Thank you for sending your Seagate E-mail inquiry.

The device what you have a linux software on the drive.So you can not replace the drive with a other drive it will not work.

Seagate have a new Network device Where you can replace the drive if it go bad. The device is Called BlackArmor NAS
hire is the link for the device
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-gb/products/external/blackarmor/

If you have any additional questions, let me know.

Actually, I do have a question. How can a customer service response, including trying to sell me a replacement, be so badly written? Seriously?

At least it makes my decision easier. ZyXEL here I come…

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The other week there was a strange power failure in my area. After that my NAS (a Maxtor Shared Storage II 500GB device) started making clicking and general drive noises that weren’t, well, healthy. They’ve now stopped but it’s not a good sign.

One thing I didn’t check when I purchased it though is how to replace the drive when it’s out of warranty. The answer is… not very easily. In fact the NAS runs Linux and requires the NAS’ operating system installing onto any new drive. Oh, and it’s not very easy to even get at the drive.

So, I’ve decided to look for a replacement – and this time I’m going to get one where I can easily swap the drive, if I need to.

The best option appeared to be the Buffalo LinkStation Pro LS-XHL. This comes with a drive built in and, after asking on their forums, it would appear that replacing the drive on that is not easy either.

I’m now looking at the ZyXEL NSA210 which, although not the quickest, is the one recommended by PC Pro. And, more importantly, comes diskless and is therefore easy to swap drives (I’ve read the online documentation to confirm too!). I’d probably stick in it a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green.

I’m just awaiting Maxtor (sorry, Seagate) to get back to my customer query, before I give up on my existing NAS.

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I’ve seen many similar lists on other sites but they seems to suffer from at least one of the following…

1. Concentrating on applications which are, well, generally useful and not really Netbook specific. Free antivirus? Hmm.
2. Recommending the same old “popular” choices – irfanview, OpenOffice, etc.
3. Recommendation are mainly around the theory of moving everything OFF your Netbook, so it’s online apps and USB storage.

I’ll try and avoid all 3. Some may be of use for non-Netbook owners, but they should all have a very specific advantage to those of use with these handy, portable devices.

Scrybe

Scrybe provides gesturing support to your touchpad – in particular those that support multi-touch (such as the Acer Aspire One). Draw a pattern on the touchpad, for instance, to launch a particular application.

Even if you don’t wish to use this facility, you do get an upgraded version of Synaptics touchpad driver.

TouchFreeze

TouchFreeze is a nice idea but I’m not sure how well it’s yet been implemented – it didn’t work for my netbook and there hasn’t been any updates to the software for a while. None-the-less, it’s worth a try.

In a nutshell, it disables your touchpad when you being typing so that your palm doesn’t accidentally do something it shouldn’t do!

winsupermaximise

This adds a system tray icon which, once clicked (or you can press a hotkey combination), will “super maximise” the current window – that is, it will resize so the title bar is actually above the screen boundaries, thus saving those extra pixels that you don’t want to waste.

Yawcam

Most netbooks come with webcams but few include any kind of software to make use of them. Yes, you can install Skype and video call, but is that all it’s good for?

Yawcam will add some much needed abilities to that webcam – video streaming, image snapshots, a built-in webserver, motion detection and FTP uploads.

Live Mesh

There are a number of providers of free folder synchronisation (that is sharing folders across different computers) but I, personally, prefer Microsoft’s Live Mesh.

The files are also accessable online – up to 5GB worth.

What sells it to me is its simplicity. I have a folder on my desktop which I’ve set up with Live Mesh to share – anything placed in that folder is automatically shared across all my PCs. This therefore provides a quick and easy way to share data with a portable device such as a Netbook.

AltDrag

Quite how I missed this from my original list, I don’t know.

With the smaller screen resolution of Netbooks it’s often the case that program windows aren’t always visible on screen, in particular with the top bar hidden off screen so you can’t move it back in view, or it may be a window without a “dragable area”.

Linux has a great function that allows you to move windows with the mouse when pressing the ALT key. Well, now, you can have this on Windows too thanks to AltDrag,  a small, free application.

Desktops

Desktops is a Microsoft utility that provides multiple desktops – ideal for those cramped Netbook screens. Quickly swap between different desktops with the system tray icon or with shortcut keys.

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Here’s what I’ve found.

Case

Black Gel Case

Having got a cheap, rubber “skin” case for my daughters Tocco Lite, I thought I’d get something similar. I bought a colour-coded (well, transparent but with a blackish hue)  “gel” case from eBay for the grand total of £2.90 (including postage). And it’s.. ok. It’s not like the more rubbery case of my daughters (with that it covers the buttons and you press them through the case, hence why it needs to be quite flexible) but it a harder material. It protects well but collects dust and crumbs quite easily.

Click the thumbnail to the right to see it a little clearer.

Screen Protectors

Again, I bought some screen protectors for my daughters phone. I got 10 and they were cheap from eBay. What I found was that your finger doesn’t glide over them as well as they did over the screen. Over time it gets better (probably as the grease from your finger penetrates the plastic).

However, it did mean that I made the decision to get some better quality ones for my Hero. HTC make “official” screen protectors, named the “SP P260″. Play.com sell them for £4.99 for 2. The price is high but it fitted well and felt good under the finger in use (in fact it’s difficult to tell that I’ve got one fitted). A definite recommendation.

Memory Card

The HTC Hero takes SD/SDHC Micro cards. It actually comes with a Sandisk 2GB card which, I believe, is class 2 (the slowest type of card). Now, what speed card you need seems to be a bit of an unknown quantity – some people on forums it makes a speed difference, others say different. Certainly, it seems likely that when Android can run applications from the SD card, then this will make a difference.

Looking at prices, 8GB is the best current price-point – you pay quite a premium to buy 16GB.

Initially I purchased a card from 7dayshop, who have been reliable in the past. Unfortunately, after 1.5 weeks they still hadn’t despatched my order. I contacted them and they said..

your order has been processed and will be dispatched shortly. Unfortunatly we are very busy at this time. Apologies for any inconvenience

Busy? What’s higher on their “to do list” than processing customer orders? Poor.

After waiting another half a week I contacted them and asked them to cancel my order. They did but I’m still awaiting my refund.

I did some further searching and came across ZoomBits (formerly MemoryBits). From them I purchased a Transcend 8GB Micro SDHC Class 6 card for £16.05. It was despatched the next day.

Car Charger

Although the USB connector on the HTC Hero looks to be specific to the device it is, in fact, a standard micro USB connection. Therefore any USB cable can be used for charging, and a search on eBay will show many USB chargers that plug into a car cigarette lighter – all you need to do is provide the requisite cable.

And, to be honest, you may already have one – my TomTom uses the same USB connector so I can charger my Hero with the car charger for that.

Docking Cradle

A docking cradle can be an ideal way to neatly charge and syncronise your phone. There appears to be 2 types available – an “official” HTC version (which is a flat black panel on which the phone sits vertically – very stylish but expensive) and a small, cheap one (eBay is a good place to look).

The latter appears to be in 2 different (but subtle designs) – one seems to rely on the USB connector to keep the phone vertical, whereas another has clear plastic “mounts” to hold it into place – the latter appears to me to be the best but is harder to get hold of.

I decided against any. The battery in the Hero is, let’s be honest, rubbish and so it needs a charge each night – I just use the mains charger to do this. During the day, at work, it sits next to me at my desk. It doesn’t need charging and, for security reasons, I can’t connect it to my PC to synchronise (not that I use the software).

Besides, would they work with the case fitted?

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None-the-less, because of the drum banging and ceremony that goes with an Apple launch, BBC feel the need to allow people to submit their comments. My favourite is this…

Apple never just produces ‘gadgets’; they engineer solutions that people can see fitting into their lives eventually.

It’s that last word… eventually. What he’s trying to say is that Apple find solutions to problems that don’t currently exist. Whoever could accuse Apple customers of being vain, purchasing style over price and function?

Having said that, I quite like this comment…

You can just hear the money being poured into the Apple bank account as the brainless tech sheep of this generation rush out to by this fantastically overpriced netbook.

<snigger>  The worst comment award though must go to..

Finally stupid netbooks will disappear. But if you’re going to carry around a 10-inch so-called pad why not just buy a Macbook with more power, to do work, play DVDs and all that added functionality?

Yea, those stupid netbooks. Good case against them. Erm. But, yea, if you’re going to carry around a 10-inch computer, why not just buy a much, much bulkier 13-inch Macbook at not far off twice the price of an iPad<snort>?  Stupid consumers eh? And there they are buying 10-inch £200 Netbooks. What are they thinking?

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However, first, I had to remove all my personal data from it. There is an option in the settings to reset it to factory settings but that leaves the data behind.

After some searching I found the answer. So, here’s what to do…

1. Connect your Nokia to your PC and format the removable drive (FAT32 flavour)
2. Disconnect and type in the following on the phone – *#7370#
3. It will prompt you for a lock code. If you’ve not changed this, the default is 12345.
4. It will now reset and start prompting for country, date and time, etc.

And it’s done. Bye bye Nokia – you promised so much but ended up a disappointment.

1. the one that would give me the most money!

MyMemory features a wide range of top brand electronics and accessories, including Digital Memory, Blu-ray Media, and Electronic Games, delivered worldwide for free.

So, in no order what-so-ever, here’s my list of what you need to know.

Which version of Android?

The HTC Hero comes with version 1.5 of Android. There is a 1.6, but HTC have decided to not release this, instead waiting for the recent 2.1 version (which the Nexus One comes with). I believe the upgrade to 2.1 is due in the next few months. Once HTC release this, you will need to wait for your network provider to create their own version.

Bluetooth is Flaky

The hardware is fine, but the software is only part implemented. And by “part” I mean the ability to connect to a headset works, but sending files doesn’t. I believe version 2 of Android rectifies this, although I could be wrong!

The Manual

Well, I don’t know how it is with other Hero providers, but the T-Mobile version comes with a Quick Start paper sheet and that’s it. There’s no manual. After perusing the SD card that T-Mobile provided, I came across it! However, unless I missed something, I didn’t find any mention of this elsewhere. Just head to the PDF reader app and it should be listed!

PC Software

Again, nothing is provided, but it can be found on the included SD card. Having said that, I’d just head to the HTC website and download the latest version.

The only software that’s provided is a combination driver and sync application. The latter lets you synchronise contacts, etc, with popular PC programs. Personally, I don’t use it as all of my mails, contacts, etc, are online.

With the driver installed you can connect your Hero to your PC and view it as a removable drive¹. You can then browse the content of the SD card where photos, videos and music are stored by default. This means you can use applications such as Windows Media Player and Picasa to synchronise and import automatically.

Backups

With the aforementioned lack of software, an obvious omission is the ability to back the handset up. Of course, much of the data is automatically synchronised online, especially if you make use of the Google services. In my case this includes mail, calendars and contacts. Music and photos I mentioned before you can synchronise from your PC – however, items such as installed applications, SMS’ and even dictionary additions are not backed up.

ASTRO is an excellent free file manager that just happens to also have the ability to backup your applications. And it’s free. There is also an SMS Backup App as well. In both cases, these save the data to your SD card, so you still need to remember to regularly copy this data away.

Of course, this still doesn’t cover everything anyway.

The best solution, if you’re willing to put your hands in your pockets is the MyBackup Pro app, which costs $4.99 (approx. £3.13). This not only allows scheduled backup to your SD card but also an option of backing up to their own online servers as well (although the option to backup apps is only available when storing to SD card). A 30 day trial is available.

Connection

There are just 2 connections – a headphone jack on the top and a USB connector on the bottom.

The USB appears to be proprietary, but it’s not – a standard mini USB cable will connect to it. If you connect a USB cable to your PC, it will trickle charge it as well as provide the data connection. However, in the box you are provided with just this one cable PLUS a mains socket which this cable plugs into, doubling it as a mains charger. This provides a much quicker method of charging the phone.

The headphone socket needs just one thing saying about it – there is a know bug where plugging in headphones won’t cause the phone to switch off its own speakers and divert sound to the headphones. This can be worked around by an application called toggleheadset – there is a separate one for Android 1.5 and another for 1.6.

Managing Applications

Unlike, oh I don’t know, the iPhone, you can run multiple applications on Android. However, the method of managing these are not obvious.

Some Apps will have an “exit” option which will cause them cleanly end when selected. Most, however, will continue running, particularly if have to use the “Home” or “Back” button to exit from them.

If you press and hold the Home button it will  display up to 6 recently used applications. You can then select and switch between them.

To “kill” or uninstall applications you need to go into the “Manage Applications” option in Settings. This is slow to launch so isn’t really a good method of quickly handling apps. Needless to say there are applications available to assist, including the previously mentioned ASTRO.

WiFi and Standby

After a pre-determined amount of time your phone will enter “standby”, which is when your screen blanks and any security activated. When this happens, by default, your WiFi will turn off. This is for power saving reasons.

You can override this via the Advanced Menu within WiFi options. Or you can use a free app named Wi-Fi Lock to toggle the options from the front screen.

The On-screen Keyboard

You can switch between different keyboard types, including traditional numeric phone keypad styles. The typing is, okay, but an improved keyboard is included in Android 2.1. Meantime, there are (paid) apps available to make improvements until you’re able to upgrade.

Personally, I’d suggest using the keyboard calibration facility as soon as you can – it made an immediate, and very marked, improvement with my sausage fingered typing.

Linking Accounts

When you first starting using the phone, you’ll be asked for account details to link your phone. I don’t think any are necessary but, at least, a Google account is very handy. Why buy a Google branded phone otherwise?

When I did this it automatically connected to all my Google services and started downloading my contacts. Very, very handy.

You can also link Facebook and Flickr accounts (but no Picasa?). Any friends with these accounts can then be connected so when you bring up their contact details it will also display Facebook status’, photos, etc. You can also use their Facebook profile photo as their display picture.

Screenshots (added 19/02/2010)

If you want to take a picture of the screen contents you can do this automatically with an iPhone. The Android, however, doesn’t have this feature.

There are plenty of apps to do this in the marketplace BUT you need to root² your phone for them to work – it would appear that the ability to do this is not available to “standard” apps. For the same reason, Opera Mobile is not available for Android (although Opera can get around this by getting phone manufacturers to bundle the browser with new phones).

Anything Else

I don’t realise this at the time but have since read about on Wikipedia…

• A lack of standards-based iCalendar/CalDAV functionality in the Android calendar client. Currently, the Android calendar is restricted to synchronisation with Google Calendar service.
• The Android does not support animated .gif files. It only shows the first frame.
• Because of potential security issues, Android does not officially allow applications to be installed on, nor run from, an SD card. In the case of the Hero this limits you to the 288 MB of system RAM. Several unsupported modifications exist, to give the user this capability, but they’re a bit scary!

And that, I think, is it. For the time being anyway.

As I’m new to all this, I may have got bits wrong but, I’ll be honest, it’s not always clear what the situation is with many things and you have to do some digging around forums to get an answer. So I’ll blame them

1. to do this you also have to go to the information bar (the strip along the top) and select an option to “mount” it
2. “rooting” an Android phone is a method that gives you complete access to all aspects of the OS. It’s also not 100% safe and will probably invalidate your phone and network warranties

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There were a few initial issues but these were all related to my network provider, rather than the fault of the phone – my data connection didn’t work (T-Mobile had to resend my settings) and I couldn’t access the Android Marketplace (this is because it may contain content for over 18’s so you have to override this on the T-Mobile website).

Once all that was sorted, I was off.

My thoughts, before I got the phone, is that Android provides only the basics, expecting you to populate your phone from the Marketplace with what you want. Well, thanks to all the “additions” from HTC, this is not the case and I’ve been surprised how “well stocked” the default set-up is.

I was very impressed with the way that I supplied my Google signin details once and it automatically connected all the appropriate Google apps – including downloading all my contacts to the phone book. A nice touch.

There is no PC software with the phone, but you can download HTC syncronisation software – but this is merely to syncronise contacts, etc, with PC applications, something I don’t use. That means there’s no backup software, which will be one issue I’ll need to tackle.

Once connected via USB there is an option on the phone to “mount” the device to the PC, allowing the phone to act as an external hard drive. From here you can use Picasa to import any photos and Windows Media Player to synchronise music.

Now I continue with setting the phone up and getting it just how I’d like. The built in alarm clock is okay, but doesn’t have a “vibrate only” option (and when I’m getting up at 5:30am this is essential for me) – I may have to splash out a whole $1.99 for something more advanced!

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Many people were expecting some exciting name, with it often being referred to as a “slate”. In the end it’s the underwhelmingly named iPad. You see, it sounds like iPod. How they must have chuckled at their own ingenuity.

The thing is, nobody was really talking beforehand about the software – that’s the one thing that Apple are good at and with the iPhone and Mac OS already available, it was obvious that one of them would be used. None-the-less, most thought it would be the latter as they were expecting a slim, multi-touch computing device. In the end, it’s turned out to be a big iPod.

And there’s the rub – Apple have traditionally not been so good with the hardware so, to me at least, the resultant iPad isn’t very exciting.  It literally is a big iPod. Or iPhone if you buy the 3G version. Look at the picture above of Steve Jobs with the iPad – it does look like he’s got some kind of promotional oversized iPod in his hands. To me, it looks like some kind of bad Photoshop picture.

What does the iPad offer? Well, it’s got a special screen with a wide viewing angle but it’s smaller than the screen on my Netbook. It’s not even OLED – it’s just a bog standard LED with better viewing angles. And, well, that’s about it.

Apple are intending to target gamers and, particularly, eBook readers.

The former, well, I can’t see it working. Gamers either want full scale powerful gaming or a pocketable device – this is neither. Electronic Ink based eBook readers are 100 times¹ better for reading eBooks with. Why spend £500 on an iPad instead of under £200 for a dedicated eBook reader?

Okay, I’m not Apple lover but I can appreciate a good bit of kit and I will happily say good things about the iPod and iPhone, even if I don’t want one myself. But the iPad has left me cold. I just don’t get it.

1. okay, maybe I made that statistic up

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And I was right to – T-Mobile will only deliver to your home address.

A quick phone call revealed that they delivery next day before 1am if they receive the order before 16:45¹. At this point it was 16:40 and I realised my wife would be home until 1am tomorrow but not on Friday. You’ve never seen an order rushed so much before (but I did remember to use Quidco to get £35 back!)!

So, instead of there now being 2 days remaining, it’s now 1.

But, can I resist getting home tomorrow and not using it²?

1. their website said that it’s a 2 day delivery
2. the reason for this is because, I believe, the Hero wants to connect you, via a non-secure Wi-fi connection, to register your user details as soon as you start using it. I can do that at work but not at home. Well, not without turning off encryption temporarily.

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