Hands on: Google Chrome OS
It didn't take long after Google released early test code of its Chrome OS for some enterprising techies to build it and make it available as a virtual machine.
A colleague managed to download a copy of this and I took a quick look using VMware Workstation to run it, but sadly, there isn't that much to report; if you have used Google's Chrome browser, then you have a fair idea of what it's like to use Chrome OS, as the browser pretty much IS the operating system.
Once Chrome OS is available, users will have access to web apps - primary Google's own apps like Google Docs and Picasa, but not necessarily restricted to these - but Chrome has no "desktop" as there is with most other operating systems, just browser tabs, and a few drop-down menu options for functions such as turning Wi-Fi on and off on your system (Chrome OS is intended for netbooks).
The build I looked at (very briefly) seemed very slow, but then I was running it with a limit of 256MB memory on a PC with 1GB total memory in the first place, and not everything seemed to be working. I hope to get a fuller hands-on with the software in future.
Software deals on offer at V3.co.uk's new online store
The new V3.co.uk download store is live and accessible now here or via the Shop navigation links across the main V3 site. The store lets you browse through popular software titles, make an online payment and receive an immediate download and serial code. You can have your software on your computer within minutes.
In addition to an improved look and feel, the new site offers a much wider range of software from leading vendors including Uniblue, Kaspersky, AVG, Paragon Software and Avira plus many more. Other key brands will follow shortly, so keep referring back to the store. The store also supports multiple currencies so international users can order products in their local currency, unlike many other software stores.
To support the launch of the new store we have several promotional offers including discounts on Laplink PCmover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant, AVG AntiVirus 9, Kaspersky Internet Security 2010, as well as free full software applications from Ashampoo and Acebit.
To take advantage of additional weekly promotion codes to get even better discounts on software, sign up to the Software Downloads Weekly newsletter on V3.co.uk or via the newsletter link on the download store.
Pictures: Microsoft's Office Web Apps
The technical preview of Microsoft's Office Web Applications shows that the applications still have a long way to go before being finished - go here for our First Look article.
Word currently only supports viewing of documents, as shown in this screenshot, but the content looks exactly as it would appear if you opened it in the full version of Word.
PowerPoint also shows presentation slides exactly as you would see them in the full PowerPoint client, and you can click to start a slideshow in a new full-screen browser Window. Page transitions are painfully slow unless you have Microsoft's Silverlight runtime installed on your computer.
The most complete of the Office Web Applications is Excel, shown here with an existing spreadsheet open for editing containing a table and an embedded chart. The application has a polished look that make it more closely resemble a full client application than many web-based applications achieve.
Novatel MiFi
With almost every gadget under the sun packing a Wi-Fi connection it can sometimes feel like a bit of a waste if there isn't a handy hotspot to connect to while you're out and about.
This problem has been partially solved thanks to the USB dongles and mobile data packages for smartphones, but neither of these is particularly useful if the device in question is not a laptop or a phone. Even when it comes to a laptop, the USB dongles require extra software to be installed to set up the connection, so letting a friend or colleague quickly borrow it becomes a laborious process.
Enter Novatel's MiFi, essentially a very small mobile data router that allows several devices to network over Wi-Fi and share a single mobile data connection.
The MiFi unit is about the same size and weight as a deck of playing cards so carrying it around isn't going to add any serious weight to your bag and even popping it into a handbag or laptop case is not a problem.
The device is very minimal, with a single button with a multicolour LED, microUSB port, microSD card slot and a Wi-Fi status indicator.
The LED lets you see the status of the unit, but with five different colours meaning different things depending on whether it's solid or flashing, this can be a bit confusing at first. Pretty much the only colour of any importance is the red as this indicates a low battery or a device error.
One very minor gripe is that the status LED is embedded within the power button which is fine most of the time, but if you're turning the device on or off your finger completely covers the light so it's difficult to tell what's going on.
If you get a MiFi as part of a mobile data deal it will already be set up and so using it is very simple. When switching it on it automatically initiates a mobile data connection and switches on the Wi-Fi. Up to five devices can be wirelessly connected to the MiFi at any time.
At first the Wi-Fi is completely open so any device can connect without a password. There are several profiles available in the settings to allow you to create an encrypted, password protected connection to help ensure security and prevent anyone nearby from piggybacking on your connection.
If you want to save power you can also connect the MiFi via USB and use it just like a traditional mobile data dongle.
The whole device is controlled through a web interface and provides most of the settings you'd expect from a wireless router such as MAC filtering, port filtering and forwarding, connectivity and power management as well as providing details about the battery and the mobile data signal and connection.
The contents of the microSD card can also be accessed through the web interface or as a removable storage device when the MiFi is tethered to a computer.
It would drain the battery faster but we would love to have seen the MiFi offer some kind of sleep mode whereby it powers up and connects to the internet when it detects a Wi-Fi connection. This would allow users to carry the unit around in a bag and not have to worry about digging it out and switching it on every time they want to use it.
Even if you don't have a 3G data connection, the MiFi can be used as a basic network hub allowing you to connect several devices to share information, and the onboard SD card can also be a great way of sharing content.
As with most wireless devices battery life is going to depend a lot on how much data it's handling, so a lot of downloading or connecting several devices will take its toll pretty quickly. That said we managed to easily get several hours of constant use out of a single charge, and average use saw the device lasting around two days between charges. The added bonus is that if the battery dies you can simply tether it to your laptop and use it that way.
The MiFi is a great piece of kit and if you're in the market for a mobile data package we would definitely recommend that you try and get one of these rather than the standard USB dongles included in most packages.
Google Squared gives all the wrong answers
Generally people search to find the right answers or to deepen their knowledge on a subject. Not on Google Squared.
People using the new search tool should be prepared to be misinformed. Google should be prepared for a few complaints.
Google Squared was launched on Thursday with the product's manager, Alex Komoroske, admitting the technology "is by no means perfect", which some testing the tool would say is an understatement. So far the technology looks like it will cause users more trouble than its worth.
Google Squared is designed to allow users to research a subject without visiting many different web sites. Search results are delivered in a table, which users can then compare side by side.
However, so far the tool has pronounced both Prince William and Prince Charles dead.
A search for 'UK national papers' lists the Guardian as a tabloid while the Times maintains its status as a broadsheet. The Express is apparently a mix of student books, audio tapes and CDs. The Metro is a movie.
A search for 'Social Network' lists the MySpace owner as Facebook Will Win for Now while Facebook is owned by mario. Luckily Google knows that it owns YouTube and the tool correctly lists Flickr as Yahoo's.
A search for Good Camera Phones prices the Motorola Razr V3 at a bargain price of $3.45.
Hands on with Twitter
A lot of people do not like Twitter and a few months back I could understand their reasoning. For those that are unfamiliar with the Twittersphere, it could seem like a bunch of hopefuls posting pointless comments about what they had for supper or how they want a new motorbike in a vain attempt that someone might listen.
But when our marketing team told me Twitter could be used for increasing the take-up of my stories on the web, it suddenly became a bit more appealing.
I started pushing my own news out and even began a bit of Twittering (or is it Tweeting?) about my daily chores. I admit that for quite a while I still thought I was wasting my time. I only had a handful of followers and no one seemed to notice me.
It did not take long for the whole experience to become more positive. The value of Twitter became clear when the plane that landed in the Hudson River was first captured on camera by a Twitter user. The photo was immediately distributed all over the world, showing the potential of Twitter users as a source for generating news.
In order to source stories for vnunet.com and to find contacts who would want to read my news, I had the (now obvious) idea to start searching for IT people. I typed in big name vendors, such as Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft and started stalking a random mix of people. I then started following their followers and I was thrilled to find I was getting a good number of followers back.
I started to become pickier, deleting those who were twittering irrelevant posts and searching for particular executives I had met at briefings. I searched for like-minded journalists and analysts, and I added a few contacts from Twitter's most respected community.
My first story I sourced from Twitter came from an analyst tweeting criticism at a recent move by a company and that was satisfying. But then when people started to directly message me with ideas for stories or just that they liked particular content, I started checking in with Twitter more than I do my Facebook account for story tips.
I have since downloaded some Twitter applications to make the following of Twitter users easier. The application I find most user-friendly is Tweetdeck, which I wrote in detail about yesterday.
My tips for using Twitter for business purposes include starting the experience by following people in your community and by searching for individuals you find interesting to see if they are part of the micro-blogging world.
Apart from offering a good tool to source information, Twitter offers a great avenue to promote oneself. Rather than just dumping pointless ramblings on the site, valuable Twitter members tend to ask questions and engage with what other people are saying.
People will probably not seem to care right away about your Tweets but when your name keeps popping up with interesting comments or good links, they might start looking out for you, reading you posts, clicking on your links and engaging in conversation.
Web demos - watch that open microphone after they're over!
Ronnie Reagan's done it, John Major has, so has Jacques Chirac - that is forgotten the mike close to them was still open and active - and it seems that web demos can also trip up the unprepared. I recently had a one hour web demo where the vendor presented its next latest and greatest - under embargo.
Unfortunately I can't do shorthand yet and didn't fancy using the old water-cooled pen for nearly an hour. However, I can dump phone calls straight to hard disk courtesy of a dongle attached to the phone mini-jacked into the audio input. Unfortunately speech recognition hasn't progressed yet to the stage where you can present a low signal-to-noise .WAV file to speech recognition software and get a neat transcript of the call ready to cut and paste into articles.
A pair of headphones mini-jacked into the audio output was a good alternative to holding the phone for an hour. When the questions had been answered at the end of the demo, I put the phone back, but blow me down when I could still hear somebody at the other end through the headphones. Nothing dramatic and no scoops were in the offing - but the potential was there. So check those mikes after web demos - you might just save yourself a shedload of pain.
BlackBerry Bold and Storm: Head to head
I've been having a try out with the BlackBerry Storm, Research in Motion's (RIM's) first touch-screen device. My colleague Daniel Robinson has carried out a full review or you can get a look at the Storm in action by watching our video review.
I was keen to get my hands on the device for two reasons. Firstly, I've long coveted an Apple iPhone, mainly for its lovely looks, and screen size and quality and so was interested to have a try out on RIM's touch-screen version; and also because I've just switched over from using my old 8700 BlackBerry and a separate Nokia mobile handset to having just one device, the BlackBerry Bold and so wanted to see how the Storm would compare.
Previously in my old unconverged world of separate mobile/emailer I never used the BlackBerry for anything but checking my email and replying to the odd one here and there; I made the occasional phone call and sent the odd text but much preferred my mobile for those things. 
So moving to the Bold was quite an experience and I'd advise anyone considering a switch away from two devices to a combined phone/emailer to thoroughly try out the keyboards of any potential handsets before making a purchase.
I found the BlackBerry SMS and phone capabilities difficult to get used to, mainly due to what seem like minor changes from a normal mobile handset but they caused a lot of frustration for me.
For example, the Bold and Storm save all messages in one folder, while I'm used to separate folders for received/sent/draft texts; while trying to change the phone settings, including selecting a ring tone and choosing between the vibrate/ring/vibrate+ring options, proved a real chore, requiring navigating through several different pages and dozens of options before finding the correct Profiles/Advanced/Normal/Phone sequence and arriving at the right place. I also found the requirement of repeating the same choice of Volume/Number of Vibrations and so on for the phone when it is out of holster or in holster an unnecessary duplication of effort; the same process was then required for setting up my preferred SMS profile.
Having said all that, I still rate the BlackBerry as an emailer device, and RIM has made huge improvements since I first began using one a few years ago, especially in terms of the speed of mobile browsing and the ability to view spreadsheets and other business documents.
From my fairly brief look at the Storm, I couldn't spot many different features from the Bold apart from the obvious touch-screen upgrade. Both devices have the same icons, browser, and phone capabilities.
One key upgrade with the Storm was the inclusion of a Chat icon in the menu, offering direct links to download pages for popular instant messaging tools. However, I didn't have much joy with this feature. I managed to download Google Chat, but was unable to log in to my account to try it out.
The music and video players are the same on both devices; the video quality was particularly impressive on both, with high quality picture and sound.
One strange difference was in the charger. I didn't take the charger for the borrowed Storm home with me overnight and when the battery died that evening I automatically went to plug in my Bold charger, only to find they have different connectors. It would be great to see RIM, and in fact all mobile handset makers, standardise on chargers across their different models and it would certainly earn them some green brownie points.
So now onto the Storm's headline-grabber - the touch-screen capability. The general consensus around the vnunet.com office was underwhelming - most people found the virtual keys very difficult to get used to, even with the addition of a "click" when pressing down on the screen - and this was my initial reaction too.
However, having used the Storm as my main emailer/phone for a few days I got used to the way the keyboard worked - I found it helped to aim to put my finger slightly to the left of keys rather than direct centre of them. I also really liked the ability to go back to using a SureType keypad and predictive text, especially for sending SMS messages, something I really miss with the Bold.
A final point: the way the screen switches view to reflect whether you're holding the phone sideways or upright is a neat feature, but it is slow in switching between the views. In the end I found myself favouring a sideways full keyboard view for emailing; and upright SureType for texting.
Overall my first touch-screen BlackBerry experience was good enough to make me consider a full-time move to a similar device in the future - but preferably one with a more satisfying mobile phone experience.
Microsoft’s Tafiti looks interesting but immature
Martin Veitch takes a brief look at Microsoft's Tafiti sample application.
Microsoft has uploaded an open beta of its Tafiti search site that has led to critics queuing up to admire its user interface. However, while Tafiti is noteworthy, don’t expect to dump Google anytime soon.
Tafiti requires Microsoft’s Silverlight cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in that is intended to provide a platform for rich internet applications, and also mandates that popups are enabled.
It certainly has an interesting user interface with searches conducted through a virtual index card, a “carousel” for search types and the ability to store results stacked on a “shelf”.
Some reviewers suggest that Tafiti is slow although it performed well on a standard Windows XP laptop across a corporate internet connection.
The main, indeed the overwhelming, drawback is that Tafiti is based on Microsoft’s LiveSearch, which is still lagging behind the mighty Google. Searches were largely relevant but not as good as those from the world’s most popular site.
To get a second opinion on Tafiti, I spoke to Julian Harris, senior business consultant at Conchango, a UK services firm that is behind a lot of the smartest new consumer and retail web sites, many of them based on the latest Microsoft code.
“The usability is definitely taking a back seat to the eye candy and it’s basically a showcase for Silverlight,” Julian told me.
“It looks great and it’s fun to demo but there is no help if you mistype a search query, no cached view, and you can’t even search on the [stacked searches].”
The best way to think about Tafiti is, as Julian suggests, a flag-waving exercise for Silverlight. Many such proof-of-concepts get a bit of attention then fade away. So in that sense at least, maybe Tafiti is a case of “job done” for Microsoft.
Virtually green
Everyone now accepts that virtualisation systems are pretty useful. Whether you can afford them or not is another matter, but there are enough case studies out there to prove that a well run virtualised environment can deliver the average datacenter huge hikes in utilisation rates and availability while making it far easier for administrators to test new configurations and applications without plunging the whole business into darkness.
However, there is also another benefit and it's one not many people seem to have thought about. Virtualisation is kind to the planet.
I made this discovery while putting together a series of articles on how to make your IT department more environmentally friendly. I've embarked on this task not because I have a secret desire to grow my hair, stop using deodorant, and start wearing hemp. But because - as all but the most rabid Clarksonistas now accept - the environment is a front and centre corporate issue and firms are facing increasing pressure from both the public and the government to reduce their environmental impact, not least through the technologies they use.
Which brings me back to virtualisation. In preparing the article I spoke last week with Gary Fowle, marketing director at Fujitsu Siemens Computers, about the steps IT directors could take to become greener. In amongst all the usual tips about thinking about energy consumption when making purchases and signing up with an authorised recycler he also said IT directors should really consider virtualisation as a really green technology.
I'll let him explain: "Some of the most power hungry applications are run from the datacenter and here virtualisation technologies can really help improve energy efficiency. Effectively virtualisation aims to simplify the datacenter and drive up utilisation. That means you are running the same tasks on fewer servers, using less electricity and requiring less cooling. It is a triple whammy: less servers have to get made, they are more energy efficient, and, on the business side, there is much less cost for the IT director."
Of course he is right. Energy efficiency may not be one of the issues talked about at your typical virtualised system sales pitch, but it is a significant hidden benefit that is likely to get more and more coverage as environmental issues become a wider concern for IT professionals.
I'd be keen to hear any other tips you may have about running an environmentally responsible IT department and look out for the full series of Green IT articles in the 4th of September issue of IT Week.
