Month: July 2013

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Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8 trial: Day 2

Wattle blooming near Bunjaree Cottages: click to embiggenI didn’t leave home base today, so I just gave the Nokia Lumia 925’s camera another quick try-out. I continue to be impressed.

It was an overcast winter’s day here at Wentworth Falls, but everything was looking nice and crisp after some early rain. I figured that a few snapshots around Bunjaree Cottages would be in order.

So, for Day 2 of my Nokia Lumia 925 / Windows Phone 8 trial, here’s 24 photos. All of them have been uploaded to Flickr exactly as they came out of the camera.

The image at the top of the post is a good example of the close-up capability — and I’m pleased that Nokia calls it “close-up” and not “macro”. The image certainly holds up when you zoom in and tweak the contrast.

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Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8 trial: Day 1

Katoomba railway station: click to embiggenSetting up the Nokia Lumia 925 was straightforward, and I’m impressed with the smartphone itself. But while there’s plenty to like about Windows Phone 8, I was also struck by the lack of key applications and a few rough edges.

These are my bullet-point observations from Day 1 of my Nokia Lumia 925 / Windows Phone 8 trial. You can also follow it live on Twitter, where I’m using the hashtag #LumiaWP8trial.

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Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8: the trial begins

Nokia Lumia 925 smartphone pictured against the Reviewers Guide: click to embiggenStarting today, I’m going to try using a Nokia Lumia 925 running Windows Phone 8 as my primary smartphone. I plan to run this trial for a week, through to the end of next Tuesday 6 August 2013. This post explains the why and how of it all.

The why is easy enough. I write about this stuff, and both Nokia and Microsoft are hoping these products will be their saviours. I should therefore take a closer look, and what better way than to actually use them.

The how is easy enough too. As soon as I’ve finished this blog post, I’ll take the SIM from my current smartphone, put it into the Lumia, and go from there, attempting to use it in exactly the same way as I go about my business each day.

While I’m doing the set-up, I’ll be listening to a Patch Monday podcast episode from a year ago, Windows 8: Rectangles for all the things explained. I’ve already read the companion article, Windows 8 interface’s design heritage.

I’ll be tweeting my observations as I go, using the hashtag #LumiaWP8trial, writing up my observations at the end of each day, and recording them for a podcast. There will also be a Flickr set of all the photos.

Finally, here’s some background information on how I work.

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Weekly Wrap 164: A turn-around, with Finnish jelly beans

Glimpse of Sydney Central: click to embiggenMy week Monday 22 to Sunday 28 July 2013 was initially as unproductive as the previous two, but Thursday marked a turning-point. Thank the gods. No details.

Articles

Podcasts

None, but I did plenty of behind-the-scenes work on the Corrupted Nerds website, including settling on Cryout Creations’ Mantra theme for WordPress as the design framework.

This fixed a very, very annoying bug that I’d encountered in some other themes that broke the RSS feeds in Blubrry’s PowerPress Podcasting Plugin for WordPress, and that in turn meant that I couldn’t add the podcasts to Apple’s iTunes store.

Having removed that roadblock, I’ll be able to add more material to Corrupted Nerds very soon — including two new episodes in the coming week.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

The Week Ahead

On Monday I’ll complete a catch-up edition of my ZDNet Australia column, The Full Tilt, with something that’ll probably annoy quite a few people who call themselves geeks, and then spending the afternoon in Katoomba. Somewhere in there I’ll fire up that Nokia Lumia 925.

On Tuesday I’ll write a piece for Technology Spectator, one that’s been on the back burner for a while, and completing a new episode of Corrupted Nerds: Conversations podcast. The forecast is for a rainy day, so that’s perfect.

On Wednesday morning I’ll head into Sydney to attend a media event with Vodafone Australia at 1030, then the rest of the week becomes some what flexible — although I know it include a medical appointment in Sydney, another column for ZDNet Australia and some planning.

The weekend is currently unplanned.

[Photo: Glimpse of Sydney Central, being a view of the clock tower at Sydney’s Central station, taken early one winter morning from the Metro Sydney Central hotel.]

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Do McAfee’s new cyberstats really represent a shift?

Composite image of ZDNet column headline and McAfee report title: click for ZDNet columnAs brokers of reliable information about the scale of online crime and espionage, most information security vendors would make great used car salesmen — but McAfee’s latest research finally seems to be taking the right path.

In my column at ZDNet Australia this week, I give McAfee some praise for the most recent research they’ve funded, a preliminary report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies titled The Economic Impact of Cybercrime and Cyber Espionage that dismantles the daft idea that cyberstuff costs the global economy a trillion dollars a year.

McAfee now admits that you can’t run a small-N survey in a couple dozen large, wealthy nations — often a self-selected sample of known crime victims at that — and extrapolate the data globally.

Their new figure is “probably measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars”, although they never quite commit to one specific number…

“In the context of a $70 trillion global economy, these losses are small, but that does not mean it is not in the national interest to try to reduce the loss, and the theft of sensitive military technology creates damage whose full cost is not easily quantifiable in monetary terms,” McAfee writes.

True, but as McAfee themselves point out, this supposed cybercrime explosion is really down at the level of shoplifting. Retailers generally budget between 0.5% and 2% for pilferage and other such “shrinkage”.

I also mention my previous critical comments about various infosec vendors’ dodgy statistics — but I don’t link to them, because they were mostly published at non-CBS mastheads. So here’s a selection of stories I’ve written on this subject over the last couple of years.

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There is no Weekly Wrap 163

My week Monday 15 to Sunday 21 July 2013 is not being recorded here. In any event, no media objects were produced, so there’s nothing of importance to link to.