Ay? DSL?

As well as my new phone, I’ve got round to sorting my broadband provider.  Regular readers will remember my quest to find a new ADSL service after hitting problems with my current supplier, Demon.  Well, its taken a while but I’ve finally got my MAC code and I’m transitioning to my new service provider AAISP hopefully sometime on Monday.

I’ve chosen AAISP for several reasons:-

1) Their service is aimed at a corporate or ‘professional’ users – their website isn’t that pretty, but it has lots of technical information for those that are interested.

2) Whilst not an ‘unlimited’ service, they offer good Fair usage polices with the option to buy more if you exceed the limits.  They operate a ‘daytime (9am-6pm)’ and ‘evening (6pm-midnight)’ tariff structure with transfers outside these times FREE!.  I’ve gone for 4GB day/100GB evening rate because I generally use the Internet during the evening, but I do have stuff synchronising during the day too.  I’ll have to see how it goes because you can adjust it monthly up or down depending on requirements.  And having unlimited out of hours downloads is great because I can just schedule them to start & stop during this time.

3) When you sign up, you can request as many external IP addresses as you like (within reason).  So I’ve got 5 routable static IP addresses available to use, plus they support IPv6 natively and they’ve assigned me a 48 bit IPv6 subnet – I could have 2^64 devices on my network without running out of capacity.  So if everyone in the world decides to come round my house and each has a smartphone and a laptop,  there’s still plenty to go around.

4) Bull plop isn’t bundled as a free extra.  You only have to look at their support section to see this – They’ll admit when they make a mistake, but they’ll also say when the problem lies ‘upstream’ with a provider, e.g. BT.  Plus, this is the first bit in their terms and conditions:-

It is up to you to pick the right service for you, and some services have usage limits. The internet is big and complicated and we do not control it. The internet has many good and useful things in it, but it also has bad things, so do not blame us for anything you find. It is up to you to protect your network. You must take responsibility for what you do with the service, and for anyone you let use the service. The internet has rules, so play fair. Things can break! If they do, we will try and fix things as quickly as we can. It can take days to fix some problems. We allocate you internet addresses, but they do not belong to you, and we can change them if we need to.

Quality! 

So, fingers x’d, things will go across smoothly on Monday.  I will be spending the weekend reconfiguring my router for the new service.  Ohh, and people who live in the Midlands and have broadband, I’ve some news for you on some major BT changes coming very soon – watch this space!

Finally a new phone…

Well, I’ve finally got myself a new phone, after the old Ameo started being a bit creaky and a bit bulky to carry around, and I've replaced it with a new Smartphone, the HTC Touch Diamond 2.

You may remember me blogging about this phone WAY back in February and now I’ve finally got my hands on this great bit of kit. And what’s even better is that is that the ‘unofficial’ development channels have had a chance to do some magic and work the phone into a real beaut…  The reason I now go for HTC devices is that there is lots of 3rd party development work, not only on applications, but on the underlying operating system.  

A few of the phone’s specs:

3.2” WVGA screen (800x480).
5mp Camera.
TouchFlo 3d interface.
A-GPS.
Upto 32GB storage (8GB MiniSD fitted).
Wifi/Bluetooth/HSDPA.
FM Radio
Delivered with Windows Mobile 6.1, but upgraded to a beta release of Mobile 6.5. 

I have to say, I’m amazing impressed with the phone and HTC have really stepped upto the bat to compete with the iPhone.  The biggest way they’ve done this is to ‘hide’ as much of Windows Mobile as they can within the TF3D interface.  This allows you to make calls, see texts and emails, launch programmes and change settings from within this ‘front end’ with finger gestures, rather than having to use a stylus.  A stylus is still provided for when a program doesn’t support touch gestures, but this is becoming less common these days.

Another massive improvement to the earlier TouchFlo implementations is the contact integration.  This is now designed to be like a mini CMS solution, meaning that each contact has a ‘profile’ area, where all communication with that person is logged, be it phone calls, text messages, email or even facebook feeds. That's right, it links with your facebook profile and pulls down status updates, photo’s and other information from your facebook friends – Genius!  Hopefully the next revision will also support Twitter feeds which is the one thing missing!

The only trouble I’m having from the phone is that its too shiny!  The glass, and satin case pickup fingerprints merely through the power of thought, but hopefully I’ll get a case that will protect against this! :)