As usual its been a while since I updated my geekzone blog almost like a confession  for me!!
Currently Gadget wise I have a Galaxy Samsung S3 with an Zero Lemon Extended battery 7000 Mah which is very nice. My  partner has my old Galaxy Note and likes it.
Still using the Asus Transformer Prime TF201. Operating Jelly Bean 4.1.1. This is for sale on trademe.

Funnily enough I have a Transformer TF301 as well.This is for sale too if the price is right.

Tempted by a few tech products - namely Windows Tablet Surface RT, Padfone 2 but trouble here is they are asus and I have 2 of there tabs now.
Recently partner had problems with desktop which just needed a new power supply.

Power company wise we have switched to powershop BTW

Well well more changes

Tonight made the decision to sell Ipad 2 and Macbook 13 Inch
I have moved from Iphones to Android OS and recently to the Galaxy Note.
I have since bought the Asus Transformer Prime which is a Android ICS device.
This means that I can consolidate my devices.
Who have done this change before??
This means I will have gone completely android OS

I see its been 3 years since I last updated my Geekzone Blog. I feel somewhat embarrassed to say the least.
Well well how do I start.

Over those years Ive moved from having Windows Mobile devices- you remember the Imate Jasjar through various IOS devices Iphone 3G through to Iphone 4. I then switched direction completely and went Android. Saw a mates Samsung Galaxy s2 and sold my Iphone 4 to get that. Now Im using a Galaxy Note. Funnily enough I tell my family and colleagues that its because Im getting older and need the bigger screen !! There is a certain truth about that statement.
As far as Tablets go I bought an Ipad a couple of years ago and updated that on launch day to an Ipad 2. Waiting in the cue when I was visiting Wellington last year. Interesting conversations are had when waiting in such cues.

My colleagues at work seem to always ask me what have I got now as far as technology goes. Plus ask my advice for what is good for them. I try to help them out by asking what do they want to do with such a device.
I very much envy the folk that are able to review new devices and can almost make a living doing it. technobuffalo.com is a case in point.  Plug also for AndroidNZ our very own @NZtechfreak who does extensive reviews on his Website and youtube.

There is certainly a lot of developments wise hardware going. CES in Las Vegas US is going on right now.
I have several video cameras that manage HD video, I sold my SLR Canon for a all in one PIS Panasonic Lumix with a long zoom and feel a lot happier for it.  Less gear to carry. Have noticed its photographic limitations however at times
My Galaxy Note manages HD Vid but doesnt quite have the zoom capabilities but its fine for general use.
Yes I must update my profile as well.

Feel free to contact me for comments.
Im sure Ill be posting more.
I hope to catch up with folk at GZ Pizza evenings coming up

Believe it or not our old desktop has finaly been replaced yesterday.
It was actually an old PC Company Box with an AMD 2000+ Chip in it. This dates it about 8 odd years.!!
It had the MB changed a couple of years ago when it fried.

We well recently we upgraded the Video Camera to  JVC GZ-HD 40 which is reasonably high spec-120 Gb HDD, can capture either in AVCHD or Mpeg 2. HDMI capable output.
As you can imagine this means a lot of data moving around in editing software and the old PC just couldnt cut the mustard.

After some research we looked at boxes in Dell-high end stuff but some over $4000 and the usual retail outlets we settled on an Acer M3201 from DSE at $1599 + a 1 TB Free Agent Pro externall HDD at $349. We had been looking at those several months ago but they have come down in price very nicely.

Specs:

Processor: AMD Phenom 9600(Quad) 2.3GHz, 2MB L2 + 2MB L3 Cache

RAM: 4GB (2 x 2GB 800MHz)

HDD: 500GB 7200rpm SATA HDD

Optical: DVD SuperMulti SATA

Graphics: Integrated ATi Radeon HD3450 (256MB Discrete) layered on the AMD RS780 with 256MB shared

Card Reader: Multi-Card Reader

TV Tuner: Single MCE Digital TV Tuner + remote

Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium

Never having used Vista before its not so a big learning curve.
Getting to grops with the many pop up things that come up.

Havnt got to do any video editing yet but hope to put through its paces soon.
The Graphics card is not optimal -probably should be 512 Mb dedicated but we can always upgrade this later.

We have connected them both on the network and am gradually moving stuff across to how we like everything.
So we shall see how it works out

I mentioned in my blog a few days ago about using Mobileme which is an  apple replacement for the .mac service.
I am still in the trial of their service which last for another 45 odd days.80
So far the service has been reasonable -initially there were teething problems which  we triallers were given 60 days.
The Calendar feature still seems to be problematic however.

Anyway whilst being involved with the Apple-Iphone Yahoo group I learnt about a free enterprise Push service utilizing Google and using opensource sync protocols already available.

http://www.nuevasync.com/

Some might ask who is behind this and why is it free plus other ?? security issues.
They dont have the push mail running yet but definitely Calendar and contacts works via Google.
Ill be reporting back on this one

Thanks for the information in your comment David.
Amazing how you found my blog entry??

Geeze its about time I updated my Blog-it was last updated February.
Launch day was July 10 and I took the plunge and got a White 16gb Iphone 3 G.

Yes I saw all the hype and probably got sucked in a bit but boy am I glad I did.
I wasnt terribly happy with the Nokia N 95. Sure it probably has more features, better camera MMS and others but I dont think it beats the Iphone for ease of use and the WOW factor.

I always look for a Yahoo group concerning a device that I use to see what what others are experiencing.
I did on this occassion and signed up as a member of apple-iphone@yahoogroups.com.
It is quitre a busy group and the initial posts I came across were people upgrading to Firmware 2 on there previous Iphones and Ipods.

There nwas also a lot of issues with the new service Mobileme which is replacing the old .mac service. As an upshot Apple are now offerring users a 2 month tirial of this service. More about this later.

The initialisation of the phone was easy and after I walked out of the shop my old sim card was disabled so I went home to activate the new phone. Not a problem. ( I was given a new sim card with my old number transferred) Changed from a You Choose 20 plan to one of the new Iphone plans. Talk 120, txt 600 and 250mb data.

Set up Itunes 7.7 which was required. I am using a Windows PC and managed to transfer a lot of my songs collection onto the device. So far so good.
Tried to Sync outlook with the device. Contacts went across ok but no Calendar items. Fiddled a bit with preferences. Looked at the forums reset sync options. Hello worked from Deskltop and not from laptop which is where I had all my latest calendar items ??? very frustrating sorting this bit out.
How about a work around I wondered.
Set up Mobileme-its free for 2 months.

http://www.mobileme.com/

The concept of this is that you have all your information-ie contacts, calendar, files, photos. You sync between various PC's and mobile devices into the "Cloud" and the data moves around over the air thereby keeping everything up to date. The iphone supports this-basically a Push data system.

After some twidling I finally managed to get this working so now all my data is in sync with the laptop and the Iphone and any changes I make is live on the mobileme website within minutes and vice a versa.

Impressions of the vfarious apps:
I like the threading of the SMS-just like you are having a conversation
The email is a brease and easy to set up and use and now I have the poush email up and running its even better. Albeit at cost. The Mobileme service is going to cost around $155 a year to use.
Thye camera is OK and a shame it doesnt have more Mega pixels and there is no MMS. But theyu can go out in emails easily enough. There are plenty of apps available that are sort of integrated to some social networking sites like Facebook, flikr and the photos you take are also geotaged as well which adds to the social nbetworking possibilities.
The Map function is quite usefull although seing im a Geocacher I already own a functional GPS unit and would not use this feature a lot.
Theree is a You tube Interface but I have found that it takes a while for the viudeos to load-on my wifi network so prob even slower if I was using the 3 G network. Use this moccassionally.

World Clock usefull. Stocks alsop usefull -I have set up NZ stuff just for interest. The weather app isnt the most detailed and I await for a local NZ app made by a guy at http://www.orsome.co.nz. He has produces a top seller app in trhe app store called My Trades which allowes you to follow your trades on Trademe. He has also got an app that followes the NZ TV Channels called tvGuide and gets rave reviews.

Obviously the Itunes store is a great feature and as yet I havnt purchased any music. Have listened to samples from the store though and have been tempted. What Ill do is go through my music library-consolidate all my folders and see what ive got 1st.

Ok what apps have I installed and comments.
My favourite so far is Palringo which is a Multi Chat programme like Trillian which I use on my PC. It enables you to run Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk and there own network plus they have groups. There is an Iphone group and now a NZiphone group on palringo.
This was a freee app.
I have installed netnewswire a news reader,m 2 mahjong games one I paid for, Express another aggregated data capture app, Labrynth game-free, speechcloud-enables voice command for your contacts, Shazam a music recofnition programe that identifies songs-not accurate all the time but links in with Itunes store which is quite cleaver; 105 Classics a Internet music channel, exposure a flickr related product; Ifob which uses the GPS function of the iphone to work out whoi is nearby-bit freaky but has its possibilities. Who is that nice chick across the rd ??!!
Epocrates a drug information app-good but the druf names are americanised so a bit hard to search for information. Last MoPhoTo and another flickr app.

The Safari web browser is very nice and the screen is very nice and resizing with your finger is easy to makes pages easy to read. I have found some local sites that are designed to run on your Iphone -Kiwibank,vodafone, NZHerald etc.

So far my impression has been very good. Some frustrations re the sync issues.
It does chew through Battery power though. Suppose things will settle down after the novelty wears oiff a bit.
I have found also that I am not using as much data as I expected. I signed up on the 10th July and today still got over 180 mb;s left to use.
So all in all a pretty good experience and Im glad I made the swith.
Feel free to makle some comments and ask my advice as I think I have learnt a lot during this process.
I was a bit reluctant to post a blog about the Iphone as there appeared to be a bit of anti sentiment around on GZ but after chatting to some of the "blokes" in the IRC channel I was encouraged to put my post in so thanks for the support Scott and a few others.

My 1st blog update since last year.
I am just awaiting the arrival of the Courier.
I am expecting a New Garmin Colorado 300 GPS unit.

https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=11019

This is to upgrade from my Garmin 60c unit which ive had now for 3 + years.
This unit is a major upgrade.
Sirf 3 chip, wireless ability to transfer waypoints and Geocache information.
I am a hardened Geocacher and this is the main reason why I use GPS equipment.

Up till now Ive used Brett C maps but this time ill be using the NZ Open Source GPS maps project

http://gwprojects.orcon.net.nz/gps

These are excellent as they are free and autorouting.

There has been some concern expressed by =geocachers about the functionality lost in this unit compared to previouis series -60/70 csx.

Ill be reporting back in a few weeks on a review

I got so fed up with the Performance of my Jasjar-that I have sent it off to Mobile Fone Repar in Auckland.
Since the Rom upgrade it has been very very unstable and I dont know whether it was this or perhaps a few minor drops its had.
Problems:
Frequent hard and soft resets
Screen would turn blue and or other funny colours-needing a reset.
More recently several soiftware applications wouldnt work properly

So Ive made a claim on my VF Insurance.
This was last Monday and I havnt heard a thing as yet. (now being Thursday)-stated turn around was 5-10 days.
The business that I dropped it off to were going to charge me $70 as well as the excess of $120 that VF charged me.
I didnt bother asking for a loan phone-boy its been quiet.

I learnt today that my Jasjar will be completely replaced.
It seems that that it was fried-ie the circut board


Addit: Courier arrived Saturday am whilst I was away out of town-very good service.
Will be picking up new Jasjar Monday morning personally from the couriewr depot by the looks

Chris here reporting from GZ06.
Amazing talks so far. Only trouble is on the way down from hamilton today my jasjar went a bit flat:Luckily Mauricio came up with an easy soln-he had a battery that could charge it up-about the size of a cigarette box.-charging as we speak.
Saves me going back up to the hotel to get charger-then i would be limited as to where i sit in the rm.
Good socialisation occuring during the breaks courtesy of the sponsors-tweezers. Looking forward to our dinner later and more talking.
Listening to Jethro Carr about Open Sourse Software at momement.
An excellent experience so far.
Thanks for the organisers for the planning

Well I had some fun last week.

The Jasjar began playing up again-doing real strange things like not starting up in the morning, when synced to PC the screen would turn a funny colour and basically freeze up.
In the end I took the battery out for several minutes and this seemed to sort of get me going but system, still seemd very unstable and even the soft reset didnt work.
The hard reset where you hold the power button while pressing the soft reset button didnt seem to work either.
I resorted to the alternative way-pressing the 2 - buttons on the keyboard simultaneously pressing the soft reset button and we were all go and Ill admit we have had no problems since!! SPB Backup got me up and running in about 20 minutes

I just cant understand this scenario at all, if you remember earlier in the winter Ive had similiar situations where the unit would become very unbstable. Its not as though Id been loading up on software either.
Think the only thing ive changed of late is load up Netfront Mini browser which so far ive liked the feel off.
I did try Minimo which is a Mozilla product and that seemsed quite slow and not responsive.
One of the other new software Im trying is Mobile Contacts Phone edition by www.sygic.com/mobile
Im using Personal Vehicle Manager ( Two Peaks Software )  to manage my vehicle costs.
Hopefully we are all smooth sailing now