Category Archives: Gadgets

Cisco, umi is stupid.

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It’s been a while since I’ve looked at or played with a product that pushed my buttons enough to write a rant.

Cisco umi, is just such a product.

What is umi?   umi is John Chamber’s delusional Telepresence vision for the consumer.

High Definition telepresence for the consumer, yep you read that right.  Video conference on your HD TV.  With tilt/pan/zoom support and it can even record it for you so you can play back those awkward family teleconferencing moments at a later date.

umi01 

But wait, that’s cool? What’s dumb about it?   What’s dumb is that it’s $599 for the unit.  While that doesn’t seem all that bad, when you consider I paid less than that for most of my Hi-Def TV’s that’s kind of pricy.

For starters, it’s a consumer product, and Cisco Sucks at anything with a user interface that isn’t command line so expect this to be hard to use.

Second, you will need two of them, so that’s $1200.

For that money, I’d send my parents at the other end a PS3 and a PS3 Eye camera, total cost:  $350.   Then they’d have a blueray player and decent video game system. 

Best of all, NO SUBSCRIPTION fees.

that’s right, Cisco charges you $24.99 a month (1 year contract), or if you’re smart you’d opt for the annual plan for a whopping 9% savings at $274.99 Annually.

I don’t understand what you get for that?  A directory service so you can find your parents/grandparents on the other end?

So you’re looking at $599 x2 and $274.99 x2 for this?  That’s a lot of jack.

Also listed in the things you ‘Need’ are:

- TV with HDMI, while most people have that, I suspect none of my parents or grandparents do (yet), and I have little desire to telepresence with anyone else at this stage.

- Broadband, and a good one, with at least 1.5mb up.   That’s more rare than you might think and that’s just for 720p calls.  1080 requires 3.5mb UP.

Video is what it is, but I know few folks with that kind of reliable up-stream bandwidth.

Given that now FaceTime is free on all apple products and the plethora of other options out there, while they aren’t true HD are far more than adequate.

This is dumb Cisco, very very dumb.

I really dislike XM/Sirius now.

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So the only place I use XM is on my motorcycle.  XM has value for me, as I typically like to ride long distances.  It’s not unusual for me to say ride 2400 miles over a 3 day weekend whilst rallying.  (yes you read that right twenty four hundred miles).

This certainly means I’m all over the place and being able to listen to a consistent signal or station is a good thing.

XM is pretty consistent on the highways, but when you’re in the mountains (which is where we prefer to ride) it can be spotty.  Especially when you’re on the north east side of the mountain.

So, being that I live in the North East, motorcycling unfortunately isn’t a year round event.   From sometime in November to at least the end of February, with a few exceptions the bike gets put away. 

Every year I call up XM, explain to them that I don’t need the service until March.  They threaten me with re-activation fees but when I persist they have usually discounted those months.  Enough so that it’s still worth it for that rare winter day around here when it hits 50 degrees and we go out for a ride.

Since the XM/Sirius merger, there isn’t any competition.  You can’t play one off the other any more.

I picked up my bill this year to start the negotiating process that happens every winter. Only to come to a few new realizations that really bothered me.

XMBill

I remember last year being promised the price wouldn’t change for, I *think* 3 years. 

So what’s the strategy?  We didn’t raise our prices, but we now have to charge you a music royalty fee.  WTF?

This irritates me.

I *may* not even listen to music, in fact I generally listen to sports, or the comedy channel.  Their 80’s channel only has 100 songs, if you ride a 12 hour ride you will hear all of them, often twice.

I’m not against the artists being paid, but I am against XM billing me for a line item that is simply part of their cost of doing business.

Very few industries can do this.   I don’t patronize car repair places that charge me a line item ‘rag-fee’ or ‘fluid disposal fee’, and I likely won’t patronize XM any more.

I also get dinged $2.00 so they can send me an invoice.  I’m perfectly happy to receive this digitally, but no, I’m not going to let them auto-charge me for anything.   When they auto-charged my credit card in years past they couldn’t seem to charge me the same amount twice (even though my subscription didn’t change)

This year, they have a new feature.  I am apparently not alone.  They now let you suspend your account.  So that later you don’t have to be threatened with re-activation fees.  They also get to continue to list you as one of their ‘subscribers’ albeit a suspended one.

So for now I’m a suspended subscriber.  Helping to dilute your royalty fees.  I expect that will remain until I just have to have it for a big trip.

We’ll see.

Dell e4300 is bittersweet.

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e4300

We’re Dell fans, especially latitude fans.  Super stable hardware.  We recently did a technology upgrade in our department and switched from the D-Series Latitudes to the e-Series.   We have a handful of e6500′s, a few 6400′s and a couple e4300′s.

For the most part this 1st generation of laptops has gone well.  Not perfect, but pretty good.  The e64/6500′s have seen a few BIOS upgrades that have worked out most of the issues.   The fingerprint reader/software combination (Dell Control Point) is still crap though.  Very unreliable.  Especially when compared the Wave fingerprint software that came bundled with an XPS that I own.

Outside of that they have been pretty good.

The e4300, not so much.

This little laptop is super sweet.  Nice small, fast, good battery life.  But we’re experiencing some hard hangs/freezes.   We’ve tried multiple flavors of OS’s, multiple driver combinations, all with little success.   We’ve also replaced the motherboard in one unit.  The problem persists.

I realize these are relatively new, but it amazes us that a google search for this issue returns nada.  Both laptops behave the same, random hard lock-ups.

It seems sleep/video/audio related, and no we can’t make it happen but it’s enough to send them back for the time being.

We’re working with our Dell rep and hopefully someone from the Brand Team to get to a resolution.  We really want them to work and be stable.  There isn’t another laptop out there that $ for $, feature for feature meets the need.

So if you’ve experienced similar issues I’m interested in hearing from you.

Post a comment and we’ll get in touch.

UPDATE

On Friday the 19th I had a conversation with a Latitude Brand  Manager.  He assured me that this problem is well known, especially with e4300′s running Vista.  A BIOS updated to address this specific freezing issue is in the works and slated to be released on the 29th.

We’re going to hang tight until then.   If this is known inside Dell, and being worked on.  The fact that none fo the Tier 2/Tier 3 Support people had any clue is somewhat bothersome.   We’ll report back if the fix does what it’s supposed to.

Yes it’s true, the Blackberry Storm is a turd.

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BB_Storm_Front_Left271x500

Thankfully I don’t have to use one.  But I did get to play with one at a Christmas gathering last weekend.

It was pathetically slow, slow switching applications, slow changing from portrait to landscape.

The clickable front, button simulator, was a nice touch.  But the Pearl like keyboard in vertical mode is horrible.

I hope Blackberry can fix these issues.   It will not replace my 8830, or my iPhone which is still a sub-par enterprise device.

So basically, everything you’ve read on the Internet is true.  This phone sure is pretty but its poorly executed.

Destructoid NARP Party

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Saturday night I attended the Destructiod NARP (No Apparent Reason Party).   First Destructoid, for which I was not familiar with prior is a community for hard core gamers.  The primary reason I went was to meet Robert of Infinity Ward.  I was led to believe there’d be good IW SWAG.   Unfortunately the RockStar guys clearly one-up’d infinity ward.  There was GTA4 stuff everywhere, multiple Tee’s for just about everyone as well as stickers and what not.

The prize for the COD tournament was a signed Infinity Ward poster.  (whoopie)…

I understand this was Desctructoid’s first event.  Overall as a party goes it was pretty good.   There was a good group of folks playing Rock Band, a game I still don’t ‘get’.  Clearly sucking and looking stupid at Karaoke isn’t enough. At least with Rock Band you get to share the shame with 3 other people playing guitar and drums.   Some of the ‘bands’ were OK, at least they can push the buttons, but the singing, well, I should probably just stop here.

There was another station set up for people to play smash brothers.   Which to me was about as lame as it gets.  If I had shelled out $50 for that game I’d have to hurt someone.

There was a pre-release showing of a Ninja game.   Imagine the sword fighting of the Lord of the Rings PS3 games or Prince of Persia, mixed with the run around task based game Assassins Creed, only not as good and you’ve got this game.   I’ll certainly pass on that release.

The COD tourney was somewhat of a joke.  Very unorganized, and I’m sorry to say, you need sound to play that game.  That wasn’t possible hooked up to the big screens above the bar.

This review may sound negative and perhaps it is.  But the party was a blast and I’m sure it will only be better next time. 

Wh00t!

Hori Turbo Controller for PS3 Sucks

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After looking around this seemed to be the only Turbo controller that I could find for the PS3.

Why would you want this? What’s wrong with the 6 Axis?

Two reasons.

  1. Six Axis controllers are $50, they seem to last about 3-4 months if you use them hard as I do. The analog sticks go to hell, become less responsive and it becomes almost impossible to use the L3-R3 buttons underneath them.
  2. Some games really benefit from turbo, think Call of Duty, where your single shot weapons are now full auto’s.

The instructions for this thing were weak as most cheap over seas electronics are. But it is straight forward enough. The feel of the control is somewhat crappy. It’s a low end unit. The turbo functions work as advertised, but the analog sticks are crap. It often gets confused if you’re trying to move and run (using the left analog stick but also pushing it down to activate the L3 button, while looking around (using the right analog stick). You might do a 180, you might end up looking at the sky. Results are unpredictable.

It feels like the analog sticks are accelerated and non-linear. This blows when you need to make small critical adjustments (like sniping).

It has a switch with 3 settings for the analog stick movement, but none are good, medium is jacked up, fast is too fast, and slow is too slow. Even working with in game adjustments I couldn’t find a setting that was even close the the accuracy and quality of the Six-Axis.

Game controls are certainly subjective. The ergos are OK, it’s the mechanics of this thing that are jacked up.

It also burns a USB port because you have to use their dongle. Since the PS3 has built in bluetooth why hasn’t anyone reverse engineered how to make replacement controller that just uses that? Why do I need another dongle?

It also eats batteries. It burned through fully charged AA’s in 9 hours not the 400 hours indicated in the manual.

So if you are looking at this, you might want to pass.