Last Friday I received this brand new Dell Vostro 1310 laptop and it did not disappoint in anyway. I opted for this model, which is released on May 1st instead of XPS in the last minute as this is new model from DELL with completely redesigned to make it thinner and lighter than all its current models.
The laptop came almost fully loaded with the following spec:
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Intel core 2 duo 2.1G
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3G RAM
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160 GB 7200 RPM hard drive
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13.3″ 1280×800 WXGA TrueLife glossy display
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I ordered 6-cell battery, so the weight must be ~4.6LB
The major change in the system (even in DELL product line) includes:
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Sleek and attractive (the first series of Vostro is really bulky and ugly looking)
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Touch based Media controls
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Touch based dedicated eject button for CD/DVD
The laptop seems to offer reasonable battery life based on the CNET lab tests (At least when I pulled the power, it shows 4:49 hours left on a fully charged battery).
The only disappoint is the keyboard; with home and end buttons are now controlled in combination with ‘fn’ key. Also, it could have been nice if the laptop had touch based mute button aside volume buttons instead of making it in keyboard (fn+delete). Even though I like normal 14″ laptops as it offers 1440X900 resolution; but DELL seems to be following the foot steps of Apple (13″ and 15″ models).
At least this is a welcome change from Dell concentrating on less expensive sleek and thinner design models in the business line of products which can attract college grades as well as home and business users.
You can find nice reviews about Vostro 1310 model from here:
Recently Yahoo! released a new beta messenger (code name Diablo) for Windows Vista. Initially I tried during the alpha days and did not had a chance to try it again; and I installed it today during the free time and surprised to see that it offers almost all the existing features of regular messenger with much more enhancements.
The good thing about the new Diablo is; it is completely re-written messenger on top of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for Vista to get the rich GUI look and feel. It has number of interesting features like zooming of contacts to the desired level, multiple color choice, searching of contacts, auto spell checker, phone support, call history etc. This is for sure much better than the currently existing one; and need to see what new features the team will add in the coming days especially towards the social networking of friends as part of YOS.
The only thing that I found missing is the archive of messages; that’s one of the feature that I use a lot by archiving all the messages; so that I can refer back to them at any time.
The screenshots of the messenger can be found from here:
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Today I received a SMS message from evite for one of the birthday function. This is because my phone is configured with the evite account. The content is simple with 4 lines of text; which contains title, host, when and where. That is normal.
But I was surprised by the footer of the text message with the following line…
*Sponsored by The All-New Toyota Corolla
So, this seems to be a really cool idea; and we have to appreciate evite in order to incorporate the text ads as part of their SMS messages for evite invitations; this could generate some revenue for the company.
In India all incoming and outgoing SMS is free along with incoming calls, even though am not sure how mobile carriers are making money out there; but in USA that’s not the case even for SMS (some times its free as its part of the media packages).
Even in USA, it is possible for mobile carriers (like AT&T Cingular, Verizon and T-Mobile) to offer free SMS service to all end users by incorporating sponsored text or visual ads (if the phone can support media messages) as part of the message; that could be another adwords on Mobile SMS. Not only this offers a good revenue stream to the mobile carriers; but also can get more users to use the text or media message service as it will be free.
After Microsoft released its beta version of “SQL Server Data Services“; I was more interested to know what kind of considerations were taken care in the design and architecture of SSDS in order to get performance, distribution of data and scalability as it is developed on top of SQL Server.
To my surprise, I noticed Microsoft is conducting the live event to answer some of these questions by following up Ryan Dunn blog; Today I also got the confirmation to attend the event and I look forward to get some of my general questions answered.
It will be interesting to see the pricing model of SSDS in the coming days, and might even attract if they make it FREE for initial customers and/or by setting the limit on the data usage by distributing it as part of OS. It will be really cool if they could also integrate some kind of access mechanism as part of the windows operating system itself to access/store the data.
I hope Microsoft will also change the name of SSDS to something else before the final release as Data Services is not catchy and does not sound right (check yet another post on the similar lines).
Since few hours am trying to get a document from Google Docs for a print out; and after login all it says is “The server encountered an error. Please try again later.undefined”. So, looks like the doc server is down.
But I can see the listing of all my folders and count of all files from the left pane. And I can even navigate to the folder and view and edit all files..wondering why they have a problem in the first place ?
Here is the screen shot of the error.
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Last Friday I received this brand new Dell Vostro 1310 laptop and it did not disappoint in anyway. I opted for this model, which is released on May 1st instead of XPS in the last minute as this is new model from DELL with completely redesigned to make it thinner and lighter than all its current models.
CNET Review
