I’ve implemented some of the Twitter Bootstrap goodness and also made sure the website passes the W3C Markup Validation Service (apart from the blog!)

I’m no web designer so would love to get some feedback on the site and any suggestions to improve it.

Please post at the bottom or use the contact form - https://sysadminman.net/contact.php

Thanks!

The Scroll Extreme is a 9.7″ tablet and runs Android 4.0 – Ice Cream Sandwich.

Hardware

The battery took a few hours to fully charge from shipping. It has a separate charging port, rather than just charging via the micro-usb port. The manual says you can charge via the micro-usb port although it will ‘trickle charge’ so I’m not sure how long that would take. It’s got a pretty large 7,800mAH battery (11,666mAH in the New iPad!).

It’s got a matte silver finish on the back and feels pretty secure to hold. It’s fairly heavy to support with one hand. I couldn’t find the weight listed on the website but I make it around 650g. That compares to the ‘New iPad’ which is 652g (WiFi version).

Screen

The screen is pretty nice with a good viewing angle. With the brightness turned up the screen is bright. I’m sure it doesn’t compare with the screen on the New iPad but it’s certainly usable. I image only when holding the 2 side by side would you be disappointed with the Extreme’s screen. It’s going to be more than adequate for web browsing, e-mail, video …

Wifi

As expected these days there was no issue connecting to my WiFi, which uses WPA2 PSK.

Sound

Sound it tinny on full volume but I guess that’s to be expected. It’s not overly loud either, but there is a 3.5in audio jack for headphones.

Speed

Switching between applications is quick and so far (after only around an hours use!) the tablet feels responsive. Youtube loaded quickly and web browsing with the built in browser was pretty good.

Apps – Google Play

I read a lot before I purchased the Extreme about not being able to access the Google Store (Google Play now). This was a bit of a disappointment  but I just figured I’d use the SlideMe store that was recommended. However, after signing in to my Google account it seems my Extreme DOES have Google Play installed, and the screenshots are below to prove it. The only weird thing seems that sometimes it does appear in the list of installed apps, and sometimes it doesn’t! I’m not really sure why this is so far but will post more if I find out.

Conclusion

I’m glad I went for the Extreme. I didn’t want to spend £400 on a tablet I might not use much. The Extreme seems fast enough, and well built enough for what I need. Being able to get on the Google store is definitely an added bonus.

FusionPBX is the first template available from SysAdminMan to use Freeswitch instead of Asterisk.

More details about this solution can be found here - http://sysadminman.net/fusionpbx-hosting.html

FusionPBX is different to the other templates as it is not based on FreePBX. Some guides to get you started can be found here -

• http://sysadminman.net/blog/2012/fusionpbx-getting-started-setting-up-an-extension-3568
• http://sysadminman.net/blog/2012/fusionpbx-getting-started-making-an-outbound-call-3585
• http://sysadminman.net/blog/2012/fusionpbx-getting-started-receiving-an-inbound-call-3601
• http://sysadminman.net/blog/2012/fusionpbx-getting-started-conference-room-3682

Sometimes I think a blog is not the best platform for documentation. It’s a bit unstructured but I like having the date articles were published as documentation soon goes out of date.

So here are some of the figures collected by Google Analytics over the past year. I’m not sure there’s any really reliable stats systems, but Google Analytics relies on the client running Javascript so it’s probably as good as it gets.

In the past 12 months there have been around 121,000 visits, with just over 75,000 from unique IP addresses. Pretty good I think for a small blog about VOIP! The traffic is growing month on month. The busiest days are weekdays, with a slight drop off at the weekends.

There are a good proportion of visitors that return to the site. with over 46,000 IP visitors returning. Some of the how-to’s are quite long and I’m sure people have to keep re-reading to figure out exactly what I meant!

A huge proportion of the traffic comes form Google, with other search engines way down the list. This shows just how dominant Google are in the field of search.

And I guess not surprisingly most of my viewers are not using Internet Explorer. With Firefox top and Google Chrome second in the choice of browsers. However, Google Chrome has become more popular just looking at later months, rather than back over the previous year.

So my plan is to keep writing more (hopefully!) interesting posts and we’ll see what the visitor numbers look like in another year!

• CentOS 5.7
• Asterisk 1.8.7.1
• FreePBX 2.9
• A2billing 1.9.4

For more information please see the website here – http://sysadminman.net/sysadminman-freepbx-a2billing-hosting.html

So far I’ve only used the basic e-mail to SMS but there a comprehensive API so you can integrate sending SMS messages in to your application.

The price is pretty competitive but, for me at least, the most important thing is reliability. I’ve only sent around 75 SMS messages so far but there have been no problems at all, and delivery was very quick.

There are also related services such as – inbound SMS messages, short-code numbers and MMS messages.

Check them out here – www.txtlocal.co.uk

Thank you for your support!

Matt.

If you don’t know what Sitelinks are they’re the direct links that come up under some websites in Google search results, link this -

You can’t pay for them, and you don’t request them, Google generates them automatically when it considers your site is ‘popular’ enough.

Also, according to Google Analytics the SysAdminMan Blog receives around 20,000 pageviews and 7,000 unique visitors per month.

It can definitely take some getting used to, but once you’ve got the hang of it you won’t want to switch back to a normal on-screen keyboard.

There is an open beta at the moment so why not sign up and give it a go - www.swypeinc.com/index.html