The New Typecover

The new Surface Pro 4 certainly looked appetising to say the least. Better processor and higher resolution screen. But to be honest, I couldn't really justify an upgrade to my knee year old Surface Pro 3. The old unit was still going strong and the processor was still fast enough, certainly for what ever I was using the computer for.

It was mainly for letters in clinic, the odd email and of course scheduling into my Google Calendar.

But the new types cover which was launched with the new Surface was a big jump from the old one. And the good news was, it was compatible with the old notebook. Great!

It took a while before I could find a store that had it available far sales. So far, they only bundle it with the new Surface. And even harder to find one in black. I guessed I was lucky today and managed to pick one up. Not cheap, but it was certainly worth the investment.

It felt like I now own a new Surface!

Up to 10

Finally I had the chance to update my Surface to Windows 10. A much slicked OS on the whole although having only experienced it for the best part of an hour may not reveal all the features in store. And I just hope that both Word and Powerpoint runs well as I do most of my writing on that machine lately. That's the machine which hooks up to my printer in clinic and hopefully I would still be able to print tomorrow!

Otherwise the interface looked more familiar. And I could still switch the Surface into a tablet if I needed to.

I have been hearing great things about Windows 10, so hopefully it stayed true to form ...

The Orange Snapper

I have been eyeing the Windows phone for a while now. It started with the HTC One Windows version, which unfortunately was hard to come by in Malaysia.

Then came Windows 8 and the 1520. Great but the software still felt sluggish although the camera feature looked interesting.

The last Nokia I owned was the 9300i Communicator back in 2006. Before that, it was the excellent N73. Great 3.2 MP camera with a feature called Nokia LifeBlog which when the phone were connected to a PC, would upload the photos and the SMSs onto a program akin to a diary. A great feature. There was no Mac equivalent unfortunately.

Even back then, the camera on Nokia had been half-decent.

Then with the announcement of Lumia 930 and Windows 8.1, my mind was made up. And the camera was just simply amazing, with a good built-in photo editor which made post-editing and posting onto Flickr a doddle. Dare I suggest that the snaps were better than my main phone, the iPhone 6 Plus.

There were three options as far as the photographs were concerned, the small 5MP jpeg, larger 20MP jpeg and 20MP DNG file - a RAW version essentially. Even the 5 MP looked great. I only tried manipulating then lather's files using Aperturebut found the whole process - transferring and processing - rather time-consuming. I prefer just to snap, edit and upload.

How about the other features? The app store wee's still pretty basic but there were the usual Facebook, twitter and Instagram. As long as there was push email and Google Calendar integration, I was fine. Not quite as much of a productivity tool as my iPhone, but it had potential. I wouldn't mind it as a second phone. So, the Android had to stay on the tablet for the time being.

All the photos, apart from the top were taken with the Lumia 930.

Have I gone to the Dark Side?

I spend the whole of yesterday trying to install XP on my MacBook Pro, finally succeeding by using Sun's VirtualBox. It worked a treat. No data loss and was able to get SPSS installed on it. Since I have gone that far, I decided to try Windows 7. First of all, I need to download the 2.4 GB data for the install disc. It failed to do so from my Streamyx. It kept being disconnected. The maximum speed for download was only 1Mb/s. It will take 6 hours to download the whole stuff while praying that the connection doesn't stall.

Check out the speed of the download. About 2 and half times faster than good old Streamyx. I turned the E71 into a base station connected to Celcom Broadband, and just use wifi connection to download.

Microsoft also did not help matters by insisting that we use a Javascript-based download manager to get the stuff downloaded through, and the script for obvious reasons were disabled on Safari. Luckily Firefox worked OK. I decided to use my E71 as a modem instead and haul down the data. It stalled when I try to download it straight from Microsoft's website. I searched the net and stumbled upon this. What I did was acquire a product key from Microsoft and download the program from this site with the help of Speed Download.

After another 30 minutes of installation and updating, everything was up and running. I'll let you know how everything works up.