Smartphones on When Software Attacks!

Living with the Nokia Lumia 800

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you call in at Black Marble you’ll see Nokia’s everywhere. They’re talking over the place. It takes me back… I remember when almost everybody I knew had some kind of Nokia or another. I started with the 5.1 on Orange, followed by a sequence of progressively smaller phones. Then came Series 60 and I walked away – I never liked the interface. I swapped to Sony Ericsson and the P800, P900 and P910. I moved to Windows Mobile for time, until I could stand it no more and swapped to an iPhone (much to the grumbling of folk round here!).

Configuring ActiveSync on Windows Mobile for Exchange Push

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not certain how many of you will find this useful, but I had a question about configuring the Touch Diamond to talk to Exchange which I regrettably failed to notice.

SharePoint Website Schematic

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I find myself drawing the same diagram over and over again in meetings to explain how SharePoint sites relate to IIS web sites, how managed paths and alternate access mappings fit and why you need to extend the SharePoint web application if you want more than one authentication provider.

Life with a Diamond: nearly two weeks on

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I said I’d post again once I’d had the Diamond a little while. It’s now been two weeks and I can honestly say I’m completely happy with it. Battery life for me is fine - I charge it about every three days and it chugs along with exchange push pretty much constantly. I am quite comfortable with the soft keyboard and I can honestly say I haven’t noticed any issues with the speed of the device either.

Touch Diamond Battery Life

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post about the Diamond I said I would let you know what the battery life is. I therefore carefully refrained from giving it any charge over the weekend, even when connected to my PC.

blogging on the move: redux

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Richard’s little mobile blogging app is nice, but he isn’t that responsive to user requests (ie, mine!) so I thought I would see if anything else was out there.
Sadly, the answer appears to be ’not really’
However, I did come across Diarist, from Kevin Daly. Perhaps not surprisingly I am using it now. I must say that two thumb typing on the diamond keyboard is not bad, although nowhere near as fast as the real keyboard on the tytn.
So is diarist better than blogwriter? Well, it’s easier to add links and images… Still no real formatting support though, which is a shame.
Try it for yourself.

My Orange Diamond is... err... black

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

That might sound like a strange thing to say, but when my shiny new Touch Diamond, which I picked up from Orange this week, has no Orange branding or customisation of the UI. I hadn’t really noticed that until I went into the manual, where the screenshots are totally different from my phone. I was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong with the setup process, when I saw this thread at XDA-Developers.

HTC Touch Diamond on Orange

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to the advanced notice from Tracy and Matt’s blog, I picked up my HTC Touch Diamond yesterday from the Orange Store and it’s great!

‘But wait!’ I hear you cry, ‘didn’t he go on about the experia x1 and how he wanted one?’

Catching Up

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been far too busy lately and whilst there have been lots of things I wanted to post about, time has not been on my side. Before I start to forget some of the points I thought a quick post was in order.

Blogging On The Move

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We try to dogfood here at Black Marble so I’m writing this on my HTC TYTN. How? With Richard’s new app

The XPERIA X1 - A Windows Mobile device that I could really get excited over

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Before I joined Black Marble I had a succession of Sony Ericsson smartphones - the P800, P900 and finally a P910i. They were great - the size was good, the UI was good, the handwriting recognition was excellent (with a grafitti-style interface that meant I could really get a good turn of speed) and I could work most functions one handed with the fabulous Jog Dial. Please note that the jog dial was sadly emasculated with phones after the P910i when Sony Ericsson foolishly reduced it’s degrees of freedom to simply rolling back and forth and clicking.