Here’s a great blog posting from GearLog. If you plan on purchasing a Treo 700w or a Motorola Q from Verizon Wireless, make sure you get an unlimited data plan. If you don’t, you might end up paying loads of money to Verizon for things that you didn’t think were data related. GearLog reports that many users were socked with hidden data transfer charges simply by using MMS features. Yes - MMS goes over the data network which incurs a charge on your phone if you don’t have a data plan. Sneaky huh? So do yourself a favor and get the unlimited data plan but also realize that VW is expensive to begin with.

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With sales of Nokia’s Vertu line of mobile phones climbing, the company has decided to launch the high end phone line in the Nordic countries and in Japan. The current Vertu Signature Model 2006 line comes in six models and features high end enhancements such as gold plating and embedded diamonds. Models often sell as high as 31K. Who knows how much Nokia actually makes from this high end line of phones but it’s apparently high enough for them to launch in additional countries. Of course you figure that profit margins for these high end beasts will be quite high.

 

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I hope all of you had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. The weather was absolutely stunning down here in Southern California. We ended up having a ton of house parties and also celebrating the vacation time with some nice volleyball fun. Now, I’m back to the grind so let’s see what’s happening out there in the world of gadgets. I’ll also continue posting about my experiences with Windows Vista Beta 2 this week.

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If there’s one thing that’s never been completely painless about Windows, it has to be it’s installation process. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t have an easy task at hand when it comes to installing Windows since there’s just so many different hardware configurations out there and so many more hardware choices and accessories that people have. Not only are there different hardware configurations from different eras of computing, there are varying levels of driver qualities too. All this makes installing Windows a royal pain at times. Of course those of you with newer systems won’t have as many difficulties with installing Windows but yes, it’s a chore at the end of the day.

However, if you were to chart Microsoft Windows installation efforts through the years, you’d probably come to the same conclusion that I have in that Microsoft’s done a pretty good at improving the installation experience. In fact, installing Windows XP has become a simple task for most users out there (does anyone remember what it was like installing NT 4.0 at times?). So now we come to Windows Vista Beta 2. What would this be like? I wasn’t quite sure to be honest with you. I played with Beta 1 with some hesitation and found it to be annoying at times to install correctly on a new system. Would Beta 2 change my mind? Let’s find out.

I downloaded my copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 from the MSDN network which I’ve been a part of for many years now. Vista Beta 2 comes on a DVD image and I’m guessing that it’ll ship on DVD as well when release time comes. Once I finished downloading the image and burned it onto a DVD+R, I popped the disk into my system and tried my hand at installing Vista.

For those of you wondering, I have a dual processor Intel XEON system running at 2.8GHz. Each XEON processor is also hyper-threading enabled. The FSB is 800MHz and I run a PCI-e NVIDIA graphics card also - but more on this stuff later on.

Once I booted into the Windows Vista Beta 2 setup program, I was greeted by a nice graphical user interface. It basically amounted to a large wizard asking you where you’d like to install the OS. From here, you can also format your partitions, merge them and do all sorts of things with them that the average joe probably shouldn’t do.

Once you’ve selected the partition, you can begin installing which brings us to the following screen:

Thus the copying started and I walked away from my computer. I actually started the installation process at around 3am so I decided to just hit the sack and look at this in the morning.

When I woke up the next morning.. or rather in about 4 hours or so, I was greeted with the following screen.

Windows Vista was finished with the major portions of the setup routine, and now I had to enter some basic regional information;

enter a user name and pick an image for the user;

name my computer and choose a background image;

set my clock and timezone;

and that’s it!

Of course.. in true Windows fashion, that wasn’t completely it. Once Vista started up, the OS detected several hardware peripherals that needed drivers to be installed. This is where it gets pretty cool. Vista managed to install drivers for nearly all of my system components except for the more exotic pieces..and of course except for the Creative Audigy soundcard (bah! why do I even own one of these cards?)

My final steps in getting Vista up and running was to find out how I could go about getting drivers installed for those non-working pieces of hardware in my system. I’ll run them by one at a time here.

Creative Audigy 2 ZS

For the Audigy 2 ZS, I first tried installing the XP drivers from Creative - which failed pretty miserably for me. I then downloaded their beta drivers for Vista Beta 1.. and although the drivers installed correctly, I could not get any sound to actually come out of my sound card. Ugh.

So after a few hours of debugging this problem, I decided to ditch my sound card and stick with my tried and true on board Realtek AC 97 sound which did work easily for me.

DVICO FusionHDTV 5RT Gold

I own one of these DVICO FusionHDTV 5 cards which can be a royal pain in the %#@Q% to install at times. Vista could not figure out what drivers to install for this piece of hardware but then again - I expected that to happen. Thus, I went to fusionhdtv.co.kr and downloaded the latest drivers for the card which were actually meant for Windows XP but who’s looking anyhow? The first portion of the installation went by without a hitch which was to install FusionHDTV. However, when I tried installing the drivers from the installer, that failed miserably so I opted to go through the device manager under Vista and manually tell it where to find the drivers from DVICO. Sure enough, that worked like a charm and the hardware came alive! Unfortunately the FusionHDTV application didn’t work all that well but hey - Media Center did manage to work with the card but more on this later on.

For those of you who can’t fathom the card working under Vista - here’s a snapshot of my device manager:

HP Color LaserJet 2600n

For whatever reason, Vista didn’t come with drivers for the 2600n color laser printer (which I absolutely love because it made us wonderful wedding invitations) from HP. SOOO.. I installed the Windows XP device drivers and they worked without a problem. Go figure.

Epson PictureMate Personal Photo Lab

With the 2600n working without a hitch, would the PictureMate from Epson work for me? Well Vista detected the printer and installed the drivers but for whatever reason, I could never actually get any output from the photo printer. What a royal pisser. Oh well.. that’s a major lesson learned with Vista. Sometimes your hardware will have the proper drivers installed but that doesn’t mean everything will work without a hitch.

And folks - that’s basically it. Everything else on my system worked without any difficulties after the initial install. I did decide to update the NVIDIA drivers for my graphics card with the latest ones from NVIDIA (as opposed to the ones that came with Beta 2). No problems there either.

So to summarize - Windows Vista Beta 2’s installer is a cinch to use. There are actually very few steps in the whole initial setup process but that doesn’t mean it’s over of course. You still need to make sure that your more exotic pieces of hardware have some sort of device driver available for them. If Vista doesn’t have the driver, then MAYBE your XP driver will work. Anything older than XP.. then you might be in trouble.

Remember I told you that I got up in the morning to check on my system? Well that was around 7am. By 9am, I had a fully functional system for the most part and I was ready to go exploring around the world of Windows Vista Beta 2. All in all - not bad. Not perfect but not bad Microsoft.

UPDATE - June 12th, 2006:

It’s been a few weeks since I installed Beta 2. Join me as I take Beta 2 for a spin around the block here.

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It’s been a few days since the announcement of the new Motorola Q and the reviews are now starting to come in. First off, Engadget managed to score a unit from Verizon Wireless and they took some early snapshots of it here. (Lucky them!)

 

Meanwhile, the folks at MSMobiles.com managed to get a unit to review and have posted the review here. Here’s a blurb from their review:

To summarize, the Moto Q is an amazing Windows Mobile based Smartphone with many first’s and great features for the Windows Mobile Smartphone platform. In case you didn’t notice, we didn’t even mention the looks of the device.

Finally, PC Magazine came out with their review of the phone and my goodness to review looks excellent Here’s the link and here’s the verdict:

 This excellent phone, e-mail, and Web surfing device will make Q a favorite letter for Verizon customers.

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A picture of what could be the next SideKick (dubbed the SideKick 3) is now making it’s way around various gadget blog sites.. and hence of course I have to post it up here. There’s no way to confirm this quite yet but hey.. it makes for great rumors huh?

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Creative has announced the launch of three new headset models which will be unveiled in Singapore. The three new headsets are the Fatal1ty professional headset named after the famous gamer Johnathan Fatal1ty Wendel, the SL3100 Wireless Headset, and the ZEN Aurvana In-ear Earphones. 

The Fatal1ty Headset will feature 40mm neodymium drivers with a military grade microphone and noise-cancellation technology. You should be able to purchase the headset for $130.

 

The SL3100 Wireless Headset uses a combination of Bluetooth wireless technology and Creatives’ own Dual Mode technology to deliver 10 meters of wireless sound. You’ll get 8 hours of usage out of the SL3100 and the headphones even supposedly power off when the Bluetooth pairing is severed. The headset will cost you $129.

 

Finally, Creative is offering the ZEN Aurvana In-Ear headphones which feature noise-isolation technology which supposedly blocks up to 90 % of ambient noise (for those airplane flights with crying babies!). These in-ear buds will set you back $99.99.

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Griffin Technology is coming out with a version of their TuneBuds combination lanyard/in-ear headphones for the Apple iPod nano. The TuneBuds is already currently available for the Apple iPod shuffle - similar to what Apple offers in their headphone accessory. The new Griffin TuneBuds nano is expected to cost around $35 dollars.

 

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It seems everyone is making a portable boom box for the Apple iPod. Sometimes you just need to fill a room or an area up with some noise and what better way to provide the basis for the noise than with an Apple iPod. But does one really need to spend more money for the boom box than with the iPod nano or iPod itself? Well folks - read this article over at PC Magazine which tells you how to roll your own boom box which they called the iBoom Lo-Fi. You can do it for roughly $46 bucks. Sure it won’t be the most glamorous design but hey - it WORKS! Check it out.

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Sprint is now offering the LG LX550 mobile phone (although it’s been rebranded under the name “FUSIC”) to those of you into carrying music with your phone. The FUSIC features a navigational pad on the front face of the phone, a built in FM transmitter, Bluetooth support, a ring tone compose, 1.3 megapixel digital camera, EV-DO support, and a MicroSD slot. You’ll be able to pick up this phone starting on May 28th at a Sprint store for $179.99 with a two year contract.

 

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