Memory Cards



Memory Stick

Anyone need a Memory Stick Pro Duo? Well I did, but ever since the Sony PSP came it the price has gone up around $20. That is not bad, but at least Amazon.com still has some in stock and is shipping right away. Good thing too :-)

My Profile and Me

Everytime I tell people about my new blog I get the same questions, "What is that in your profile pic? Is that you? Is that your room? Whose legs & feet are in that picture?"

So to put your minds at easy here is my easy step-by-step answers to your inquires.

1. What is that in your profile pic? Its a picture of a room with stuff in it. Namely there are some legs and feet in the top right, a bed with a huge rectangle pillow in the middle and some hardwood floors all around. Ok, ok, ok... the thing on the bed is a huge pillow iPod shuffle: some people have too much time on their hands. Oh and Apple would be interested in that since I think it might be a little bit of Trademark / patent infringement.
2. Is that you? Does that look anything like me? I mean sure its only a tiny bit of the body, but unless you are talking about the iPod Shuffle on the bed then no its not me. It won't ever be me because most pictures of me are really dorky or when I am drunk er... Studying. This also answers the question of whose feet & legs are in the picture ... not me.
3. Is that your room? For all you curious females out there, no this is not my room. My room is much nicer. In fact I will tease you will a picture of my baller bathroom (Koehler, American Standard all bow before my porcelain throne)

(Picture from luxist.com)

Acura NSX transformed into a Ferrai F50

Crazy Car Modification - Japanese Styling: Think that Japaense cars are the best in the world? Sure they have great reliability, value and performance for the price, but they lack the emotion of something like say a ... Ferrari. Voom! Voom!! Vooooooommmmm!!!! If an NSX is not enough car for you just fly half way around the world and pay a bunch of money and wait a long time for you new er... newer car. Maybe it should be a Ferraro? LINK [found on j-body.org]

Before



After

Do cell phone companies track your every move?

I have received quite a few e-mails and phone calls over the past few years asking if cell phone companies track people through the GPS and/or cell signal in their phones. This was a pretty ridiculous consideration a few years ago when most mobiles were much less than the entertainment and communication devices we see today. I still remember back-in-the-day when my family got a cellular telephone built into our Mercedes Benz SEL560. It was an option for the low, low price of $1,400 or something and airtime ran a few $ (yes whole dollars) per minute. There was no such thing as text messages or digital services, it was all analog all the time. How far we have come...

But in answer to the question about cell phone companies tracking you, the answer is yes & no. It all depends on how paranoid you are and how much you believe me or not :-)

Perhaps we should turn to a more reputable source of information:
The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams

Olympus m:robe 500i



During the Superbowl some or all of you may have seen the new Olympus ads for the m:robe 500i, their new combination music player and digital camera with 20 gigabytes of storage. The ads were stragely "modern" with scenes of old coupes, young hipsters and just about everything in between "locking" (a style of modern dance/performance). The reviews are starting to trickle in and looks like there will be no fireworks or small parade for Olympus, one reviewer even titled his review of the m:robe 500i as "Review: m:robe 500i basically a shiny brick." Without further hassle I bring you an honest review of a prodcut that probably cost Olympus quite a few million of dineros to advertise.

Seattle Post Reviews Olympus' new "shiny brick"

I have decided to move the site onto a permanet domain. Right now its looking like I will go with either Dreamhost or Namecheap to register the domain. Thinking about hosting on dreamhost too since I already have an account there, but not sure. I use Ripplehost for my personal page and HostPC for the HerbAsia hosting + Dreamhost for the College Artist stuff.

Choosing a proper URL is actually a difficult task. It must be punchy, popular, easy to remember, short enough to type in and visually appealing. Plus its hard to ask for opinions because so many of the good names would be taken if I mentioned them here in the blog. Many large domain companies just register millions of names and squat on them until someone wants to pay them 100x more for the site. Disgusting. Oh well, enough of off topic stuff. Just wanted to let everyone know that they can expect a much more professional and polished site. :-)

T-Mobile Sidekick II (Danger Hiptop II) Review

Review T-mobile's massive marketing campaign for its RIM-made 7100t is proof enough that the mobile phone networks believe that businesses are desperate for mobile email and that they think most handsets' SMS-oriented keypads won't hack it. It's not just the networks - PDA vendors on both sides of the Palm OS-Windows Mobile divide are touting email on the move for businesses as a key feature of their products.

But what about consumers? Are they as hungry for mobile messaging - email, SMS, MMS and IM - that they'll opt for a device dedicated to the function? It's offered by T-Mobile as the Sidekick 2 and by Suncom as the Hiptop, and by all accounts it has built up a respectable user base in the "hundreds of thousands", according to our sources.

On the basis of a couple of weeks spent using the latest generation of the device, it's not hard to see why. The second-generation Hiptop is a more compact device than its predecessor, the better to appeal to phone buyers, and with a button layout designed to make handheld games console users feel right at home. Out of the box, the device presents you with its 3.5in colour display. There are our large buttons in each of the corners, separated on the left by a D-pad that doubles up as the speaker, and, on the right, by a scroll-wheel and call make and break button cluster.

On the back is the VGA digicam with flash and large self-portrait mirror. The right side is home to an earphone jack, power socket and, under a cover, a USB 2.0 port. There are two further console-style buttons on the top of the device, positioned for index-finger usage, and power and volume controls on the base.

Pushing the screen area down from the top right causes it to pivot rapidly round and reveal the Hiptop 2's QWERTY keypad, flipping the on-screen image to maintain the correct orientation as it goes. The opened display is held in place with magnets, and while it feels loose, its hinge seems tough enough to withstand the rigours of frequent use. Not to mention the occasional drop.

You can use either the scroll-wheel or the D-pad to run through the semi-circular collection of application icons served up by the UI, itself styled on Japanese graphic design. There are the usual PIM apps, but the Hiptop's focus is communications, so there's an AOL instant messaging client, web browser, email, SMS and phone apps. Most of them display status information as you scroll past: the number of unread messages received, the number of buddies online, to do list items, the two most recent photos you've taken, that sort of thing. It's an approach that makes it easy to get a quick update without having to launch a series of apps individually or filling up the display's device status line with hundreds of icons.

The UI and apps are all coded in Java, running the device's own OS, radio stack and virtual machine. Danger doesn't make a big deal out the Hiptop's hardware specifications and admits its machine isn't at the cutting edge, but I found it highly responsive. It certainly didn't feel underpowered. It's also well thought out, with a consistency across the applications reminiscent of the classic Mac OS era. Better still, there's a very high level of integration between them all, making it easy, say, to extract sender details out of an email and slot them into a Contacts entry. You can phone someone directly from the IM app, based on their Contacts entry. Incoming messages are flagged at the top of the screen no matter what app you're in.

The top right-hand button on the face of the Hiptop calls up each app's single, hierarchical menu - just scroll down with wheel or D-Pad and click. Dialog boxes are handled likewise. Pressing the bottom left-hand button always brings you to the device's main screen.

Only the phone app doesn't work smoothly, geared as it is to pulling numbers out of the contact list or dialling via the keyboard. Dialling with the screen closed isn't easy. Selecting the number one-handed with the D-pad is OK, but you still have to click the scroll-wheel and then turn the device through 180 degrees so the speaker's aligned with your ear. All the time, the display remains locked in landscape mode, not the portrait orientation you might expect in a phone. The Hiptop 2 has a speakerphone facility, but while it sounds fine for the user, the sound coming through to the other end was muffled. Danger claim this issue will be fixed in production units destined for Europe.

But if the Hiptop 2 makes for a so-so phone, the email, SMS and IM features can't be faulted. In the email client, for instance, there's support for multiple POP and IMAP accounts, and you can set up additional folders to file messages in. Only the lack of post-processing rules and spam filtering is a drawback - but that's likely to be less of an issue for mainstream email users than it is for hardcore emailers like myself. And, frankly, few other - if any - mobile email clients provide those kinds of facilities either.

Web browsing works less successfully. The Hiptop 2's screen is a reasonable size. Pages and images are compressed, and overly complex HTML coding junked before they're sent across the GPRS connection to speed up the download. Danger's proxy servers help too. But while large graphics are scaled to fit the device's display, smaller ones aren't. Why not shrink them equally for a more consistent view? Table columns appear sequentially rather than laterally, so with most sites it can take a lot of scrolling down to get to the information you want. There's no JavaScript support yet, either.

Danger is promising to provide the latter in an update soon, and to improve the look of pages, but it needs to go some way to reach the standard of, say, PalmOne's browsers.

Speaking of updates, Hiptop 2 accepts these over the air and transparently to the user. More cleverly, each device keeps in sync with a back-up store on Danger's servers, usually within seconds of you entering data or receiving a message, whenever that happens. While the device will synchronise with Microsoft Outlook - there's a web interface that allows you to upload files from a few other PIM apps - there's no need to do so, certainly not for back-up. You do it once to get your data on the device, and then never again, Danger believes. Incidentally, the same web interface provides full access to your data when your Hiptop is down or you've left it at home.

You can upload contacts from Palm Desktop, Microsoft Outlook Express or Microsoft Entourage, but alas not from Mac OS X's own iCal and Address Book, though you could argue that's Apple's fault for not implementing a .txt export option. There's no Mac support for calendar entries.

C users can similarly transfer contacts data from Outlook and Lotus Notes, and calendar info from Outlook or Meeting Maker. Danger will sell you a standalone $20 sync app from PumaTech, but there's no Mac version. Indeed, Danger and T-Mobile appear to be taking an age to authorise Missing Sync developer Mark/Space's Hiptop sync app even though it was completed ten months ago! Linux users are even less well-catered for.

Flaws? Well, there's no MP3 playback, support for memory cards, or Bluetooth, either for PC connectivity or headset support - all features we've come to expect from smart phones. Battery life isn't great, running down in under 48 hours, much less if you make voice calls, so this is one device you will need to charge each night. While the keyboard is great - good quality and perfect for two-thumb typing - it's not suitable for one-hand usage as a Treo 600's might be, but it passes water all over the keypad on RIM's Blackberry 'Charm' (aka the Vodafone 7100v and the T-Mobile 7100t) for usability and speed of text entry, and over traditional SMS keypads.

On the plus side, the hardware is well designed - and well built, by Sharp - and the software suite is excellent. It's hard to think of a better-integrated set of mobile apps, certainly not one focused exclusively on consumers.

Verdict

Yes, the Sidekick 2 has its flaws, but I like it. The colourful 18-30 'yoof' styling doesn't appeal to me personally, but I can see it striking a chord with the kind of people who say 'like', 'radical' and 'dude' a lot. Beyond such window dressing, it's a solid, easy-to-use mobile communicator - weaker on voice, though - that for once really doesn't require a host computer to see it at its best.

Review by Tony Smith of the Register UK (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/28/review_danger_hiptop_2/page2.html)

Nokia 7610 Review

Released for US markets on Cingular. This review of an unlocked model with T-Mobile GSM Service in the San Francisco / Bay Area.



Sharper images

Although by no means the first megapixel phone the world, the Nokia 7610 is one of the first from a major brand and probably the most-hyped one at that. The honour of the world’s first megapixel probably belongs to J-phone of Japan with the hardware manufactured by Sharp, claiming a resolution of 1144 x 858 pixels. Surprisingly, the first megapixel phone in the US is claimed by Audiovox, a brand one does not normally associate with cutting-edge handsets.

Nokia’s first megapixel runs the Symbian 7 operating system upon a series-60 platform. The system also has built-in software that allows the user to send pictures directly to a Bluetooth-enabled printer. A Movie Director application lets you change the video clips that you have shot, by adding special effects such as music, text, colours or moving objects.

Lights, camera, action!
The Nokia 7610 operates on the Symbian 7 operating system, which is slightly better than the Symbian 6 operating system. Symbian 7 supports themes and Java MIDP 2.0 but Symbian 6 does not. This is but a small inconvenience, but let me tell you that using themes really changes the way you Nokia interface looks.

The screen of the 7610 is crystal clear, and so is the sound that comes out of it. However, the back cover is really flimsy and difficult to pry off. After meddling with the infernal contraption for a while, I realised that it was a defect in the phone’s construction. The battery is just too high, and the slider mechanism that releases the back cover is not able to slide down fully because the battery is blocking it. When you take out the battery, it works just fine, but then again, how are you supposed to use the phone without the battery?

On comparing its size with the 6600, I found that the 7610 is just as large as the 6600, except that the 6600 is slightly fatter and thicker. However, perhaps due to the unbalanced cut where two of the corners are rounded off, the 7610 comes across as being one of the largest Symbian phones that I have held in my hands save the original N-gage.

I wonder why the speaker button on the 7610 has been moved to the right soft key in succeeding Symbian phones. I found it rather convenient to have that button there, especially since it not only switched your conversation to loudspeaker mode, but it also allowed one-touch voice commands to be given to the phone. The newer mode of activation for the voice command function is not readily apparent as you have to hold down the right soft key for a few seconds before it kicks in.

I brought up this point about buttons because although the 7610 retains all the buttons that are common to Symbian phones, Nokia’s continual shifting about of the edit and the menu buttons suggests that they still haven’t figured out where it goes best. The keys are laid out in a swirl that results in some of the keys being much smaller than the others. The ‘3’ key, for example, is about a third of the size of the ‘0’ key. Although pleasant to look at, the 3, 6 and 9 keys are difficult to use for right-handed text messaging.

Ordering up the right menu
Having had the chance to play with just about every Symbian phone made by Nokia, I must say that some managing of the applications is necessary. Right now, each new application introduced by Nokia results in another icon littering the menu instead of being filed away properly in a folder. It is starting to look like the mess Microsoft Windows makes on the computer by leaving files all over the place.

The infrared application has been taken out. It seems to be quite a trend these days with the Motorola E398 and Nokia N-Gage QD that we reviewed last month also being Bluetooth-only devices. Although Bluetooth is gaining widespread acceptance, I actually prefer beaming infrared for smaller-sized work such as exchanging contacts or notes with another device, and leaving the Bluetooth for the heavier moving of larger files.

The megapixel camera is a plus though, except that the portrait option has been removed and the night-mode is now buried inside the options menu. I noticed that my finger kept straying to the camera lens when I talk on the phone, and the protective plastic around the lens was already fading from the abuse imparted to the phone by another reviewer.

The MMC within the phone has been changed to one that is about half the size of a regular MMC. This is called the RS-MMC, with the RS standing for ‘reduced-size’. The use of RS-MMC allows hardware designers to save some space, and most industry observers around agree that the RS-MMC will eventually succeed the MMC in both price and capacity.

Specifications
Manufacturer	Nokia
Availability
Form Factor
Network	GSM 900/ GSM 1800/ GSM 1900
Dimensions	109mm x 53mm x 19mm
Weight	118g
Display	Type: LCD Size: 208px X 176px Colors: 65
Storage	Internal: 8 MB Expansion Slot: Comes with 64 MB RS-MMC
Camera	1 MP / with zooming capability / with video recording
Platform	Symbian OS 7.0 (Series 60)
Battery	Talk Time: 3 hours Standby Time: 250 hours
Website	Nokia 7610 Official Site
Features
Organiser	Alarm Calculator Calender Predictive Text PC Sync Speaker Phone
Messaging	SMS MMS EMS IM E-Mail
Connectivity	GPRS EDGE WAP Cable Infrared Bluetooth Wi-Fi
Extra Features	Radio Touch Screen QWERTY Others

Pictures

Welcome to the launch of
The Gadget Hoarder

A new blog where I will attempt to be a one man review team; lusting after, buying, using, and reviewing new (and old) products in simple everyday terms that anyone can understand. After trying to get the information I wanted about products from places like cNet, ePinions, and the like I have found they are often full of hoax posters who do not post relevant / useful information.

For my first few reviews I give you the cell phone dude roundup. Some of the latest and some of the greatest, but in the end these are phones I use everyday. That is why I am reviewing them first ... becuase it matters to me. A little teaser for you all.


(Sanyo 5300, Danger SKII, Motorola A668, Nokia 7610, Nokia 3650)