I got to play with both the new BlackBerry Curve models for IT Pro recently and now the review is up. The design of the Curve 8300 enabled RIM to fit in a full size QWERTY keyboard and a large enough battery to deliver the excellent life BlackBerry users are accustomed to, while still producing something small enough to carry everywhere with you. Adding an extra radio for GPS or Wi-Fi on these devices means even more options but has RIM managed to keep the impressive battery life as well? And as you can only have one extra radio - which one should you choose?Read on!

A 5" screen with an active digitiser, a slide-out keyboard, built-in 3G and Bluetooth and a nice big hard drive: full details here. I'd call it a real UMPC...

Last week I caught up with Jon Callas of PGP and we had a nice time agreeing violently about the HMRC data loss; it's the system that's broken, outsourced IT is a problem if it makes it more expensive to do it right than to do it wrong and why aren't we nailing up the courier company instead? You can read the conversation over at IT Pro.

But one of Jon's examples is how Amazon ships everything to you using tracked services. Yes, but, as he'd say. One of our Amazon orders - quite an urgent one as it's Zorb for dealing with Horrid Beasts - was sent by Royal Mail without any tracking. So it may or may not be the item they tried to deliver on Saturday morning - when we were in - and wouldn't give us at the sorting office this morning (they were fresh out of explanations as well; the Royal Mail complaint line, for future reference, is on 08456 112471). Could the police keep an eye out for my parcel while they hunt for the CDs?

and it's got GPS and 3G built in. QWERTY, check; Wi-Fi-, check; true slate format because the keyboard is magnetic, check. But the HTC Advantage (I reviewed it at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/133941/htc-advantage-x7500.html) runs Windows Mobile; is that the only reason it didn't generate the same excitement as the Eee PC?

EDIT: note - I'm curious in terms of how many people have said they want the Eee PC with a 3G card, which means I consider it fair game to price the Advantage with a data contract, reducing it significantly from the non-contract price. The comments make me think it's the price for the size that is appealing to most of you,.

Want a multitouch phone now? There's the Prada and the iPhone. And for the rest of us there's the HTC Touch. Simon and I don't quite agree on this one; for business users who don't like QWERTY I think this is a pretty good phone. Here's why

3% Vista users, 4% Mac users - and just 3.4% Linux users? I was quite surprised by the statistics on the W3schools site for the OS of visitors. I know it's not going to be full representative, but I'm hoping it will make for an argumentative weekend over at our IT Pro blog. Please - go check my sums...
http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-blogs/simon-bisson-and-mary-branscombe/942151/is-vista-growing-faster-than-linux.thtml

Imagine installing connectivity for an office of over 1600 people from scratch, with everything from ISDN and voice lines to DSL and IP video conferencing. Now imagine doing it over and over again in a new location every day, sometimes in the middle of a city and sometimes on the top of a mountain, using WiMax and satellite connectivity because there isn't an exchange to plug in to. Now imagine clicking the link and reading the rest of this over at IT Pro. Cables, cycles, copters and cheering crowds await...

I'm not really a news writer; I have too many opinions and I don't always have an industry expert to quote to put my opinion across. News is reporting, not reportage - the writer should be even less in the way of the story than usual. But when I have an interesting story and really juicy quotes, I like writing it up. The story - Nortel creates an alliance to bid against mobile operators for UK WiMAX - is good because it's a service that understands that the most important word in 'mobile Internet' is not mobile. Make me pick between a toy service now and the real thing on my PC and I'll complain about your service and go home. And the quotes were great - I have lots more snark on the subject of wireless broadband than I could fit in the piece ;-)

Plus I was pleased that the story hardly got edited at all, and that was for euphony rather than structure. Go me!

If you keep an eye on my upcoming features I have just updated the list on www.marybranscombe.com - next stage is flipping it to a scraped list rather than a static div. What's the Web equivalent of dead tree media - dead bit div's?

I've been playing with more phones for IT Pro....

The HTC Excalibur - also known as the T-Mobile Dash - is a smart, capable, lightweight smartphone with multimedia features good enough to let you keep it in your pocket out of business hours. By the time the Motorola Q finally makes it to the UK, the S620 may have stolen its market.
Read on at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/118512/htc-s620-smartphone.html

The first BlackBerry to combine a full keyboard and camera, the 8300 Curve doesn't have the visceral desirability of the Pearl - or the slab-like bulk of the 8800 - but it does have QWERTY and trackball, spell checking and competent multimedia in a small and neat package.
Read on at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/119405/blackberry-8300-curve.html

I like them both and I've stuck with the Excalibur for personal use to replace the Treo 750v - the battery life, the better call quality and the standard connector plus the slimmer size made up for losing the extra software features. If you're a BlackBerry fan - and you have BES - the 8300 is an excellent phone. Incidentally, I wrote the review of it on the flight from San Francisco to Indianapolis...

Somewhere along the way from Pasadena to LA I lost the thread of blogging our trip, but you can see where we went on the joint blog over at IT Pro. sbisson pulled togehter this handy list of what we've been saying recently - check them out ;-)

"Mini USB - it's not just a good idea, it's the law!" China standardises on mini-USB. That'll simplify the power supplies under my desk and in my luggage.

"A Virtual Archive" Do you have problems with obsolete file formats? You're not alone - the team at the National Archive have an even a bigger version of the very same problem!

"Why are you still using the post office?" There's a strike on today - so it's the perfect time to give up your paper habit.

"Take the tablet, just not as it comes" Shiny new laptop; scuffed old Norton uninstaller - and the utility that does the job

"Free Wi-Fi, free security holes" I'm not hacking the network, I'm trying to fix it... lucky for the hotel

"How simple is too simple?" There's easy and there's deceptively simple; only one isn't a con

"Women in Technology at Microsoft" Women in IT - want a job at Microsoft? Go for it…

"The commoditisation of IT hits new highs" Next up - the Lego machine room!

"Microsoft goes back to the future at TechEd" Few new announcements, and a non-vision vision set the scene for a week with 10,000 IT pros in Orlando

"The wrong Dayton airport" Driving through the dawn to Dayton, Ohio for the flight to Orlando, we reach the airport in plenty of time. Shame it's the wrong one.

Somehow the 8800 doesn't have the visceral desirability of the Pearl and it doesn't have WiFi or 3G. But with GPS and a QWERTY keyboard it's undoubtedly a more capable business device, especially if you want a BlackBerry with a full keyboard. Read what else I have to say about the shiny BlackBerry 8800...

I wasn't going to be talking about this in public until Monday, even though we saw it at CES, but thanks to La Tribune I dropped everything in the middle of a press event yesterday to write up the features of Windows Mobile 6 for IT Pro. I'm really looking forward to predictive dialling on the more powerful Windows Mobile devices, to HTML email and to searching my whole mailbox via Exchange 2007 (lucky sbisson gets to install Exchange 2007). I don't like that I still can't search the body of emails on the phone and I think Microsoft has looked too much at Symbian in some places. No CardSpace, no XML file formats for a while. But an update I'll want to get. Pretty please Mr Network Operator...

Last year I went to the Motorola analysts conference and got previews of just about everything they've announced since, like the new RAZRs, the professional version of the Q and follow-me TV. The most interesting discussion was around the services that make smartphones more than mobile phones with big colourful screens and I have a piece in IT Pro on the subject. Ed Zander practically runs Motorola from his Q...with services like enterprise Google search.

Nice, pricey for the full versions and going to be popular.

You want more detail? Simon and I have reviewed them quite thoroughly for IT Pro from a business and IT admin perspective but it's also a general overview...
Office 2007
Windows Vista

Simon and I are now also blogging on the IT Pro site at http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-blogs/simon-bisson-and-mary-branscombe/. I claim first post with a piece about Las Vegas and the Montecito - which is Intel's new Itanium as well as the home of Ed & Delinda DeLine, Danny, Mike, Mary, Nessa and the ever-amoral Sam. I don't know if Intel has a safe full of silver bars...

From the start of September sbisson and I will be looking after the Server and Networking sections of IT Pro. We'll also be running a joint blog on the IT Pro site.

This means we'll be doing several news stories a week, and several features a month - so we'll be looking for plenty of press releases and people to talk to.

Any PRs with relevant clients, please, get in touch - we're starting to work on September right now!

We're not dropping any of our other regular writing, but this gives us a good place to cover some of the areas we're particularly interested in like the server side of 2007 Office and developments in wireless.