Category: Gadgets

I just got myself a new Sony PSP. Here are a few random thoughts accumulated over the last couple of days.

• Sheer computing power. Two 32-bit CPUs (MIPS R4000@333MHz), a GPU capable of 35 million polygons/sec…. More specs here.

• As soon as I’d configured the WiFi to access my home network, the PSP phoned home for a software update.

• Where’s the web browser? Yes, I know the trick with the embedded game browser, but that doesn’t count. My guess is that Sony will wait until they’re ready to support streaming video on demand.

• Standards, bloody standards. The PSP manual says that it takes a USB cable with a “mini-B connector”. I bought one… it didn’t fit. Eventually I got a different “mini-B” cable that worked OK.

• Several nice packages for the Mac to sync with the PSP, including PSPWare and iPSP. I’m testing them both before picking one and shelling out the registration fee. PSPWare is OK so far, though the iTunes integration needs work. (It only supports MP3, not Apple’s AAC, but if you give it a playlist of AAC files to sync it does nothing, silently. It could let me know….) It uses Quicktime to convert video files into the special MP4 format used by the PSP, and the conversion rate isn’t too good on my 867MHz PowerBook.

• Video blogging?! I found ANT, which is very cool. Engadget has a piece on how to make ANT and PSPWare play nicely together. The result? PSP-casting…

• The games, oh yes… I got Ridge Racer (auto racing) and Darkstalkers Chronicle (2D fighter). So far I’ve spent most of my time with Ridge Racer, alternating between game play and open-mouthed amazement at the graphics. I’m waiting for Ghost in the Shell, which looks like it’ll be the hottest FPS.

• Good grief, not another proprietary disk format! Will they never learn? (Probably not.) And why does Sony have to keep pushing its own flash memory format, the Memory Stick Duo? Yes, OK, prices are competitive (it comes with a 32MB card; I bought a 512MB replacement), but still….

• Bottom line: it’s stunning. Graphics are better than the PS2, WiFi, audio. Please can Namco do a PSP SoulCalibur? Pretty please? The only potential weakness I can see is the battery: Sony’s claims of 4-10 hours have translated into 3-4 for gaming, less if the WiFi is in use.

Went test driving cars today. First stop was a Toyota dealership a few miles south of us. Their website said they had a couple of 2005 Priuses in stock, but no… they had a pre-owned 2004 (whose owner had traded up to a 2005), they were expecting one from a cancelled order to arrive in a week (“if you’d like to put down a deposit”), and otherwise the delivery time was around a month. (Longer for red – 36% of the Prius deliveries are in silver, only 13% in red.)

But at least I could test drive the 2004. Very smooth, very comfortable. I was a bit tentative, in part because I wasn’t sure what would feel different, but in the end I was very pleased. The system status screen is fascinating, and the sensation of everything shutting down when you stop is… different. Dealership experience? We got a generic car salesman, no overt pressure but trying to weave a web of commitment.

From there we went down to the Subaru dealership where Merry has bought two out of her last three cars. Her regular salesman wasn’t there, but we worked with a young guy who was both an excellent salesman and a complete geek. (We spent almost as much time checking out his PSP and my Treo 650 as we did talking cars.) I was interested in the WRX, but he steered me to the new Legacy GT – the one with the 250 hp 2.5 litre turbo and a Tiptonic-style automatic with shift switches on the steering wheel. Man, that was a fast car! We drove around some nice sweeping backstreet curves and then onto I-95, where I got to check out the acceleration from 40 to 80 fast…. Unlike my tentative, experimental drive in the Prius, I got out of the Legacy with a big, silly grin all over my face. That was fun! (Thanks, Cody!)

So: two great cars, two very different experiences; about the same price. Both Car of the Year winners – the Prius in the US, the Legacy in Japan. Decisions, decisions. Anyway, there’s no rush. Maybe I should test a Mini Cooper.

I just acquired my fourth digital camera. I got my first in Washington DC many years ago, a relatively simple Kodak. I can’t remember what the second was; I lost it on a business trip. The third was a Fuji FinePix which I eventually gave to my son. And the fourth is a Nikon Coolpix 5600.

I’ve never been a real photography geek; I’ve tended to buy cameras that do the job required as simply as possible. For digital cameras, I’ve had a simple rule: buy the best possible for under $300. The Nikon qualifies. It came with a free 128MB SD card, which I’ve swapped for the 1GB SD card in my Treo 650. This means that I have room for 790 pictures (5.1MP) or 21 minutes of 640×480 video (with sound). That should be enough. (Typical British understatement.)

After getting my Treo 650, I found that I couldn’t access any data (GPRS) services – mail, messaging, web surfing, etc. This was odd, since the folks at the Cingular store had sold me a data plan to accompany my chosen voice plan. I spent several hours last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on the phone to Cingular [thank heavens for phone headsets – at least I could get on with my work while I was on hold], discussing why my data services weren’t working. Everyone I talked to assured me that they had the situation in hand, were working on it, would resolve it shortly….
On Thursday I finally got to talk to a Data Services Specialist. He immediately told me that the reason for my problem was simple: I’d been sold the wrong plan. I’d been offered a choice between an unlimited data plan ($29.99/mo) and a limited plan ($19.99/mo); feeling cheap, I’d chosen the latter. The DSS told me that neither of these plans would support the Treo; I needed a $29.99 $39.99 “PDA Plan”, which included unlimited data and some other stuff. Sigh. Several hours later (and a power cycle), I was in business.
At first I cynically thought that this was just a trick to get me into an unlimited data plan, but after watching the Blazer web browser doing its thing for a while I realized that it made sense. Unlike WAP browsers optimized for minimal feeds, this is a full-blown HTTP(S) browser. I can open my home page and suck down a quarter of a meg in a few seconds; clearly I would blow through any limited data plan in a couple of days. (Of course this doesn’t explain why a Cingular salesperson sold me an unusable plan, and why customer support failed to identify the problem for three days.)
The great news is that the email client supplied by Palm supports full SSL-secured IMAP and SMTP, which means I can access my Sun email through our “Edgemail” gateway. This is going to be phenomenally useful….
[NOTE CORRECTION TO PLAN PRICE]

As I blogged a couple of days ago, my experiment with a “back to basics” cellphone didn’t work out. So today I stopped by the Cingular store at Coolidge Corner to replace the Motorola V551 with a Treo 650. Herewith a few comments, observations, complaints.

• First and foremost, it’s a PalmOS device. Over the years I’ve owned various Palm Pilot and Handspring devices, but none recently. (All of my devices had Dragonball chips, which dates them.) The Treo felt instantly familiar.
• It feels like a nice phone, though I’ve only made and received a few calls; I haven’t really explored it yet. The address book only contains the few entries I’d stored on the SIM card in the V551. I haven’t yet figured out how to juggle the info in the PalmOS Contacts app and the SIM. Similarly I haven’t tried voice or speed dialling.
• Synchronization with the Mac went just fine, first with the supplied USB cable, and then via Bluetooth. The Palm Desktop is a bit prettier than I remember it, but it’s not what I’m planning to rely on. I want to sync with the OS X apps – iCal, Address Book, iPhoto, and so forth. So…
• I bought a copy of MarkSpace‘s Missing Sync, a vastly superior synchronization solution. Speaking of which…
• Missing Sync supports the mounting of the Treo’s SD card on the Mac desktop, making it easy to export a bunch of MP3 files from iTunes or grab a video clip from the Treo. SD card? What SD card? Hmmm… I had read several stories about how Palm was going to include a free 64MB SD card with every Treo 650, because of the bad publicity they got over the device’s limited storage. (They changed the memory management model, so that storage of small objects became much less efficient.) I guess their embarrassment was short-lived, because no SD card was provided with my unit. Oh well, 512MB cards are getting pretty cheap….
• Another cool feature of Missing Sync is Internet Sharing: connecting to the Internet from the PalmOS device through your computer. Of course this would bypass Cingular’s (revenue-generating) network, so I was disappointed, but not really surprised, to find that the Cingular-supplied Treo 650 was restricted: you couldn’t create an Internet Connection profile other than the predefined Cingular GPRS set-up. Shucks….

Overall, I’m delighted with the unit. It’s pretty much what I imagined as the perfect hand-held device a few years ago. I guess my expectations will always run ahead of my budget; I’d like to see more memory, 802.11, and a better camera. But the screen is gorgeous, the keyboard is really easy to work with, and the fit and finish is superb.

As I noted earlier, I replaced my old Nokia 3650 with a Motorola V551. I thought hoped that the inability to sync with my Mac via Bluetooth wouldn’t be a big deal. I was wrong. I tried syncing using a friend’s USB cable, and it was a hit-and-miss affair. Furthermore I couldn’t transfer photos, video clips or data between the two. I guess Motorola and Cingular want to force me to use billable air time and bandwidth to move stuff around.

The other thing I realized is that I’ve gone off flip phones. Over the years I’ve had both fixed and flip units, and I guess I forgot how inconvenient it can be to flip open a phone one-handed. If I was planning to use my headset all the time, a flip might be OK, but I’m not. Oh, well. Cingular has a 30 day no-questions return policy, so I’ll probably trade the V551 in for a Treo 650 some time in the next few days.

After my recent rant about the lamentable state of the US cellphone market, I calmed down. What am I really looking for? I’ve already got a decentadequate digital camera; I’ve got a Bluetooth mouse, so I don’t need to use my phone as a remote control for my PowerBook (plus I won’t always be using my PowerBook – more in a week or two). I need a basic cellphone that has decent battery life, good signal reception, good audio, and an easy UI. I use the WAP! portal! to! My! Yahoo! a lot, so decent GPRS (EDGE) is a plus. Oh, and I’d like a usable hands-free solution, rather than that earbud-on-a-string that always seems to get tangled in my seatbelt.
So today, after my Nokia 3650 spontaneously powered off for the umpteenth time, I picked up a Motorola V551, along with a Motorola Bluetooth headset. Let’s see how it goes. I’ve noted one annoyance already: Motorola and Apple don’t agree about Bluetooth, so to use iSync I’ll have to get a cable. And when I select silent or vibrate mode I’d like a really clear indication of this in the external display. But on balance, I like it. It feels right; menus are mostly clear; the multimedia stuff is ignorable; the screen is dazzling; predictive text entry is a little easier than I’m used to; IM and email is a snap. The battery claims are impressive; we’ll see what reality is like.
Oh, yes, I did have one more criterion: that the price be low enough that if the perfect phone comes along tomorrow I won’t feel like a schmuck.

James Lileks, on how owning the latest gear from Apple makes you… well, better: cool, more hip, just a superior kind of human being. But as he admits “On the other hand, I must be honest. Those of us who are true Apple devotees will buy almost anything they make. We know it, and we don’t care. If they came out with an iPod RiceGrain that was implanted under your skin and played six notes, I’d buy it.”

For the last year or two, I’ve been using a Nokia 3650 cell phone. It’s quite a nice unit – BlueTooth, a decent screen, Java, a few cool apps (including remote control of my PowerBook), a basic camera, international roaming via GSM – but it’s getting a little long in the tooth. Recently it’s taken to powering off spontaneously, which is a little tedious. So it’s time to look for a new phone.

There are lots of really cool phones out there these days.

• 3G phones like Motorola’s gorgeous A1000
• the latest version of Nokia’s intriguing Communicator, the 9500
• Sony Ericsson’s cool S700 and amazing P910i
• The “Imate” family, such as O2’s XDA IIs and XDA II mini (sold under various other names)
• the Treo 650, where palmOne finally got it (mostly) right
• even HP, with their iPaq 6315 – like the Imate, this include WiFi

I’m sure I’ve missed some. But they all have one thing in common: none of them are available from my phone company. I’m with AT&T Wireless, now merged with Cingular, which makes it unquestionably the biggest GSM provider in the USA. And what do they have for phones? Crap. Or, rather, vanilla, with a few teasers like the Motorola V3 RAZR. I suppose I could switch to T-Mobile, just to get the Treo 650, but the odds are that next time I’m in the market it will be their turn to be behind. Do I really have to buy an unlocked phone? (I know: I’m cheap. But why not?) Don’t the US providers want my business? Do they really think that Blackberry has sewn up the high end market? (It hasn’t.) Or do they only care about the 12-25 year old market? (Dumb.)

What’s wrong with the US market? Why are all the exciting wireless innovations happening in Japan and Europe? And how much would an unlocked O2 XDA IIs cost me….?

(I didn’t bother to take the time to hyperlink all of those phones and companies. You know where to find them. One of my favorite sites for drooling over unattainable gadgetry is Mobile Phones UK. Please wipe the saliva off your keyboard afterwards.)

OK, I admit it: the only reason to blog about this was because I couldn’t resist using this subject line. As CNET reports, Samsung is launching a motion-sensitive mobile phone: “Samsung said the phone is also able to recognize and translate more complex movements, including dialing numbers drawn in the air using the handset or recognizing an ‘o’ or an ‘x’ drawn in the air as a yes or no command. “ I imagine they’ll use “gumby” clips from Monty Python in the TV ads…

(Via L’Inq.)