The neat thing about modern mobile phones is that you can install additional applications on them. This article introduces three excellent mobile phone applications that have made my life a lot easier, and my cutting edge Nokia phone (currently E71) even better. In fact these have proven to be real life savers, are made by one of the most respected software companies and are offered for free. Check out Google’s GMail and Maps for mobile, and Opera Mini! I have tested these applications on several Nokia Symbian S60 mobile phones, but they are Java based applications and therefore support various other devices as well.

Read more »

VSO’s PhotoDVD is a nice way to create a dvd slideshows of your favorite photos. It’s easy to use, but it also has a lot of features to configure to satisfy the more advanced users. The features of PhotoDVD include DVD subtitles, background music, a great amount of different visual animation effects and much  more. PhotoDVD is one software that no digital photographer should live without.

Read more »

VSO PhotoDVD is one of the best DVD Slideshow software to create slideshows on DVD. Share your digital pictures on DVD with your friends and family with any home DVD player.

PhotoDVD animates your images to make a stunning DVD photo Slideshow. You can easily add music and comments to your pictures. The result is attractive and vibrant. The software is very easy to use and burns photos to DVD with any DVD writer. DVD format has a much better quality than a photo cd.

Read more »

Oh boy, this week the ‘quality’ of the biggest Linux distributions almost depressed me. Here are a couple fine examples of issues that one will never experience in the commercial software world. You see, after more than one and a half years of testing distributions, except for the times I was happily using PCLOS 2008, I wanted to try something in the long run. I got the idea that I should install a distro and usefor a longer period of time. My particular point of interest was how well do distributions backport the key applications to their aging releases. This story involves Ubuntu and openSUSE, but it actually starts with PCLinuxOS and a demonstration of what kind of problems may arise with distros that are a one man show.

Read more »

In case you have read our articles, you know that I’ve been doing plenty of distro hopping recently. The freedom of choice is one thing that Linux fans often boast about – you can choose in between hundreds of Linux distributions, a number of desktop environments and so on. Initially this freedom seems appealing and interesting, but after a number of hops from a distro to another I have started wondering about the meaningfulness of the huge variety of distributions. And then I happened to read an article at the Linux Hater’s Blog, who makes an interesting statement:“This “choice”, as loudly as it is trumpeted, is a key reason that Linux has not made it on the desktop.” - and he is damn right about it!

Read more »

The Apple iPhone 3G has finally arrived to the global market. It has been very interesting to read about the consumer reactions and initial comments regarding this device. After all the European / International market has used to advanced 3G smartphone concepts, and in that sense is much more demanding than the U.S. consumers on Apple’s home field. I skimmed through some mobile phone related message boards and discovered that the iPhone 3G has already found a number of passionate fans, but the limited set of features and restricting operating systems has also been heavily criticized. The iPhone 3G has also raised many questions that have been asked over and over again during the last few days, so I decided to sum it up for you - here is the Apple iPhone 3G  FAQ.

Read more »

Couple of years ago Google released a nifty little Mozilla Firefox add-on known as Google Browser Sync. This little tool had the sole purpose of synchronizing the personal data in between multiple installation of Mozilla Firefox web browser. In other words it synchronized user’s passwords, bookmarks, saved form data and cookies in between multiple PC. This was very convenient for people like me that have more than one PC, a desktop and a laptop, because I would not have to feed all my web passwords, logins and bookmarks to two computers. I especially enjoyed the service while I was testing various Linux distributions, as it only took minutes to sync my Firefox on the laptop with all the personal browser data I have on the desktop - this means that I was using and producing with a number of web based tools that I use daily literally in minutes after I had finished my Linux installation. Unfortunately Google stopped developing the service and apparantly pulled the plug by not updating the add-on for the Firefox. Mozilla however is working on something that might work as a replacement - Mozilla Weave.

Read more »

ConvertXtoDVD 3 is the best tool for converting video files, and I mean virtually any video file, to standard compliant DVDs. It is very fast to process the files, while it produces very good quality as well. The best part of it however is the intuitive user interface, that is very user friendly but still offers plenty of functionality for the more advanced users. It literally doesn’t take more than 30 seconds to start converting videos to a DVD with subtitles and good looking animated menus. Here is a video guide that covers the basics of this fine software and should give anyone a pleasant start with this software. Click here to download the software and read on to watch the video guide.

Read more »

Dealing with video files or DVD images on a PC typically involves massive hard drive operations, as the file sizes tend to be rather large. A full size DVD image is roughly 4.4 gigabytes, but high definition files (Blu-ray, HD DVD) can be ten times larger! Copying, moving or extracting files for archives takes time, even on a high performance computer, so therefore it is worth while to check that your hard drive is performing at it’s peak by defragmenting it every once in a while. Windows comes with a disk defragmention software, but unfortunately it is not best of it’s kind. There are a lot of commercial alternatives out there, but luckily also some very good free software is available. In this guide we show you how to defragment Windows drives by using JkDefrag and PageDefrag software.

Read more »

The six month update cycles of major Linux distributions guarantees that there will be plenty of fresh releases for every spring and fall. At the end of 2007 we ranked the best distributions of the year, but as most distros have been refreshed since it is time to have another look at the current Linux offering. In the past six months the development has been incremental, but with a few nice surprises as well.

As before our focus is on typical desktop and Internet usage, seeking an open-source alternative to Windows. We value a good out-of-the-box experience, polished desktop design and usability over other features.

Read more »