Grade A

 We’ve been following Google’s latest product for a while now at Grade A and are very interested to see how this ends up in reality.

Picture a set of glasses with a small screen inserted in the top right part of your range of vision. You can speak to the device to control it for basic actions like recording what you see in your field of view, take pictures or surf the web. Google’s vision is everyone would wear these to help improve their day to day lives and compute in a less distracting way.

Not to sound pessimistic but I think Google may need to invent a Google helmet alongside this device. The amount of people who will be distracted while walking or driving will be insane. And imagine how annoying it will when you’re talking to someone and they are watching TV without you even knowing.

I love Google for their forward thinking and I really do think this device could help as a tool for certain work environments but you’ll be hard pressed to find me wearing glasses all day. I had laser eye surgery to get rid of them

The following video gives you a glamorized example of the devices in action. Pretty cool, but I have trouble focusing  just watching the video itself:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v1uyQZNg2vE

This is the first in many waves of battles between Google and Microsoft to control your email account. Email is the entry point for these organizations to get you on their Cloud platforms. Its the free candy to lure you into their shop. Once they have you, they are hoping you sign up for their suite of services.

ActiveSync is the protocol which allows your mobile devices to connect to your corporate Exchange email server or Google’s Gmail services. So if Google no longer supports ActiveSync one of two things could happen:

1. Your nice new Google mobile device will not be able to connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server
2. Your Gmail account won’t easily sync to a non-Google mobile device

I have no doubt an application will come in to circumvent any issues, however at the cost to the end consumer. One thing to always keep in mind is many of these technologies are offered free at a huge cost to the service provider. If they can’t recoup their costs with advertising dollars or additional service revenues the service disappears. Google is notorious for this. Take a look at the Google graveyard to see all the applications that launched and flopped: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html

The old adage still holds true, you always get what you pay for.

The recent release of the Blackberry Z10 has helped bring some life back into the once Canadian tech giant. But some still believe they are on the way out. A few things that our team has noticed when trying to support these new Z10 devices:

• Your current Blackberry server does not support the new device
• The new Blackberry server does not support legacy devices

So if you have a mix of new and old Blackberry devices you will need both a new and old Blackberry server to manage them. You can use ActiveSync to synchronize your Blackberries new and old without the need for a Blackberry server but you do however lose the extra security/manageability and the functionality of their network. Why do they always make things so complicated…