Two weeks ago, during exam week, my sister got a phone call while she was at school. This phone call was from MTV and they called her to confirm her address so they could send her the prize she had won. The prize, it was a Samsung SGH-E250V phone. The next morning, there was a package on our doorstep. It was the phone. My sister had already gone for her exam and wouldn’t be home till later on in the afternoon so I wouldn’t get to see it till then.

When she did get home, she quickly opened it and there is was, a little red box with a cellphone in it. I quickly got the camera and asked her if I could unbox it and take pictures of it. She said it would be okay. I did that and then we put the phone on the charger and left it overnight. Just by looking at it, and reading the instruction manual (who reads instructions anymore) we worked out that her current LG phone is a lot better than the new Samsung, so she would let me use it till I got a real (i)Phone.

I turned it in and had a good 10 minute play with it. It doesn’t have 3G but it has a music player, bluetooth, FM radio, camera that can record video, and the other basics that a phone has. Now I needed a SIM card so I could take the phone. My sister went on for another exam that day and got me one while she was in town. Now I could actually use the phone.

Its a decent phone, I’m pretty happy with it. One of the things I have never had a good chance to play with is Bluetooth. Sending files to and from a computer using Bluetooth is amazing. Its quite quick and pretty easy to do, and the best thing about it, no wires! There is also an issue that I have with the phone. Since is it a slide phone, to access the numberpad, you need to slide the screen up. This is not a simple task, it doesn’t just glide up like the LG Chocolate, you really have to push it. On top of that, it is really hard to grip to slide it up. While this is not really a huge issue, it is really annoying, even more so if you really don’t want to touch the screen and get fingerprints on it.

Other that that minor problem, I am pretty happy with the phone. It is a temporary phone until I get my hands on a Jesus Phone, aka, the Apple iPhone. I can’t wait to be able to carry around one device, a cellphone, a music player, and an internet device. If there is a downside to this phone, and many other phones, its that I expect more from them, and they just don’t deliver like the iPhone Hopefully the temporary phone is very temporary!

The latest release of the best browser ever has just come. The Mozilla crew have done a top job with this version of their Firefox web browser and there are many features that make you all warm and gooey inside. If you need some convincing, carry on reading, otherwise get out of here and go download Firefox 3! You have less than 24 hours to download it to be part of the World Record that Mozilla are trying to achieve, most downloads in 24 hours. Here goes a few reasons why the new Firefox Rocks.

Places - They have completely revamped the bookmarks and it is really fast due to the fact it is stored in a database. History and Bookmarks are accessible from here and are easy to manage in folders and even tags. They have also separated the bookmarks into Bookmarks Menu, Toolbar and Unsorted. I really like how they have done this.

Smart Bar -The address bar isn’t just a standard address bar anymore. It is a lot more powerful. You can type in terms and it will show you where they are, whether its at the start of an address URL or page title, or in the middle or end, wherever the term is, it will find it. It it very good and getting the page you want up there so its very easy to access past pages and sites you have been to with the smart bar.

User Interface -Now, no matter what Operating System you use, Firefox 3 looks unique in all 4. They have made Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X and Linux all have different themes that make it match the system better. The browser looks more integrated visually with the operating system than looking like something thrown on top of it. It may not be a huge thing feature wise, and may not make the browser work any better, but the refreshed looks is still a big deal.

There are lots of other great features but those are 3 of the most noticeable and wonderful ones. If you are a current Firefox user, its a no brainer to upgrade to 3. Memory management is hugely improved for starters and the whole browser generally is faster and is more solid. Firefox 3 is the future so upgrade as soon as possible, upgrade now!

Over the past month, I have been using a Twitter like services called Plurk. The major difference between this and Twitter is the way they display the messages, or as they call them, Plurks. Where Twitter shows Tweets in a list form, Plurks are shown in a timeline format. At first, I found the site to be a little slow and not as good, but as soon as more of my friends jumped on the bandwagon, the ball started rolling.

One of the things that makes Plurk different from Twitter is the conversations. Replies are threaded with a Plurk, as shown by clicking on the Plurk to drop down the replies people have said. This is better than the way Twitter does it because it don’t show it as a new message, which is a little annoying at times seeing replies to other people in your tweet stream. It just doesn’t make sense.I really like the replies because it makes the site seem a lot more active and fast paced, more like IM or IRC.

Plurk is very smooth, all thanks to AJAX. There is no refreshing of pages, which is a godsend, especially when there is a new Plurk or reply every second. You would be refreshing all the time otherwise. It is also good about notifying you when there are new messages and replies, and marking them as read. I like being able to know what I have and have not read. It makes it so much easier to catch up when I have been away sleeping or at school or away from keyboard.

One of the perks with Plurk is a Karma system. This gives users a way to how they compare with other users on the site. This is much better than judging by who has the most friends or followers, as sometimes its impossible to beat web celebs with that. The karma system is more fair and is based more on messages that friends, although it still is a factor. Although having a ratings system as such does have its downsides, such as people overplurking, aka spamming. This isn’t a huge issue but it could be in the future. I hope they have ways to manage this when it does happen.

I have not had any issues with Plurk and I think it is a great service, better than Twitter in my books. Although this wouldn’t be the case if it wasn’t for my friends and the internet people that friend me and make the Plurking experience more enjoyable and real. If you don’t already have a Plurk account, make one by using my link here. By doing so will note me for your referral and we will automatically be added on each others friends lists. Plurk on my friends!

The new version of Opera came out a couple of days ago. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try and alternative browser that wasn’t Internet Explorer or Firefox. When I saw the news on the Digg front page, one feature really stood out. This was Opera Link. I wanted to see how well it performs and if it, along with other features was enough for me to take Opera as seriously as I do Firefox. Could this play around make me a switcher?

There were a few surprising things I loved about Opera right off the bat. The first one being a feature called Speed Dial. This is a page displayed when you open a new tab, and it gives you access to your 9 favourite websites. You can choose what websites you put there and it had a thumbnail of the site along with the title underneath for quick access to the sites you access the most.

Another great feature of Opera is the tab preview. When you hover your mouse over a tab on the tab bar for a few seconds, a little thumbnail will display of the current page, and when you scroll your cursor over the other tabs, the thumbnail will change to the website tab hovered. This may sound a little useless but when you have quite a few tabs open, its a great way to find the webpage you are looking for in your tab bar.

On the topic of tabs, I also love the way Opera handles the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut for switching tabs. Unlike in other browsers where it would switch you over to the next tab, Opera shows a little menu with all you current tabs and you can keep tabbing through them till you get to the one desired and that page will come up. It is much cleaner than having to focus half a dozen tabs to get to the one you desire. Also if you go into the options, you can incorporate tab thumbnails, so along with the titles in the menu, you also get a visual aide.

The final feature that really appealed to me was Opera Links. This is a service provided by Opera that synchronizes your browser bookmarks, speed dial and the personal bar (known as the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox.) All the information goes to the cloud and can be synchronized across browsers. And as an added bonus, you can also access your bookmarks and speed dial right from the Opera Links website. This is useful if you are using an alternative browser or a mobile browser and allows you to view all your bookmarked sites right from in the browser.

Now, my Opera experience did come with a few annoyances. One thing I did find odd is the search on the speed dial. I don’t think it is necessary to have that there due to there being a Google search tool on the address bar. I believe that it would be much more useful as a bookmarks and history search, instead of another web search. And while we are on Bookmarks, I didn’t find the bookmarks manager anywhere near as powerful as Firefox’s Places. I am so use to having my Bookmarks Toolbar, Bookmark Menu and General Bookmarks all separate, but still together in a unified place. With Opera, the Personal Bar was completely separate from the other general bookmarks, which is the same as the bookmarks menu. This is not Opera’s fault this annoyed me, I’m just so use to the new way Firefox manages bookmarks that I find the old way frustrating.

The default Opera UI is a bit of a mess compared to other browsers. I don’t understand why everyone wants to change things! Internet Explorer removed/hid the File menu, and Opera thinks that they would prefer to have the Address bar and Tab bar switched around. This is a little annoyance and should not be a problem one you get use to and familiar with it.

Being so use to the Firefox way of browsing, the pop-up password notification box is here, and annoying! Its not too bad because the website still logs on in the background and you can wait for it to successfully log in before saving your password, but I would still prefer it out of the way completely. And while we are at password saving, the Wand password manager is a little different from others. When you go to a site with a saved password, other browsers would auto-complete the username and password fields. Opera on the other hand highlights the edges. I have no idea what this means and ended up typing my username and password again. It wasn’t till a few sites later I noticed a wand icon in the address bar and clicked it and the fields filled in with my login details. It would have been nice to have a notification bubble telling me how to use it the first time this happens just so a new user like myself is aware.

My last minor gripe with Opera is Google. Yes, Google. I use a lot of Google’s services and it was a little annoying to not have them work as well as they do in Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Gmail was stripped down and didn’t have a lot of the cool display that it does in Firefox. It seemed a little stripped down. Also I couldn’t be invisible on GTalk inside Gmail and I couldn’t use any of the Gmail Lab features. I also got an error message on Google Notepad. I could still use it perfectly fine and it looks normal to me, but there was an error message there for some reason. That was just odd. My iGoogle page has quite a few gadgets and one of the gadgets didn’t like Opera, so it caused it to keep refreshing the page. This made iGoogle unusable. I am also disappointed that there is no Google Gears for Opera either. I understand that this is not really Opera’s fault, it’s Google’s, but nevertheless, I still found it to be worthwhile to mention.

In conclusion, I feel that Opera is a great browser, and with a few tweaks and a bit of getting use to, Opera could be a perfect browser. Its memory and CPU usage was as good, if not better than Firefox 3 RC1’s, and it was very stable. Did playing around with Opera 9.5 make me want to switch. No, I’m still a Firefox user and will continue to do so for a while now. But in saying that, I am going to keep Opera around. It is an amazing alternative browser, second best, and I will use it when I need to use another browser for certain tasks.

This morning, at 5:00 am New Zealand time, the main event of the Worldwide Developers Conference took place. This is when Steve Jobs, Apple CEO presents his Keynote. I set my alarm for 4:00 am so I could get up and have plenty of time to do stuff before the keynote, but I ended up sleeping through it and getting up at 5:10 am. At this point, I quickly hopped out of bed to get my laptop and I brought it into bed with me and loaded up many sites so I could see the live happenings, with pictures, of the keynote event.

The whole internet knew what the main parts of the keynote were going to be about, the 3G iPhone, and 3rd Party Applications, as well as the possibility of OS X 10.6. And they were pretty much spot on. It started with a little bit about the next version of OS X but then they moved on and talked a lot about 3rd party applications coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch. At this stage, I was happy I didn’t get up earlier or else I would have been waiting a long time for nothing. I didn’t miss much and there was not much to it. Some developers showed off their apps and games that will be coming to the App Store when it launches.

Towards the end of the keynote, this is when the moment everyone was waiting for came, the announcement of the 3G iPhone. It is basically the same as the original iPhone. The new features are the 3G capabilities, GPS, plastic backing, flushed headphone jack, thinner edges and better battery life. And the price $199 and $299 USD for the 8 and 16 GB versions. This is with a 2-year contract with AT&T. The phone is going to be launching in 22 countries, including Australia and New Zealand on July 11th.

I want this device a lot! And after I watch the video version of the keynote, I am going to want to 100 times more. Reading about it and looking as some pictures of it makes me excited but hearing about it from the Steve Jobs and seeing it on video is going to increase the hype for me by an infinite amount. The only issue I had, was that I was not prepared to get this phone on a contract with Vodafone, but later on in a press release, they announced that it would be available on prepaid and contract plans.

Now this phone is going to be quite expensive in New Zealand. To get an idea of the price it will cost, double the US price and add about 25% on to it, which would make the iPhone cost probably around $500 to $650 NZD, and I assume that is with a 2 year contract with Vodafone. The prepaid version, I would say yu are looking about about $1,000 and $1,200. That is way too much! I am not willing to pay anywhere near that amount, especially for a cellphone I will hardly use as a cellphone.

Since that is the case, I would be better off with an iPod Touch. Although I would really love an iPhone because I don’t carry around a cellphone and an iPod + iPhone would be the idea device and pocket companion for me. At this stage, I would be happy to obtain a original iPhone. I don’t particularly need the 3G and GPS features so a simple iPhone would still be more than ideal for me. I might think about looking for a second hand iPhone but I still like the idea of having the iPhone 3G. We will see how this plays out.

Last week, I got accepted into the Live Mesh Tech Preview (also known as Beta.) I had only heard a little bit about it from various websites and podcasts and it sounded and looked like an interesting service. Live Mesh is basically cloud storage, with basically all the same functionality as Dropbox except with a bit more added.

When you download the client, which is around 2MB in size, the installation starts in the background. This took quite a while to install, and even other people I know have commented on that. There is no progress indicator or anything so you are expected to sit back and wait for it to just do its thing. The only reason I can think of for the lengthy installation time is that it probably downloads the actually application off the internet, similar to how the other Windows Live services do it. I really dislike this and would prefer to download the actual install file manually. This was the only issue I had with Mesh, everything else is pretty much positive.

You are again greeted with a new folder on your computer, except here it goes in your User directory. This is basically where you will get access to everything in your Live Mesh. When you create a new folder, it goes in there and any files synchronized between your computer and the cloud are put here. Another interesting thing is that any folders outside here that you wish to synchronize, their shortcut will appear in the directory. This is good as it makes it easy to manage what is going on in the Live Desktop and other computers that are synchronized.

Synchronization with folders is quite fast, with information on progress of the upload and download. If you only synchronize one file, it happens so fast you wouldn’t even notice it going on in the background. You get 5GB storage which is plenty of space for backing up Documents and a few other files. Its not ideal for video or loads of images, but if you had those types of files, you probably wouldn’t want to back them up online anyway (unless you have a fat pipe.) You can synchronize between your computer, the Live Desktop, and other computer. This is great because it means that your Documents folder can be synchronized between multiple computers, and the cloud.

The Live Desktop is the way you access your files and folders on the web. Once you log on, you are greeted with a very straight forward user interface. The thing that makes it so straight forward, is the fact it looks like a very basic Windows desktop, with folders on the desktop that are folders you have synced to the Live Desktop. Clicking the folder will open a window that looks and operates very similar to Windows Explorer does. From here you can view items in the folders as well as make changes, make new folders and upload.

I also tried the image viewer. As I clicked on a picture in Firefox, I was in for a rude awakening, you need Silverlight 2 to use the photo browser, and at this stage, you cannot get SL2 for Firefox. I understand this is in beta so its not much of an issue and shouldn’t be for too long. In Internet Explorer however, it looked and worked pretty well, it had the thumbnails at the top, and you could see the image and use the familiar forward, backwards and play buttons to go through the pictures and start and stop a slideshow. I did find it to be a little slow to load a bunch of relatively small images, but that could have been due to a number of factors.

There are a whole heap of options that are not available yet and at this stage it is Windows only, but they do plan for a Mac client for synchronization. I was very happy with this service and it was done really well. If it is this good at the beta stage, its going to be one hell of a service when it is out of beta and open to the public. There are a few things that I have missed do talk about such as syncing to two machines and remote desktop and such, but at this stage, I have yet to play around with that. You can hear about those from other people, when I cover this again when it is out of beta with more features and functionality, or you can go and try them yourself. I would highly recommend this service to every Windows user out there because it is that great.

Last month, I was playing around with a service called Dropbox. The name of the site pretty much tells you what it basically is, a service that allows you to drop files into a folder on your computer and it syncs it up onto the cloud (the internet) for access there.

When you first install the application, it puts a folder in your Documents directory called My Dropbox. This is where all your files go to get synced with the server, and it is also where files that get put into your Dropbox get downloaded to. When uploading files to the web, I found it to be quite slow, and when I say slow, I mean that my connection can handle a fair bit more. The other issue I had here was that the program wasn’t very good at telling me the progress of my upload, as well as the speed it was going. It was very inaccurate and most of the time, looked as if it had stalled.

You also have a public folder which is a folder that you can publicly share the files in, as long as you give the link to the people you want to share with. You can also share other folders too. You can view and download files using a web browser by logging on to your Dropbox account and you have access to all your files from there. You can also share folders with other Dropbox users. There you have a common folder and it appears on both peoples Dropbox’s and when anyone adds a file to it, it will automatically sync with the other people.

My only real grip was with the uploading of files to the Dropbox. There are still many ways in which this service can grow. The storage is limited to 2GB per user, and depending on how many files you have, and how much you want synced to the internet, this could be a huge limitation for some people. The service could also improve with backup. At the moment, it is only good at backing up individual files, and even then, there are services out there that do it a lot better.

There are many features that I have missed mentioning and overall, Dropbox is an amazing service. It does what it does reasonably well. I am really looking forward at seeing what they do to improve this service and make it a real competitor in the online storage/sync/backup space. If you would like to try it out, I have 9 invitations, and you can get one by commenting below. If you haven’t already, please do try out this great service.