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O2’s not so unlimited data offer
When is an unlimited data offer not an unlimited data offer? When it’s a commercial tariff, sometimes, and so it proves again with O2’s latest deal.
Quoth the press release: “O2 UK today announced that on 1 October 2007 it will launch three new unlimited data Bolt Ons for Pay Monthly and Pay & Go customers who want to make the most of internet services on their O2 phone.”
It’s not that this offer is a rip-off. At £7.50 including VAT per month, the price will be right for many consumers and business users.
The catch, as ever with “unlimited” deals is that the deal is not unlimited at all and the spectre of the “fair usage policy” has risen again. In this case, these always-flexible terms mean 200MB per month, or, by O2’s reckoning, 1,400 web pages.
Sorry, but as anybody who has worked a hard shift will tell you, that’s not unlimited.
Much more attractive is the data card offer of £30 per month, including VAT, that this time suggests “fair usage” is above 3GB per month.
Deals on wireless data are better than ever and prices will very likely fall further. Just remember that “unlimited” and “fair usage” are, even by marketing standards, malleable terms.
First impressions of OQO's new UMPC
OQO launched its first model of ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) aimed at the European market earlier this week, and I went along to get a closer look at the device.
The OQO model e2 is a full-spec PC that just happens to fit in the palm of your hand. What images don’t convey is how good the screen is – even though it is only 5 inches across the diagonal, I could quite clearly read the text on the 800 x 480 Windows desktop.
The unit itself is quite comfortable to hold, at least for the short period I tried it out, and it feels quite natural to type with thumbs BlackBerry-style while cradling it in your hands.
One concern of this model is likely to be battery life. The company quotes the OQO as offering up to three hours only on the standard batteries. Nevertheless, this looks like the only UMPC I have seen that could stand up as a serious rival for a full-blown laptop.
Look out for a full review of the OQO model e2 in future, when IT Week will evaluate the performance and battery life of the model, as well as reporting on using such a small form factor device for productivity work.
Testing LogMeIn's new service
I've been trying out the beta version of LogMein's updated remote control service, which is due to go live at the end of this month. It adds a number of new features that make life easier when accessing a computer remotely.
LogMeIn's service is useful if you need to access your computer remotely, whether to fetch some documents you need or to use an application that you wouldn't otherwise have access to.
I've found the service extremely useful when working from home. Our company email system uses Lotus Notes, and web-based access to this is rather primitive and unsatisfactory. Rather than install Notes on my home PC, it's easier to remotely view the screen of my office computer instead.
The new LogMeIn version makes the controls clear and easier to find than before. You can go into a remote control session or open the file transfer window at any time by clicking a single button. When in a remote control session, a pop-up control panel lets you flick between the browser view and full screen mode, and select various other options.
New features include support for drag and drop file transfer. If I've written an article at home, this lets me copy the document file to my office PC as easily as you would move a document between folders on the same computer.
However, LogMeIn also seems to have improved the performance of the remote control viewer itself. A year or two back, most remote control tools suffered to a greater or lesser degree from network latency, meaning that when you moved the mouse, the pointer on the remote screen took a fraction of a second to follow.
Using the new LogMeIn, I didn't experience any of this. When in full-screen mode, I found it easy to believe that the Windows desktop I was using belonged to my home PC in front of me, and not the remote office system. However, there is a floating status message and a toolbar at the top of the screen that gives the game away.
My only gripe is that I couldn't get LogMeIn to bring sound from the remote computer to my home PC, but this is likely to be an issue that is sorted out before the updated service goes live at the end of September.
