Mad about .NET

Nokia Lumia 800

Filed under Technology

A week ago I bought the new Nokia Lumia 800 and I can already say I love this device.

Once you open the box you will see the phone comes with a soft cover in the same color of the device, people who knows me know I hate covers but this one fits perfectly and I’ve decided to use it myself. You can see the phone with and without the cover in the figures below.

Nokia Lumia 800 with soft cover.

Nokia Lumia 800 without soft cover

Another nice surprise is the fast USB charger, instead of having the traditional AC/DC adapter you will find as a charger a small circular piece with a diameter just a little bit bigger than a coin. You can compare it below against 2€, a quarter of dollar and fifty pence.

The design of the phone is simply gorgeous and solid, the case is built in a single piece of polycarbonate that gets emptied and filled with all the electronic in a later phase. The screen, a very stylish Gorilla glass, is a curved 3.7” capacitive AMOLED with ClearBlack that redefines the concept of the black color.

The Nokia Lumia 800 comes equipped with a 8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics that provides you with a resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels, a 2x LED flash, F aperture of 2.2, minimum focus range of 10 cm and focal length of 28.0 mm. The camera also allows you to record 720 HD video.

The phone has other goodness like:

• GPS
• WIFI
• Bluetooth
• 2 microphones
• 3D accelerometer
• Magnetometer Sensor (compass)
• Proximity sensor
• Ambient light sensor

You will see some haters say the phone doesn’t come with a dual core and they use it as their argument to dismiss the phone, a dual core is completely useless today in Windows Phone 7.5 devices as the OS is extremely fast and fluid. The single core Qualcomm MSM8255 with a clock rate of 1400 MHz makes the phone and apps perform much better than several dual core devices.

As I said above, the Nokia Lumia 800 comes with the Microsoft OS Windows Phone 7.5 aka “Mango” installed. The OS offers you out of the box among many other things:

• Microsoft Office Mobile: It allows you to work with your Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote files. Thanks to SharePoint Workspace you can also access to your corporate SharePoint repository.
• Xbox Live: You can play games with the advantages of the Xbox Live network like achievements, manage your friends and messages, etc.
• SkyDrive: To have your files synched/backed up in the cloud (25 GB of free space)
• Zune: To have your music and videos downloaded, streamed or simply synched on the phone
• Social Networks: Have your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Live contacts as any regular contact, see their updates, etc..

In addition to this, Nokia has included some exclusive apps like Nokia Music, Nokia Maps and the impressing Nokia Drive that allows you to reach your destinations by car using cartography that can be downloaded, free of charge, for virtually the entire world.

Just to finish you will like to hear that the battery lasts for:

• 9.5 hours for 3G talk time
• 335 hours for 3G standby time
• 55 hours for music playback time
• 6.5 hours for video playback time

Did I say I love the phone?

Consumerization of IT

Filed under Technology

Consumerization of IT means that enterprises are seeing how their businesses are being affected by consumer devices and services, which normally include new devices like smartphones or tablets and services like cloud-based applications or social networks. Or as we can read in the Wikipedia “consumerization is a stable neologism that describes the trend for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business organizations, resulting in the convergence of the IT and consumer electronics industries, and a shift in IT innovation from large businesses to the home.”

Enterprises see how these new technologies are changing the way people communicate and work. Today nobody is surprised to see how employees have contact with customers or partners using consumer services like Messenger, Skype; social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn or even Facebook, or that employees share documents internally using consumer SaaS services like Skydrive or DropBox

Another perfect example are the smartphones, a device that was designed for the enterprise, but that is having now its apogee in the consumer space thanks in big part to the disruption that the iPhone created in the market. Any smartphone today allow us carrying the work home, this was the initial idea, but this has also the reverse consequences that means we can also take our personal life to the office.

Whether we like or not we have crossed the line that divides our personal and business life too many time ago, lot of times fostered by the companies themselves in an effort to involve more and more the employees into their work.

The problem is that CIOs and IT Professionals need to face this situation, which is growing very fast especially now that the Internet Generation has fully joined the job market, and will be multiplied by several orders of magnitude when the generation that born fully connected and holding a device in their hands hits the workforce. This tech-savvy generation is not demanding the change, instead it is brutally driving the change.

The main challenges CIOs and IT Pros will need to resolve to avoid frustrating and to fulfill the expectations of these new workers are among other things:

• how to certify soon new devices for their enterprises
• how to provide a common experience across disparate devices
• how to secure the communications
• how to protect personal information
• how to increase the capacity of their systems to support the new demand

The good news is that all these challenges don’t come alone, they come also with lot of opportunities, because the Consumerization of IT can boost productivity with new ways of communicate and being connected, we have seen also how the use of Social Networks for instance drives higher levels of NSAT among customers and increased loyalty. Embracing public cloud services can also help to improve cost and efficiency by reducing IT costs and provide better application performance...

The consumerization of IT needs to be addressed today, not tomorrow. Like it happens with the cloud movement resistance to the consumerization of IT is futile.

If you have two extra minutes you can check also this funny video.

Samsung 9 Series

Filed under Technology

Yesterday we received at the office the new Samsung 9 Series notebook that was first introduced at CES. I should confess that the first time I saw this notebook I immediately fell in love.

Samsung has done a great design exercise with this device. The external case is very slick with almost no sharp angles, instead the lines follow a nice subtle curve. All the connectors, which include Micro HDMI, headphone, mic-in, RJ45, 2 USBs and even a MicroSD slot, are hidden in small slots that you can open only when needed.

The weight, 1.3 Kg and the size 32.7 cm x 22.6 cm with a thickness of only 1.7 cm are just amazing and places this computer in the same range of the MacBook Air or the Lenovo ThinkPad X1.

The display follows the same high quality pattern with a 400 nits, HD Led Backlit anti-glare display with an Intel HD Graphics 3000.

This is not just a small computer, it’s a serious and powerful device with 3 year warranty and great specifications:

• Intel Core i5 Processor 2537M
• 4GB DD3 (8GB Max.)
• 128 GB Solid State Drive

All this and more for approx. $1600 and a battery life that gives you up to 7 hours to go.