Super Zune

If you've got a Zune (and why not - they are neat devices) then congratulations. You've just got a new one, thanks to a spiffy new version of the firmware that has just been released for all the Zune devices.

I picked a Zune up in the 'states while I was out there earlier this year and they are rather neat. Kind of an ipod with a wifi twist and a nicer (to me anyway) music management tool. And they let you rent your music, which I really like.

If you are signed up with Zune you should be hearing about the upgrade soon.  The biggest improvement concerns the wifi support in the Zune device, which previously limited me to sharing audio files with the only other Zune owner I know in the UK, who lives in Wales. You can now sync over wifi which means that I should now be able to wirelessly sync content with my home network. I'm looking forward to playing with this, with a bit of luck I'll be able to move recorded TV programs onto my Zune to watch when I'm out and about. There are also some very stylish changes to the user interface and the Zune marketplace has started to sprout free, unprotected MP3 files for your Zune too.

And the new PC based Zune player program is just beautiful.

In fact the only thing about the Zune I don't like is that it isn't on sale in the UK yet.....

Bread and Cheese

I'm presently finishing off "The XNA Book". I'm just doing game state management and I needed to come up with a title screen for one of the sample games.

I hope you don't think that it is too cheesy..

Wide Screen Pain

My new notebook has a wide screen display which, over the week away, I'd rather learnt to like. So, bearing in mind that I spend a lot of time staring at a monitor screen I thought I'd get a new wider one. So I did.

The new monitor has a fantastic, jaw dropping display of amazing quality. Which is just as well, because otherwise I might have chucked it through the window by now. It is a 22 inch HP job, with an HDMI input as well as VGA and a lovely glossy finish. However, it and Vista just don't get on.

I know exactly how this should work. I know because I've read the White Paper "Transient Multimon Manager (TMM) Ver. 1.1" by Yu-Kuan Lin Program Manager, Mobile PC Business Unit. This is well written, comprehensive and has some nice scenarios that explain just what should happen. Essentially, the whole thing has been designed so that you set a monitor up once, Vista remembers that setup and then replicates it each time you plug that monitor in again.

This does not happen.

What happens is that you set it up once, and next time you plug it in the system does what the heck it likes, with a range of implausible and hard to select display options. Should you be stupid enough to let the screen saver kick in it then does something else. And if you are such an idiot as to put the machine to sleep you can look forward to no screen, a black screen with a cursor, a screen that you can't do anything with because the window is on the other screen or the blue screen of death when you come back depending on the whim of the system.

I'm not sure who to blame here. The monitor has the habit of reporting itself to Vista as one of a number of devices. The HP monitor control program refuses to believe that an HP monitor is plugged in. The Nvidia display driver doesn't even let me change options and Vista seems quite happy that nothing is wrong.

As for me, the picture is so good that I'm just about prepared to live with it for now. But I've lost a couple of hours trying to find out why something which should just be plug and play is nothing of the sort.

Update on Monday, November 12, 2007 at 07:04PM by Rob

'tis a driver thing. I've managed to track down a set of NVidia drivers that makes the monitor mostly work.

iPhone

The HTC S710 Smartphone is the best phone I've ever had. The synchronisation with Exchange still blows me away, with email, contacts and appointments moving seamlessly from my desktop to my portable device. The screen is beautiful, the slide out keyboard superb and the call quality is always good. I can use it to watch movies, listen to music and make it into a modem for my Vista computer. Battery life is excellent. I can write and run C# programs on it from Visual Studio 2005. Truly it is the most effective mobile device I own. There is only one thing wrong with it.

It is not an iPhone.

The iPhone is not a particularly wonderful phone to be honest. It needs quite a strong signal before it will talk to people. The voice quality is OK, but nothing special. The camera is quite good in spite of the limited resolution, but won't take movies, and it can't send a picture in an MMS. The iPhone doesn't have that lovely "type in a bit of the name and I'll find the rest from Contacts" thing that the Smartphone has. Exchange sycnchronisation is non-existent and the synchronisation with Outlook is OK but I have to do it by hand now. I have to use the (in my opinion) horrible and counter intuitive iTunes to get music on it. I can't put my programs into it. It won't connect with a Bluetooth stereo headset. I can't plug my favourite headphones in because the socket is stupidly designed. Thing is, even with all these faults, I love it.

The touch interface is wonderful. Rather than faffing around with a stylus, you can use those things on the end of your hands called "fingers" to control everything. Because the surface is glass, rather than a flimsy plastic membrane, I have no issue with touching it because I'm fairly sure I won't damage it and I can always wipe fingermarks off. The screen is enormous and the browser superb, put it together with the intuitive design of the software and you have the first proper mobile web experience that I can live with. The music player delivers the goods and actually makes album artwork interesting again.

I've been using it for a while now and it is so nice to use that for the moment I've decided I can live without all the useful bits of the best phone I've ever had.

As someone with a huge respect and affection for Microsoft stuff I sincerely hope that somewhere in a lab. in Redmond there is a Smartphone looking something similar to this. The Deepfish project certainly gives me hope for the future, as does the Microsoft Surface.  At TechEd I was waving the iPhone around and telling people that this is the way that phones are going, like it or not.If there is something like this coming along, please, please, please get it into the shops as soon as you can. An iPhone that does all the things that my S710 can do would be the stuff of legends.

Apple devices are always surrounded by hype which I've always taken with a big pinch of salt. However, in the case of the iPhone I think that it is pretty much justified. One thing is certain, and that's that you will be able to split mobile phone history into "before Apple" and "after Apple".

Unconscious Activity

Learn how to do this....

I've just been sent a question about an article that I seem to have published. I sent it over to the OpenNET people and they put it out in August this year. It is all about Image Processing in C# on a mobile device. If you want to take a look, get the code and get the articles, take a look here:

http://community.opennetcf.com/articles/cf/archive/2007/08/30/image-manipulation-in-windows-mobile-5.aspx