Headworx

The title is controversial. And so is the subject of 3G mobile. Anyway, after eight years of 3G I should never ask... But the reality is different and sometimes it is good to ask. What prompted me to post on this subject was my decision last Friday to change my mobile service provider from T-Mobile (Era in Poland) to Orange. No no, the switch is not over yet. There will be more episodes in The Switch saga . Today I am still with T-Mobile, but the decision has already been made. So yes, I am dropping my fantastic Blackberry Bold 9000... The phenomenal, the best piece of hardware I have ever had. And believe me there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Bold itself. It is the service provider to blame. The reasons are described in details in The Episode 4 , so I will not be repeating them here. My next gadget will be the Blackberry Curve 8900 provisioned by Orange. A big unknown. Absolutely no guarantee, it will work as intended. I tried to push Orange to check all the details of the set...

Dynamic range has been a problem ever since any attempt to record a piece of reality was done. What we see and hear live is still beyond what most capturing methods are capable of. I remember the years of analog compact cassette tape and my old analog tape recorder being able to achieve signal to noise ratio of 53 decibels. When I adjusted the recording level to reach maximum with the loudest parts of a song, the silent passages were disappearing in random noise. There was a circuitry called DNS, or dynamic noise reduction system, essentially compressing the input signal to fit in the 50-something decibels range. Then came CDs with digital audio delivering dynamic range of 90 decibels. While great on paper specs and fantastic to listen in an isolated quiet room, 90 decibels is very difficult to replay when riding a train in a headset or watching a movie at home. Many recent audio systems offer dynamic range compression, so the silent parts are amplified and the louder parts are attenua...

Last week I realized my Lenovo X200s was capable of full day, zero stress computing on a single battery charge. Now that is a difference. A light (under 3 lbs) and sufficiently powerful (high resolution screen, 200GB drive, dual core 2GHz CPU) machine able to silently run for ten hours is a difference. Last Tuesday I was on a train with a friend of mine on our frequent 200 miles almost daily route form Krakow to Warsaw. The journey is enough boring that even if it was 7am, both of us took out our laptops and started some business activities. When his Dell died, my lenovo was showing 7 hours remaining battery life. So the next day when I went to the office, for the first time in my life I decided to leave the power supply at home. And I was able to continously work for almost nine hours and the battery was still not drained. Not taking the power supply with me had another reason behind it. It is the most hated piece of equipment Lenovo has ever produced. They spend millions of dollars o...

Being a BlackBerry addict, from time to time i scan the Internet looking for some interesting applications or devices bringing the new use cases to the original phone / messenger setup. And the other day I came across this site: http://www.unify4life.com . They seem to be quite fresh, as the site itself has gone a number of transformations during the last couple of weeks. Anyway the approach and addressed market segment seems interesting: hardware + software solutions extending the BlackBerry phones beyond what they were designed for. Unify4life has two products so far, and only one (the AV|Shadow) can be purchased now and only in the US and Canada). The AV|Shadow falls in the remote control category and I fully agree a good remote control solution for a mobile phone has the potential power to replace a number of conventional remotes. The key to its success, as is the case with almost all gadgets recently, is how easy to use the software is. The second product seems to be something the...

A service. Something absolutely central being offered by MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) for years. A handset - delivered by a hardware vendor was nothing without the wireless service. A SIM card - the soul being put in the body of a handset wakes it up and connects to the network, offering services - voice calls, text messaging and data transmission. Possibly more. many more, but these three are essential and cover probably more than 99% of use scenarios. It was like that fifteen years ago. Or even ten years ago. But times are changing. Advances in hardware platforms, like faster processors, larger screens with much higher resolution, lots of storage memory enable new use scenarios. We use our mobile phones to snap photos, listen to music, play games. Our address books are hundreds entries long. We want social networking, content sharing, shopping and other services. yes, they are available from third parties. Some ecosystems (read: Apple / iPhone) deliver all in the box. What would a...