Bleep - Technology news and reviews from Ireland

Meeting the EU today in ComReg HQ to tell them how shit ComReg are and how lame the Dept of Comms are. Then over to Dublin Castle for this shindig with Eamon Ryan ringleading it. The rockstars, the hasbeens and the neverwillbes of Irish telecoms will be there as well as general consumers and those representing as many demographics as possible. I’ll try to liveblog from it if I can. I hope it’s constructive. I already hear the IBEC lot are put up a united front.

It’s apt that this survey from the EU showing how bad Ireland is came out yesterday.

And also that we may get a super telecoms regulator for the EU.

ComReg are running a conference on the Digital Divide on Wednesday where EU Commissioner Viviane Reding will talk and probably talk more about this super-regulator. Naturally I didn’t get invited. It seems perverse that we have a Comms Minister who actually rings me and invites me to events despite not agreeing on a whole lot and the “independent” telecoms regulator does their best to pretend I don’t exist.

Lost my temper. iPhone was nearest thing. Then it was the furthest thing from me.

The screen is cracked and broken and touchscreen is not working at all. It still synchs with my computer though.

Luckily I bought an N95 recently. I’ll miss you iPhone. Best phone I ever owned. Now I’ll need to buy flashier clothes to act like a jumped up shit.

Probably an established brand in the Irish Web Scene these days, DownloadMusic.ie is a simple service with all the complex stuff hidden away. Buy music off the site or via their SMS shortcode. You get a copy sent to the phone and to an online download link so you can have a copy on your computer too. All for a euro.

I’ve already covered the album that they brought out. One of the guys behind the site is Johnny Beirne who has been a music fan forever and always has been involved with independent music in Irekabd so this site sprung from his passion in this area. Some of the best businesses out there have been created by people that have been immersed in their market and want to improve it or see a painpoint that can be addressed.

If you’ve not seen DownloadMusic.ie before, go and have a look.

If you want your technology/product listed on the Tuesday Push, then fill in this form here. We’re not interested in some rebadged or reskinned piece of technology, you have to have added some kind of IP to your service. To see the benefits of the Tuesday Push, read Gordon’s blog post on it.

The Moviestar Irish Web Awards are on October 11th. Registration is now open.

There’s even an unofficial Facebook event page thing for it. Already!

It should be a laugh. If the usual gathering and community building at the Blog Awards gets replicated again at this then without talking it up too much, it should be fantastic. Everyone is welcome too. You don’t need to be nominated, you don’t need a website or a blog. 30 euros in. Rick O’Shea is your wonderful MC for the event too.

On Tuesday 9th September 2008 Magnet launched two new highly competitive broadband packages. “Magnet Force 10″, features 10Mbps Broadband for €29.99 per month (incl vat, excl line rental), free access to the new Magnet PC TV service & value call packages. Uniquely, this new product has a magic red button called “Turbo Boost”, which when pressed will instantly boost a customers speed to the maximum possible on their line, upto 24Mbps. This new feature is free until January 2009, but after that Magnet are planning on charging a small fee for 4 hours of maximum speed browsing! “Magnet Force Max”, is an upto 24Mbps product priced at €39.99 per month (incl vat, excl line rental). This products joins the ranks of super fast products now available in Ireland from the likes of BT, Smart and UPC. Magnet promise excellent quality of service by guaranteeing 1:1 contention, this means that even at peak times your connection speed will not degrade unlike their competitors. This “Max” product also features the new Magnet PC TV service.

The free Magnet PC TV service allows customers to watch RTE1, RTE2, TV3, TG4 and Bubble Hits on their computers. A small free application is required to decode the Mpeg4 stream which will use approximately 1Mbps of your bandwidth. More than 12 high quality radio stations are also included. Plans are in place for live pause and record features. Having seen a short demonstration, I think this could be a revolutionary step for an ISP, the convenience alone of having your broadband deliver your phone, radio and TV sounds great. An added bonus is that no tv license is required for TV through the internet in Ireland!

Magnet are one of the few internet service providers in Ireland really pushing the envelope in terms of new cutting edge products. Their fibre products in new developments (stay tuned for a detailed article coming soon) are available to 11,000 homes across the country and these new ADSL2+ products launched on Tuesday are available to 500,000 customers via their 39 unbundled exchanges in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Portlaoise. Magnet are also planning to unbundle a further 9 exchanges in the near future.

We still need a few more judges for the Web Awards. Why not sign up? Email contact awards.ie, if your site/work has been nominated then you can’t judge any category at all. Sorry!

This week’s Tuesday Push: eWrite Lite.

eWrite Lite is a tool for editing and publishing a website. It can be used to create a whole new website or log into your existing website and make changes, all via a web browser. There’s no need to install anything. They even have a demo that you can use to log into your own site. It’s also very affordable and ideally suits their target market of SMEs.

I’ve actually reviewed eWrite Lite previously so read that. Ideally for such a low charge, eWrite Lite would best be licensed by hosting providers or ISPs as selling to individuals at that price could take a lot of footwork.

Check out eWrite Lite and their other products. If you want your product on the Tuesday Push, fill out this form. Please remember we’re looking for something that was created by an Irish company, not just some technology that was reskinned.

On a side note, someone asked me recently about whether you could give constructive criticism for the Tuesday Push or were you required only to say positive things and talk something up. The idea is to talk the company/person’s effort up and give honest feedback too. I would think the pushees would prefer someone kicking the tyres and looking for leaking oil than saying everything is super.

DownloadMusic is up in two weeks and BookAMeetingRoom

Dell’s high end M1530 is for “Individuals searching design, function, and
performance” according to Dell. The M1530 is a 15.4 inch reasonably thin high
performance laptop available in a numbers of colours.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say, but to me this laptop is an
attractive piece of kit. The high quality materials used in the construction
ooze quality, from the brushed metal around the keyboard to the high quality
plastics elsewhere. The keyboard and touch pad are well designed & ergonomic
and I found them to be a pleasure to use compared to the cheap Dell Vostro
models. The 9 cell battery offers superb performance although you can opt for
the 6 cell variant which is smaller and lighter, yet odly the same price. I managed to
get over 3 hours out of the 9 cell with varying usage from light to medium to all out 3d gaming. Connectivity wise the M1530 has 3 USB ports, HDMI, s-video & VGA for video out,
firewire gigabit ethernet, 8 in 1 card reader, dual headphone jacks & a mic jack,
and a biometric fingerprint reader. It also ships with a remote control which you can
conveniently store in the express slot & the other now standard Dell features like
slot loading DVD writer & touch sensitive controls above the keyboard.

This laptop is fast. The model I borrowed had a dual core 2 ghz cpu, 3 gigs of
ram and a 8600GT Nvidia graphics card with 256 megs of ram and a 250 gig
5400rpm hard drive. Vista home premium is fast and responsive. Productivity
applications ran flawlessly; programs feel as quick as they do on my high end
desktop. I ran 3Dmark 06 and the M1530 scored approximately 4000 marks which
is very good for a 15.4 inch portable. I also loaded up a couple of games.
Unreal Tournament 3 was perfectly playable at native resolutions at “High”
detail settings, framerates hovered around 40 fps. I also tried some Valve
Half life 2 engine games at max details and the M1530 coped easily. Don’t get
too excited though, Crysis is not going to be a silky smooth experience.
When the M1530 is under heavy load it does get a little warm & the fan spins
up to audible levels. Also, one thing did niggle me regarding the M1530, the
hard drive is mounted towards the front & I found the 250 gig model when
seeking was very noisy.

Overall the XPS M1530 is a great laptop which will handle almost any
application that you throw at it.

Call it a Blackberry clone but the HP iPaq 910 Business Messenger is a strong contender to win the hearts and minds of business people that wanted the iPhone but want more power and less gimmicks. Full tactile keyboard, Windows Mobile, good connectivity with 3G and WiFi, GPS, a proper 3 mexapixel camera with flash and focus.

For the business person that’s considering getting a blackberry styled phone they have a lot of choice nowadays with devices from Blackberry themselves, Nokia and HP using the old iPaq brand to sell these solid business phones.

iPaq 910 runs the latest version of Windows Mobile and so all the usual apps appear including Internet Explorer but you can install another browser if you so desire. GPS on this works quite well and shows you where you are on Google Maps which is installed for you. The Bluetooth is proper bluetooth so you can pair it to many devices. Being Windows you can read your office documents too and it has push corporate email.

Phone reception is great too. Yes, it’s 2008 and we are now talking about good phone reception as if that’s some kind of new feature. Thanks iPhone!

A great business phone overall and one we wouldn’t hesitate in recommending.

The Traxdata Waterproof USB Flash Drive is a well built solid memory stick which offers fast read and write speeds. I prefer Traxdata’s square build approach as it leads to a more sturdy reliable product. I’ve ended up breaking other waterproof products because they were too thin and not strong enough.

The 8 gig model provides ample storage space for most people, but Traxdata do offer larger capacities if you need to bring huge amounts of data around in your pocket. Admittedly, I haven’t tested the waterproof feature; I don’t think it would’ve gone down too well with Traxdata if I drowned this review model!

Here are some benchmark numbers for comparison purposes

Neo 8 GB                           Write  1         Read   4
OCZ 8GB Waterproof            Write  8         Read   30
Traxdata Waterproof           Write 8.5         Read  31

Speeds are in megabytes per second. Tested in Vista Ultimate 64bit.

I can’t find a single flaw with this product & it has everything going for it. So I’m happy to give the Waterproof USB Flash Drive 5 stars!

Michele’s kicked off something interesting with his blog post about the IIA’s Blog putting in nofollow or rather using the wordpress default on their blogs for comments.

(For the non techies who are the majority on this blog: the nofollow attribute in links left in comments on a blog means Google and other search engines won’t give these links any weight because they came from your site. See some people/bots had been leaving 1000s of comments on blogs before which linked to certain sites and it resulted those sites getting artificial boosts in Google rankings)

The IIA have since changed that around. Michele himself talks about his moderation policy and how he nukes any soft sell comments. If you have a moderation policy of doing that then removing nofollow makes sense I would guess.

No, not that kinda Link:

Photo owned by metaxin (cc)

However, the way I see it, links without nofollow should be ones that you endorse and they’re not links in comments. I leave plenty of comments through that I do not agree with. I’ll do the same for links but I don’t vote with my site for those links. My own moderation policy is I’ll allow most stuff through soft sell or not (though not all) with the idea being the stupid and bad linking of an individual just makes them look like tits.

When you have IIA in their training classes advocating leaving comments on blogs to boost your Google rankings, maybe nofollow is actually a good idea?

Also wouldn’t spam engines target your blog more if it removes nofollows?

It would be nice though for Wordpresss to allow you to have that control. Maybe they’ll bring it out. Meanwhile there’s a Dofollow wordpress plugin for it.

Dell have once again added to their impressive armada of flat panel monitors. The 2709W monitor is a 27inch 1900×1200 widescreen flat panel monster. I believe it offers the perfect size to resolution ratio; some argue that the dot pitch (the size of every pixel) is too large, but 5 minutes with this monitor and you will agree with me, Dell got it right!

The 2709W features every possible connection you could ever require, HDMI, DVI, VGA, component, composite, audio out and the new displayport. It also has a USB hub and a 5 in 1 card reader built into the side.  The monitor is built brilliantly. The stand is amongst the best I’ve used for height and tilt adjustments, the touch controls  are tricky at first but after a few minutes you won’t want to go back to clunky buttons. As hard as I looked, I couldn’t find a single dead or stuck pixel.

I personally don’t like being too much above 1080p because you require too much graphics card horsepower to keep the frame rates up in games.  I plugged up my Xbox 360 via the HDMI port and the games looked superb in 1080p. The resolution is also ideal for movies; I loaded up Transformers in HD and the monitor performed superbly.  The 2709W is also great for productivity; it’s so convenient to be able to work on two A4 documents side by side!

The 2709W isn’t by any means perfect. The response times are pretty bad, so if you competitively game (first person shooters particularly) then I would definitely avoid this monitor. Also, the screen ships with ridiculous contrast & brightness settings that will need to be changed immediately unless you like looking staring at the sun. Also, for ideal colour reproduction, I’d advise getting or borrowing a calibration tool!

I love this screen, I’m too old and too slow to competitively game, so the 2709W from Dell is absolutely  perfect for me!

BT are blaming eircom or some BT staff are. Also affecting Perlico and UTV. Seems to happen mostly in the evenings the past few days. Something is certainly screwy.

Philipp Lenssen has the scoop on Google Chrome, their new open source “web browser”. He got sent a comic about it in the post. Brilliant marketing move.

Some bits about this open source browser:

• Google Gears built-in
• A new javascript engine called V8
• A task manager
• Web apps can run in without the address window
• Better security
• An iGoogle like start page

A browser you say? Sounds more like a WebOS that can run offline on your desktop. Any desktop. Windows, MacOS, Linux

Google’s awful open Social idea will follow next too and will probably be changed to fit into this so people can build web apps for this browser so they can run online and offline. A very clever idea. Not only getting a larger share of online but moving into offline too. Apple’s iPhone Appstore shows people will buy applications if they’re uselful. I wonder will we see the same thing happen here? Build an app for Chrome, sell it on the Google App store and use the Google Engine infrastructure to run it all.