When I think business class laptops, I think Lenovo Thinkpad followed by HP’s Elitebook. When I think business class desktop’s I think of HP followed by Dell. Lenovo is looking to change that.
The Lenovo ThinkCentre A70z touts it’s ease to upgrade as well as a low price point. The A70z ThinkCentre design is just what I have come to expect from Lenovo. Sturdy, simple and well designed even when it comes down to the packaging.
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Until the last few years I was a big Dell supporter. I recommended Dell to the majority of my business clients as well as anyone looking for a home machine. At the time I had no problems with the brand and they were usually one of the low price leaders in their class. I had clients buy Servers, Monitors and Desktops without blinking an eye.
I have noticed over the years the same customers I gave my recommendation to were complaining about increased problems but I just shrugged it off. I then was given 30 machines from around 1999 – 2001 to build a temporary training class with, half HP, Half Dell. I had problems with almost each one of the Dell’s. Everything from not posting to the heat sink clip being broken. The HP’s also had a couple of issues but not near as many as the Dell’s.
I thought at the time it might have been a coincidence, until my company decided to buy 500 off lease Dell GX260’s for a fresh build out. I was horrified, not because they were Dell’s but because they were old and ratty. We made due with what we were given and put them out to production and have seen nothing but issues. Everything from BIOS batteries going out to smoke coming out of the power supply. We have between 4 – 6 of these off lease Dell’s go bad every month and at least 2 of them have “caught fire” from the power supply.
Now I hear that Dell knowingly covered up that they sold faulty motherboards? Not just one or two, but 11.8 million! How can I recommend for anyone to get a Dell product when they try to sweep this under the rug? How am I to know that they didn’t cover up a faulty power supply design in the GX260’s that we have so many issues with and they just haven’t been caught yet?
If you are looking for a new build out of any type I would steer clear of Dell, I know I will be for quite some time.
I am on the ground in Las Vegas at the HP Tech Forum 2010 at the Mandalay Bay. This event will show HP and their partners newest technolgoy and how they plan on making the “Converged Infastrucure” that we have been hearing about fall in line.
I will be attending keynotes, hands on sessions as well as trolling the floor and talking to the many HP Partners that will be presenting at the expo. I will be tweeting about anything I hear and see that I find interesting and snapping shots and uploading them to Flickr as the day goes by.
If you have anything you would like to see or if you want to get answers about specific technology from HP Execs let me know!
Disclaimer: HP has provided my flight and accomidations for this event. However they have no control over the content I produce. My opinions, tweets and blog posts are my own.
For the majority of my adult life I have owned and adored Windows Mobile phones. I remember the first one I saw was from HTC dubbed the Blue Angel. At the time this device seemed way to large and bulky to carry in your pocket on a daily basis so I passed. Soon after, I started to hear about the MPx200 and loved the specs and size. As soon as they became available in my local AT&T Wireless store (which turned into Cingular, and is now back to AT&T) I picked one up and I didn’t look back…. until last week.
I received my previous Windows Mobile device, the Touch Pro 2, last October. Overall it has been a good device and it lasted me over 6 months without a major problem. An impressive feat considering most devices only last 3 months without my need to seek out a replacement. I was getting bored with the Touch Pro 2 and Windows Mobile and so I got the choice of a HTC Snap (oh heck no), a HTC Hero or a Samsung Moment. I didn’t particularly like the design of the Moment so I went with the Hero.
I love some of the new features of the new Android device, like Visual Voicemail, push email on multiple types of email accounts and merging contacts/calendars from multiple sources. All of these items are things I wish Windows Mobile offered but never could find a way to do it.
After using the Hero for a week I am beginning to think the Moment might have been a better choice. Sense UI seems to cause some problems on the underpowered Hero processor and the on screen keyboard has been hard to get used to. Some of the features I am surprised that are missing are features enterprises would look for, like enforced security options as well as remote wipe and remote lock. I know these are available as third party apps but without these features built into a centralized console security conscious businesses will continue to shy away from the Android platform.
If Google wants to continue to pull business away from the Google Apps platform I think they need to figure out how to include these advance security features into Android as well as Google Apps.
I just got back to my hotel room after a first full 12 hour day of Interop goodness. I started out the day at the 1st Keynote session with HP talking about their converged infastructure (something we have heard a lot of recently) moving on to Avaya talking about how they are handling all aspects of communications and then Cisco talking about Borderless Networking.
I attended a number of sessions throughout the day talking about Virtualization and Outsourcing security as well as a walk through the expo floor. You can see some of the pictures as well as the tweets here. Tomorrow I have appointments with Avocent, HP and a few other companies to talk about their current technology as well as where they feel the overall direction of the industry is going. I will be tweeting live from the floor and posting a overview on TechVirtuoso of day 2 at Interop.
I am traveling to Las Vegas for Interop 2010 April 26th – April 29th. Interop is a global business technology event that combines in-depth educational programs, workshops, real-world demonstrations and live technology implementations. Interop is focused towards business technology professionals or anyone who deals with business technology.
While at Interop I will be posting about everything I see as well as tweeting about everything I see from the keynotes to the expo floor and the conference tracks. I have scheduled some time with companies like Avocent and DisplayLink to discuss their upcoming products. If you would like us to check anything out while we are there just send me a message or post a comment. For those of you heading to Interop you shoud checkout the Spiceworks contest. I am sure you will get some attention if you are one of the winners!
Phone Systems have evolved over the last 10 years. With the death of the traditional PBX and the new VoIP movement businesses have more reasons to upgrade and more feature sets to choose from. I previously managed the IT department for a small company that relied heavily on the phone system.
They purchased a (at the time) a state of the art system and spent a big chunk of change thinking it would last them forever. Fast Forward 10 years and that same system that cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars is now worth 30K (if they found a sucker on the street) and they were spending thousands of dollars every month on maintenance for the ancient piece of equipment sitting on the wall. They were stuck with a dinosaur and were quickly falling behind their competitors.
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Sprints soon to be flagship Android device may be coming to big yellow sooner then anyone expected. According to a article at Forbes.com the HTC Monster could be available by Summer of 2010. Is it coincidence that this date has been pushed up a week after Verizon announced that they are looking better then expected for the LTE rollout of 2010? Is Sprint trying to 1 up Verizon by getting their first WiMAX enabled phone out the door before Verizon gets their first LTE roll out functional?
No matter the reason I cannot wait to get my hands on this device. The rumored Snapdragon processor, slim form factor and large display should make this phone a winner among many Sprint fans. Look below for some leaked photos of the new device, these photos have been taken from EngadgetMobile.com, androidmobileos.com and youhtc.ru.
Today was the first day on the HP Campus and our schedule is jam packed with sessions with HP experts. We started off watching a video about how HP provided data solutions for the new stadium for the Dallas Cowboys. They have over 200 concession stands and each one needed it’s own server to run properly. They run those 200 Windows 2003 servers on 16 HP blades running VMWare. They went from 500 servers in their old datacenter to 250 blades in the new stadium. This not only cut the amount of space and power that was required but also sped up some of their basic tasks 50 times what they were with the old setup.
After the video Gary Thome, Chief Architect for ISB presented an overview for the Infrastructure Software and Blades division as well as presenting his thoughts for Data Center trends for 2010. One of the key points of his presentation was virtualization of the data center, including power. After Gary’s presentation was complete we had a partner presentation from a HP Partner on their business and why they partner with HP. Before we broke for Lunch we had a great presentation on Virtual Connect and how HP views standards like FCoE and other standards.
After we broke for lunch we split up into two groups. My group went into the BladeSystem lab to discuss the HP Blades. We then visited the Insight Software group to learn about the Infrastructure Software HP is working on. After we went over the Infrastructure Software we then went back into the BladeLab to go over a competitive difference session. Stay Tuned for more in depth posts of these sessions coming in the next few days!
We ended our day at HP with a discussion from Paul Perez, CTO of Storage for HP. Paul had some very interesting views and ideas of where storage is going toward the future. One of the items he was very passionate about was something called a memristor, a new type of storage that he believes will fuel the next generation of storage products.
This trip was sponsored by HP. HP paid for the travel arrangements and most meals for 10 bloggers to visit the HP Houston campus.
After arriving in Houston for the HP Blades Tech Day 2010 I met in the lobby with the rest of the Bloggers, IVY Worldwide Staff and Calvin from HP. We had a couple of drinks at the hotel and then headed over to Fusion Pizza, right down the road.
The pizza and drinks were very good and during dinner I had some great discussions with @kevin_houston, @Knieriemen, @rbrambley, @kiwi_Si, @StorageNerve and @sfoskett. We talked about everything on how to create a good podcast (Contact Greg Knieriemen if you need to know how to create one, he loves it) to the origins of ProCurve (which we still do not have a full answer).
Dinner at Pizza Fusion – Picture taken by Stephen Foskett
After dinner we headed back to the hotel where John Obeto surprised us with some Nigerian Palm Wine. I was a little hesitant after the smell but after a couple of drinks I decided it wasn’t to bad. After a couple of glasses I decided It was probably best to call it a night before I wasn’t able to get up in the morning.
The Palm Wine – Picture taken by Rich Brambley
Stay tuned for more posts on the HP Blades Tech Day!
This trip was sponsored by HP. HP paid for the travel arrangements and most meals for 10 bloggers to visit the HP Houston campus.
