neville

For the past week, I’ve been getting to know the 3 Skypephone S2, the second-generation of this Skype-enabled mobile phone which goes on general sale in the UK today.

As I also tried out the original Skypephone launched in October 2007 – what mobile operator 3 is now calling the 3 Skypephone S1 – I wanted to see what was different, what was new and what had improved.

It’s a pretty smart phone. If you want an immediate look at screens and packaging, take a stroll through this collection of photos I took when the phone arrived last week.

Rather than write a review, I decided to record a video of what I experienced with the 3 Skypephone S2, starting with a look at it, turning it on and going through its features.

You can read plenty of written reviews already, so this audio-visual review might add something a little different.

In the 28-minute video, I run through each of the major features showing how you interact with the phone, focusing on what you actually see and do when using its built-in applications or access services online – Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Facebook, Google mobile applications, RSS feeds, and more – as well as the mundane like manage contacts and create text messages.

My overall conclusion? It’s a terrific device, greatly improved on its predecessor in areas like usability and network connectivity, the latter a poor experience for me before.

As a phone, it works as you expect it should. Skype seems to work better than before, judging by the high quality of audio on Skype calls I made and received.

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My experience with Windows Vista desktop search is awful. Poor overall performance and constant hard disk thrashing were the two most obvious behaviours that drove me to frustration every day.

I’m convinced it was all down to background search indexing activity.

Let me put it this way - since I disabled the default Windows Vista desktop search and changed that default to use Copernic, all these problems have gone away.

So if you have Windows Vista and experience such issues, you might want to change the default search app for your desktop. I found a helpful Microsoft Knowledgebase article 941946 that explains how to do that with Vista SP1.

So I put this video together that shows how to do it, which you might find helpful.

If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you will probably notice that things look a bit different since your last visit.

I’m experimenting with a new theme called Thesis which is now running the look and feel of this blog. Thesis is created by Chris Pearson, a US-based web developer who has produced some pretty cool WordPress themes over the years.

Thesis is a very good example of a new breed of WordPress theme - a theme that contains some intelligence in its creation and significant added value to go along with it, all of which enables you the blogger to adapt it to your specific requirements without having to do any PHP code editing.

You can do almost all your tweaking with a combination of the Thesis Options page in your blog, which appears once you’ve installed and activated the theme, and a custom cascading style sheet (CSS).

What you’re looking at today is Thesis literally out of the box. About the only design thing I’ve done so far is add some of my own images to the rotating images feature you see at the top right of the page which automatically changes the image as you move from post to post on the site.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep that feature - it’s quite neat, though - nor what elements of the out-of-the-box theme I’ll change or adapt.

Whatever I decide to do will largely be driven by my desire and wish to have something that is a bit personal to me and this blog and not just another cookie-cutter WordPress theme (or as the default WordPress tag line says whenever you install a new blog, ‘just another WordPress weblog’), points directly address by Chris Pearson:

Just a WordPress theme? Hardly. Thesis is a search engine optimized HTML + CSS + PHP framework equipped with an innovative options panel that makes it easy for anyone to run a professional, customized blog or Website (without being a code jockey).

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WordPress 2.6 was released two days ago and I’ve just upgraded this blog to that latest version. It was a painless process and worked fine.

Upgrading your blog platform requires some essential planning beforehand, notably backing up your database at the very least. WordPress has a handy upgrade guide which, if you follow all the steps, should result in a successful upgrade.

I do read that guide every time I upgrade. But for the last four upgrade versions of WordPress, I’ve upgraded everything with just one click.

Well, not quite. But I use a reliable service from DreamHost, my hosting provider, that literally does everything in one click. It has a snappy name - 1-Click Install.

So my upgrade path goes like this:

1. Backup the database.
2. Disable all plugins.
3. Run DreamHost 1-Click Install and wait for email confirmation that upgrade done.
4. Log in to the blog and re-enable all plugins.

The only time I’ve ever had an issue with a WP upgrade via 1-Click Install is when I hadn’t disabled plugins before doing the upgrade. (I would have had that issue however I’d done the upgrade.)

There’s lots to discover about WordPress 2.6 especially new features like Google Gears support to speed up your blog admin, and enhancements for editing posts such as wiki-like version control, word count and adding captions to images.

Now that I’ve successfully upgraded, the most crucial thing for me at the moment is getting the answer to this question - does Windows Live Writer work with WordPress 2.6?

I write all my posts and pages in WLW - by far the best offline blog editor for Windows - including this one, so this post is testing that it works.

The reason that’s an important question is that WP 2.6 introduces a significant change, one that will affect offline editors like WLW.

The change concerns XML-RPC which, in very simple terms, affects whether your offline editor can connect to your blog or not. If XML-RPC is disabled, it can’t.

For fresh installations of WP 2.6, XML-RPC is disabled by default. For upgrades, like mine, it’s enabled.

Luckily, it’s a setting that’s easy to control yourself and you’ll find it in Admin > Settings > Writing:

Both Atom and XML-RPC are topics that have been talked about a bit in recent months in relation to WordPress development.

Anyway, I’m happy with how the upgrade to WP 2.6 went. Now to test whether this post publishes ok from Windows Live Writer…

[Post-publish edit] Yes, it did publish just fine, exactly as I was expecting. That means I’m comfortable going ahead with upgrading my main blog soon.