An Amusing Diversion

Since Apple’s announcement of the MacBook Air back in January, it seems to be the machine that people love to hate. The design of the machine is absolutely amazing, but the innovative design sacrifices some of the functionality that people have come to expect on a laptop. As an alternative to the MacBook Air, PC maker Lenovo introduced a new model to add to their lineup called the X300. The X300 is a little slower and larger than the MacBook Air, but it does include a few of the things that Apple had to sacrifice. To help drive these selling points home, Lenovo recently posted an ad Parody on YouTube. This is great…

My opinion? Given all of its limitations, I still like the MacBook Air. I just find it amusing that not only are companies doing everything in their power to duplicate machine designs and technology from Apple, but now, they are borrowing from the minds of their creative marketing teams as well. I guess some things never change, do they?

iPhones in the Enterprise? Coming Soon…

iphone_handIn a town-hall style meeting today, Apple announced their intentions of releasing version 2.0 of the firmware for the iPhone in June. This new firmware release would feature support for Microsoft Exchange’s ActiveSync protocol and several industry-standard corporate security standards. ActiveSync support will include not only ‘Push’ email for immediate delivery, but will also feature contact and calendar synchronization for Exchange users. iPhone 2.0 also offers certificates and identities, WPA2/802.1x support, enforced security policies, more VPN protocols, device configuration, and ‘remote wipe’ functionality to delete data on lost or stolen iPhones.

Since its release in June of 2007, the iPhone has been widely criticized for its lack of support of enterprise features. This announcement, though it comes as no surprise to many people, should now allow the iPhone to effectively compete against Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices in corporate settings. Like many others, I can’t wait to get my hands on iPhone 2.0!

Google goes IMAP

Hallelujah! Google is finally offering IMAP access to Gmail mailboxes. Since the launch of the iPhone, Google has been criticized for not offering a good solution to email access for the device. The web-based interface was slow and clumsy and access with the POP protocol left a lot to be desired. Now, users can access their Gmail accounts from any standard IMAP email client, including the iPhone and other mobile devices.

New information has been posted on how to enable IMAP for your Gmail account, as well as a tutorial for configuring IMAP access on the iPhone. Thank you Google. For the time being, you have made cyberspace a better place.

Optimized for iPhone

iphone_hand
To coincide with the redesign of BurnedOutGeek.com, I have enabled a template that properly formats the site for the Apple iPhone as well as the iPod Touch.  Even though these devices will render the “normal” version of the site, as most iPhone owners know, a view that is optimized for the correct screen width and lower bandwidth is quite nice. iPhone owners rejoice!

Blackberry users?  Umm… resume whatever it was that you were doing.

To Q or NOT to Q?

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Like many other people, I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Motorola Q personal device, but now that it has finally arrived, I’m not quite sure what to think. I love it at times and hate it at others. It’s useful, yet it also has the potential to kill my productivity. Allow me to explain.

As of today, Verizon Wireless has an exclusive on the Q from Motorola, at least until the beginning of the year or so. Being that I have been with Cingular for the past 6 years, moving to another carrier was a huge step just to get a new geek toy, but I decided to do it anyways. Everybody that knows me also knows that I really couldn’t stand Cingular to begin with. That company has got to have the worst customer service of any I had ever dealt with, with the exception of maybe their parent company, Bellsouth. So without any further delays, I ordered my gadget and Verizon promptly shipped it FedEx so I would have it the next day, just in time for my birthday.   More…