Life & Technology

Great show today with a tonne of questions from listeners. First of all there is some good news for Tony, who was asking after a mobile phone that has AM radio. Sony Ericsson has the R306, which has AM radio. It was the only one I could find that does so.

Steve was having problems with his homepage, Football365, in that the video didn’t work properly. He was running Windows Vista, which should not have presented to much of a problem. However, if you are only interested in reading the content, then a good place to start is to turn off your graphics. This will speed up your computer. You could also get Adobe Flash upgrades, which could have caused the problem.

Maria accidentally reset the default size of her browser and didn’t know how to get it back to normal. The easiest way to fix this is to put your cursor at the bottom right-hand side of the window and expand it to the size you like. Then close the window. This should reset the window to open to the size you set it at.

Poor Lynette accidentally deleted her emails and was wondering how to recover them. I found a website that sells software that claims to recover lost emails amongst other things. Take a look here.

Donna asked for what is the best anti-virus, or security, software around. There are plenty of vendors in this category, but the most popular are Kaspersky, McAfee and Norton. I’ve used all three at some stage and they seem pretty good to me.

Finally, a call from John whose computer runs Vista, and he now has the Blue Screen of Death. What does this mean? Well, it means your computer has pretty well had it. Don’t take my word though, go to your local computer dealer and see if they can at least save your hard drive.

Keep the questions coming!

I went to a launch of Samsung’s new series of mobile phones yesterday, which threw up some interesting new technologies, which I’ve mentioned here.

Outside of the units themselves, a comment made during the briefing caught my eye. According to Samsung, up to 15 percent of mobile phone users saw little or no use for a touchscreen on a telephone. And this intrigued me.

All technologies evolve, and while some people are not as fast on the uptake as others, most people generally get there in the end. Somebody was the last person to get a colour telly, or a VCR, and there are plenty of people out there who still don’t have a DVD player. Yet, to actually unequivocally say that there is no need for a touchscreen doesn’t make sense.

A touchscreen on a mobile is one of the most fundamental must-haves. It makes life so much more easier than having to use buttons. Think of how much easier it is to navigate your mobile Internet function? Or dragging the map on your mobile GPS? What about how most good smartphones turn your touchscreen Qwerty keyboard to landscape without having to utilise a clunky slider keyboard or normal numerical keypad? Or, how about the screen size – if you do away with the button keyboard suddenly you can increase the screen size to be almost the same as the surface area of the mobile.

So who is this 15 percent? People who don’t understand the technology, or are being contrary, or genuinely believe that touchscreen technology is of absolute no use? I don’t know, but I say, get with the programme – this technology is not only here to stay, but I predict within five years button mobiles will be going the way of the Dodo.

There are a tonne of apps out there at the moment in smartphone land, but one that has made me sit up and take notice is the tramTRACKER for the iPhone, from Yarra Trams in Victoria.

What this little app does is track your tram in real time. So if is running late, or has broken down, you can log into the app on your smartphone and find out where the tram is located. It uses GPS technology so users can find out the estimated arrival time of a tram at their stop.

We all know just check it out on your phone and if it is running late, you don’t have to hurry, or if it is on time, then you can get your skates on.

More importantly, though, what I find interesting about this app is how it can be used in other public transport such as buses and trains. I know that Sydney’s City Rail has something similar, and that a few months ago they tried to stop third-party software that gave out the running time of trains.
I think it is short-sighted when companies do this because, at the end of the day, it’s about the commuter and not some petty bureaucracy getting its nose out of joint.

I hope that in the near future, more of the state public transport companies get onboard if similar applications are released for mobile phones. Hopefully this is just the beginning.