasonable phone, apart from a few caveats - the phone seemed slow and slightly 'clunky' which made me want to avoid using it where possible; the touch screen was annoying for sending text messages, as you'll need to look at the screen when typing (which often requires the use of two hands).  I also found browsing the Internet and downloading email to be far too slow, mainly because the Touch is limited to GPRS connectivity only.

So obviously, when I saw the Touch Dual, I thought that HTC had managed to fix everything wrong with the original Touch, and couldn't wait to get my hands on it for testing.  It's specs are much higher than the original Touch, so it seems much more responsive to user input; one thing I've noted particularly is that when you tap the menu to view open programs, then select the 'Close All' option, the programs close more or less instantly; this took a few seconds on the original Touch.  Upon closer inspection, I found the Touch Dual to be equipped with a 400Mhz processor, which handles Windows Mobile much more efficiently than the 200Mhz processor seen in the original Touch.

The Dual also comes equipped with a slide-out keypad (not a QWERTY keyboard), which solved my problem with on-screen keyboard text messaging - I can now accurately type a message without even looking at the screen, which makes multitasking easy.  One problem I identified early with the Dual was, when using the XT9 dictionary, pressing the number '2' key, which would usually produce the letter 'a', actually produced the letter 'c'.  If you wanted to type the sentence "I have a phone", you'd likely end up with "I have c phone", which was incredibly annoying.  After searching the web for a bit, I came across a fix for the phone on the MoDaCo website, aptly named the "MoDaCo Touch Dual 'c to a' fix", which managed to solve my issue!

Perhaps the most key feature of the Touch Dual though, is the vast array of connectivity you get with it.  Sure, HTC ran out of room in the device, so wisely decided to remove the WiFi module, in favour of adding support for 3G and HSDPA, and a front-facing camera for video calling.  I agree with this move; after all, if you're in a place where you've got WiFi access, usually you'd have your laptop anyway - mobile Internet access is for when you're on the road, and no Internet connection is available.

Data transfer over 3G is so pleasurable when compared to that of GPRS.  I used to have to wait about 1 minute or so (which can seem to take forever) before my emails would start downloading after connecting using the Touch.  With 3G on the Touch Dual, I have to wait about 10 seconds for the emails to finish downloading - fantastic!

Just finishing writing my content for the Microsoft Imagine Cup Invitationals, and I got bored, decided to go on Youtube to look for some videos, decided I hate spiders so I'll look for a video of them (weird I know!) and found probably the most entertaining video I've seen to date: 

SELECT Uni.UniName, Uni.PostCode, Msp.MspName FROM Uni, Msp WHERE MSP.UniID = Uni.ID ORDER BY Uni.UniName;

var MSPNames = New Array(<%=MSPCount%>);

 

<%

for(int t=1;t<(MSPCount+1);t++)

{

Response.Write("MSPNames[" + t + "]=\"" + CSMSPNames(t) + "\";\n");

}

%>

var MSPNames = New Array(3);

 

MSPNames[1] = "Ben Coley";

MSPNames[2] = "John Smith";

MSPNames[3] = "Anna Johnson";