Posted on May 27, 2006

Word 2007 Blogging Problems – I’m Not Alone

It seems that I’m not alone in my problems blogging with the Word 2007 Beta, detailed here. Ed Bott, in a post about a free AV for Vista beta testers, notes that when he tries to publish from Word 2007 to his WordPress blog his posts seem to disappear into the ether.

I don’t believe that this is a problem with posts disappearing, just that they are getting a post date of far into the past – in my case, it was December 1969. For everyone having trouble posting from Word 2007 to a WordPress blog, fire up your admin console and head to Manage > Posts and change the browse month dropdown to whatever is the abstract date.

Posted on May 26, 2006

Office 2007 Impressions

Along with over 200,000 other people, I downloaded the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 when it was released to the public the other day. In my job, I basically live in Word and Outlook, and as such was hesitant to install beta versions of these products. Nonetheless, I bit the bullet and did it, and overall my experience has been fairly good. Read more after the jump.

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Posted on May 22, 2006

Pac Man: The Movie

Fantastic trailer for the new Pac Man movie, coming this summer: Pac Man: The Movie

Also, check out the creator’s MySpace page here. Yes, that is the first and most probably last time I will ever link to MySpace… Gee I hate MySpace.

Posted on May 20, 2006

Brand Battling in the Mobile World

It seems that, at least in the mid- to high-end handset space, the battle for market share will not be fought with features alone – but with marketing alliances.

It has started already, with the recent co-branding efforts that Nokia and Sony Ericsson have undertaken.

Sony Ericsson led the way through the Walkman line of music handsets, and more recently with the Cyber-shot branded K800i. The Cyber-shot branding, it seems, was in response to Nokia’s Carl Zeiss alliance.

This camera branding is a perfect example of how important recognition is in the marketplace. The Sony Ericsson K750 was, in most tests we carried out for MobileBurn, a better camera than the Nokia N90, though most people believed that the N90 was far superior, purely because they recognise the Carl Zeiss brand.

It is unfortunate, but superior sales may be down to what brand power the manufacturers can muster – I just hope that they don’t forget actual features as well.

Posted on May 9, 2006

CeBIT Australia

I made a visit to CeBIT in Sydney today, and despite the small size of the show, it was rather entertaining. For those in Australia that care about such matters, the Sony Ericsson P990 and Nokia E61 smartphones will be available on Vodafone very soon. Sagem also had a nice showing, which is great, as I have not seen much from them in a while.

You can check out my Flickr set of photos from the show floor right here, including hands on photos with the E61 and other handsets.

Next up for me is Communicasia in Singapore next month. If there are any MobileBurn readers that want to meet up while I’m in the country, drop me an email.

Posted on May 5, 2006

Posted on May 4, 2006

Posted on May 4, 2006

Microsoft Expression Web Designer Beta

I was invited to the Expression Web Designer (the much needed replacement for the terrible Microsoft Front Page) beta today, and so far my impression of the beast is not good.

And it hasn’t even finished installing yet.

After downloading the 250-odd megabyte install file and double-clicking like a trained Microsoft monkey (think Robert Scoble), the installer prompted me if I really wanted to proceed, then extracted the setup files, and promptly launched a progress dialog of the install. While I can understand that Microsoft may want to simplify the install process, there are absolutely no options related to the install. I have no idea where it is installing to, or what components are being installed. I’m quite annoyed with the product already, and I haven’t even gotten to the first launch.

Microsoft better change this for the final version, as I know I’m not alone in not liking installers that don’t give a hint of what they are doing.

Speaking of the install, this is taking freaking ages…

Update: Now that it has finished, it wants to restart the computer. This is a web design product, and I already had ASP.Net and any other things that may have been prerequisites installed, why should I have to reboot?

Posted on May 3, 2006

Posted on May 2, 2006