After a week away what seems almost a lifetime ago, it’s taken me a while to get back onto the blogging bandwagon and find something to talk about.
I had a great time in Les Deux Alps skiing other than the usual battle with the largest tour company in the country who show little remorse for the trouble they’ve caused me – big corporate machines pah! I know, I know, being a company director I fight this battle in my mind quite a lot and I’ve decided it is my mission in life to create a large corporate machine that doesn’t annoy people as much as your average telecoms company, your bank, your utility provider and your tour operator – and so on! I’m sure our customers will be the judge of that in a few years…
Anyway apart from the snow, or lack of it, having my holiday cancelled due to “overbooking” five days due to departure and not being allowed compensation if I rebooked instead of having to cancel then start a new booking and at the end of it all being left with no breakfast and whisked off in a minibus with six others to a meeting point for the transfer coach and being told they’d back for us in five minutes … then 50mins later at -10 they appeared, it was a pretty good holiday.
The glorious sunshine we had was great, the ultimate mood lifter. Was nice also to have a bit of disconnection from technology for a week – I’d took my netbook, digital camera, Nintendo DS, MP3 player and two mobile phones. I barely used any. I watched a bit of TV and on BBC World I got watching Tony Blair and I forgot there’d been other prime ministers since, we were still in the boom times and all was good with the world.
The ultimate mood destroyer is always to return to Manchester, guaranteed any weather as long as it’s grey and first day back at work and I’m up at Glasgow and then I remembered it’s a recession and there had been other prime ministers after Tony Blair.
I’d been doing a market trial for another toy, a Philips goLITE BLU. Now this is a toy for the SAD cases out of there – literally, it’s for seasonal affected disorder and jet lag. I’d been a big fan of these type of things for years and had used a Lumie desk lamp as well as a Philips wake-up light, however with traveling for work a lot, I simply didn’t persevere. This great little device solves that problem as well as allows you to take it on holiday with its multiple international adaptors. What’s more is as it’s based on LED technology, it runs from batteries!
After getting some funny looks in the office, I fired the goLITE up and it did attract some interest – someone even offered to buy it off me! So with my energy levels restored, I didn’t care it was grey outside, I remembered I’m British and actually wouldn’t be happy if I wasn’t moaning about something and it may as well be the weather. I got back to work and the recession didn’t seem too bad as we got some new customers!
Anyway, back to technology, so I’d abandoned most of my toys for my holiday – mainly because I secretly covet all those sat in the lounge of my hotel’s iPad’s, Galaxy Tabs and such like. I’m no early adopter anyway, we all know I’m waiting for the Cisco Cius as per my other blogs. Or am I?
One of my mobiles is a Palm Pre, the damn thing annoys me, yet I love it. I want rid of it, but I can’t stand to. Why? Well for one, the software (WebOS) is superb, but on the other-hand it’s let down by poor hardware and the most shocking battery life on any device, ever. However it’s clever and it works really well, but has no apps. It also manages to rack up a huge roaming bill because I’ve got the thing doing that much – it’s hooked into several exchange servers, Hotmail, Gmail, a pop box, Facebook, LinkedIn and consolidates and organises contacts, calendars and emails – it does more than what I’ve managed to achieve with any PC or any software I’ve used.
The damn thing will be going at some point simply due to the hardware, the software is great.
Today however, I noticed a tweet from one of our suppliers with regards to the Blackberry Playbook. I’d heard that Blackberry were going to start a line of tablets and again their software is solid – from an IT manager point of view, they’re very well respected and manageability of the devices is a doddle. I started thinking back to my earlier posts about the Cius and wondered when this business tablet battle was going to begin, the devices are being announced we just don’t have the fight. I even read on The Register that Elton has predicted (or knows something we don’t) the iPad 2 is due shortly.
Of course it would have been foolish to write off HP in all this, they have form. They bought Compaq who had the iPaq, yeah, yeah that was a PDA, potato, po-tat-o. Then they bought Palm, WebOS is official WebOS and the Pre is HP’s problem now. So tonight, what do I see – Palm’s Blog and a HP TouchPad is on its way running the excellent WebOS.
Great I hear you think, it seems as if he was right, there’s going to be a business tablet war. Why isn’t he happy? Well really, I’m now getting spoiled for choice! Ideally I’d want a Cisco or a Microsoft based tablet, mainly to integrate with our infrastructure. But my experiences of WebOS and indeed its integration with anything has been great and I’d daren’t write off the iPad 2 even though I’m not an Apple man.
This is certainly going to be a toughie and although the devices aren’t here yet I at least live in comfort that if I make the wrong decision I’ll have the goLITE BLU to turn on and delude myself I’m in the French Alps skiing in the sunshine…! J
