The Symbian Foundation has revealed it now has the Symbian OS running in a test symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configuration on an evaluation handset.

In a post on the Symbian Foundation blog, executive director Lee Williams wrote that "a team at ST-Ericsson, and ARM have the operating system now running on a highly capable SMP configuration."

The test platform is apparently a reference smart phone built around a ST-Ericsson U8500 chip, one of the first silicon implementations of ARM's Cortex-A9 MPCore, a multi-core version of the ARM architecture found in almost all today's smartphones.

Williams said that multi-core handsets can accommodate features such as high-definition video and hardware accelerated 3D Graphics supporting OpenGL.

Symbian said it intended to support the Cortex-A9 MPCore architecture when it was announced in 2007, but that multiple core processing is only likely to be used when required, to preserve battery life on handsets.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on June 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft's latest search innovation has been switched on in the UK today and I've been having a play around with Bing to see if it does what is promised.

When it finally unveiled Bing last week - code-named Kumo - Microsoft described the online application as a "decision engine", rather than search engine, which has been developed to help users "make faster, more informed decisions". The search tool will initially focus on four key vertical areas, according to Microsoft: shopping online, travel arrangements, medical information and a local business search.

I tested each of these four areas, all set to only look at pages from the UK.

I ran a search for 'flights to crete' to test the travel component and found the results were very similar to those returned by Google. I liked the information boxes that popped up alongside the Bing results to give extra detail on each of the sites being linked to.

However, Google scored an extra point in the sponsored links section, where its top three results were Thomas Cook, EasyJet and Flydeals, all sites I'm familiar with. Bing's top three sponsored links were for Flydeals, Directline Holidays and an aggregator site called iReviewed, which includes links to lots of other travel web sites, surely a service Bing is supposed to be offering anyway? EasyJet doesn't appear anywhere on the first page of results, even though it's one of the most competitive airlines for direct flights between London and Crete.

To test the medical information section, I ran a search for 'root canal' as it's an area close to my heart at present as unfortunately I have to go for dental treatment soon.

Again I found the Bing pop-up information boxes really helpful, giving a much better idea of what the site will contain rather than having to click through to each search result. But Google had a better mix of results overall.

Bing's results were a series of standard web site links, with Cosmetic Dentistry Guide as the top result, and the top sponsored link was a dental and healthcare insurance provider. On Google, the top result was the British Dental Health Foundation, while the top sponsored link was for an emergency dentist, again just edging Microsoft on the relevance and usefulness of the results. And the fourth result on the Google front page was for root canal images, with four pictures helpfully displaying exactly what treatment involves, not for the squeamish like me but a useful feature of search results.

Carrying on the dental theme, I ran a search for 'dentist e11' to test out the local business search feature. In this category, Google beat Microsoft hands down. Clicking the link at the top of the Bing search results for 'top local listings for dentist near E11' took me through to a separate page full of links to dentists located in either the E1 or EC2M areas of London, miles away from me. The main page of search results included links to dentists in other areas of East London, and a site for salaried dentists, while the sponsored links had also got mixed up with the number of '1's in my postcode and were instead focused on the E111 European health insurance programme.

Google fared much better, listing several dentists all within walking distance of my house right at the top of the page, along with their phone numbers and a map showing their location.

Microsoft was also shown up by Google in its online shopping provisions. I ran a search across both search engines for 'Netbooks'. Although I thought Bing, which is powered by the Ciao shopping comparison tool Microsoft acquired last year, returned a better mix of results with netbooks from a wider range of vendors on display on the first page, the presentation was a real letdown.

The top section of the page contained a lot of white space and a bare-looking list of sponsored links, with many of the results missing either pictures or any pricing information, instead providing an 'Offers by Ebay' link. In terms of price comparison functionality, the Asus EEE PC 901 had the biggest number of retailers selling the same product. According to the results front page, the netbook was available at nine online stores with prices ranging from an incredibly cheap £39.13 through to a more realistic-sounding £335.12.

However, when I clicked on the 'Compare prices' button, it turned out several of the results were duplicated and there were only six different retailers in the list. Meanwhile, the bargain £39.13 price tag was actually for a laptop battery and the most expensive product was only £272.99 not £335.12 as listed on the front page.

Google returned a smaller selection of netbooks and vendors on its first page of results, but it kept the sponsored links to the right-hand side of the results. Presentation was much cleaner, and Google included pricing details and an image for each result.

So while Microsoft has made a big song and dance of the fact that Bing isn't just any old search engine and has moved to distance itself from Google et al, the decision to brand Bing as a 'decision engine' seems to have backfired on the firm. My early tests instead serve to highlight how Google has moved on from being a provider of links to a provider of relevant, location-based, contextual information, and how Bing appears to sit much more comfortably under the traditional definition of a search engine. I'm sure Microsoft would be quick to point out this is only a beta version, but it faces a steep climb to reach Google's level, let alone surpass its rival.

Posted by Madeline Bennett on June 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7)

There are numerous alternatives to Acrobat for creating files in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), but most of these tend to focus on simply converting a file to PDF from some other format, such as Microsoft Word.

What happens if you're not an expert, but you want to change something inside a PDF or add a page from a separate document?

I've been trying out gDoc Fusion, a recently launched tool that is designed with this in mind.

The user interface presents just four main options, selected by dragging a Word, Excel, PS, PDF or PowerPoint document onto them.

Drag the file to Quick Convert, and you can change it to PDF, XPS or Word format. Drag it to Page View, and you can change the text by highlighting it and typing replacement text into a dialog box, then saving it to any of the formats just listed.

Document View lets you open several documents at once and simply drag-and-drop pages to re-order them or insert them from one document into another. Yet again, you can save the final result as PDF, XPS or a Word document.

The final option is Flick View, designed to let you quickly skim through a file visually to find the information you are looking for.

As usual, it also puts an option on the menu bar of applications such as Word to let you save the file you're working on as PDF or XPS as well.

While gDoc Fusion isn't free, it does seem to make creating PDF documents much easier than getting to grips with Acrobat.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on May 14, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Windows XP Mode that Microsoft is planning for Windows 7 does allow you to access applications straight from the Start menu as promised, and it also enables you to save files straight to the hard drive of the Windows 7 host, I can confirm.

However, in my tests at least, performance was not entirely impressive, with a distinct lag between keys being pressed and the application inside the virtual machine responding.

Windows XP Mode, for those that don't know, is a tool designed to help users moving to Windows 7 if they have any compatibility issues with applications they are currently running.

Still currently in beta, it sets up a virtual Windows XP environment using Microsoft's Virtual PC software.

Users can then install applications inside the virtual machine, which will be available from the  Start menu of Windows 7 afterwards.

The first hurdle a prospective user faces is hardware requirements. Not only does Windows XP Mode require at least 1.25GB of memory (2GB preferred), but it will only run on systems with hardware acceleration for virtualisation. This means you must have an Intel processor with VT-x extensions or AMD processor with AMD-V technology. These must also be enabled in the system's Bios firmware.

I tested Windows XP Mode on a Lenovo ThinkPad X300, which was already being used as a testbed for the Windows 7 Beta. This has a Core 2 Duo L7100 processor that supports Intel's VT-x, but I had to enable this in the Bios.

After installing the new Windows 7 Release Candidate, I downloaded and installed the Windows XP Mode installer, which turned out to be about 445MB in size. Users can also now download it here.

After installation, a new Virtual PC folder appeared in the Start menu, but clicking on the 'Virtual Windows XP' option revealed that Virtual PC itself had yet to be installed. Fortunately, this was automatically downloaded, and a short while later I was fixed up with a pre-configured XP environment.

At this stage, the virtual machine has no applications other than those that come with Windows XP. To install applications, you need to fire up the virtual machine in its normal mode, where the XP screen appears as a window on the Windows 7 desktop (see screenshot).

As you can see, the XP machine automatically maps to the drives available on the Windows 7 machine, allowing you to install software by DVD or hard disk, or by downloading from the Internet.

For test purposes, I downloaded and installed the latest version of the OpenOffice.org suite in my virtual machine, then closed it down. As you can see from the screenshot alongside, the applications now appear in a sub menu on the Windows 7 Start menu.

Clicking an application name starts the virtual machine in the background, but all you will see is the application itself, as if it was running natively on Windows 7. The giveaway is that the application window retains the look and feel of XP, as you can see in the final screenshot below.

The good part about Windows XP Mode is that you can create a document, as I did in OpenOffice Writer, and save it to the My Documents folder on the Windows 7 machine along with all my other files.

The downside is the virtual machine's performance. I found that as I typed text into Writer, nothing would happen for several seconds, whereupon all the characters I had typed suddenly splurged across the screen in one go. This is quite off-putting, and I would hope that Microsoft will address this before the final release is made available.

If you have an application that just won't run under Windows 7, then this solution will get you by, although I personally have found very few applications that don't work with the new platform. However, it remains to be seen whether end users will be satisfied with this. Waiting for an updated version of your application is still likely to be the best option.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on May 6, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6)

Will the Windows XP Mode compatibility tool Microsoft plans to provide for Windows 7 prove a boon to those worried about application compatibility, or is it just a half-hearted kludge to try and convince XP die-hards to upgrade, as some observers believe?

For those not up to speed, Windows XP Mode will be a tool that users can download for Windows 7 that basically provides a pre-configured instance of XP inside a virtual machine. Any software not compatible with Windows 7 can instead be run in this.

A lot will depend upon how XP Mode is implemented, but getting a straight answer from Microsoft is not always an easy matter, as it turns out in this case.

When I met with the company, one question I wanted to know is where document files ended up if you hit the save button in an application running in XP Mode. Would it just go onto the hard drive inside the virtual machine, or has Microsoft been clever and allowed XP Mode applications to map to folders on the host machine?

This is something that Parallels has already implemented in its Desktop for Mac product, which lets Mac users run Windows applications. It means that users don't have to worry about moving documents into the virtual machine in order to edit them with Windows applications.

Has Microsoft done the same with XP Mode? Here is the response I finally got from the company;

"Windows XP Mode is the combination of two features. The first part is a pre-packaged virtual Windows XP environment. The second is Windows Virtual PC, which is used to run the virtual Windows XP environment. Customers can install their applications into Windows XP Mode using typical installation processes such as downloading from the Web or using the product CD. Once installed, the applications are automatically available on the Windows 7 Start Menu and can be launched just like any Windows 7 program. Optionally, these Windows XP applications can be pinned to the Windows 7 Task Bar and launched using just a single click from the Windows 7 desktop."

Like a response during Prime Minister's Question Time in Parliament, this carefully avoids addressing the issue in hand. However, other sources on the web seem to suggest that Microsoft hasn't gone this far, meaning that XP Mode is likely to have a separate file system from the host system. If so, this would be a shame and renders it much less useful than it otherwise would be as a compatibility tool.

I hope to soon have the answer - either by clarification from Microsoft, or by testing the beta of Windows XP Mode and finding out for myself.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on April 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Service Pack 2 (SP2) update for Office 2007 that Microsoft is set to release on 28 April will introduce a number of changes, with the most significant of these affecting file format support.

For customers concerned about file interoperability, SP2 will add support for version 1.1 of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) specifications, enabling users to open and edit word processor, spreadsheet and presentation documents distributed in the latest version of these open standard formats.

However, perhaps more important is the addition of the 'Save As PDF' function in SP2, which means that users no longer have to install this separately in order to output documents as an Acrobat file. This is widely used for distributing documents because it is a cross-platform standard. Microsoft is also adding support for XPS, its own rival for PDF, enabling Office users to output in both these formats.

According to Microsoft, users can also expect to see some performance improvements, such as faster startup of Outlook, improved fidelity when printing and in PDF and XPS documents, and better handling of graphic-heavy documents.

However, SP2 will also include updates to some of the server-based products included in Microsoft's broader Office System. For example, SharePoint Services and Excel Services will be updated to make them compatible with a broader range of web browsers, while the usual slew of bug fixes will address issues such as reliability of large searches in Search Server.

As usual, the number of changes that will be introduced in this update runs to a very long list, and Microsoft said it will have full details when SP2 is available.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on April 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer is now available to download, and I've been taking a look at the newly released browser.

Overall, IE8 is a welcome improvement over previous Microsoft browsers, and I believe it is on a par with rivals such as FireFox and Safari in terms of features, performance and ease of use. This may not be enough to tempt back users who have defected to FireFox over the last few years, but it is definitely worth the upgrade for those still using older versions of IE.

The major feature of IE8 is its greater adherence to standards such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The upside of this is that it drives greater Web interoperability, but it may cause problems with web content designed around the quirks found in earlier versions of IE.

Unlike an earlier review of an IE8 beta release, I had few problems with content not displaying in IE8. In fact, I found it difficult to locate any sites that showed any problems at all. Of those that showed issues, almost all were web-based applications rather than public-facing web sites, suggesting that businesses are the most likely to require IE8's Compatibility View that displays pages as they would appear in IE7. Pages that did have problems with IE8 seemed to work fine when Compatibility View was activated.

IE8 is also not lacking in terms of performance, with no perceptible difference in page load times between it and FireFox. Microsoft itself disclosed figures last week that showed any differences between the three top browsers are measured in fractions of a second.

New in IE8 are Accelerators and Web Slices, both of which are useful but not must-have features.

Accelerators provide links to functions when you highlight text on a page. By default, IE includes Accelerators to show a pop-up map from an address, or a translation (see screenshot), or to create an email or blog entry. Others are available online from the "Get More Add-ons" button on the toolbar.

Web Slices provide a direct link to web content from the Favourites bar, akin to the way RSS feeds work. Examples include an eBay web slice that shows auctions you are interested in and alerts you to changes in bids. However, many of the currently available slices are very US-centric, such as those providing weather or traffic alerts, but only for US cities.

Like Safari and Firefox, IE8 now provides a "private" browsing mode, InPrivate Browsing. Selecting this from the Safety button launches a new browser window with InPrivate mode enabled, to avoid confusion with any pages you might already have open. IE does not retain any browsing history for sites visited in this mode, which ends when the user closes the new window.

This will be useful for hiding login information if you need to access your email via a publicly access computer, for example, but users should be aware that it does not ensure complete privacy. In a corporate environment, the internet gateway will likely have a record of all web sites visited, for example.

IE8 also helps privacy through InPrivate Filtering (called InPrivate Blocking in the beta releases), which gives users some control over third-party content such as adverts that might be used to track them. IE examines such content as the user browses sites, and if ten or more sites load the same resource, it appears on a list from which users can block it, should they choose.

Perhaps the most useful security features are the SmartScreen Filter and Cross-Site Scripting Filter. The first is an enhanced anti-phishing filter that analyses pages for suspected malicious content, as well as checking the web address against a blacklist.

The Cross-Site Scripting Filter is designed to detect code that has been inserted into a genuine web site in order to steal information such as credentials, and disable it. Microsoft has a demo that shows how this works, but whether it will work as well in a real situation remains to be seen.

The size of the install file you need to download for IE8 depends upon the platform, with the Windows XP version weighing in at 16MB. The installer checks for any new patches or updates, and a reboot is required after installation is complete.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on March 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9)

Microsoft's recently unveiled My Phone service for synchronising smartphone content with a web-based storage site is still officially in beta, but the company has allowed me access to test it out.

Generally, I'm quite pleased with the service, but there is definitely room for lots of improvement. As Microsoft is garnering feedback during the beta phase, it is quite possible that many issues will be ironed out before it is opened up for broader use.

As reported in the news here, My Phone lets you synchronise various types of content from your phone up to the web site. This includes contacts, calendar and task entries, but also text messages, documents, photos, videos and music.

Each of these categories can be selected individually by checking a box. You can also synchronise content from Flash storage cards.

Synchronisation is also bi-directional, so you can upload a file to the web site from your PC, and it will be sent to your phone the next time you synchronise - handy for sending across Word documents and such for viewing while on the move later.

This should also allow you to re-load all the content you want if you get a new handset - providing it is also Windows Mobile - but I haven't tested this out.

On the downside, synchronisation seems to take a long time, not just on the first run when all your selected content gets uploaded, but also on subsequent runs when very little has changed. One synchronisation session took close to ten minutes, even when I switched to using the Wi-Fi interface of my handset instead of the cellular HSDPA connection.

You can continue to make calls and use your handset for other purposes while synchronisation takes place in the background, but if you lose the wireless signal for any reason, My Phone simply stops and does not appear to retry without manual intervention.

You can set synchronisation to happen on a daily or weekly schedule, or keep it on manual. Unless you have a generous bandwidth allowance from your mobile operator, manual synchronisation is generally recommended.

I would also like to see more fine-grained selection of content to synchronise. For example, all my photos are stored on a Micro SD Flash card, but I can't set My Phone to synchronise photos only from there. This means that the entire set of sample images that came pre-loaded on the handset also got synchronised up to the web site, even though I don't want these.

Another drawback is that when you choose to synchronise contacts, My Phone only includes names from the Outlook contact list and not any of those stored on the phone SIM itself. This means you are likely to lose some contacts if your phone should go missing, unless you use another method of backing these up.

Access to the online content from a PC browser is also fairly basic at present. For example, while you can view a slide show of all uploaded photos, there is no facility to rotate images you might have captured by rotating the handset sideways to get a landscape shot.  There does not seem to be a way to select more than one image at a time to download to your PC, either, which makes this a laborious process.

However, I should point out the My Phone is still in beta, and is not expected to be broadly available until early Q4 2009, according to Microsoft, so much could change between now and then.

My Phone will eventually come pre-installed in Windows Mobile 6.5, but users with Windows Mobile 6 or 6.1 handsets can download and install it. I am currently trying it out on an HTC S730 handset, which is based on Windows Mobile 6.

The client itself is a 560kB download and unpacks several files, one of which is a runtime of just over 700kB in size. Microsoft recently pushed out an updated version, which was a download of  exactly the same size.

You need a Windows Live ID in order to login to use My Phone. If you have a Hotmail account, then this is your email address.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on March 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in December, I wrote in this blog about the Skyfire mobile browser, which is virtually unique in being able to show web pages not only as they should appear in a desktop browser, but also supporting Java, Flash and moving video content.

Since that posting, things have gone a little quiet, so I contacted Skyfire to see if there was any news. It appears the company is working on an updated beta release, but the spokesperson would only say that this is expected "in the spring", which implies it is a month or two away at least. No word yet on when a full release version might be available.

I also shared with Skyfire some of the problems I've noticed after using the browser for a while. My main concern is that it is often slow - taking several minutes to load a page, for example. The spokesperson said that some issues are due to the mobile network and tariff a specific mobile user has signed up with, but it should be noted that another mobile browser I have installed - Opera Mini - does not seem to suffer as much from this snail-like download problem.

Other gripes include Skyfire's behaviour if it cannot load a page, which might happen for various reasons, such as momentary loss of signal. When this happens, the browser just does nothing. No error message, nothing. Skyfire just reverts to the page you were looking at before, as if you hadn't clicked a link at all.

However, it should be pointed out that this is a beta version (v 0.85.0.7927), and that bugs are still being ironed out at this stage. And when Skyfire does work as expected, it really is impressive.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on February 6, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the much trumpeted features of Windows 7 is that it will make setting up and using home networks much easier. According to Microsoft, the company used a real home as a model for the way this should work, i.e. those inside the home are usually trusted with unrestricted access to pretty much anything.

This doesn't sound like a real home to me - at least, not one with teenagers, but never mind.

HomeGroup is thus intended to allow users to easily access each other's content, such as pictures, documents and other media, and to share resources like printers. However, each user can also limit what is accessible to others, if they wish.

I tried out setting up a HomeGroup using just a pair of PCs running Windows 7 beta while connected to the same network (for test purposes, through an Ethernet switch) and it does indeed seem pretty straightforward to get the computers talking to each other.

Users can create a new HomeGroup from the Network and Sharing Center, accessible in Windows 7 via Control Panel or the View Available Networks pop-up on the taskbar.

If this is the first computer in the HomeGroup, the setup screen asks what kind of information you wish to share, and automatically generates a password for everyone else to join the group, as shown in the screenshot.

When I connected the second Windows 7 computer to the network, it automatically detected the existence of a HomeGroup, and asked if I wanted to join. This required nothing more than keying in the password, and again specifying what content I wanted to share from that computer.

Once this is accomplished, users can then see other computers in the HomeGroup and browse the contents just like accessing a network share in a traditional LAN. You also automatically get access to printers connected to any other computer within the group.

But HomeGroup really comes into its own with Windows 7's Libraries. Libraries are like a superset of a standard Windows folder; they are designed to include content from multiple sources, which might be one or more folders on your own PC, or folders from other computers as well.

For example, a photo library could collate together all pictures across the HomeGroup. I created a Library to do exactly this, including the Picture Library from both computers. Opening this Library showed all the pictures, and I could also find a picture regardless of location by typing into the search box in the Windows Start menu.

The same principal applies to other files, so users should be able to find and play music and video stored on other computers within the HomeGroup - so long as they are switched on at the time, of course.

Of course, HomeGroup doesn't solve every problem - you need to have a functioning network in the first place. But assuming your ISP left you with a functioning broadband router when it installed your internet connection, HomeGroup does look like it should greatly simplify the task of connecting computers together at home for a great many people.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on January 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)