The good -

• The bitrate of the Spotify stream is much higher than Napster, and it’s quite noticeable on my kitchen Polk Audio RC60i hooked upto a ZP120
• iPhone app is great, sync playlists over WiFi to play later. As I sync the lossless music in my library to 128kbps AAC for my iPhone in the car, I prefer Spotify when I’m sitting down with headphones.
• Playlists show up on Sonos in the same order as in the client

The bad -

• Unable to play a lot of songs from playlists that work fine in the desktop client on the Sonos. CR100 has a line through the track icon, iPhone shows as below. These are tracks from the user Spotify – Top 100 tracks currently on Spotify.

• Can’t currently play a track from a playlist on the iPhone – probably will be fixed in a v3.3 version?
• Starting streaming from my mobile or client makes Sonos stop playing. OK the FAQ says you can only stream to one computer at a time, but I hoped that wouldn’t count.
  Can I use Spotify from multiple locations?
  Yes, you can install Spotify on as many computers as you like. You may be logged in to Spotify from several computers simultaneously, but you can only play music on one computer at a time. The music at your other computers will automatically be paused. If you want to install Spotify on more than one computer simply download the program again and log in with your existing username and password, there is no need for an invite token.
• £10/month is twice the cost of Napster, which also gives you 5 MP3 downloads per month & allows multiple streams. Napster also has a great selection of playlists, charts etc..

At the moment, I’m undecided as to whether I should stick with Spotify, or go back to Napster. I guess the ultimate option would be to subscribe to both…!

Also new today is the Sonos iPad app. There’s not much I can say about it that’s not been covered elsewhere. The Sonos CR100 & iPhone apps are so easy to use you wouldn’t think they could be improved on, but by having the extra screen-space it’s a lot more functional when customising playlists or generally browsing through a music library.

Update from Spotify about unplayable tracks – the client automagically finds a playable replacement in your country. Sonos doesn’t do that (yet).

CoPilot seems a bit of a steal at £19.99, then £19.99 for 1-year of traffic updates & fuel prices. And it initially looks fantastic, with a massive clear display & groovy colour-scheme. It’s possibly too customisable, you could spend ages tweaking settings but by default the routing seems OK, although it massively over-estimates ETAs. If you drive, ahem, exactly at the speed limit all the time. But you can specify in the routing profile exactly what speed you drive on each type of road.

The one thing I really don’t like is the red triangle representing your position turns into a big red circle (puck?) at low speed, obscuring detail on the map. Usually you’re at light or a junction, and working out which turn to take is made unecessarily more complicated.

However after a fair bit of use, the maps are old (see below picture of the A1 roundabout at Colsterworth) & CoPilot have said on their Facebook support site that their licence doesn’t allow them to issue map updates(!). So maybe CoPilot 2011 will be out, for another £20? It also seems a bit daft to charge £2.99 for a TTS voice. But their traffic implementation, well isn’t really implemented at all as it’s barely there.

It will connect over GPRS & get a list of traffic incidents, then show a traffic bar on the right-hand side of the screen & announce “Traffic Incident on Route”. Every time it checks (I’ve set it to 5min). You can go into the traffic incidents & select to avoid, but there’s no option to automatically re-route due to traffic. It’s a bit difficult to fiddle around while you’re driving, so you probably won’t bother. I’ve been trying to get some more details screenshots, but no matter where I select as a destination in the country (Glasgow, Croydon, Bristol etc..) there’s no incidents on my route….

I had to raise a case with support, as if you have the iPhone mounted horizontally & choose the playlists button in the iPod control the app crashes. It took 12 days for a response, although they did say they’d identified the problem & had got a partial fix & it would be included with the next update. Maybe they’ll include better traffic handling? And put an option in to get rid of the puck!

The USA CoPilot map is only £2.99, and if you vacation there it’s certainly worth purchasing.

Navigon was half-price a couple of weekends ago, and has now settled at £19.99 for the UK (British Isles). Lifetime traffic is £14.99. For some reason full-postcode input is £1.19, although it does work fairly well without it if you know the road/town you’re heading to.

The main interface wastes a lot of screen real-estate, with a big black bar at the top & bottom. The application has far fewer options than CoPilot & lot less choice of routing profile (Car, Motorbike, Lorry, Bicycle, Pedestrian & options to avoid motorways, tolls & ferries – perfectly sufficient). Maps seem to be upto date, and it includes a lot of POIs. The two buildings for my company are both represented on the map with the building name! You can in-app purchase 3D Maps (£6.99, so I’ve not bothered).

Selecting a destination (POI, from contacts or by entering an address/postcode, Google Search) is easy enough & you can then favourite it, see the nearest parking/petrol station (no prices)/McD’s. The route overview shows you a couple of routing options, but unless the journey is really short you won’t be able to tell the difference, and any traffic incidents on the route.

Under the options, Traffic->Consider Traffic Information can be set to Off/Automatically/On Request. You can see Route-Related incidents, or all by Distance/Road/Delay. Selecting an incident brings up a clear map with the details of the problem. A traffic icon hovers over the top-left of the navigation screen. Navigon uses (with permission) the location of other users to calculate traffic delays, routes & ETAs. So the more people driving nearby, the better the traffic info should be. But I don’t think they’ve reached the installed base of TomTom, who also aggregate general location data from Vodafone users.

The voice (TTS) is a bit basic, and if by mistake you exceed the speed-limit says “Beware” in husky tones. When near a speed-camera, says “Beware traffic control” (eh?!). A nice touch is she is polite & says “Please follow the road of 10 miles”.

Tomtom - supposedly has the best traffic info, TrafficHD which uses the data from many different sources to calculate delays. But I’m not going to pay £49.99 for the UK maps (or £52.99 for Europe), then £22.99 for a year’s traffic (1-month for £4.99 or 1-day for £1.19) to find out. Donations gratefully received!

For JBOD, the process warns you that it will wipe any data (on the newly inserted drive), and then has to reboot the unit to finish configuration. It all takes about 10 minutes for the Stora to be available again. I think RAID1 should be able to re-configure immediately, then work on mirroring the data for some time.

Now can anyone tell me what happens if I configure back to RAID1 & have less than 1Tb (OK 932Gb) data? Will it consolidate everything onto one drive? Or wipe the lot?

Update – it took over an hour, but going from JBOD to RAID1 didn’t loose any data. It was unresponsive with solid blue light & flashing green hard drives (consolidating data?) but now is 50% through rebuilding the mirror, 2 hours to finish.

Anyway, kudos to KarenCR on the AVG forums with the correct answer for 10 points:

Delete c:\windows\system32\drivers\directxsli.sys
(which shows up as a Nvidia driver. But I have Intel GPU)

Then reboot.

For the last two days I’ve been taunted by my colleage that I wouldn’t find the solution & would have to reinstall. Ha!

For what it’s worth, we used 3849 Electricity kWh, and 14103 Gas kWh in the last year. IGT charge is about £40, so could end up ‘saving’ OVER £100. Although every site I’ve tried seems to come up with different figures for my current & projected charges…

EDIT: first:Utility just dropped me a mail to say they can’t supply Gas on an IGT at the moment Hopefully they’ll put that in their FAQ.

Things I like:
Micro-USB charging
Screen is really good, even with the protector on
Slide is cool
Barely need to use the keyboard
USB throughput with the Mac is much better than the E71 – upto 3600kB/s compared with ~800kB/s.
Destinations, how access points should have always work

Don’t like:
Battery cover feels cheap
No software update to v11 yet

Yesterday it was a nice day, so off to Belton House we went. A simple trip out takes a bit of preparation, but we got there eventually. Coffee shop didn’t have the terminals, but the gift store did. And there was a nice muffin recipe book for £2.99. The lady conmented that they’d never used it before, quick hold of the card against the terminal & “Approved”. It actually works, genius.

So a Drobo is around £375, although Play.com had the old USB-only version for £320. 1Tb drive ~ £80. Putting this configuration into the Drobolator, the 1Tb drive gives 464Gb free, so I can copy over the data from the first 500Gb drive OK. When that’s inserted I’d have 464Gb of space. And if I somehow manage to get the data off the other, insert the disk then I’d have a total of 929Gb which is just enough. So £400 to protect the capacity I’ve already got, I can’t see the wife approving that. If I put an extra 500Gb or 1Tb then I gain something, for another £45-£80.

At work we’d purchased a couple of WD My Book Mirror Edition 2TB drives to use in RAID 0 mode to give us lots of quick space. As the name suggests, they do RAID 1 & come in that configuration (although formatted NTFS). £208 from Scan = 1Tb extra protected storage, a lot more affordable. Works out ~£50 for the enclosure, which isn’t bad value.

OK it’s only 2 drives, you can’t hot-swap them, both drives must be the same size & only WD are supported. On the plus side there’s a 3 year warranty, you don’t have to pay for software updates (you have to purchase Drobocare to get non-critical firmware after the first year) & if there are any warranty issues they’ll courier a new drive/chassis to you within a couple of days. Plus I can buy another one, have 2Tb of protected storage & still save a few £s. Also I have a couple of spare 500Gb drives, so one can go into my Buffalo NAS & the other be dedicated for Time Machine.