Musings of an Internet Marketing Consultant |
|
Monday, April 25, 2005
My Dell Axim X50v -- now much more than "just a PDA"
Posted
10:45 a.m.
by Jim Courtney
Towards the end of August 2004 my three-year-old HP Jornada 768 lost its display screen -- one day there was nothing but a big blob. Once I had determined that HP wanted close to the price of a new PocketPC for a replacement display screen I started a search for a replacement PocketPC. I had noticed three trends in newly introduced PocketPC's: VGA screens, WiFi and Bluetooth compatibility and dual memory card slots - Compact Flash (CF) and Secure Digital (SD). Of course they all had processors that were 2x to 3x faster than the Jornada.
Installing and learning these programs came with the usual surprises - both positive and negative. The PocketPC is not exactly Windows XP when it comes to user interfaces and does not have the most obvious common set of menus, action buttons and other functionality normally associated with desktop/laptop Windows software. I also noticed a need to often do a soft reset of the Axim to clean up what appeared to be "congestive memory failure" problems if several programs were running, particularly if I turned on WiFi or Bluetooth.
Two key maintenance milestones:
Even with these changes I finally came to the conclusion that the Axim had memory management (or congestive memory failure) problems causing lockups reminiscent of Windows 95/98's tendency to lock up under any severe usage stress. I had decided that soft resets were going to be part of my life using the Axim but I was still impressed due to the variety of applications and services it provided. In the meantime I came across market surveys that showed this unit to have become the top selling PocketPC on the market. Reviews, such as this one by Palm devotee Tanker Bob and only accelerated this market acceptance. As the final straw at last week's Voice over the Net Canada conference, with probably a dozen WiFi networks radiating, I found that I could not get logged onto the public WiFi yet could connect in areas, such as at home and in WiFi-enabled coffee shops, where there were only one or two WiFi networks detected. More symptoms of congestive memory failure? Last Thursday Dell announced a new A03 ROM upgrade. After upgrading on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I was surprised to find that all my performance issues evaporated:
even my standard ActiveSync activities require significantly less nurturing -- place it in the cradle and a synchronization starts, Pocket Weather updates, Skype shows me who is available for a phone call and I can get back to using it to facilitate my normal business activities without having to "force" the configuration under use. No hiccups! No more congestive memory failure. (Note that this upgrade also is supposed to optimize battery usage through better utilization of the variable speed capability of the underlying Intel ARM processor. But I have not had occasion to check this out so early after doing the upgrade.) With this upgrade, my Dell Axim X50v has finally become a true productivity tool, keeping in my shirt pocket all the information critical to my activities on-the-go. And the RIM Blackberry 7100 becomes the ideal companion for providing traditional telephone and robust email services. A final acknowledgement: congratulations and thanks to the Dell Axim product management and engineering team for acknowleding they had a problem and successfully addressing it. This is a model for how product support should work. (Note to Axim X50 owners: I used the Sprite Backup "ROM Upgrade" process to avoid the need to reinstall programs after the upgrade. Following the instructions closely, including making the auxiliary Device Upgrade file, meant I had completed the upgrade in under 20 minutes.) Saturday, April 09, 2005
Hustle, Passion and Resiliency
Posted
8:51 p.m.
by Jim Courtney
VC's, as part of their assessment formula, want to readily identify "unique intellectual property" in assessing a business opportunity. In more general terms they are looking for an "unfair competitive advantage". Sometimes they fail to realize that "individual people" or "unique teams" can be that unfair competitive advantage if they have hustle, passion and resiliency. Kills the assumption that anyone can just "copy the business". This applies especially to a truly successful blog and any business model that may be associated with it, whether simply relying on AdWords to cover costs or demonstrating the passion behind a complete business operation. I keep in my RSS Reader blogs that I know I want to visit on a frequent basis because the author provides interesting, informative and provocative content -- from hish/her unique perspective. Thanks to Alec Saunders for pointing this one out.
|