It was only a few years ago that a keyboard was a basic peripheral which allowed the input of textual data. They had no fancy capabilities and were not 'stylish' by any means. Now jump to the present and there are a vast number of keyboards available, all sporting their own unique feature set and design. You can get anything from your basic 102 key keyboard to an ergonomically designed advanced keyboard with a many different features which go well beyond simply entering text.

Personally I find myself drawn to Logitech, when it comes to peripherals; not to say that Microsoft (and others) don't have great alternatives. For some time now I have been using the Logitech G15 gaming keyboard, and have found that the sideshow feature absolutely great. However it has one major limitation... It is wired.

In the past I have always prefered to go with a wired keyboard, however I recently picked up the Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard and I absolutely love it! It's stylish, sleek and has the features to boot. The keys have that nice feeling of a laptop keyboard and it has the added convience of a tackpad to control the mouse cursor. It also has a nice touch sensitive volumn control which lights up the section currently under your finger.

Another great feature, both design and useability, is the function key. Upon pressing the function [Fn] key a row above the F keys dramatically fades in to existance, presenting more options including quick links to voip, search, email, your homepage four custom shortcuts and of course media keys (previous, stop, play/pause and next). After releasing the [Fn] key the row fades back out of existance.

Logitech go the entire way with this package. Including the bluetooth dongle, a nice charger base which the keyboard slides down into - emphasising its stylish design - and they even go as far as to include a custom diNovo Edge cleaning cloth to remove any finger prints from the keyboard piano black finish.

There are however a few issues with the keyboard. Occasionally the bluetooth connection will die and take a while to reconnect with the computer, although this does appear to be rare and more so the case when the path between the keyboard and the bluetooth dongle is heavily obstructed. While the volumn control looks sleek, in terms of usability it is lacking; only changing the volumn level very slightly with each slide of the control, making adjusting the volumn a slow process.

However, after all is said and done I find the keyboard to be absolutely brilliant - especially if you're using the keyboard from the couch or somewhere a mouse is less usable. If you're willing to have to use the cleaning cloth, as it does pick up finger prints very easily, the keyboard is a great choice amongst all of the avaliable alternatives. The Logitech diNovo Edge can be picked up for around au$185 from Umart. (retailers such as Dick Smith Electronics and Harvey Norman will price them at $350, but should price match Umart if you push them)

Labels: dinovo edge, hardware, keyboard, logitech, review

Microsoft Australia are currently running a promotion aimed at Australian university students, which entitles them to a single perpetual or 12 month license of Microsoft's Office 2007 Ultimate for $75 or $25, respectively. In order to be eligible for this offer you do need to be a current student at one of the qualifying universities, with an active university email.

A retail copy of Office Ultimate 2007 can generally be picked up for around $1170, with the upgrade version slightly cheaper, whilst a Office Student 2007 comes in at around $249. This means university students are getting Office Ultimate 2007 with a 94% discount, which is much cheaper than Student version of Office 2007.

Office Home and Student comes with 4 Office products - Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote - where Ultimate is packed with over 10 different Office products - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook w/ business contact manager, Account Express, Publisher, Access, InfoPath, Groove, OneNote, and more. For a full product comparison visit the 2007 Microsoft Office System Suites comparison page.

Upon questioning, by APC, at first Microsoft spokespersons could not provide reasoning behind the promotion. At a later date Microsoft did provide answers to some of APC's questions such as Why is MSFT doing this so cheaply?:

There are three reasons:

Overview - Microsoft has long provided academic pricing for students attending Universities with Volume Licensing agreements. This offering is available to these same students.

1. Microsoft has worked closely with universities so that students can now easily validate their student status online. This makes it easy for students to access this offer.
2. Microsoft is offering this license directly to students for the first time.
3. The online/download model eliminates the need for the CD distribution and product packaging.

Now to me it seems like Microsoft have finally realized that perhaps there is a great potential in generating a great deal of promotion through blogging (such as this) for their software. At the same time this is encouraging the group of people who probably make up the majority of software pirate's to purchase a copy of the software, rather than obtaining an illegitimate copy. This would also be helping Microsoft to perhaps gain some ground back from open source alternatives being offered by universities, such as openoffice.

There is one catch to this promotion, however, you do not receive a DVD or CD copy off Office but rather you are given an Office 2007 Ultimate key which upgrades the free downloaded trail version to a non-limited version, or a copy of office may be obtainable from your university. The product key will also only allow the installation of Office on a single computer.

If you would like to find out more about this promotion or would like to purchase your copy of Office 2007 Ultimate for $75 visit http://itsnotcheating.com.au/ or visit the Microsoft site for the terms and conditions.

Labels: microsoft, office, promotion, university

Wow, time really does go by faster than you notice it as it's going by. It has been over 3 since I first signed up with Blogger - I'm surprised they haven't deactivated my account with how inactive I have been - and so much has changed since then.

I have never been a huge blogger on my own personal life as such, rather I've been more interested in blogging about technical subjects, even though I have made a handful of different blogs. I think the biggest challenge of writing a personal blog is trying to recollect all of the interesting situations in your life and presenting them in such a way that it is entertaining for other people to read. Sure plenty of humours and interesting events may occur throughout your day, but when you got to write it in a blog, it suddenly doesn't appear so funny and interesting all of the time; Well at least not in my perspective.

My personal website, where I would normally be blogging this sort of stuff, has been down for a while now and I have felt like writing down some of my ramblings for a little while now so I thought I would revive this blogger account and start posting on here. It is certainly much easier than getting my server working again, but who knows I may get it going again one day...

Labels: blogging, life, website