Well, not really. However when I was recently up in Seattle, Jen and Sean McCown contacted me about being on their show and doing an interview. I agreed, and we met late, as in starting around 9:30pm one night, to do a sit down and interview.
It was totally off the cuff, and I had fun with it. You can check out out here: Steve Jones in the House
The Windows Phone 7 (WP7) devices are out, and recently at conferences all around there were a number of people sporting the new devices and blogging, tweeting, and more about their new toys. Since I tend to know many people that work in the Microsoft world, there was a lot more buzz about the phone at recent events than I’ve seen elsewhere. It seems that finally Windows phones are a worthy competitor to the Android and iPhone devices.
A good friend of mine, a Windows infrastructure guru, sent me this early review of WP7, with the idea that it might convince me to switch from my iPhone and give it a try. That’s not likely to happen anytime soon as I like my iPhone and don’t really see a compelling reason to change. To me the important thing is the platform and the coverage. While I get decent, not great, coverage from T-Mobile, I am tempted to switch to Sprint or Verizon. If they had an iPhone, I’d move tomorrow.
The platform is the bigger deal for me. I had an Android phone, and while I liked it, the platform wasn’t mature. There were relatively few applications that I wanted and many were not stable. Things have changed, but I’m still not sure it’s quite mature enough for me. WP7 might get there, but right now I am sure its platform is much less mature than the others. We’ll see if Microsoft can change that.
One thing in the review that I found very, very interesting was in part 9 of the review. The author mentions that WP7 is changing the game by understanding that the user is the center of the device, not the applications, and it seeks to better blend the core data, the information the user has across different applications. It’s an interesting idea that the data a person has (photos, music, contacts, etc.) should be overlaid across applications. The data is the most important thing to me and finding ways to better integrate it is important to me.
I don’t know what many of you think of WP7, but it might be worth taking a look if you want a new smartphone. And if you don’t have a smartphone, I’d encourage you to look at them. I know that all the major platforms (WP7, Android, iOS) have made me much more productive over the last few years.
Steve Jones
At the PASS Summit a few weeks ago, the keynote talks and the WIT luncheon were streamed live to the world. I watched most of the talks from my house, and some of them were very interesting.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the first two days, which were full of too much marketing for me. There are some cool demos, but I’ll let you decide if it’s worth checking out. However the third keynote, from Dr. David Dewitt, was amazing. Just as it was last year, it was mind blowing, and I’m not completely sure I understood it, but it’s worth watching.
The Women In Technology luncheon that I thought was interesting as well. I know that not everyone wants to take this on as a cause, but if you think that we should help promote technology to women, check it out.
It’s vacation week for me. Everything’s scheduled for SQLServerCentral, and my family is taking our annual ski break for Thanksgiving. We left on Sunday, after I returned from SQL Saturday #59 and are not due back in town until Fri or Sat. I’m not even sure how “wired” we’ll be, though I will be tweeting/FB’ing a bit from the slopes.
We typically have gone skiing on Thursday to Sunday, but this year we managed to book a whole week in Winter Park, CO. So we took advantage of it, and I’m leaving work behind.
It’s a good break, and while I’m worried about coming back to tons of articles to edit, I need to break. The last few months have been slightly crazy, and we have lots of stuff in the pipeline for next year, so I need to step back, relax, and then spend December looking to find ways to manage the work life balance.
Hopefully everyone has a great holiday, and if you don’t get a response from my this week, you’ll know why.
Voice of the DBA 