Our PC3 meeting for January featured a presentation on a subject many of us have been dealing with for some time – SmartPhones: “Everything You’ve Wanted to Know about SmartPhones”.

Our program was presented by a particularly knowledgeable team of professionals in this area, Charles Canady, Amy Johnson and Zach Pulliam. Charles is the Cell Phone Department Manager for Best Buy at the Midtown location and Amy and Zach are Sales Associates. As such they represent most of the major cell phone brands and are leading resellers of SmartPhones in this region. Charles has been working in this business for 10+ years. Charles and his associates, Amy and Zach, did a great job of presenting this cutting edge technology in a way we could all understand and relate to. They demonstrated a number of phones, and gave us their opinions on the issues involved with each. This turned out to be a great source of information and recommendations. Thanks to Charles and his associates for an interesting and informative presentation.

We took advantage of this first meeting of the New Year to steer the PC3 into somewhat new territory. Our program covered a side of personal computing that has captured more and more of the public’s attention: SmartPhones. That is the convergence of mobile telephony, computing and web browsing all rolled into one handily portable device.

Everyone in our club has a cell phone of some sort. Several of our members have recently upgraded to the more sophisticated SmartPhones. Many, however, including yours truly, are still checking in on old flip or bar feature phones. I can tell you I’ve been looking for some time and what I’ve found is that from one month to the next more new products are displayed and they just get more complex. There are so many variables to consider: cost, of course; geographical coverage; number of calls, texts, internet usage per month and features such as Apps, Support, Bluetooth, 3G or 4G bandwidth and on and on. At some point I think we all realize we’re all going to have to find a way to deal with these issues.

Cell phones are evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up with what’s available let alone make an informed decision which one best fits your needs. Our meeting was a big step forward in coming to grips with all this. Our speakers, the Consumer Reports Magazine article and Bill Barnes’ Newsletter article were great assets in getting ahead of these issues. Getting a handle on what the local experts are saying was particularly helpful: What brands and models do they like? Who can support these technological marvels most effectively? What are the best deals right now? All questions we got answers for as the presentation unfolded.

Again, thanks to all our contributors for an exciting and instructive meeting.

Special kudos to Bill Haney – winner of the Kindle Touch!

We had a great meal – Beef Wellington! – with salad, veges and pumpkin cheesecake. Once again a fantastic dinner and good folks to talk too.

The Personal Computer Club of Charlotte [PC3] had an exciting meeting last Thursday, October 13th. Our program topic “Taking Facebook to the Next Level” was a rousing success. Nicole LaPointe conducted a workshop for us which allowed us to try out many of the new Facebook features. Nicole did an outstanding job of balancing the introduction of new material with the practical application of day to day use. Thanks to Nicole for an interesting and informative presentation and her patience in helping us learn to deal with Facebook. 

Using Facebook is, like most applications, just a matter of figuring out where the bells and whistles are and getting use to using them. Just using it is one thing, using it safely and effectively is another. There are a couple of issues, security issues, lying in wait out there: One is knowing how your Facebook output will translate to friends who see it. Another is being aware of where your information will appear; that is, who can see it. Public, in terms of Facebook’s reach, now means 800 million people could be viewing your most intimate details… and your boss may be one of them.

While Facebook is primarily a personal networking medium, it does support an organization page format. The organization page is somewhat different than the personal page: for one thing it doesn’t so much track “friends” but rather “likes”. It can, however, be and is used extensively for business development, particular for small business. Non-profit organizations fall somewhere between small business and this area of personal communication. Facebook may, in fact, be an ideal fit for nonprofits like us.

We focused the program on using the personal Facebook pages. However, we think Facebook is a great medium for getting the word out about our PC group. We have tailored our PCCC FaceBook Page to communicate with you the members, but we are relying on you to pass notices and messages on to your “friends”. I trust this workshop prepared you to do that and we’ll expect to see lots of new members at our meetings in the future as a result.