Outlook.com Android App Needs Fixing

I've updated my apps on my Nexus 4 phone and it removed the Hotmail app and updated it to the Outlook.com app. This was a big mistake, here are the reasons why this app is so awful.

• The font size from where the email came from is to large, this needs to be a setting.
• The background is white, with Hotmail it was black and looked better, this also needs to be a setting.
• Sent a single email to myself, 1 appear as expected on the web site, but I received 2 on the phone.
• Email from the app does not include the message signature.

Overall this app is very simple and does not feel as if it has been finished, Microsoft really should have done more testing and finished it before sending it out. I think it needs far more settings to enable the user to customise the look and feel. Poor show again Microsoft, please fix this app ASAP.

iPhone Sofa - Terrible idea?

I recently saw that a furniture company had manufactured a sofa that included an iPhone dock and speakers. This is an example of someone or a group of people desperately trying to think of something new, here are some reasons why this is an awful idea.

• Sofa space is taken up by a rather large dock.
• Speakers cannot be move to the best place in the room.
• It is fixed to a specific phone so if you change your phone you will need to change your sofa or have a redundant dock.
• It's not the future, surely the best solution is to control your music from holding the phone and not having to plug it into anything. This means the only use for the sofa apart from sitting on it, is as a charger for your phone.

The more I think about it the more I think it is a ridiculous idea, will be interesting to see what the next thing they do is, to try to sell a sofa.

How to unprotect an Excel workbook

I have an Excel workbook which is protected by a password, so that when you try to open it in MS Excel it requires a password. I needed to transfer this file so it was an Apple Numbers file. Numbers cannot open Excel files that have password protection, so I needed to find a way to unprotect the document open it in Numbers and then save the document as a new Numbers file.

The help in Excel did not give me a solution, but eventually I worked out how it is done, and it is not a case of removing the password protection, here is how to do it.

1) Open the Excel file and enter the password.
2) Click 'Save As' to open the save as dialog.
3) In the bottom left hand corner click on the 'Tools' button.
4) Select 'General Options'
5) This will open a password dialog which will allow you to remove the password and save the file.

This solution makes sense and that once you have added a password on a file the only way of removing it is to save it as another file with the password removed.

Top Free Android Apps

I have been using my Nexus 4 phone for 3 months now, below is my list of my favourite free Android Apps, I have excluded the usual Facebook, Twitter and BBC News apps.

1. Hotmail - View emails, I prefer this app over Google mail.
2. IMDB - I use this app more than I thought, contains loads on info on any movie.
3. Autotrader - View cars for sale
4. Rightmove - Useful app if looking for property
5. Wikipedia - Everyone knows this one.
6. Nectar - View your balance and subscribe to special offers
7. Task List - List of jobs and tasks that can be separated into different sesctions
8. Real Racing 3 - great racing sim

Broadband speed tests between Apple and Windows

The IPS I use at the moment is BT Infinity, which sells itself as a high speed broadband supplier. I thought recently I would try to check what speed I was getting

Below are some results of speed checking web sites. I concentrated on just the download speeds and on both iOS and Windows I used Google Chrome as the browser.

Speedtest.net
Apple - 37 mbps
Windows XP - 3.19 mbps
Android App - 14 mbps

BroadbandSpeedChecker.co.uk
Apple - 34 mbps
Windows XP - 3.38 mbps

I was surprised to see such a difference in the results. The results are the best I could archive and are not the average, but you can see a clear difference between Apple and Windows. I tried the speed tests on 2 different Windows XP machines and got similar results, so concluded at the time that it was not the hardware.

The following day, I looked at just using my Mac with a Windows virtual machine installed, here are the results:


Speedtest.net
Apple - 19.8 mbps
Windows - 17.8 mbps

BroadbandSpeedChecker.co.uk
Apple - 13.5 mbps
Windows - 5.9 mbps


You can see that the following day the speed was generally less, this could be the time of day and other factors, but these results are using the same hardware, just different operating systems to run the browser. Speedtest.net web site does seem to get very similar results, which would hint that different hardware (same router) could make a difference, but with BroadbandSpeedChecker it seems that different operating systems also make a difference.

In conclusion I think these speed testing web sites are a useful tool, however I am still not confident on how accurate they are and do not understand why Apple iOS gets such better results.