Henk van de Goor's Bloggers@large

I have about a year to go before my current mobile subscription ends and I will be able to pick out a new phone. People that know me (or read my blog), know that I am a big gadget lover. Many have asked why I do not own an Apple iPhone. I currently own a T-Mobile MDA Vario IV (HTC Touch Pro) running Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro. Well, quite simply: Apple is just too trendy, too expensive and too closed-source to me. But mostly the first part: everyone already owns an iPhone or iPod. And most of their owners have all turned into "iSheep" (well done Apple). It's like there are no other devices left. It's like everyone drives a Ford Focus or something: boring!

Anyway: my next phone is definitely going to be an Android powered phone. Currently I am quite impressed with the Motorola Droid. It's will be launched in the US in November (6th if I am informed correctly) and it features the new Android 2.0 and the new Google Maps (beta).

The phone has very nice design and big screen! I love the Android/Motorola take on the phone interface. Motorola is also known for building sturdy phones. My take overall: very cool. Don't know if it's going to be sold in Europe or not.

But back to Google Maps. The new version was launched this week and it was a bombshell for all current GPS manufacturers. TomTom stocks dropped 33% (!) in two days (by the way: that's a Dutch company). Garmin and other manufacturers stocks have dropped as well. Why? Well, quite simply: Google Maps is for free!

Now, in the video below, you can see what the fuzz is about. Google Maps now (finally) offers step by step instructions. Before you just had to guess where you went. No spoken instructions (yet?), but nevertheless a big step forward. It also has spoken directions (haven't heard it yet, though). There are other very nice features as well. I would say; just watch the video.

Now, one questions remains: is this really going to be a TomTom killer? No, I don't think so. At least not in it's current form. And I will tell you why.

Google Maps depends on you being online and having a data connection on your phone. The other GPS devices have build-in maps. Now, you might argue: "hey, most people have a phone subscription with data anyway, so what's the problem?" Well, quite simply put: within your own country/area there is no problem. But have you ever gotten a bill for data-transmissions while you where roaming? Right: that really chapped your *ss didn't it?

So using Google Maps while you are abroad is not really an option. Not to mention that data connectivity isn't really available everywhere or fast enough. I have first hand experience with that myself. I tried (the old) Google Maps and while driving it just can't get the data downloaded fast enough to keep up.

Only when Google Maps offers some kind of pre-loading of maps or something like it, they will really wipe-out the competition. For now, I think that all the big telecom companies are laughing all the way to the bank; thanks to Google Maps.



More Droid goodness:

I'm sure that some of you must have picked up on the news that 2008 is the year that Mr. Microsoft himself - Bill Gates - will leave the company. In July this year he will be leaving day-to-day operations management at the company he founded, to devote himself to a full-time career in philanthropy, whilst remaining as a chairman. As a founder of Microsoft that company was basically the only one he ever worked at in his entire life. Off course this leaves people speculating on what might become of him once he steps down from his full time position at Microsoft.
Well, at this years Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Gates revealed a video as part of his keynote speech, that showed him attempting to be a star in rock, rap, movies and politics and features numerous Hollywood stars, as well as past and present US presidential candidates.

One thing is sure: Gates will never become an accomplished actor, but I smile at this geek among nerds. You can say or think what you want about the man, but his geek factor is way higher than Apple's CEO Steve Jobs. Not to mention Gates gave away over $29 billion to charities since 2000. That is more money than Jobs will ever make in his life.

Anyway: this whole story is just to provide myself with an alibi to show you Gates' video. So here it is :-)

Bill Gates’ swansong speech at CES 2008

I just installed Mac OS X Leopard on my PowerBook G4. Well, not really 'on' it: I actually used my external 160gb firewire disk for that. I know that some applications are not compatible with Leopard, so I try to play it save. Also I didn't know how smooth it would run on my PowerBook which is just based on a G4 and not the latest Intel platform that Apple is using nowadays. So I'm just experimenting, to put it that way. But I have to say: so far so good. It took about 2 hours before I had installed and copied my stuff, but it looks great, I love Safari 3 (I'm writing this entry with it), and I love stacks; it's makes things a lot less messy on my desktop.

I will definitely need some more time to check things out a bit more in-depth, but so far so good. I was even surprised to find out that with Leopard you get Front Row back! That was something that was not officially included with Tiger for my PowerBook. All the other stuff - Time Machine, Spaces etc - I will need to check out later. One thing that surprises me so far, is that it runs relatively smooth on my 1.5ghz G4 with 768mb ram. Even the new finder with it's "coverflow" like interface seems to work smooth. Amazing!

All I can say so far: Microsoft Vista, eat your heart out!

Yesterday I finally bought another external harddisk: an Iomega 2.5" firewire/usb 2.0, 160gb. I have a Mac PowerBook G4 and some time agao I made the mistake of splitting the internal 80gb harddisk into 2 partions: one for my applications and one for my data. Off course I always ran out of space on my application partition because of the very annoying way OS X uses swapspace. I tried to relocate that swap parttion to my Data parttition but whatever fancy utility I tried, it did not work. So I just wanted to switch back again to one big - well "biggish" - partition.

But in order to do that I had to have a bootable external disc (firewire). So I bought one and cloned my harddrive (took about 2 1/2 hours for each partition) and erased my 80gb harddrive, cloned everything back and started cleaning up as thing were messed up a bit (dock wouldn't start). But after running Applejack it worked like a charm again.

To cut a long story short; I have reclaimed my harddisk and now I have a good extra harddrive. The cool part is that I have cut the Iomega in 2 partitions, one with Apple journaling etc. and the other using NTFS. Now, as you might know OS X can read NTFS, but not write to it. Well lucky you: if you want to write to your external NTFS drive as well, just head over to Lifehack.org and read the article "How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X".

Enjoy!

I ran across some funny spoofs on the "Hello, I am a Mac. And I am a PC" commercials as it seems that Novell is now entering the market as well trying to sell SUSE Linux. Just sit back and let the movies roll :-)

Apple vs Microsoft vs Linux?