Not quite 48 hours to deliver, arrived 72 hours after I placed the order. Had to chase up with Neotel but the operators I spoke to where really efficient and always gave accurate information. A far cry from Telkom’s service, when of course you do eventually get to speak to human..

Back to the device. Neatly packed and consisting of three parts that needed some assembly. The hand piece, the battery (which I will talk about later) and the antenna. All fitted together fairly easily.

Neotel Phone

Back of Phone

From there, simply plugged in the transformer and pressed the phones ‘on’ button. Less than 20 sec later it was up and running.

Checked the signal strength (far left of the phones screen) and I had four bars. Dunno what the maximum is but probably five bars would indicate full signal strength. Making a call was straight forward. Voice quality is excellent! Probably better than our Telkom phone.

The phones menu is the usual garden variety, phone book, phone settings and or course screen display settings. Had that ‘banner’ feature where I have added our Companies name. Overall the phone build quality is not bad. The keys are a little clunky, the screen is clear but not fantastic. My only moan is I can’t seem to see where I can change the ring tone nor how I can turn down the volume of the ringing. There is a ’silent’, ‘Outdoor’ and ‘general’ mode but I would have preferred a volume dial. Turning down the headset volume also seems to be an issue. I personally find it a little loud. The conference / loudspeaker feature works well but again very loud.

What’s really great is the battery that comes with the phone. The sales gumff advises it can run the phone for three days. Haven’t tested that theory yet but possibly over optimistic. Or, it was based on ’standby’ mode only. I will be using the phone at another office every few days using battery power only. Will report back then.

Battery Compartment

The Neotel coverage maps seem out of date. Used the phone about 3Kms down the road where the maps said there was no coverage but managed 3 bars. Calls made and received where all very clear.

Overall, very impressed with Neotels service, voice quality and of course the cost of calls. The battery an added bonus.

With the financial crisis firmly upon us and pressure on the SOHO and SME markets to do ‘more with less’, I think it’s important for us at Janus IT to show clients various technologies that can make their companies more efficient.

Some technologies have been around for quite some time but are not well marketed hence less penetration in the South African market. Take Ubuntu for example, a community developed, Linux-based operating system managed in part (most part?)by Mark Shuttleworth. It’s a fantastic operating system that comes with OpenOffice (a free version of MS Office but with differences and limitations) and quite a few Email applications that compete well feature-for-feature with MS’s popular Outlook.

It’s all about your businesses requirements, getting past the marketing waffel and putting in a solution that fit’s your business need rather than listening to the ‘noise’ in the media. Why buy a Rolls Royce when what you really need is a Getz – particularly in these uncertain economic times.

Many of the technologies I talk about in this blog may not be suited to your business, in fact most probably won’t be. But one or two could be suitable and save your company some hard earned cash.

Today’s gadget is called the C-PEN. Simply a hand-held scanner just larger than a pen with a technology called: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – a big word for converting text on paper to text that can be saved electronically.

C-Pen

A user simply presses the pen onto the text, say in a magazine, and pulls the pen across the line of text. A tiny camera records the text underneath the pen and using the OCR software, converts the typed words into an electronic format  and inserts these into an electronic document such as a MS Word document. 

It’s a slick little gadget that works well for scanning lines of text but, in my experience not great for scanning articles or paragraphs of text. In the pharmaceutical market it could be used to scan product names or chemical entities that are difficult to spell and therefore error prone if human coders where to capture such data. Names, addresses on forms or invoice information that is paper based with no electronic copy available could easily be captured with this device.

There is quite a nice SDK kit that allows 3rd party applications to be written if your capturing requirements needed to be more specific than just having the text populate a MS Word document. The software does allow you to capture the text into a database field for example simply by highlighting the field. Once done, the C-Pen automatically populates the field highlighted.

Unfortunately these devices are not easily available in South Africa, we had to get ours off ebay. But if you want a demo, just give us a buzz.

About 5 years ago I purchased a Logitech io2 digital pen. It’s a pen with a built in camera.

You write on special stationary that has patterns on each page so the pen knows where it as it writes (probably the main downfall of the product actually) The technology was developed by Anoto and then licensed to various Companies that manufacture the pens and the paper.

So, what can you use it for? Apart from having an electronic backup of what you write instead of loose papers or books, I used to create an image of my notes such as minutes of meeting that could then be emailed onto people. It’s also nice to be able to save your hand written notes with your electronic documentation for a project for example. My Doctor uses the pen to write info relating to a patient which he then files with the patients other electronic records.

Probably the most useful aspect of the tool is if your company does surveys or has people complete questionnaires. The survey questions can be printed on the Anoto paper and if a person writes every letter in a block can be converted to electronic text. This can save companies significant amounts of coding resources that are probably slightly more inaccurate than using the digital pen and possibly a lot slower in getting the information into an electronic format.

Sadly the io2 pen has been discontinued (but still available new from many online stores). However, another company, LiveScribe that makes use of the Anoto technology has gone one better, they have added a voice recorder to the pen so while you are writing or drawing diagrams, the person/s voices talking to you are recorded. So, lets say you have taken notes at a conference or lecture, you simply click on the diagram or text where you want to find out what was said at that time and the pen plays back only from that part of the lecture.

The io2 pen has been a fantastic tool and we look forward to trying out the PulsePen.

Having finalised the purchase of Janus IT Solutions last week, it was time to look for an ‘office phone’. Only a year ago, there would have been no choice other than calling Telkom, waiting a month for a call back and possibly another few months for the installation – not to mention the onerous forms requiring completion in triplicate that would form part of the application process..

While I’m not a Telkom fan, there broadband ADSL offering is currently in a league of its own when comparing it to other broadband offerings. I say that from both cost and performance perspective and of course based on your requirement being for a fixed broadband offering. Any mobile broadband requirment is of course a different story and something I will cover in a later blog.

First and foremost, as with any purchase, one has to make an unbiased decision based on facts, What I call cutting through the ‘noise’ and finding the ‘tune’. Particularly with technology purchases, you have to really know your requirements and disregard all the nice-to-have’s that the products advertisers will have you believe are have-to-haves. 

Our requirments where:

• We needed a telephone to make and receive voice calls.
• If no one was in the office, the calls would be forwarded to our cell phones.
• If at all possible, it should be easily transferable if we moved office
• Probably most importantly, the call quality should be excellent.
• The rental cost should be competitive
• Call costs should be competitive

So, onto Telkom’s website, downloaded there price list and then onto Neotel’s website for there tariff guide. This Neotel page is also worth a visit if you want to see the ‘features’ of the Neotel device.

Without going through the comparative process in detail, probably worthless as your detailed requirments would differ from ours, one Neotel benefit that stood out was they bill per second from the start of the call. Telkomcharges a ‘minimum charge’ and then only charges per second. So, if you are doing cold calls in your marketing drive, you know that most of those calls normally end in less than a minute and there are of course many calls made. The Telkom cost would therefore be much higher in this case.

With VAT, Telkom’s local calls come in at 65c / min (minimum charge) and then 34c per minute after that. Neotel’s is charged at 0.34c / min with no minimum charge. Rental costs are R99 / per month for Neotel and R124.20 / per month for Telkom. 

The Neotel phone on the NeoConnect 99 option requires an outright purchase of the device costing R599.00. Looking at the monthly saving on rental, that was not a big price to pay. One also has to purchase a phone if going with Telkom but in fairness, these devices start at R150.00 if you really shop around so a bonus point there for Telkom.

Having the facts, we decided to go with Neotel. One simply logs onto there website, check that you have Neotel coverage in your area and then fill in the online application form. The online application form was not of the usual painful varieties either which was a welcome change.

I called Neotel a day later just to make sure the ball was rolling. Impressive was that the call was answered in under a minute. The operator wasn’t impressive but did manage to answer my simply query for an update on the application process. What was also nice is she was able to give me our new number – great for us as we could get the business cards and stationary sorted out more quickly.

We now await the device which should be delivered to us within ‘48 hours’ according to the marketing gumff.