Gadget day here at Chez Geoff. First, I finally got my iPhone 3G this morning. After my frustrating wait in line a week or so ago, I spent an age on the phone with AT&T Customer Service to make sure that my account was unencumbered. All clear. Then last night I checked in at the iPhone availability page at Apple.com, and saw that the Bellevue was going to have inventory. According to the website, the store opened at 9:30, so I planned to arrive at 8:00. I did so, to find a dozen people in line ahead of me, and the store open for business! After an hour I reached the head of the line, got a 16GB white phone, and headed home. It took nearly half an hour to transfer the saved state of my old iPhone to the new one; while I was doing this, I was erasing all of the data on the old iPhone. (Apple finally realized that it was important to get this bit right: with the 2.0 software, erasing an 8GB iPhone takes over an hour! That’s thorough.)
Meanwhile, my new camera arrived. For the last couple of years I’ve used two cameras: a tiny Casio Exilim S600, and a bulky Kodak P850. Both are low-res by current standards (6MP and 5MP respectively), which is not necessarily a bad thing, and the Kodak does decent RAW and zooms to 12x. The trouble was the weight/bulk of the Kodak. Over the last two years I’ve relied almost exclusively on the Casio; yesterday I found myself literally “dusting off” the Kodak. And as a tourist camera, the Casio is far from ideal. Yes, it’s conveniently small, but the relatively narrow field and 3x zoom are really limiting. I think that my trip to Beijing was the final straw: I was continually frustrated while trying to capture the sweep and grandeur of the Forbidden City.
So yesterday I ordered myself a Panasonic DMC-TZ4 from Amazon, along with a spare battery and an 8GB(!) SD card. 8.1MP, 10x optical zoom, nice wide-angle Leica lens. It’s my seventh digital camera, and like all of them (except the Kodak) it cost under $300. Why not the DMC-TZ5? Partly to save a little money, and partly because I’m still not convinced that I need that many pixels. (The lower resolution means that I’ll get a couple of hundred more pictures on my SD card with the TZ4.)
Hopefully the weather in Chennai will give me the opportunity to put the camera through its paces.
UPDATE: Per dpreview, it appears that I need to update the firmware in my camera. Why am I not surprised?