So, who has the best cloud? Gartner has been looking into that for you and the results are in. Amazon's Web Services and Microsoft Azure are the top two with a combination of maturity, ability to execute and a completeness of vision. As cloud technologies have evolved people are no longer looking for simply some rented space for data storage but are demanding more functionality. They also want stable availability, good security along with great performance. Of the eight vendors examined, IBM and Oracle finished at the bottom showing that just having a long history doesn't necessarily keep you near the top.
While finishing on top of the ratings, Microsoft and Amazon are far from perfect. Neither did well in the technical support department. If you are a Microsoft shop however, it would be hard to choose anything else but Azure. Google came in as a good solid choice behind the leaders, but their services aren't yet as broad. You also need to take care as their discounts often last for only the first year.
Oracle is a relatively late entry to the cloud market and has a good engineering plan for the future. As of now it is a basic product and uses high-pressure sales tactics to encourage people to invest in the platform. They can even threaten to raise licensing costs for Oracle users if they look elsewhere for their cloud needs.
For the nerd who has everything Seagate has developed a portable drive and battery for the HTC Vive Focus virtual reality headset. It contains 1TB of storage and has a microB cable with USB C adaptor along with a belt clip. It also comes with a microSD slot supporting up to 2TB of extra memory. The best part is you can connect it to your HTC U12+ mobile phone, the not-so-good part is that might be the only product it can connect to. Not sure what goes on in the minds of manufacturers, but it is not all good.
According to Canalys, Garmin is now the No.2 smartwatch vendor worldwide. Garmin doesn't run any third-party apps proving that you don't really need them -- or a platform -- to be successful. It does have a lot of different watch faces as I have noted before; customers want their watches to primarily tell time. The Garmin devices can't make phone calls or book you an Uber but again, people don't seem to care because their phones can handle those chores. Apple is still in first place with 3.8 million units shipped in the first quarter of 2018. Garmin sold 1 million.
You can make mobile payments using your Garmin watch along with fitness tracking stuff and notifications. What more is really needed from a wrist mounted device? I'm willing to wager that after the first day or so most people settle down to one or two apps on their watch using the rest on their phone. In other related news, AndroidOS has reached version 1.0 allowing manufacturers to provide the same basic stuff that the Garmin product does. Without all that bloatware it is expected that watches will now last days instead of hours on a charge, that being the one other thing you want from a watch -- longer battery life.
The OnePlus phone, made by the same people who bring you the Oppo, is up to version 6. The display is 19:9 with an OLED panel. It has a glass back and the alarm slider is still there. You still don't get waterproofing or wireless charging or an SD card slot. The audio is not top of class, but it does come in a 258GB model with 8GB of RAM. Pricing is also sub-flagship so it sits in that slot for the person who doesn't need all the fancy features but still wants a decent phone.
Too bad if you live in Australia and have always ordered form Amazon UK or the US because from the middle of the year you will only be able to buy from Amazon Oz at the higher prices. This is all thanks to the Australian government declaring that any foreign seller must add 10% government sales tax to all sales. The real question is whether or not eBay is going to cut Australians out of all the other global vendors, limiting them to the higher prices and substandard selection of goods in the 24 million-people country's local market.
Finally for this week, PGP still works just fine. If you have heard some rumours about an email client being unsecure and blaming PGP, the fault lies with the client implementation and not the PGP portion that is working just fine in many other systems.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.