Hasta La Gadget!

Nokia’s looking to ride the mojo of any negative fallout from today’s Apple press conference, slipping out a rather fascinating statement this afternoon. The gist of it is that Espoo’s keen on letting everyone know how much blood, sweat, and tears they’ve poured into perfecting their antenna design strategy over the years, going so far as to say that they “prioritize” it over the physical design of the phone if they need to in order to optimize its call performance — an opinion moderately different from the “we want to have our cake and eat it too” philosophy espoused by Jobs today. In closing, Nokia acknowledges that a “tight grip” can mess with the performance, though they say they’ve done a bunch of research on the ways their phones are typically held so that the antennas are placed optimally. Interestingly, there was a stink not long ago about the severe signal degradation some E71 users were seeing when they placed their hands on the lower rear of the phone — but you can’t win ’em all, we suppose. Follow the break for the full statement.

Continue reading Nokia: ‘we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict’

Nokia: ‘we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 21, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Transferring files from one folder to another, or from computer to computer is something most people do on a regular basis. Have you ever thought about speeding up the process by using a file transfer utility? They’re similar to the download managers in your web browser, except they’re made to be used all around your computer.

The best part is that the two free programs that I mention below replace the built-in Windows file transfer manager. You can still use Windows Explorer just as you normally do, but anytime you try to copy, paste, or move files, these apps will do the dirty work for you. Not only that, but both programs will pick up where they left off, should you shutdown your computer in the middle of a transfer, or need to stop it for some reason. Heck, you can even pause the transfers and resume them later on!

–Copy Handler (Homepage)–

This is probably my favorite of the two programs this article covers. It has an insane number of options (over 60) that you customize, doesn’t require any installation, and is open source. One of the reasons that I love this program so much is that you can adjust the number of simultaneous transfers, and once that number is hit it will queue up the rest for later on.

After you download the ZIP folder and extract the contents, the first thing you’ll want to do is register the DLL. This will ensure that Copy Handler replaces the built-in transfer manager for Windows:

Then whenever you go to transfer a file you’ll be presented with an extremely compact file transfer window (left – actual size), or you can open a more detailed window full of all the stats that you crave (right – click to enlarge):

Then if you want to try and speed things up even more, or want to change how something works, just head on over to the options where there are plenty of things for you to play with:

There is one downside to this program, and it’s that it isn’t actively developed any more. The last update was provided back in October 2006, but luckily it still works great on Vista. The developer is currently looking for a sponsor so that he can continue the development on Copy Handler.

–TeraCopy (Homepage)–

This application is similar to the Copy Handler above, but I saw it on Lifehacker recently and it also piqued my interest. I gave it a whirl and found it to be much simpler than Copy Handler. It doesn’t really have anything for you to configure, and what you see below is essentially the entire application.

You’ll be notified if an error occurs while in the middle of a transfer, but TeraCopy will continue working on the other files. That way one bad file doesn’t screw up the entire batch of files being transferred.

–Overview/Benchmarks–

You’ll only notice a large speed difference with these file transfer utilities if your moving or copying many files, or really big files. To give you a quick comparison of the differences in using these I transferred 85 images over the network that totaled 114MB. Again, the differences aren’t that large, but if you’re moving around a few gigabytes of data these utilities could possibly chop a few minutes off of the transfer time.

• Copy Handler – 58 seconds
• TeraCopy – 1 minute
• Vista (with Performance Pack) – 1 minute and 3 seconds
• Vista (without Performance Pack) – 1 minute and 14 seconds

Note: Default options were used in each of the applications.

If you find yourself frequently moving large things around, these apps could be priceless to you. Of the two, I would recommend Copy Handler to anyone that is a power user, and TeraCopy for anyone looking for a simple replacement for what’s built-in to Windows.

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You heard it here first, folks. Google has just come out with the strident claim that the web browser in Android 2.2, aka Froyo, is the world’s fastest for mobile devices. Having implemented the V8 JavaScript Engine that’s already made an appearance in its desktop Chrome browser, Google’s reporting JavaScript performance that’s somewhere in the vicinity of two to three times better than what you can get from previous Android versions. We’ll give this geek cabal some style points for the double equals sign up top, but will certainly be putting its bold assertion to the test in the very near future.

Google claims Froyo has the world’s fastest mobile browser originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 May 2010 11:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on September 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 is on the home stretch with the first Release Candidate being made available today. It’s been over 5-months since OpenOffice.org 2.2 was released, and I’m sure most users will be welcoming this update with open arms.

The release notes for OpenOffice.org 2.3 isn’t exactly easy reading, and so I went looking through the OpenOffice.org Wiki for some info. That’s when I stumbled upon their draft of the press release which mentioned several of the more notable features in 2.3. To make it a bit easier to follow I’ve put them in a list format:

• Charting component (available for use throughout OpenOffice.org)
• A new chart wizard
• Enhanced 3D chart designs
• Replacement colour palettes
• Additional axis options and scaling
• Improved toolbars
• Flexible data sources
• Improved data editor
• OpenOffice.org Writer (word processor)
• Create Wiki pages with a new filter (example of a page created with it can be found here)
• Documents aligned to the center of the window rather than to the left
• Language guessing of unknown text, which provides better spelling recommendations
• Simple Mail Merge now allows the saving of the merge to a single document
• Support for ODF specification soft page breaks added
• Pages are not being centered
• Changed link behaviour in Writer (Ctrl+click for opening links)
• OpenOffice.org Calc (spreadsheets)
• Default print settings have changed to suppress the printing of blank pages and to only print the selected sheets
• Additional simplification of shortcuts
• Improvement of various functions
• Changes to context menus and dialogues
• Improvements to import filters
• Modifications to toolbars
• Enhancemed AutoSum feature
• OpenOffice.org Impress (presentations)
• Performance improvements
• The ‘move along curve’ animation feature has been re-introduced, giving ‘cartoon-like’ abilities to presentations.
• OpenOffice.org Base (databases)
• Additional features for expert users such as keyboard shortcuts, and a Report Builder, available as extension on http://extensions.services.openoffice.org.
• OpenOffice.org Draw (diagram creation)
• Improved exporting to HTML/web by adding support for exporting the images to portable network graphics (PNG) format
• Provide alternate text for image maps and layer titles and descriptions.

Interestingly enough most OpenOffice.org users had little to no urge to make the jump over to StarOffice when Google started offering it for free. I thought the idea of more clipart and included templates would have been more than enough to entice new users, but that didn’t end up being the case.

As of right now OpenOffice.org 2.3 is scheduled for release on September 12th or 13th, and with the numerous improvements it will be well worth the upgrade. Oh yeah, don’t forget to improve the startup time of OpenOffice.org by following the info Bob posted in our forum.

Download OpenOffice 2.3 RC1 [via Ghacks]

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This article was written on August 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

Mac users were supposed to be getting the newly redesigned Office 2008, but as it turns out the development team hit a snafu. Now the release date for Office 2008 on Macs is getting pushed back from Fall 2007 to January 2008. Yes, all Intel Mac users running Office 2004 have about 5 more months that they will be putting up with the sluggish performance because of running it with Rosetta.

The new target date of January 2008 will put the release just in time for Macworld, which is where all of the biggest Apple fanatics gather at the same time. So what was the cause for the delay? Craig Eisler, the Microsoft Mac Business Unit’s General Manager, said:

There was no one thing that caused the push—it was more of a perfect storm. The switch to Intel processors, the switch to different tools in the development stream, the switch in formats with Office—all of it presented different roadblocks for the team, and we wanted to make sure we could address all of those issues.

If you look at the release history of Office for Windows vs. Office for Mac you’ll find that the Mac version is typically released 6 to 8 months after the Windows version. Office 2008 is going to be one of the longest delays between the Windows and Mac versions coming in almost a year after-the-fact. Technically it is a year and two months if you count when Office 2007 was released to businesses.

Current Mac users will need to use a file converter that Microsoft offers if they want to open Office 2007 documents. However, that only handles Word and PowerPoint documents.

Alright…I’ll close things up with some screenshots from Office 2008 running on a Mac. These were taken back in January, so some things have probably changes since then:

Source: Ars Technica and TUAW

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