Thankfully, its fine. Sure its scratched up to hell and the back flew off but once I’d put the pieces back together it all worked just the same.

This has been the same for every modern phone I’ve owned. None of them were ever seriously damaged by my clumsiness – they just got beat up.

In the future however, I may not be so lucky. Check out this video of someone dropping a brand new iPhone:

A design flaw? Sure, but because Apple provide the inception for other firms to follow suit we can expect Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Co to put their own swing on the new iPhone design which could result in a bevy of breakable phones in the near future.

I’ve never had to worry about the ‘dropability’ of a new phone but if the new iPhone is a glimpse of the future I’m seriously worried!

Both mice are showing their age with my office one only recognising 1 in every 3 clicks and my home one freezing every now and again. Because of this its time to move on and get a new mouse, hell, I may as well get a new keyboard too.

Enter Logitech

10 years ago Microsoft were at the forefront of mouse design. Recently Logitech have taken this mantle after a string of excellent gaming mice.

Its also evident that wireless is the new in-thing. Try as I might I couldn’t find a high-tech wired mouse for the office!

After a couple of weeks doing R&D into the new world of mice I settled for the ‘Logitech Cordless Desktop MX 5500 Revolution’:

The MX 5500 bundle includes the MX Revolution Mouse which by my reckoning is the best non-gamer mouse on the market right now.

It also comes with what appears to be a super snazzy keyboard, something I have needed at home since I accidentally ordered a Dell USA layout keyboard from eBay 2 years ago.

At £50 for the mouse and £100 for the bundle they arn’t cheap but I paid £50 for each of my Intellimice and got almost 10 years out of each of them.

This actually made me LOL, I really did roll on the floor.

My wife sad she had to see what was “sooooo funny” guess what, she didn’t get it…

I’m currently using this one.

Well, this afternoon, I took the plunge and installed the new beta (7000) on my laptop. NOT as a VM either, as the machines primary OS.

Initial impressions are positive. In fact, after about 20 minutes I fell in love with it! It really does feel like a true progression away from Windows XP.

Sure, it feels a lot like ‘Vista with a facelift’. But its a functional facelift, with new features and tweaks that Windows has been crying out for since they announced the replacement for XP over 5 years ago.

Installation was a breeze. The whole thing took less than 30 minutes and my graphics, wifi and sound all worked without any manual installation.

Boot up time is snappy and the whole thing has an “almost finished” feel about it. Quite amazing considering the short amount of time it has been since they announced they would be canning Vista so soon after its birth.

I have been critical of Windows 7 in the past. Mainly because I really do like Vista and I hoped that Microsoft would try to steady the ship before re-working and re-releasing it under a new name. If anything, I felt bad for Vista. It’s release was a fanfare which soon turned into a flogging.

Using the new 7 beta you start to get the impression that the
developers really are working on something they are proud of.

And fingers crossed Microsoft may finally be listening and moving towards an OS which will be welcomed by the nerds and also the housewives.

LifeHacker just did some testing of the new Windows 7 beta to try and gauge its boot time response:

That all said, the numbers:

Operating System	Average time to reach desktop
Windows 7 Ultimate (Beta, Build 7000, 32-bit)	28 seconds
Windows 7 Ultimate (Preview, Build 6801, PDC edition, 32-bit)	32 seconds
Windows Vista Ultimate (32-bit, SP1)	33 seconds
Windows XP Professional (SP3)	40 seconds

Here you can see that for the first time, Windows is offering a sub-30 second start time on pretty standard modern hardware, for the first time in at least a long time (if ever, I don’t have a copy of Windows 95 or 3.1 to test).

Now, 20-30 seconds is deemed “impressive” by anyone testing a Windows system. In fact, its decent for ANY OS.

The thing is, I’m not that impressed, let me explain.

Sit down for a moment and count to 20, in real time, use your watch to help.

Now do the same but count to 30. No distractions, just counting.

Trust me, it takes AGES. A 30 seconds boot sequence is just NOT good enough for a modern OS. If your TV or games console took that long to boot up you’d take it back!

If I were Microsoft I’d give up on the fast-boot-time boast. Its just not worth the backlash.

(to download hi-res version you will have to click though a couple of times…)

The words I thought I would never hear. The thing I said would never happen. Vista, oh Vista, they have betrayed you.

Ballmer-d

In a single comment Steve Ballmer has tarred Windows Vista with the same brush that killed off poor old Windows ME:

“It’s not minor because it’s a lot more work than a minor release. It’s a major release. Windows 7 will be Vista, but a lot better.”

Full Article

Its now official Windows 7 will be everything that Vista should have. Shame on Microsoft for doing this.

You have to be kidding me

According to Mike Nash on the Vista blog, the company went with Windows 7 because it “just makes sense” as the seventh release of Windows, and MS doesn’t want to come up with a new “aspirational” name like Vista

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