ASUS ZenBook UX31A

Greg

[sc:hardware-category ]I’ve been using my Acer Timeline 1810T notebook for almost 4 years now and it was finally time to upgrade as it no longer supported some of the functionality I needed.

Specifically, while it did have a processor that supported virtualization, the latest version of Visual Studio for Windows Phone no longer support the specific processor in the Timeline.  That left a few questions about what I wanted to upgrade to.  A few items were important to me:

  • Full “desktop” class CPU
  • High resolution display
  • Small and light

The Timeline was an 11.6″ display and I like the format but the keyboard was a bit small and running Visual Studio on a small display was always challenging.  I decided to take a look at the 13.3″ Ultrabooks that have become available in the last few months.  It came down to two, an Acer S7 and the ASUS UX31A.  At the top end of the range, both had an Intel I7 dual core CPU, full HD display and were thin and light.

In the end I decided to go with the ASUS as it was several hundred dollars less and had one feature I really liked, a non-glare screen.  A pet peeve of mine is high gloss screens, they show up every little reflection and make it hard to work on.

My first impressions are very positive, it’s fast and I mean REALLY fast.  Boot times are down to seconds and the I7 chews through pretty much everything I through at it.  Run time looks to be in the 4+ hour range under heave load (both using the processor and WiFi at the same time).

The HD resolution makes it looks spectacular, but it is a little dense, I’ve set Windows to 125% of normal to start with, I may move it back down to 100% at some point but I’ll see how it goes for a while.

Here in Canada we sometimes get the “multi-lingual” version of notebooks, they have a different keyboard layout and I do hate them.  I just can’t type quickly on them.  Fortunately ASUS seems to have woken up to this fact and it looks like they’re shipping US keyboards on their Canadian product now.  The only small issue I have with the keyboard is the placement of the power button.  It’s at the top right, where the delete key is usually on a laptop, just to the left of it is where the delete key is.  It looks like this was thought of though as the power button must be held for a second or so, making accidentally hitting it when trying to do a Ctrl-Alt-Delete not a big issue.

The unit itself is very well-built, is a nice dark metallic colour and it feels good.  The front edge of the keyboard is a little too thin, if the keyboard is above your hands its not very comfortable, however that is a very rare case so I can forgive it.

The only thing really missing is the Ethernet port, it comes with a USB dongle but it’s only a 10/100 adapter so it’s a little slow.  I’ll probably have to pick up a gigabit adapter at some point, but not a big deal either.

Overall, a very nice Ultrabook.

700Mhz Auction AKA Time to Nationalize the Wireless Industry?

Greg

The Federal Government recently announced some more details of the 700Mhz spectrum auction that is scheduled for this year, which is kind of interesting.

I can remember a time when using a modem on a residential phone line was not allowed by Bell Canada so I’m no fan of incumbent, monopolistic telephone companies, but is having “competition” better when it really isn’t competition at all?

The wireless industry has been moving along under the “free market” banner for years but real competition has yet to arrive in a meaningful way for most Canadians (yes, Wind and other new entrants bring some competition to the table, but are limited in the coverage).  When the telephone companies first start to appear it was quickly realized that having multiple companies run phones lines to homes didn’t make much sense.  The solution was to give a monopoly to one company per area of service and then force them all to interoperate with each other.

This actually worked pretty well to begin with as the industry grew and only started to fall off the rails when new technology came along that threatened the status quo.  The monopolies of course tried to kill the new tech, but eventually failed to do so.

So why haven’t we realized that building three or four wireless networks to do the same thing is a waste as well?  Ok, sure, when there were competing standards (CDMA and GSM) there was an argument to be made to support multiple networks, but LTE has won.  There is only one standard and maybe now its time to rethink how we license wireless operators.

Let’s face it, many of the ‘tricks’ wireless providers use today to keep people on their networks (long term financing of phones, locked hardware, limited hardware options) look a lot like what the phone company use to do as well.  Could a hybrid model be created that would reduce the cost of the infrastructure and spurs competition as well?

I think its possible.  Nationalize the underlying network, build one set of towers and run it as a monopoly with regulations that require open access.  Then providers like Bell, Rogers and Telus can offer services on top of the network (access to the phone network, the internet, their own content, etc.), forcing them to complete on price and features instead of which phones they have.  This would allow smaller providers like Wind to compete on a level playing field instead of having to spend years building out infrastructure and spending billions on spectrum and roaming agreements.

In the end, just like with telephone service, national wireless coverage is the goal and duplicating the effort two, three or four times is just a waste of money that end users have to pay for through higher monthly bills.

Exchange 2013 Upgrade – Part 1

Greg

[sc:software-category ]Exchange 2013 came out late last year and I haven’t had a chance to install it until recently.

I have to admit I just kind of jump feet first in to the upgrade, spun up a Windows Server 2012 VM, assigned some RAM and Disk space and mounted the cd image.

The setup is pretty straight forward from there, a few pre-requisites that you have to manually install (the UC runtime and the Filter Pack) but other than that the setup program does the rest.

Once installed Microsoft has continued down its “Don’t provide GUI tools” path and there is basically no GUI for Exchange Server management.  Instead everything is done through the web UI, which isn’t as robust as the old Windows GUI was.

After poking around a bit I decided to move an admin account from 2010 to 2013, the migration process was straight forward and I logged in to OWA for the admin account.  The first thing I noticed was the fact that it was still the 2010 OWA interface.  After poking around a bit I found a setting that indicated which version to use, but it was read only and I could not alter it.

Doing some research on the net turned up a couple of interesting things:

  • The Exchange 2013 documentation is well… let’s call it thin.  Many of the pages are simply blank and others don’t contain nearly enough information yet.
  • The Exchange Server Deployment Assistant has only just been released and only support new installs, no upgrades so it’s not much help really.
  • Exchange 2013 co-existence with 2007 and 2010 is not yet supported, Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) which is supposed to be released by end of Q1 will bring this support.

And that’s when I stepped back and released I was in quick sand.  The good news is that there doesn’t seem to be any issue with leaving 2013 in place at the moment.  2010 is running along just fine and mail is flowing to the admin mailbox I moved over as well.

It does kind of make me wonder why Microsoft released 2013 so early when it’s clearly not yet ready for the majority of deployments, but presumably there was pressure to get it out to support new clients moving from other platforms and to support their hosted hybrid implementations.

CU1 was released last week and I’ve done the install but the lack of documentation for co-existence is a real problem, I’ll post part 2 of the upgrade once the deployment assistant is updated (unless I get adventurous again and just give it a go again ;).

BlackBerry Z10

Greg

[sc:mobile-category ]The Blackberry Z10 has been out for a while and a friend of mine picked one up a couple of weeks ago.  I had a chance to use it a bit and my initial thoughts are kind of mixed.

The hardware is quite nice, a well-built phone that can pretty much compete with other phones that are out there.  The display, while a little small in comparison to the monsters that are out there these days, is still large and bright, especially if you are coming from an older BB.  My work phone these days is a BB Bold and in comparison to that the Z10 has a monster display 😉

In reality, no one is going to buy the Z10 due to its hardware.  It’s nice and all, but it’s really no different from any other smart phone these days.  Smartphone hardware has pretty much plateaued.  If the Z10 is going to be successful, then its the software that has to do it.

And that’s where the problem really is.  The OS just doesn’t pop out at you, it looks kind of visually boring.  It all works, the gestures are kind of neat and it runs quite smoothly but it doesn’t feel like a brand new OS.

Thinking back using it, it kind of felt abrupt.  Transitions between apps and screen happen quickly (which is normally good) but almost felt too quick.  That might be one of those things you get use to after a while, but it was just something that felt a little off while I was using it.

BBM is there, but that’s not nearly as big a deal as it once was.  With falling market share, most users have moved away from BBM to other cross-platform messaging clients.  In fact, the other day when WhatsApp was released for BB10 my friend was more exited about it than BBM.

I asked him why he choose the Z10 over and Android or Windows Phone device (an iPhone was never in the running and he does have a second Android phone) and for him it came down to having several Playbooks that he could use the BlackBerry Bridge functionality with.  I guess vendor lock in wins again 😉

The Z10 I was playing with also had the Otterbox and that was not a good thing.  I have had an Otterbox for several of my phones and I am a big fan in general, but the Z10 box has a couple of design flaws atypical of them.  First the case doesn’t come anywhere close to being flush to the display so there is a good 1/4 inch raised lip around the entire phone.  This makes it seem much thicker than the phone actually is.

As well, the Z10 uses a swipe from the bottom up to bring up the home screen, the case has a tapered edge down to this but it interferes with the swipe quite often and I found myself having to swipe two or three times to get it right.

Overall I imagine I’ll get a Z10 (or its successor) at work at some point, but there’s nothing that it brings to the table that makes me excited to get it.  And that’s probably its biggest issue, there’s nothing to drive new users to the platform and that spells trouble in the long run for the company.

WP8 Portico Update and WP7.8 Update

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A while ago Bell released the Portico update for my HTC 8x and since then things have been going  well.  Unless of course you had a Windows Phone 7 and install the 7.8 update, then not so much 😉

I have not had a single reboot since I installed the update and so there’s not really anything else to say about Portico.

Microsoft though did kind of screw up with the 7.8 update as the live tiles seem to be pretty much broken and they stopped the rollout a little while ago.  Since then they’ve been working on a fix and it appears they’ve finally started rolling it out.

I plugged in my HD7 the other day and two updates came down:

  • 7.10.8860.142
  • 7.10.8862.144

Installation was straight forward and there’s no obvious changes, but presumably the live tiles work better 😉