TheSa|nt's Blog

This baby speaks for itself. Reading through the specs makes it very hard not to appreciate what Yamaha brings to your living room with their receivers. Overcoming the specs of the recently popular Pioneer Elite receivers, this receiver competes with the high performance lines and bring you the wattage to power some of the big boy speakers (such as the high performance lines of Klipsch, Synergy, Marin Logan and B&W for a few examples). Best of all, this amazing piece of techdebuted this month with a low price of only (continue reading…)

Under Review: Newshosting

We have used multiple providers in the past, testing both connection and stability and Newshosting has to be one of the best we have seen thus far.

From what we have seen, Newshosting (so far) has had a 0% downtime. Now when I say we put that to the test…I mean we REALLY put that to the test. Since most newsgroup applications record and save their queue information, this really isn’t much of a deal, but for some…it is. It also says a lot about a company’s reputation and pro-activeness to thwart network problems.

One of the biggest selling points of Newshosting, is that they have a retention period that is more than 1000 days!!! That’s not months..that’s YEARS until posts vanish from their servers. Just imagine how much information if just waiting for you. We have used companies in the past that had 60-150 day retentions. You get bored of those companies because you find that you miss out on a lot of stuff. Newshosting eliminates that problem completely.

Next we tested connections. They claim to allow 30-60 connections all at once from your PC. That’s a lot of connections, but is it true? Well, we wound up locking up 3 different machines because we opened all connections at once, and the connection was so strong…it flooded our network/ports and put the PC’s into a total panic. We even had to restart the router because for some reason…it got confused from it and Wifi was totally knocked down. Awesome!

Speed….now there’s an important factor! Tons of retention and enough connections to choke your computer to death…but does it happen quickly? The answer…yes. We tested from 2 different networks. One pulled an average of about 30mbits/s (3.5+MBytes/s), the other a whopping 50mbits/s (6.2MBytes/s). We wanted to go even higher than that but we didn’t have access to a faster ISP connection. This is more than enough to show a result though since I’ve had hard drives transfer information from one to another at a speed slower than that. Got a faster connection to test it with? Sign up with their trial and give it a try. Let us know what your results are and we will post them!

Other benefits? For the most part, pretty much all of their accounts offer unlimited downloads. They have an account where the monthly download is limited to a large number of gigabytes, but to switch up to the unlimited one is such a small difference in price that you might as well go all the way. They also offer encrypted connections which is cool and all of their accounts come with a free trial.

The conclusion: I’m impressed, we’re all impressed and you will be too! Especially if you LOVE to access everything your mind can absorb (and or your hard drives…whichever gives in first). Newshosting has to be the best Newsgroup provider we have ever experienced, and we back it 100%

Well I went ahead and bit the bullet and bought a Windows Phone 7….phone. It’s the HTC Surround from AT&T, and I have to admit I am impressed. I have my disappointments but I also understand that Windows Phone 7 isn’t for an extreme techy who likes to treat their phone as more than just a phone/media device.

I like the OS for it’s speed, it’s ability to really take a load while showing little to no lag what’s so ever and it’s deep advantages in multimedia. The is very reliable and so far hasn’t crashed on me. Only certain apps have done something weird here and there (ie Marketplace) but it didn’t effect the OS. It feels very stable, extremely speedy and user friendly.

The user-interface also feels (visually) very happy (unlike the iPhone). Oh, and the GPS (at least on the HTC Surround) is VERY accurate. I was in the dead center of a casino with a giant tower of hotel rooms right above my head and it picked up my exact location. I didn’t have to stand outside and hope it’s not too cloudy or anything. That was great.

Another “VERY” nice advantage of the WP7 phones is that the Xbox integration is really cool. The games on WP7 are finally up to par and quite entertaining.

For normal people looking for a Windows Phone 7, I would recommend it. If you don’t heavily use your phone for business or tcp/ip/port related tasks. If you need a phone that’s a phone yet everything multi-media in one….it’s wonderful.

The disadvantages? Well I am the techy that likes to use and abuse his phone in as many ways as possible. So features I wish it had:

• File Explorer: I enjoy using my phone as a thumb drive to store common files that I need. They could at least reserve a small space that is separate from everything else on the phone so that you can do this.
• Remote desktop applications: There are none…WP7 is locked down tight for TCP/IP/Port related tasks so no remote desktop apps (i.e., VNC). There are other apps/services like Skype that cannot be ported over to WP7 at the moment for these same reasons. This really does cripple WP7 from making use of some nice/advanced apps that business users and techies demand for their daily activities.
• No custom ringtones….wtf Microsoft lol….how can you drop the ball on one of the most common features found in cellphones dating back to…a long time.
• Voice command no longer covers the media on the phone. Windows Mobile 6.x allowed you to play music by using voice command to pick an artist, track, genre, etc….WP7?…nope. You can dial numbers, open “certain” apps and search with bing via voice command but nothing for music. That sucks when you have a TON of music like I do and don’t want to fiddle around with the menus while using it for work or driving.
• Sync…..they took out activesync support (except for Exchange Activesync). So when you sync (using Zune now), you can only sync music, videos and podcasts. You can no longer sync your contacts, calendar, etc. Now if they could relax the TCP/IP/Port restriction a little, maybe someone can develop an app to remotely do this at least. I know I’d love to sync with Thunderbird for my contacts and calendar.
• Office sync: Only syncs “OneNote”….what about the rest? If not via usb then at least via skydrive…common. At the moment you have to email yourself office docs and save them one by one into office.
• Skydrive…….we should be able to do so much more with it on WP7
• We need more full qwerty sliders on the market. AT&T only has the LG and that phone feels and looks like crap. The HTC’s slider looks really nice and has gotten great reviews…..course it’s Sprint only. I hate on-screen keyboards with a passion BUT….I have to say I have been able to compromise a little as the WP7 on-screen kb has to be the best I have ever tried to use.

The “noDo” update is coming soon for WP7 phones that adds a few things like copy/paste (which is why I didn’t add it to the list of things I don’t like). It’s already been rolled out for certain phones/networks. The downside of this update is that it doesn’t fix/add anything that I have mentioned above so …. my list of disadvantages remains the same for now.

Past that, I am beyond happy with this phone. Fastest, nicest looking phone OS I have ever used. Too many restrictions though…feels like MS’s version of the iPhone more than anything. It at least pounds that market very hard proving to be a great threat to Apple.

And that is my review!

A great review by Steve ^^

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRcTYgEx3mI