The Inimitable Have Tex Blog

A lot of companies are spending a small fortune to get unified communications, which, put simply, is where both voice and email end up in your email inbox. In addition to acting as a Skype competitor for making calls, Google Voice can replace your voicemail with a combination of text message alerts to your mobile phone, and MP3 attachments on emails.

The text message alerts attempt to turn the spoken word into text through voice recognition. The success of this varies wildly based on the speaker, often with hilarious results. The same text also appears in the email you receive, along with a link to download an MP3 file. The MP3 is a recording of the incoming call that would otherwise have gone to voice mail. Any media player with play them back (Windows Media Player, iTunes for example).

You can set up Google Voice on multiple lines, so that all your voice mail hits your inbox. That way you only have one place to look for your voice mail, and you can keep it for as long as you like.

It also solved another problem for me, the lousy, extra fee Visual Voice Mail app from Verizon on my Android phone. The dumb thing wouldn’t recognize bluetooth. It also required you to switch to speakerphone for each message, if you wanted that option.

Google Voice is a huge improvement, and the text sometimes informs, often entertains, and like all Google products, will probably improve over time.

Windows 7 is now installed on millions of PCs. I have two in everyday use in my business, a desktop that is my workhorse PC, and a netbook that is my travel unit and jack of all trades.

The desktop is fairly powerful, with an AMD Quad Core and 3GB of RAM. I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit loaded on it. I also run XP Mode, which is a full copy of XP Professional running under Virtual PC, and proves useful for running software that Windows 7 will not. I’m not a gamer, but the PC will do everything I ask of it, including photo editing of large images from my DSLR. It’s stable, and the 64 bit operating system seems to have none of the “gotchas” that prior iterations under XP and Vista suffered from. It runs most 32 bit software just fine, and I haven’t had any issues with device drivers.

The netbook is amazing. It’s an Acer, with an Atom N450 processor, and a 160GB drive. It came with 1GB of RAM and Windows 7 Starter Edition. It ran just fine, but I’m a tech, so I updated the operating system to Win 7 Pro, and upped the RAM to 2GB. I find it’s faster than just about any moderately priced Vista or XP laptop, which makes very little sense, except that the N450 has hyperthreading, and Windows 7 makes good use of it. There’s occasionally some video lag, if the machine launches a virus scan, for example. But these bargain basement netboooks are very practical tools. I’ve recommended the same setup to my customers who are road warriors, and the ones who have taken me up on it have been very satisfied.

Now to customer experiences, most have been very good. There’s one area  to watch out for though, desktops that you want to run via wireless adapters. I’ve been unable to find wireless adapters that work with either 32 or 64 bit Windows 7. Laptops have built-in wireless, so they have to work. Getting desktop wireless adapters working are the customer’s problem or mine. Even some All In One/Touchscreen PCs refuse to connect wirelessly. The adapter manufacturers either don’t care, or  their updates haven’t worked. ALL MAJOR BRANDS FAIL THIS TEST, don’t buy a Windows 7 desktop if you’re planning to use it wirelessly.

The only other thing to watch are printers. Some older units don’t have Windows 7 drivers, and for the ones that do, if you want to share them, you need to attach them to a Windows 7 PC. XP and Vista PCs can see printers attached to Windows 7 PCs, mostly not the other way around.

Overall, you can plan to migrate to Windows 7 from XP, and Vista without any major issues. If you need to run older applications, get either Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate, so you can get XP Mode. If you’ve already bought a PC with Home Premium, not to worry, the Anytime Upgrade feature will get you to Professional for about $90.00. I’ve connected Windows 7 PCs to both Server 2003 and Server 2008 networks without issue, and they are well behaved in mixed PC/Mac environments.

Jump on in, Windows 7 is fine!

9 months is a significant time period. All of us have spent that amount of time waiting to be born. Students spend about that much time each year in the course of their studies. I’ve now spent that amount of time with my Verizon Droid phone. A lot has happened in that time period.

The  Droid has gone through 2 system updates, Apple has continued to experience success with its iPhone, although the most recent iteration has given the company and its customers some heartburn. The Android market has matured considerably in two primary ways:

1. Lots more apps
2. Better quality apps, by and large.

The main improvements have been speed and stability, plus a lot more choice. At Verizon alone there are 4-5 Android phones to choose from. The navigation and voice search are the two biggest improvement in the platform. Voice search is increasingly accurate, and navigation has lost several clicks, making it much safer to use while driving. Surprisingly, the quality of the speakerphone and music playback quality through the built-in speaker seem to have improved.

There are a couple of Apps I just can’t speak highly enough of  Wi-Fi Analyzer and Voice Search. Wi-Fi Analyzer allows you to use the Droid to figure out where you are going to get the best reception from your wireless network, whether there’s interference on the channel you are using, and where any dead spots may be. Great for getting the most out of your wireless network, and knowing where a range extender might come in useful. Voice Search is just phenomenal in version 2.2 of the Android operating system. The recognition has improved tremendously, so that voice dialing becomes a real possibility, but it works just as well for browsing the web too, and can be used to enter an address into the navigation system. It’s a life saver while driving, perhaps literally. You can set the navigation or dial a call while keeping your eyes on the road where they belong. You can even pick out your favorite tune to play, if you store your music on your Droid.

Cloud is a strange word to describe a whole host of technologies that have only one thing in common, they are hosted on the internet, rather than locally.

For the small businesses I serve, there are two areas worth their weight in gold:

• Hosted scheduling/email
• Hosted file storage and sharing

Think of the role an Exchange server plays in a larger company. You have a central place to manage email for all your employees, plus collaborate on schedules and tasks. For a number of years there have been companies hosting exchange servers in the cloud, so you don’t have to have a local one. These solutions are much more cost effective for all but the largest organizations, as Exchange servers are great when they work, and a nightmare to deal with if they are not properly managed by experts and experience a failure. These services run from about $6 per mailbox per month on the low-end, with offshore support and long hold times, to around $12.50 per month for very well managed, secure email with responsive, domestic support.

More recently, Google Apps Premier has come along at the bargain basement price of $50 per user per year. Offering similar capabilities, with the addition of up to 25GB per user, built-in sharing of Google Apps documents, and 1GB of general storage space per user, it’s a great value, and backed by a huge company. We use it internally, and have deployed it for a number of our customers.

However, if you want to share any kind of files, with server like control of who gets to see what, and whether they can change it or just view/download it, then you need a different kind of service. There are lots of players in this space, each with a different set of capabilities, but here are three to watch:

1. Dropbox.com, this is designed primarily for personal file storage and sharing, you can use it to share with others, but it lacks sophistication in the area of setting up groups of people with different rights and privileges. A one person business can use it, but even most small businesses are going to find it limiting.
2. Box.net, this is the 800lb gorilla of this type of service. It’s full featured, sophisticated, hooks into other services like salesforce.com, and offers an API to allow developers to build custom apps that integrate with it. It’s also a little more expensive, when compared to other players in the space. As an IT vendor, I also have some reservations about Box.net’s requirement that it contract directly with all my customers, if I decide it’s the best solution for them.
3. Egnyte.com, we are strongly considering a reseller agreement with this company. Here’s why, it offers file storage, sharing, flexible group permissions, is reasonably priced, and also includes a huge amount of storage for remote backups. Like Box.net, it may be a little more complex than many small business people would wish, if they were planning to manage it themselves. We plan to integrate it with our other services, as a low-cost and flexible alternative to installing an in-house file server.

CAVEAT

What none of these services do is offer the ability to run client server applications. So you can’t move your QuickBooks or ACT databases onto them, and expect to be able to use the applications. Such applications move so much data between the PCs and the server that most internet connections will lock solid rather than run them. There’s another way to put such applications into the Cloud using server and workstation virtualization, but that’s a topic for another post.

My Droid has passed from the shiny new toy stage into the workaday tool category, and it’s holding up pretty well. I found a couple of new tools that have made it considerably easier to live with:

• K9 mail, odd name, great replacement for the standard Android mail client. You can get more items on the page, better control over each mail item, and it’s a lot easier to clean out trash with the batch ops feature. Free from the marketplace.
• Dolphin Browser. While the standard Android browser is pretty good, Dolphin has two features that are addictive: it offers a tabbed interface, something I’ve loved since Firefox was first launched; it allows the pinch and spread zooming capabilities first seen on the iPod and iPhone 0 much easier (and cooler) than the +/- of the standard browser. It also offers custom gestures for opening new tabs, going back and forward, very helpful and a little like using Graffiti, for the old Treo/Palm users among you.

Not much more to report at this time, except that I no longer have iPhone envy. If Verizon introduced the iPhone tomorrow, I would pass, not enough advantage to consider switching.

Verizon/Google did fix a few things with the December 11th update. First, whe I turned on the phone early last Friday, it just ran the update. Didn’t take long, rebooted and there it was. Here are some of the highlights from an end-user viewpoint:

• Bigger time display
• Clearer action buttons for answering/rejecting calls. It would still be better if you could just push them rather than having to swipe them, but an improvement nonetheless.
• Visual VM now has a speaker button – still doesn’t recognize a bluetooth headset, but a step in the right direction.
• Easier to pick a contact and navigate to it. Fewer clicks and it seems to be more lenient about how precisely you press the location on the map to activate navigation. Still don’t understand why it won’t just go there right from the contact.

The voice dial thing still isn’t fixed, but the voice search seems to be finding the contacts better. Email still comes in at random unless you power cycle the phone.

Verizon, when’s the next update, and what will it fix?

Just over a month ago, the Motorola Droid arrived with much fanfare from Verizon. Billed as an iPhone killer, it was overdone. I decided to be an early adopter, and, overall, I’m not disappointed.

What’s good:

• The Droid has a great touch screen, large, crisp graphics and responsive to touch.
• It has a physical keyboard when used in landscape mode, more on that later.
• It’s a good phone, decent reception, bluetooth works OK, speaker is decent.
• There are plenty of apps. The app store doesn’t compete with the iPhone, but there’s a good selection and it’s getting better
• It has wifi, and it’s easy to set up.
• Gmail integration is good.
• Great browser, great search, with decent voice search- try “nearest Panera” – great stuff.
• Built-in Navigation, with auto resume after a call

What’s not:

• No voice dial – Oh there’s an app, but in a couple of dozen tries it never once picked the right contact.
• Screen shuts off during calls, and requires you touch awkwardly placed power button to get back on, then open the lock again – stupid and annoying.
• No contact sync, except via GMail, Exchange, or Google Apps Premier. So if you have your own domain, and don’t want to spring for Exchange, you are out of luck. I know Google wants to push Premier Apps and its Exchange capability, but really, this is stone age or really exploitative, depending on your viewpoint. (Oh, I forgot, you can stick your contacts on an SD card too and import them – sneakernet anyone?)
• How the Navigation works – You pick a contact, select the icon to map it, and it brings up a map, then you click  the highlighted point on the map, then tell it to go there. How about a voice command of  “drive”, then “Alex Burns home”?- that would be nice? I think Tiger Woods got a Droid and was trying to set a destination when he hit the fire hydrant! To add insult to injury, the cloverleaf near my house went in 3 years ago, but it’s still not on Google Maps.
• Visual voice mail doesn’t integrate with bluetooth – and there’s no button to activate the speakerphone in the App – Wake up Google!
• Email sync doesn’t work, I sometimes wait hours to get emails on my phone – even my Treo 600 got that right five plus years ago.
• The slide out keyboard sucks, and the on-screen keyboard doesn’t come close to the one on the iPhone. You can use them, but you’ll be pulling out your netbook a lot more to send email if you have a Droid.

It may sound as if I hate the Droid, I don’t, but I sure hope Google/Verizon’s December 11th system update fixes a lot of the above. It seems as if the Droid/Android 2.0 operating system were rushed to market. It reminds me not of Windows Vista, but early XP. A good operating system rushed out because Millenium was awful. In Droid’s case, rushed out so as not to let AT&T/Apple have another holiday season without a competitor from Verizon.

Ultimately, Google and Verizon will fix this, it’s just too important to both of them. How can Google sell phones with Navigation if the maps are out of date? Who will tolerate non-functional voice dial when hands-free is the law in most states? I just wish they’d waited another couple of months and got more of the kinks worked out. As for Motorola, nice try, it’s a good piece of hardware overall, but we need to be able to wake the screen up at the end of the call with a finger swipe – period. And fix that keyboard in V2.0, or drop it and improve the on-screen version.

Tips from the trenches:

• What to do about email – if you power the phone off and on again it will then sync your email. Nuts, yes, effective also.
• Contacts, CompanionLink has a product that syncs from Outlook to Gmail, and let’s Google’s own sync complete the loop with the phone. Works well – $40, only drawback is you have to start the sync manually from the PC each time – no push or scheduled sync. Also first sync can take hours if you have a few thousand contacts.
• Favorites – stick a shortcut on one of your homescreens for each person you call regularly – closest thing to speed dial and a stopgap until voice dial works. Google, we need more homescreens and a menu item to pick them with.
• Simple Weather – tried them all, Android weather doesn’t refresh, this one works well
• Swift, great Twitter app
• Flashlight, when you’re fumbling for car key, or trying to find a screw you’ve dropped inside a computer case!
• Advanced Task Killer free version – when the phone starts slowing down, great way to get it moving again
• Silent mode on/off – Curvefish, also WiFi on/off from same vendor – great widgets to control things you need to do often.
• Google Sky – really cool app.

First a disclaimer, we work on Windows PCs and sell them, so do lots of other people, but be aware of it as you read this article, we’re biased because we use the same software as 90% of the population!

Windows 7 is the best operating system I’ve ever seen coming out of Microsoft. The beta version was much better than the initial release of Windows Vista, heck it was better than Windows Vista AFTER the first service pack. The release candidate was almost flawless, and the version released on Thursday to the general public is superb.

If you’ve been holding onto a Windows XP machine for several years because you refused to buy Vista (perhaps even based on our recommendation) your wait is over. Windows 7 runs well on the latest hardware, a 3 year old PC, and even a 5 year old PC. It runs better than XP on anything with a multi-core processor, and it’s no slouch on a single core machine, as long as it has 1GB of RAM. It will run in 512MB of RAM, even though Microsoft says it doesn’t, but it does bog down a little.

As to compatibility, it runs everything Vista runs, and a few things Vista never did, such as older versions of QuickBooks (pre-2007 versions). If you find something it won’t run, download XP mode, and it most likely will. XP mode is a virtual machine implementation of Windows XP, and it’s available on Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate versions. It works really well, and I have yet to find an XP vintage application that it won’t run. IT even runs Taipei, a Windows 95 vintage game that I admit I’m addicted to!

So go out with full confidence and get a Windows 7 PC, and say goodbye to Vista! A sad chapter in Microsoft history closes as a new better one opens. And for heavens sake, give that pre-2005 vintage XP PC a decent burial, and buy a new Windows 7 PC, there’s only so much the government can do to stimulate the economy – now its your turn!