Daily Archives: 22 February 2010

more on windows phone 7

On 22 February 2010 by matthew With 0 Comments - business

Clear­ing demon­strat­ing my inter­est in the new mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem being rolled out — some­time this year — by Microsoft, I thought I’d share out this video (a bit blurry) on a feature-rich Bing map appli­ca­tion that will be part of the upcom­ing Win­dows Phone 7 OS expe­ri­ence.


Clearly, Microsoft is try­ing to keep pace with the bar set by Google’s map and nav­i­ga­tion fea­tures for Android devices. FYI: the video is a lit­tle long.

In my opin­ion, Google still has the advan­tage with the voice recog­ni­tion, which can be quite handy (no pun intended) when you’re dri­ving.


Ok, now for a lit­tle rant. In my pre­vi­ous post, I kept refer­ring to the upcom­ing OS as Win­dows Mobile 7. I’ve sub­se­quently learned that it’s offi­cially called Win­dows Phone 7 Series. Leave it to Microsoft to cre­ate a com­pelling prod­uct and then muddy the water with a stu­pid label. Why note just Win­dows Mobile 7 or Win­dows Phone 7? Add to that, I’ve read in the past week that Microsoft plans to keep the Win­dows Mobile 6.xx OS on the mar­ket and change it to Win­dows Phone Clas­sic Series — or some anal­o­gous BS. (In fair­ness, Google and the device man­u­fac­tur­ers are set­ting up a sim­i­lar con­fus­ing sit­u­a­tion with it’s var­i­ous iter­a­tions of the Android OS out there. The Android OS options range from 1.5 to 2.1, and there’s now uni­ver­sal update–primarily because some of the devices don’t have the pro­cess­ing speed to run the new fea­tures and man­u­fac­tur­ers want to have cheap, entry-level Android phones in their arsenal.)

Nomen­cla­ture aside, it looks like the new mobile OS by Microsoft would be a real win­ner. Again, I don’t know if I will wait until the end of the year to get a Win­dows Phone 7 Series (said with sar­casm) device. I’ve been wait­ing, patiently, for the Nexus One to debut on Ver­i­zon.  Add to that, as much as I am an early adopter, I may want to give the new Win­dows OS some time to work out the kinks. Android isn’t per­fect, but when you’re drop­ping $200+ on a device, the oper­at­ing sys­tem bet­ter not even think of giv­ing you any­thing resem­bling the blue screen of death. 


,

jimi hendrix

On 22 February 2010 by matthew With 0 Comments - business

There are a num­ber of iconic cul­tural fig­ures that I know very lit­tle about … if any­thing at all. Jimi Hen­drix is one of the. I was headed to work on the bus yes­ter­day with my Zune in tow, as usual. I had the Zune on shuf­fle, and up pops Foxey Lady by Jimi Hen­drix. That’s funny. I don’t even remem­ber load­ing a “Best of Jimi Hen­drix” CD into my library. Shak­ing off that thought to con­cen­trate on the music, I found that I was nearly in a trance lis­ten­ing to the song.

 

Given my not so well hid­den OCD ten­den­cies, I played the song over a few times, and then lis­tened to a few more. As is nor­mally the case with me, I go into a deep dive when I become inter­ested in some­thing. I started look­ing online for more infor­ma­tion about Hen­drix. I found an inter­est­ing biog­ra­phy arti­cle in Rolling Stone. I also found the fol­low­ing video on Hen­drix that some­one put together for a class.

 Per­haps a bit naive, but after scrolling through the CD and watch­ing videos on YouTube, I was amazed at the num­ber of times I found myself say­ing, “I didn’t know he made that song.” I am sure a lot of it has to do with me not really lis­ten­ing to, or appre­ci­at­ing, rock music when I was grow­ing up. It was all around me, but I just didn’t find it that com­pelling. I was an R&B and pop kid, and there was (and still is) only so much dis­torted gui­tar I lis­ten to before squint­ing. Nev­er­the­less, as I’ve got­ten older, I am begin­ning to dis­cover that I like a num­ber of musi­cal gen­res. As much as I lis­ten to elec­tron­ica and down­beat house music, I am slowly work­ing in rock, coun­try and some other styles into my rota­tion. I think Jimi Hen­drix appeals to me because the rock is fused with a cer­tain amount of rhythm. I had the same hur­dle to over­come with Prince–granted his music is quite dif­fer­ent from Hendrix.

What about you? Is there artist or group that you have always known about gen­er­ally, but later devel­oped an appre­ci­a­tion for his/her/their style? Is there a musi­cal genre that you now like that you wouldn’t have been caught dead lis­ten­ing to years ago?

, ,