Office 2010

Well I said I would do this review well over two months ago but finally here it is. Office 2010 was released the other day without anyone really noticing. I had already made this video before it was released but I had some encoding troubles. The clicking sounds are because I had the wrong setting on the screen recorder program and it was supposed to be in HD but something went wrong there as well. Oh well. The actual programs are wonderful - it is the best version of Office by a mile.

Enjoy

AndrewCow

Vuvuzela

Hi

     

I just had to post about this today because it is very funny and I did not know how long it would stay. 

Do you find something missing from your YouTube videos, something you have been hearing so much lately to live without it is a terrifying. Well, I'm sure most of you do not but oh well. YouTube has put a button in their player that allows you to play the joyful sound of the Vuvuzela behind, or more so on top of your videos. This feature is not in all videos, but here is an example. Now your life can be filled with annoying buzzing all day long:)

     

AndrewCow

   

iOS4

Hi
So iOS4 was released a couple of days ago and the new iPhone 4 is due to be released in less than 24 hours. Now I have installed in on my iPhone 3G and had a play with it on my friends 3Gs. The first thing that comes to mind is how stupidly difficult it is to install. Now I know come people were fine and had it installed straight away but I had many issues installing it. Firstly, my phone had to go through a three hour backup before installing even though I had just backed it up 3 minutes before hand? There was no way to stop this and the disappointments
 just kept on coming. After around 4 hours of installing, I finally got to the sync stage. This is where the major stuff up occurred.

So it tried to restore it to the 3 hour long backup and just couldn't. Error message after error message spewed out at me until I finally tried to sync it without restoring my original settings whereby my iPhone decided to think it did not have a SIM card. I took out and replaced the SIM card about 5 times and my phone decided it had a SIM card but the computer it was connected to decided to completely ignore it and refuse to Sync. So I took it over to a different computer which made my iPhone very angry and phone decided it did not have a SIM card after all. By the way I think I should mention at this point iOS4 still has not been installed. It was demanding I reconnect it to iTunes and do it again. So back to the other computer (which was a Mac which probably helped), I took out the SIM card once more and low and behold it actually decides to recognize it. So I managed to install iOS4 in the phone on that computer and then Sync it with my other computer finally.

So now I have it there are some things I am happy and sad about. Well actually many things I am sad about. Apple said there were a few features it had to leave out of the 3G version. I think my a few they mean almost every one. It does not support multitasking (which I already knew) , home screen wallpapers, accessibility options or screen orientation lock. I was so excited when they announced orientation lock as I have wanted it ever since I got my phone but nope:(.

Oh well. There were some things I did like such as iBooks, Spell Check(very useful for me), and Folders. iBooks is a very nice app but a very slow. When you eventually get to one of the many free books, the reading experience is very nice when put in low brightness and Sepia mode, which makes the background brown instead of white. It often will not connect to the iBooks store for no particular reason but that hopefully will be fixed soon. Spell Check is useful bit a bit hard to use at first. I eventually got use to it but the many combinations of tapping used for select, copy, paste and replace make using feature a challenge. Folders are very easy to use as all you need to do is drag one app on top of the other and you have it but with my 130 apps the fact you can only have 12 per folder is annoying.

Now most of these features worked far better on the 3GS I used but the owner complained about the annoyance of having to stop your apps as they all go into the Multitasking menu. The system Apple implemented for stopping these apps is slow and unnatural. They make you hold to app down for a couple of seconds before closing them which can get frustrating if there are 12 apps open. The switching between these apps is seamless though and very fast.

So it is probably he fact this OS was not really made for the 3G that frustrates me so but the upgrade is mostly excellent on the 3GS.

Thanks for reading
AndrewCow

p.s. I actually have made the Office 2010 review and seeing the retail version was released with out anyone noticing I will post that tomorrow but be warned it is not very good.

PORTAL 2

I will not even bother trying to put in words the awesome of the greatest game ever created. Just watch.
AndrewCow

New Tech of E3 and Apple!!!

Hi

Well the first day of E3, the internationally renown gaming expo, has been full of major releases and announcements. Not all of these have come from E3 however - Apple, being the company they are, could never have a day of major announcements without one of their own. Not only did iPhone 4 pre-ordering start for countries were the device will be released on the 24th, the company released an update to the Mac Mini. The ultra small computer not only has a uni-body shell similar to the MacBook Pro, but also HDMI output and a SD card slot. I really like this upgrade as I have always wanted one - but not even more as Apple is exhausting its abilities as a media center device.

Microsoft finally fully unveiled their "Project Natal" device, dubbed the Kinect. This XBOX 360 add-on allows you to control games with motions, but unlike the Wii, it does not require a controller. This seems like another face palm for me. This device seems strikingly similar to the old EyeToy for the PS2 or Playstation Eye for PS3. The XBOX even had a version of these called XBOX live vision. All three devices sort of.....well...failed miserably. I seriously do not know why Microsoft thinks a better version of this 1999 technology will sell. There will be tonnes of people buying it in the beginning, but only because of media. Well at least that is what I think.

This device should be released in the US in November and has no price yet.

A motion sensor device for the PS3 is also in the works, although it uses a rather suggestive looking controller(the bottom pic). The Wii is a pretty awesome console and for so cheap its great but by the looks of it, Sony and Microsoft are trying to annihilate it.

Lastly....NEW XBOX !!!!! No, it is not the ridiculously named XBOX 720, it is still called the XBOX 360. The thinner version of the 360 has had a visual redesign as well as included Wifi (such a new concept). Personally I think too little (hardware wise) too late and.....it's sorta ugly....

It will be sold for $500 from July 1 in Australia.

Till next time :)
AndrewCow

BAD GOOGLE

Oh come on Google, you can be better than that. If you don't know what I am referring to, just go to Google's homepage. Notice anything different? No, you have not accidentally gone to Bing, Google has just straight out copied them.

As many of you know, there are only 3 reasons people use Microsoft's Bing.

1. It is default in Internet Explorer
2. They do not like Google just on principal
3. It has pretty pictures

Earlier this week, Google took away their plain white site background and replaced it with some cool nature pics. There is no way to deny that Google copied them. That is just not how you do things - come on, you have so much original software but you just go and copy other people. You have no idea how disappointed I am with you.

AndrewCow

P.S. I SWEAR the Office 2010 review will be up sometime this weekend

iPhone 4

Ravings of a Technogeek - every Monday, Wednesday and Friday......usually....except for 2 weeks when I am incredibly busy. I thought I should probably post about about the sexiest thing ever to come to the earth. I have included a photo of the past sexiest thing on the planet (Megan Fox) for comparison.


So, you have probably guessed, at 3am this morning, Apple started their press conference and released their latest iPhone - the iPhone 4. It turns out this was exactly the phone that was leaked, except this one seems really really really pretty. So apart from changing the looks, there are over 100 changes on the inside. I don't know all of them for sure, but Steve went through the main ones. 


Firstly, it has the A4 chip, like the one in the iPad. This makes it very very very fast. They also managed to shrink everything so they could grow the battery. I'm very happy about this. I never really had a problem with my 3G's battery but .....faster.....longer battery ...what could be bad???


Another thing displayed and I think is AWESOME is the 4's ability to record 720p HD video. With its new 5mp camera it can take excellent pictures and its LED Flash (which can stay on while videoing), those pictures can be taken in the dark. Now you might think, as I did at first 'pfffft 5mp, thats nothing' well Apple has dished out some of their trademark jargon to convince us that 5mp is plenty. For once, it actually makes sense. You see.....I don't really understand it. It is something to do with the number of photons in each pixel...which sounds right... OH WELL :) 


One of the reasons the iPhone 4 looks so brilliant is because of its display. Apple has implemented something called Retina Display Technology. What this means (I think) that, although the screen is only 640p, it has much smaller pixels. Text, photos, basically any curved lines are now much much smoother because there are more pixels making them up. I hope that whole bit actually made sense.


I could ramble on for hours about the 4's dual mics for noise cancellation, or the iMovie application making 720p movie editing being just one tap away, but I do not want to. There are, however, three more things I would like to focus on.


 Firstly, Apple is trying to make a case, and it actually looks pretty good. It can be seen below and it is called the "Bumper". This is because it is more like a silicone, well...bumper bar, that fits around the aluminium edge of the phone, leaving the glass back and front exposed. You might be thinking. 'Great. Now I have two places to shatter my phone' but you would be wrong. Firstly, Apple has developed a glass that is apparently, stronger than plastic and sapphires. Secondly, the "Bumper" extends from the phone, like a regular case, meaning if you drop it, the case will hit the ground first. 


Very quickly, it now has a gyroscope. This means it can sense movement as you turn, jump or be doing similar things to the accelerometer, but on more scales.


Lastly, the front facing camera wound have no point without video calling. FaceTime is a service built into the phone application that allows for excellent quality video calls. Unfortunately though, only between the iPhone 4s and, for the mean time, only over WiFi. This is quite surprising to me that they did not integrate iChat and allow it to talk to computers. I'm almost positive though Skype will be able to call to computers, be it a Mac  or PC. What they are doing however, is attempting to make their way of doing video calling (e.g. codecs) universal, which means, someday, you might be able to call between iPhone 4s and HTC phones, or Nokias. 


So there is much more I could say, but I will let the professionals say it for me. For way, way, way more information and videos, go HERE. This phone should be available in the US on June 24th, along with the renamed iOS 4 on June 21, free to all devices excluding the original iPhone and the 1st gen touch. The phone should be available in Australia some time in July. I will definitely be getting one and I will do a full review of it then. 


Till next time,
AndrewCow


P.S. the Word 2010 video should be up this weekend:)