Monthly Archives: December 2008

21.5 Hours Without Power: Which Phone Got Used the Most?

The area I live in lost power last night at 6:30pm. Power wasn’t restored until 3pm this afternoon (21.5 hours later).

My landline stayed up, of course. So, communications was not a huge problem. My neighbor’s cable TV provide voice phone went down right away (also “of course”).

T-Mobile data services stayed up for a little while (under an hour perhaps?) but went down and stayed down until after power was restored. Since all my Windows Mobile smartphones and the Nokia N96 I’m using at the moment are on that service (1 SIM card that moves from device to device), that left the iPhone on AT&T Wireless’ service.

I didn’t have a chance to recharge the iPhone before the power outage started. But, fortunately, I had a pretty good charge. I turned off WiFi (GPS & Bluetooth were already turned off) to conserve the battery’s charge. I only used the iPhone sparingly over the next 21.5 hours often setting it to flight mode to maximize battery life.

More in my MobileAppsToday blog on this topic later.

Atom Z530 Used in Dell Mini 12 Support Intel VT-x Hardware Virtualization Assist

I was just taking a look at the specs for the Dell Mini 12 netbook and noticed it uses the newer Atom Z530 processor instead of the N270 used in most of the popular netbooks that preceded it. While looking at its specs on Intel’s site…

Intel® Atom™ Processor Z530 (512K Cache, 1.60 GHz, 533 MHz FSB)

…I noticed that the box for the Intel® Virtualization Technology was checked for this processor. The N270 does not support hardware virtualization assist. This might mean that virtualization hypervisors, like Microsoft Virtual PC and VirtualBox, that support hardware virtualization assist may get a performance boost when run on Z530 based netbooks.

If you only have 1GB of RAM, you will need to choose Guest OS platforms carefully. But, you should be able to run lightweight OSes like Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, Windows 98SE, and Windows 2000 easily in Guest OS with 256MB RAM allocated to it.

I’m planning to buy a new netbook for Windows 7 Beta testing. So, I’m definitely going to look for netbooks with the Z530 processor now.

Batman The Dark Knight 2 Disc DVD Digital Copy

darkknight_1

I bought…

Batman: The Dark Knight (Two-Disc Special Edition + Digital Copy) (2008)

…the other day. The 2nd disc contains a digital copy suitable for use with mobile devices. I went through the activation process using iTunes on a Mac.

darkknight_2

The activation process was painless. I was a bit confused when I saw iTunes tell me it was downloading the movie after that. However, I soon realized that it was “downloading” the digital movie from the DVD and not the net. After this download process completed, I plugged my iPhone into the Mac and copied the movie over to it. There wasn’t any problem or additional steps above (activation-wise) to copy and view the movie to the iPhone.

Podcast w/Frank McPherson Talking About His T-Mobile G1 Experience Available

I had a great discussion with Windows Mobile expert Frank McPherson (PocketPCHow2.com) about his experience using the T-Mobile G1 (Google Android) smartphone since its release. You can find the podcast (with embedded web player) here:

MobileAppsToday Podcast: T-Mobile G1/Google Android Discussion with Windows Mobile Expert Frank McPherson