DG834 resolved - v5 is where it's at

After much wrangling, I didn't get the Netcomm to work properly, the VPN was still no good and I was unable to get VOIP running across it. Fortunately I ran into an old buddy and he suggested using the v5 of the Netgear router. Lo and behold, it uses a Conexant chipset, not Broadcomm and I put two in, one at either end. Both have been very stable, no dropouts and the VPN works perfectly.

Following this small victory I then deployed one at home and it's working fantastically well. I've been hammering it too so it's all going along nicely and my VPN is working properly too.

While the Netcomm is undoubtedly a powerful device, the lack of configuration in the VPN side of things and the fact it won't send VOIP data properly are big strikes against it. I've redeployed one of these routers elsewhere and the user loves it so that's a win and no financial loss on my part.

The love affair with Netgear is renewed!

Things I'd like to see on the iPhone

The number one thing I'd like to see on the iPhone is to be able to turn push mail on and off according to time automatically. My venerable e66 had this - it would check my mail faithfully throughout the day between 8am and 6pm and then stop. It did wonders for the battery life and for my sleep patterns. If I inadvertantly forget to disable this when I go to bed, nagios wakes me up as it's monitoring failing servers or systems.

In fact, the ability to have auto on/off dependent on time is something that the iPhone could apply to a bunch more things too - like changes of ringtones etc. It's probably too hard to do for Apple so as my old dad says - wish in one hand and pee in the other and see which hand fills up the quickest!

The other thing I'd like is for a slightly more robust design, but hey - you can't have everything. My Motorola Backflip (MB300) is more rugged and seems to go pretty well.