tech, news, productivity, views and stuff
BBC reports on the first “officially allowed” mobile phone call from a commercial airliner.
Dubai-based airline Emirates has become the first commercial airline to allow passengers to make mobile phone calls during flights.
Emirates said the first permitted mobile phone call was made on a flight between Dubai and Casablanca.
The aircraft, an Airbus A340, is fitted with a system which stops mobiles from interfering with a plane’s electronics.
British-born science fiction author Arthur C Clarke has died in hospital in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.Clarke had been in and out of hospital since his 90th birthday in December and had breathing difficulties, his aide Rohan de Silva said.“Sir Arthur passed away a short while ago at the Apollo Hospital,” Mr de Silva said.
Clarke, who foresaw communication satellites in 1945, wrote more than 80 books.
He was most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was made in to a film by controversial director Stanley Kubrick.
Clarke was Sri Lanka’s best-known resident guest and has a scientific academy named after him.
AFP
Though I believe that 2001: A Space Odyssey was first a film collaboration with Kubrick, for which he wrote the book as an exercise in working out the storyline for the screenplay.
Sad news indeed.
Adobe have announced that:
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced that Microsoft has licensed Adobe® Flash® Lite™ software, Adobe’s award-winning Flash Player runtime specifically designed for mobile devices, to enable web browsing of Flash Player compatible content within the Internet Explorer Mobile browser in future versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile phones. Microsoft has also licensed Adobe Reader® LE software for viewing Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents including email attachments and web content. Both Adobe products will be made available to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide, who license Windows Mobile software.
Read the full press release here.
This is interesting when you consider the Nokia – Silverlight deal and the lack of Flash on the iPhone.
As predicted, Apple announced their new 802.11n Airport Express.
Now featuring support for the faster 802.11n Wi-Fi specification, the new AirPort Express Base Station delivers up to five times the performance and twice the range of the previous model. The world’s smallest 802.11n-based mobile base station, the new AirPort Express offers a great option for anyone who wants to set up a high-speed wireless network, share a printer wirelessly, or stream iTunes music wirelessly from a Mac or PC with AirTunes. And because its so compact, you can take AirPort Express with you and set up an ad hoc wireless network in your hotel room.
So the main difference is the 802.11n speeds which is welcome.
Interestingly at the time of writing the 802.11n Airport Express was not available in the UK online Apple store, but that might be just because today is the day of release.
Back on Friday I blogged about a Vodafone nightmare that James Whatley was having in relation to a non-functioning Nokia N95.
Well it seems I am not the only one who suffers nightmare customer service from Vodafone.
James’ problem got resolved pretty quickly in the end.
Today SMSTextNews posted an update on how this happened and the response from Vodafone.
Hello there Mr Whatley, my name’s Amy and I’m calling from Vodafone. I hope you don’t mind me getting in contact like this, I’ve just been reading your blog…
Well James got his new Nokia N95 pretty quickly.
Just shows the power and influence a blog can have, well the influence a large and well-read blog like SMSTextNews can have.
Glad to hear that the N95 phone situation was sorted in the end…
Now about that 4GB Nokia N95….
If the rumour sites are to be believed there will be a new 802.11n capable Airport Express from Apple released on Tuesday.
We had heard reliable reports that Apple will be launching a new version of their Airport Express next week, likely on Tuesday. Apple Retail stores should have stock of the new Airport Express by mid week. The new model will be priced at the same price as the current model ($99). Though details have not been confirmed, it appears the upgrade will most likely include support for 802.11n wireless networking.
One of the downsides of the 802.11n Airport Extreme was that if you wanted to stream iTunes through AirTunes you had to downgrade your network to 802.11g compatability as the current Airport Express is 802.11g only.
A new 802.11n Airport Extreme would allow you to have a pure 802.11n wireless network and stream AirTunes as well.
I suspect it won’t support video, well that’s what the Apple TV is for.
According to the rumour images the form factor hasn’t changed, so it still looks like a MacBook power brick.
Not long till Tuesday now.
Just a quick mention that you can now buy episodes of BBC’s Robin Hood on iTunes, well in the UK you can.
Generally upgrades and updates go smoothly, but not always.
As jonmul posted recently on Jaiku, sometimes if not always you hold your breath.
Although Apple have made firmware upgrades a painless process I still hold my breath every time. Bricked to many devices in the past…
He’s not the only one who holds their breath…
I do it quite often, especially with firmware upgrades.
Having said that, I actually now rarely upgrade unless I am “forced” to. Sometimes I have been “forced” into an OS X upgrade as a piece of software I want to use is only compatible with a newer version.
If it works I generally leave it well alone. In the main as updates sometimes just do weird things.
Good example, I upgraded the iPod touch to 1.1.3, but I ain’t upgrading to 1.1.4 just yet.
You know that annoying delay when you try and take your picture with a mobile phone camera, well you can use it to good effect.
Update: image removed from remote server…
I have always liked the Sony VAIO UX1XN.
I have always been disappointed with the battery life. My original intention was to use the UX1XN as my main conference computer, it’s small enough to be unintrusive, unlike a laptop which can be a bit of a barrier, it has two cameras which enable me to send images to Flickr or take short video clips, and the keyboard is usable unlike the fiddly mobile phone type split keyboard of the Q1 Ultra. You can also use it without needing to put it on the table or on your lap which makes it ideal in the conference hall or break-out room environment.
However as I said at the beginning the battery life is the downer, I only really get about an hour and half from it, and this means that it won’t last the day at a conference.
So recently I ordered the extended battery for it, which should make it usable and hopefully last the day at a meeting or a conference.
I have therefore been practicing using the keyboard, which is quite thumbs orientated, and have managed to get a reasonable speed using it.
I wouldn’t want to write a long blog entry (like this one) on it, but for entering URLs or posting tweets or jaiku postings, I think it will work just fine.