Geoff Arnold

Updating my phone

If I'm a bit slow this morning, it's with good reason: I was up half the night updating my cell phone. Bletch!

It all started when I received an email advising me that a new firmware update was available for my Treo 650. I've ignored the last few updates, but this one promised to fix several annoying issues, so I decided to bite. The instructions advised me to set aside 20 minutes for the exercise. Hah!

I don't normally hotsync my Treo (I just back it up to an SD card), and as I started the upgrade process I remembered why: my USB cable is duff. Apparently this is a common problem with Treos - but how hard is it to make reliable cables? Never mind: I was able to set up hotsync to use BlueTooth instead. The only problem is that BT is much slower than USB, so everything dragged. On top of that, the sync process decided to back up several large cache files; it looks as if the Treo mail application doesn't compact folders properly, and the hotsync was blindly backing up uncollected garbage. I interrupted it (why does Cancel take "up to 2 minutes"?), hard reset the Treo, configured it for BT hotsync, uploaded the firmware update (taking nearly an hour), hard reset again, configured for BT (again!), and started to restore my data. Lo and behold, it started to restore the cached garbage! I interrupted it, opened the Palm desktop, exported the address book, created a new, clean user profile, and imported the address book. After hard-resetting the Treo and setting it up for BT (for the 4th time) I synced this new profile and recovered my address book. Whew!

It's hard to escape the conclusion that all of this has deliberately been made harder than necessary, either to provide (billable!) work for providers or to prevent inadvertent error. Palm certainly has a history of this: see, for example, this description of how to "zero out" a Treo:

1. Read through these instructions before attempting the reset. We made this method of zero out reset extremely awkward to perform, so that it would not happen by accident. You may need the help of a dextrous friend if you find it too difficult to do by yourself.
2. Connect your device to its HotSync cable or cradle. The HotSync cable does not need to be connected to your PC, and it does not need to be connected to power.
3. Press and hold the Power button and UP on the 5-way navigator.
4. While continuing to hold Power and UP, press and hold the HotSync button on the HotSync cable or cradle. As you press HotSync, make sure your other finger doesn't slide to LEFT or RIGHT on the 5-way navigator; it needs to be exactly on UP during the entire process. Although you are pressing the HotSync button, a HotSync operation should not begin.
5. While continuing to hold Power, UP and HotSync, press and release the RESET button on the back panel of your device (where's the reset hole?). This is very difficult to do with only one person; you may wish to hold the stylus in your mouth and use your hands to press Power, UP and HotSync.
6. Release Power, UP and HotSync.

Got that?

My PC emulates the Norwegian Blue.....

Although I'm primarily a Mac user, I've always had a WinTel PC at home, mostly for playing games. (I prefer turn-based games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri, as well as city-building simulations like Rome. However I occasionally fire up something in the Doom/Quake genre.) My current PC is an eMachines tower with an aftermarket video card and an extra hard disk so I can dual-boot WinXP and Solaris.

This morning I checked my Gmail on the PC and then hurriedly shut it down before going to work. I think that rather than choosing "Shutdown" I might have clicked on "Suspend". In any case, when I arrive home I turn on the monitor and hit the power button. Nothing. The monitor status light is yellow, meaning no signal. Hold in power button for 5 seconds, then try powering up again. Nothing. Power supply and chip fans come on, maybe a flicker on the disk light, but no video. Repeat, holding down DEL to try to get into the BIOS. Replace USB keyboard with PS/2, repeat. Try booting off a Knoppix LiveCD, then off a floppy. Lug into the next room to plug into another monitor. Open case, remove graphics card, plug monitor into on-board video. Re-install graphics card. Re-seat everything. All totally, completely ineffectual. My PC is pining for the fjords. She's dead, Jim. (Unless some blog reader can suggest something else to try.)

Now what? I'm tempted to declare victory, to forswear the works of Redmond and simply junk the PC. Of course there's stuff on the disks that I want, which means I should probably get a FireWire enclosure to read them on my PowerBook. On the other hand, am I really ready to give up on PC games? I was just getting into Civ4. And there are one or two apps that I use that only run under Windows, like Family Tree Maker. How about Virtual PC? Well, if I were prepared to spend $240 on VPC, plus $60 each for a couple of disk enclosures, I'm starting to approach the price of a new PC. (Presumably I can re-use the graphics card, disks, and RAM.) And VPC may be OK for simple apps, but it's hardly appropriate for a graphics-intensive game....

Sigh.

Talking and surfing

Before heading out on my last trip to Colorado, I (finally!) replaced our old LinkSys 802.11b router with a Belkin Wireless G Plus. Both laptops (my PB and Merry's iBook) were G-capable, so I only had one desktop PC (USB) adapter to replace. I futzed around with WPA but couldn't get it just the way I wanted it, so I stuck with WEP. The bottom line: things are much more stable, and we can now use the cordless phone or the microwave oven without disrupting the WiFi.

Wireless in India (and England)

One of the things that made my trip to India and England so successful was seamless wireless connectivity. I thought I'd go into some detail about this, because it might be useful for future travellers.

As I've described before, my phone is a Palm Treo 650 *, with service from Cingular. It's a quad-band GSM phone, and supports GPRS (IP over PPP) Internet access. (This is critical: if you plan to travel to most parts of the world, you must get a GSM phone. It's the standard; just get over it.) The Treo includes a basic but adequate email client called Versamail, which can handle POP, IMAP, and SMTP with and without SSL. This means that I can access both my Sun email (Edgemail via secure IMAP) and my personal ISP account (via POP). There's also a web browser called Blazer which does a reasonable job of rendering complex web sites on the 320x320 screen. And since it's a PalmOS device it also supports a wide range of applications; the one that I used most often was World Clock, without which it would have been really hard to keep track of the 101/2 hour time difference between Boston and Bangalore. (I also installed Bejeweled 2 as a superior time-waster to solitaire.)

As I noted earlier, I called Cingular to enable international roaming before leaving the US. Everywhere I went - in India and in the UK - I established a usable roaming connection when I turned on the phone. However the automatic choice was not always the best one. Several of the providers didn't support GPRS (or didn't allow GPRS roaming), which meant that I couldn't get my email. After manually selecting each of the available providers, I eventually determined that the best choices were Airtel in India and Orange in the UK.

Looking back on this trip, I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it was to have a working cellphone (with web and email) while travelling in India. It's not cheap, but roaming calls back to the US and UK were certainly less expensive than hotel phone rates. The normal way of getting around in India is to book a driver and car for the day; your driver will expect you to contact him by cell phone whenever you need him. When the power goes out (rarely, but inevitably), or when that WiFi hotspot turns out to require the use of a prepaid coupon that can only be purchased somewhere else, you can still use email. And most important, the successful resolution of my Mumbai connection situation depended heavily on the use of voice, email, and web; first in Bangalore airport, then on the shuttle bus to Mumbai's international terminal, and finally as I stalked the corridors of Mumbai airport at 3am.

One final thought. I packed my iSight camera in the hope of using iChatAV to videoconference with friends and family rather than using the phone. Well, it didn't work out. The main reason was that most of the hotels used firewalls that blocked several of the TCP ports needed by iChatAV. Maybe a simple VoIP system would have been better....

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*One point worth noting is that the Treo 650 includes a camera, albeit a fairly basic one. Photography is forbidden in many places in India, and you will frequently be required to check any cameras or camera-equipped phones. If I were buying now, I'd be tempted by the Siemens SX66, which doesn't have a camera but does include WiFi - and it's only 2.1 ounces!

Random preparations

1. Rather than relying on phones while travelling, I hope to be using iChat AV a fair amount. I picked up an iSight camera for Merry to use with her iBook. Then yesterday and today I spent some time debugging video chat with Merry, Kate, and a colleague of mine who just happened to be in Singapore this weekend. Looks promising.

   (There was only one dumb ease-of-use issue: in order to video chat, it's necessary to open up five ports in the OS X firewall, and for some reason there's no preset configuration that you can simply check off. Instead you need to define a new profile associated with TCP ports 5060, 5190, 5297, 5298 and 5678. That didn't feel very Mac-like.)

2. On Friday I was talking with Jim Waldo (of Jini fame) and I mentioned an iTunes playlist of mine called Music to blow your speakers out. He dragged me back to his office and introduced me to Tool. I was blown away, in more senses than one: I've only known Jim as a jazz enthusiast, and Tool's Ænima was unexpected, to say the least. But I was intrigued, and this lunchtime, while running to the drug store to pick up a few items, I made a detour to Newbury Comics and picked up a copy of the CD. (Oddly it's not available through ITMS.) I've ripped it into iTunes and added it to my iPod; I'll listen to more of it over the Atlantic tonight.

3. Checking in. Well, trying to. I logged on to the British Airways website (after finally realizing which of the four or five ticket numbers and record locators to use), changed my seat on the BOM-LHR leg (no more 53J!), and then tried to check in. And tried. And waited, and tried again. After receiving a number of different error messages, I finally received a vaguely catatonic "Unfortunately our systems are not responding at this time." Oops.

4. In spite of my earlier intentions, I decided not to get up to watch the Chinese GP. I didn't even record it. (No, I don't have a TiVo.) A pity - it would have been interesting to see Montoya's car being ripped apart by a manhole cover (or grating, whatever), not to mention the delicious schadenfreude of watching Schumacher making a fool of himself twice in a single race (the first time before the race had even started!).

"I'm goin' mobile"

I just called Cingular to turn on International Roaming for my Treo 650. I hadn't realized that there were so many wireless carriers in India! I went through the lists of roaming partners and coverage maps at GSM World to see if I could work out where I'd have service, but the coverage descriptions were confusing and the map resolution was so poor that I gave up. A colleague assures me that I'll be OK in Pune, but I have no idea about Hyderabad and Bangalore. (The UK is easy: Cingular partners with O2, Orange and Vodaphone....)

My first laptop...

I've just bought my first laptop. No, of course it isn't the first laptop that I've used: over the last 13 years* I've worked with countless systems from various vendors (IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Sharp, Apple, and Acer) in a variety of form factors (from desktop replacements to pocket-sized subnotebooks). But all of them - even the little Toshiba Libretto - were bought by Sun for me to use, and their hard disks have been filled with the documents, software, tools, and other materials that I work with on a daily basis.

As I spend a lot of my time travelling, I find that my laptop does double duty. Yes, it's a business tool - but it's also where I transfer digital photographs when my camera is full; where I store the music that I listen to on the road; and how I watch DVDs in the airport or in my hotel room. This is simply a practical matter: I'm hardly going to carry two laptops with me, one for work and one for personal use. But as a result I've found recently that more and more of the hard disk space on my laptop was being occupied by personal materials - music, videos, photographs, DVD projects - that have nothing to do with Sun.

So what was I to do? I'm committed to helping my colleagues to make Solaris 10 an excellent laptop OS (for which I use my Acer Ferrari), but I have to recognize that my personal multimedia data is tied to Apple's iLife application suite. So I started to think about getting myself a laptop for both work and personal use. This principled approach was nudged along by practical considerations: my existing PowerBook (a 12" 867MHz G4 with 640MB/60GB) was starting to feel really slow: start-up time for some of the big apps like NeoOffice/J was getting painful.

So this evening I visited the Apple store up the road and paid in cold, hard plastic for the first laptop I've owned: a 15" PowerBook (1.67GHz G4, 1GB/80GB). The migration tool worked perfectly: I strung a Firewire cable between the old Powerbook ("medieval") and the new ("silk"), rebooted medieval in target disk mode, and it sucked everything over - user info, documents, applications, network settings.

And yes, I did buy AppleCare extended warranty. Nobody's perfect.

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* I think that the first was an IBM Thinkpad 700, back in 1992.

Mighty Mouse

Yes, I did get a Mighty Mouse. I love it. The scroll ball feels absolutely natural, and the touch-sensitive shell works well. The only thing I need to work on is that, when mousing left-handed*, my ring finger sometimes brushes the left side of the shell just as I'm right-clicking. Since the logic seems to be "it's a left-click unless it's unambiguously something else", I'll have to fix this. As for the side buttons, I haven't use them much so far. The default setting is to bring up Expose to switch windows, but I prefer to task-switch by using scroll-ball-click to bring up the application list, horizontally scrolling with the scroll ball, and selecting via left-click. Very easy, better than repeated cmd-tabs.

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* Even though I'm right-handed, I've taken to mousing left-handed about 80% of the time. Good for incipient carpal issues.

Cracked

OK, this is an essential add-on for PSPs: the Akihabara News reports on "a new wallpaper for the PSP". Sounds innocent enough.... But on further examination, there doesn't seem to be a download link. Hopefully this will be rectified soon. I did a quick search trying to find other images of this kind - it seems like a natural theme - but I only came across one modest effort (registration required). Odd.

Hen-pecked dads?

The Independent has now published an enthusiastic, and thoroughly sexist, review of my new car, the Subaru Legacy. Highlights:

The current über dad brand is Subaru, which makes chunky, reasonably priced and practical intercontinental ballistic missiles. Though they might look the epitome of sensible family motoring... Subaru make some of the fastest cars, point-to-point, in the world right now....

I plumped for the good, old-fashioned, four-door saloon – a car so wilfully nondescript [love that phrase] no wife could ever suspect that a fire-breathing rally car lurks beneath.... Drive one, though, and you are left in no doubt that this is an extremely capable sports saloon with immense traction and grip capable of hauling itself to 60 quicker than an Audi TT. I reckon it's got the hen-pecked dad's vote sewn up.

Of course the one that they tested was the 3 litre normally aspirated Legacy; mine is a GT with a 2.5L turbo. A quick look at Subaru UK's web site suggests that they don't offer this model over there. (And as for the reviewer's sexist views about car purchasing, I should note that my wife's choice in the new car stakes was a BMW 325Xi - hardly a vote for moderation.)

Some thoughts on a new gadget

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.

Got the car

I finally picked up my new Legacy GT this afternoon after a couple of scheduling hiccups. The Subaru dealership kindly sent a young salesman over to pick me up; unfortunately he managed to get lost in West Roxbury. I still need to get an inspection sticker on it; I'll do that first thing tomorrow.

The car is a dream. (N.b.: this is a stock photo, but it's the right colour.) Handling and acceleration are just awesome: it corners as though it's on rails. It's a 2.5L turbo powerplant giving 250 HP; I didn't notice much turbo lag under acceleration, but it did catch me out a couple of times when the turbo came on strong before I expected it. This should be easy to adjust to, though. The transmission is a 5 speed automatic, with Tiptronic-style manual override using switches on the steering wheel (or the regular shifter, if you prefer). The sound system is pretty neat, too, with an in-dash 6 CD changer. I "baptised" it with a mix CD that started with Faithless doing God is a DJ and included Sunscreem, Groove Armada, and a couple of tracks from Free by Libera.

We celebrated by driving over to Lucy's for dinner, taking a longer, twistier route than usual....

Great - now I'm really confused!

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.

4th digital camera

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 640x480 video (with sound). That should be enough. (Typical British understatement.)

PS on the Treo 650

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]

Treo 650

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.

More on cellphones

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.

Back to basics

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.

On being a True Believer...

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."

Rant: PO'd at stupid US cellphone companies

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.)

On Apple, BMW, and Minis

Like many Mac users, I've dismissed talk of Apple's miniscule share of the personal computer market by (a) pointing out that many of those PCs are just glorified 3270s/VT100s/Wang word processors/cash registers, and (b) invoking the "BMW argument": what market share does BMW have - and does that stop them from being a really important, cool, desirable brand? So now Apple goes and releases a couple of down-market products, and various people are asking, understandably, "is Apple blowing its BMW model?". Frank Steele has a nice response: "Perhaps BMW could create (or purchase) a second brand that sold cars that were not quite so expensive. Maybe comparable in price to other cars, but maybe a little smaller, and fun. [...] But what could BMW possibly call such a company?"

(Via Oren.)

Not waving, but dialling....

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.)

Building sci-fi?

When I first started reading science fiction back in the early 1960s, it seemed that all future cities were either shattered dystopias or cool, automated Jetsons-like worlds. This account seems typical: "Just swipe a prepaid card through a stanchion in front of an empty waiting vehicle, punch in the destination number, take a seat in the vehicle and our computer control system will sweep you non-stop to your destination."

(Via Salon.)