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The 'WareDaily Awards 2007

GoodWare© Awards

To:
• 3mobile, for producing a Skype-compatible mobile phone which also has:
  3G; Bluetooth; camera phone; colour screen; GPRS; FM radio; music player; picture messaging; vibrating alert; WAP. Price is £49.99 for pay-as-you-go (free on contract). (But see under BadWare©.)
  
• BT for its free 80Gb BT Vision Freeview recorder (only for BT broadband customers).
  
• David S. Platt, for his wonderful book, Why Software Sucks, about which nothing else need be said by way of a review cos the title says it all. Check out a specimen chapter at http://www.whysoftwaresucks.com/ if you don’t trust our judgement.
  
  • Buy it from Amazon UK
    
  • Buy it from Amazon US
  
  
• MovAVI for their powerful video converter software (fully-featured free trial downloadable from http://movavi.com/videoconverter/buynow.html). This is one of the few products to take advantage of Intel Pentium D Dual-Core Processor and AMD Athlon 64 X 2 Dual-Core processors, resulting in claimed 3x conversion speed.
  
• Quentin Brown, for MP3Soundstream, the best way of adding audio to a webpage (downloadable from http://mp3soundstream.com/).
  
• Skype, for at last making a Vista-compatible version (download from http://www.skype.com/go/downloading). (What took you so long?)
  
• Sony for providing such a wide range of price- and ability-options for its superb audio and video editing software, ranging from £44.99 each for Vegas Movie Studio and Sound Forge Audio Studio to £299.95 for Vegas Pro 8.
  
  • Search for Vegas software offers on Amazon UK
    
  • Search for SoundForge software offers on Amazon UK
    
  • Search for Vegas software offers on Amazon US
    
  • Search for SoundForge software offers on Amazon US
  
  
• X1 (http://www.x1.com), for the best desktop search engine.
  
• XRayz Software, for ClipCache, the best clipboard extender you can buy from http://www.xrayz.co.uk/clipcache/.

BadWare© Awards

To:

• 3 network, for advertising "free" calls on its new Skypephone when you have to top up by at least £10 a month to call other Skype users.
  
• Adobe, for clumsily cluttered workspace in Audition (pre-Adobe CoolEdit was much cleaner and easier to use.)
  
• Apple, for hyping the iPhone as the very latest thing, when it’s only a 2G device, shortly to become less available to O2 iPhone users when Ofcom takes away half of O2’s 900MHz spectrum in 2009.
  
• Ashampoo for loss of lipsync when downloaded YouTube files are converted from .FLV using their ClipFisher application.
  
• Ashampoo, for poor after-sales service and failure to deal with user queries.
  
• BT for a user interface for BT Vision order menu which makes it seem that it’s impossible to have its Freeview recorder without signing up for a monthly package. Not true.
  
• Carphone Warehouse, for limiting pay-as-you-go customers for £49.99 SkypePhone to any colour as long as it’s black. Contract customers get free handset (minimum rental £12 a month) plus choice of black or white. Explain, please.
  
• Dell, for making it impossible to enable stereo mix recording on Inspiron laptop.
  
• Epson, for not making available a download of PrintCD software. Who else would want it but owners of an R220 or its successors? And, while we’re at it, why doesn’t PrintCD remember its settings? We’ve already got enough misprinted coasters.
  
• http://www.iphoneteam.co.uk/ for claiming to be able to unlock your iPhone for use on any network. Avoid any rip-off site which offers you this. The iPhone can NOT be fully unlocked (yet!) but for less than UKP30, http://www.free-your-iphone.co.uk/ will allow you to modify the phone so you can use pay-as-you-go on O2, avoiding their expensive 18-month contract. They also promise you full unlocking when (if?) it ever becomes possible.
  Of course, non-UK subscribers can get unlocked iPhones in Germany and France, for €999 or €749 respectively (in France, phones it’s illegal to tie phone sales to specific networks). Or you could rent an unlocked iPhone in UK for £29 a day.
  
• Laptop manufacturers, for that stupid touchie-feelie non-mouse thingie, which requires two hands (at least) to use, and still skitters all over the screen uncontrollably. The only hardware mouse substitute that ever worked was on the IBM Thinkpad (the one with the little red clitoris in the middle of the keyboard) and they’ve stopped making them.
  
• Microsoft, for removing control of video hardware acceleration from Vista.
  
• Nokia, for removing the tracking feature from Nokia Maps when users upgrade the N95 firmware.
  
• Palm, for its 500 Treo Smartphone, which has no stylus or touchscreen, no Wi-Fi, no HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access).
  
• Pinnacle, for its Dazzle TV tuner/capture device which can’t find BBC4, and does not allow manual tuning to digital frequencies.
  
• Skype, for making us wait so long for a Vista-compatible version.
  
• Sony for otherwise superb SoundForge 9, which doesn’t allow creation of multi-channel mix-downs from scratch, though capture of surround-sound via 4+ channel sound card is permitted.
  
• Tenebril, for producing an excellent memory organiser in MemoryBoost, but which requires Vista users to continually unlock the program every time it runs. (Downloadable from http://download.tenebril.com/pub/bin/mbsetup.exe.)


What would be your GoodWare© or BadWare© award nominations? Add them to our list by posting a comment.


Wishlist

• CoolEdit-style multi-track in Sony SoundForge


Why can't

• Palm Treo 750v copy/paste from/to SMS messages?

BadWare and GoodWare Awards 2007

Karl Dallas, publisher editor of HardwareDaily (http://hardwaredaily.blogspot.com) and SoftwareDaily (http://software-daily.blogspot.com) is assembling his BadWare and GoodWare awards for 2007. Among those companies who have been nominated (sometimes in both categories) are 3mobile, Adobe, Ashampoo, Carphone Warehouse, Dell, Epson, Microsoft, MovAVI, Skype, and Sony Creative Software.
Anyone wishing to nominate hardware or software as being either notably good or bad may do so by posting a comment to this message.
The complete Awards listing will be published on January 11, 2008.

Guided tour of Apple's iPhone

For a guided tour of Apple's new iPhone, go to:
http://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/gettingstarted/guidedtour.html?cid=CDM-EU-1525

Guided tour of Apple's iPhone

For a guided tour of Apple's new iPhone, go to:
http://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/gettingstarted/guidedtour.html?cid=CDM-EU-1525

Hitachi breakthrough promises 4TB drives by 2011

Click here for full story
Published: October 15, 2007 - 01:30PM CT

Hitachi announced today that it has developed the world's smallest hard drive read heads, and that it expects the new technique to eventually quadruple hard drive size within four years.