新年快乐！ (Happy New Year in Chinese)

I just wanted to wish all the ReflectionUpon Blog Readers a Happy Chinese New Year (even if you aren’t Chinese) and for a joyful and prosperous 2009. It is also known as the Spring Festival (春节) or the Lunar New Year (since it corresponds with the Lunar Calendar).

By the way, it is the year of the Ox, which means that if you are born in this year (which are aren’t since you are reading this), you have the zodiac symbol of an ox and supposedly you are likely to have certain characteristics (see this page on Wikipedia). The Chinese cycle of animals repeats every 12 years, so if you were born twelve years ago, you also have the ox for a zodiac symbol.

In China, this is a huge celebration with fireworks, parties, performances (such as the dragon dance), and food (such as dumplings). There is also a tradition for the kids to receive a red envelope from the adults with money in then.

Some more info on Chinese New Year is available on Yahoo! (see here) and on Wikipedia (see here).

Image from mtholyoke.edu (link)

CES was last week and quite a few cool devices popped up at the event. Here are some of my favorites.

Palm Pre

The biggest (in my opinion and CNET’s, is the Palm Pre. This iPhone competitor is a touchscreen phone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard and a cool new Palm OS called WebOS. This OS is filled with cool animations, gestures (multi-touch ones), and seems to be very intuitive. Now, I bet you are thinking along the line of: Doesn’t the iPhone have that already? True, but this Palm does have the ability for you to multitask and it has an actual keyboard (the jelly button kind like the one on a Palm Centro). In addition, it does have copy and paste. Multitasking (not just being able to play music in the background like the iPhone) works by having multiple “cards” on your main screen which you can flick back and forth from. And these aren’t just static views, they are live mini-views of the open apps and you can interact with them too.

Other tidbits: the web browser is also very good (comparable to the iPhone’s), the Pre comes with a 3 MP camera, and you can download music through the Amazon Music Store (similar to the G1). There is also GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 3.5mm headphone jack (yay!), and 8 GB of internal storage.

No details yet on pricing or release date. But it is supposed to be around the iPhone’s price and released in the first half of 2009. The Pre will be available on Sprint.

Palm Pre Video:

More info:

Palm Pre First Impressions on CNET

Palm Pre Photo Gallery on CNET

Official Palm Pre website

Palm Pre Info on Engadget

The Sony P-Series Lifestyle PC

This not quite netbook like netbook is going along with Sony’s general premium higher end feel for laptops. It has a wide 8 inch screen with a 1600*768 resolution, is less than an inch think, and weights 1.4 pounds. But it has no touchpad, instead, it has a pointing stick. It also has 3G mobile broadband (Verizon), 802.11n wi-fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. The P-Series runs Windows Vista and will retail at $900.

CNET article on the Sony P-Series Lifestyle PC

Engadget Hands-on videos of the Sony P-Series Lifestyle PC

LG Watch Phone

This futuristic watch is also a touchscreen phone. It uses iPhone like gestures to navigate through the TFT capacitive touch screen (1.43 inches diagonally). It looks quite cool though I question its usability as a phone. You would probably need a Bluetooth headset to talk calls since your other option is to take phones with speakerphone. There is also a camera built-in. But the main issue is that you can’t get it (no plans, yet), not unless you are in Europe. The LG Watch phone is scheduled for release later this year and pricing has not yet been released.

Hands-on video of the LG Watch Phone

A CNET article on the LG Watch Phone

So that is basically it for what I though was cool at CES. For more info about it, check out the CES Page at CNET (here) and the articles on CES at Engadget (here). Want to mention another gadget that was at CES that I didn’t mention? Tell the readers in the comments!

Images from CNET and Engadget.

I made (using Jing) a screencast of Windows 7 and its features. Please comment on this video. I’m curious to see what you think of it. Sorry that the video is a bit cut off at the bottom because of the video bar, I’ll see what I can do about that. Check it out below!

So even though Steve Ballmer promised at CES a public beta of Windows 7 to be released on Friday, we didn’t officially get it. This was from server overloads, errors, and a bunch of other issues with people all trying to get the beta. I would assume the main reason to this is that Microsoft told us it would only give out 2.5 million keys to beta testers (which they have decided against), so people were rushing to grab one. I got the beta on that day from a direct link to the ISO file, but I still didn’t have a product key. But the beta works for 30 days without a key, so I installed it on my Lenovo S10 Netbook. The installation went quite smoothly and right now I’m typing this blog post on Windows 7 (with Windows Live Writer). I did finally get a key from Microsoft, so my beta will work until August 1, 2009.

Overall, I think the OS is quite nice and does bring quite a bit of extra functionality to your computer. The interface does take a bit to get used to with its changes. As I mentioned in my other article about Windows 7 (see here), there are some nice simple features that make the experience with Windows much better. One of these is the Aero Snap feature where you can just move a window to the side an it’ll “snap” to occupy half of the screen. Or at the top, where it will go full screen. This is extremely helpful for using a website to write a report or for multitasking. Another is Aero Peek where you can hover over the bottom right hand corner and see the desktop without actually going to it. This is helpful if you have widgets there.

Some other small improvements include having a little triangle next to start menu items that you can hover over to explore recent documents, websites, and common tasks without opening the application. Also, there is the Action Center where you can manage your system’s security and solve issues that Windows finds.

The OS is definitely faster than both XP and Vista, and keeping mind that Aero is enabled with its transparency and animations, is quite a feat. The system does boot up quite quickly and feels quite stable. The fact that it is Vista’s successor is quite obvious with the similar start menu and feel to it. Though that isn’t a bad thing, those were reasons why Vista was good, the bad was the incompatibility and slowness of it. The compatibility is quite amazing. I just plugged in random devices and the OS quickly detects and installs drivers for it.

Some criticism: The taskbar’s organization. Though I feel it has been improved drastically, I do find having shortcut icons and open windows together a bit annoying, but I think I’ve gotten used to it, since Microsoft does differentiate them by putting the open windows in a box. I’m also still not quite sure why they took out some applications such as Mail and Movie Maker and put it in a separate suit (Windows Live Essentials) and made people download it separately (unless you buy a Dell, which as partnered up with Microsoft to bundle Windows 7 and Essentials together).

If you are interested in downloading and trying out the beta. Here are my tips. If you have XP, you aren’t able to just upgrade up to 7, but if you have Vista SP1, you can. For XP users, you’ll just have to do a clean install on a separate partition or deleting XP (and your files) and installing it on your current partition. I would recommend backing up before installing Windows 7 (for XP users, it is kind of mandatory, otherwise, you’ll lose all your files). Keep in mind that the beta ends on August 1st, 2009, so plan ahead for upgrading to the final version or to reinstall your original OS.

To repartition your hard drive (shrink your current partition, and then make a new one). I would recommend using GParted Live (see here). You can run this from a CD or a USB drive.

For backing up, check this page out.

For the beta FAQ, go here.

For release notes, go here.

For installation instructions, go here.

For an overview of what is new in Windows 7, go here.

Want to dive in to Windows 7? Go to the Windows 7 main page(http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/) to download the beta (NOTE: You need a Live/Hotmail account to do so). I would recommend reading the information on the download page before going ahead. Again, Microsoft is not having that 2.5 million beta keys limit anymore (until January 24th), so don’t worry about not getting a key.

Good luck, if you are going to test out Windows 7. Also, I may post up a video about Windows 7 in the future, so look for that.

Thanks to Wikipedia for having that screenshot of Windows 7, build 7000.