tech ronin

My New RSS 2.0 Feed Here

Hi folks. I got with the program and started using Feedburner to generate my news feed. Now when you subscribe using my orange FEED button in the left column or just grab this, you'll get the finest of RSS 2.0 feeds. Try it! If you do, you'll also help me track my readership which I will greatly appreciate. Who knows, maybe all that readership information will inspire me to greater blogging heights?

Technorati Tags: Blogging, RSS

Palm's Dynamic Duo

I couldn't resist adding this shot of a the Treo 650 on top of a Lifedrive when I found it over on Flickr. I know, I'm obsessed. But, you gotta admit they look good together!

Technorati Tags: cellphone, handhelds, lifedrive, mobilephone, mobility, Palm, PalmOne, PDA, smartphone, treo, treo650, Wi-fi, wireless

Treo and Lifedrive: Partners in Crime?

Being a person who (a) wants the maximum cool tool support and (b) believes in the value of an intermediate device between a small handheld and a notebook, once I purchased my Treo 650 a couple weeks ago, my mind wandered right back over to the Lifedrive.

The Lifedrive's popularity in geek circles is on the rise. Although impressive and cool immediately, many of us were disappointed with reports of (1) slow application start-up times, (2) application incompatibility like Fitaly, (3) instability, (4) really time-consuming and data losing resets and (5) poor battery life. Well, most of that's handled -- already.

There's been a Lifedrive update. Their's a new caching program (SharkCache) to elimate most load time issues and besides people seem to quickly adjust their expections to the slight delays.

There's now a hack to run Fitaly using SkinDIA. More apps have been updated. There's a way to quickly reset only the RAM instead of the whole hard drive.

So, the question is, just because I have a Treo 650, does that mean I can't have this other amazing device called a Lifedrive? Let's set aside fiscal sanity for a moment.

It seems logical to me that these two Palm's could be made to complement each other's talents. Via Bluetooth, couldn't I use the Wi-fi in the Lifedrive on my Treo? Could I download quicker with that Wi-fi? And couldn't I use the ubiquitous Edge on my Cingular Treo to augment what's available to my Lifedrive?

If you like the lifedrive, surely a Treo 650 would be the ideal cell phone compared to getting some other phone and then carrying one of those little portable keyboards around? (Of course, this assumes you can afford the 650 and that you enjoy thumb typing.)

Treo 650:
Cell Phone
Ubiquitous Net connection via Edge
Great little Qwerty keyboard
Camera

Lifedrive:
Wi-fi
4 gig hard drive
Bigger horizontal screen

If I got a Lifedrive, I can see using it like this:

Master PDA: because it has 4 gigs, I would put more on it. More reference material. More notes. More podcasts and my favorite 60 songs of the moment. More photos - creating some little photo albums.

The companion for my camera. This would be the fastest way to offload pix from my camera.

Browser of choice. At home over wi-fi, I wouldn't have to use my Powerbook to read. I could use the less obtrusive, less heavy, pocketable Lifedrive. Reading horizontally, especially with RSS feeds which are more text-heavy and friendly to a smaller device.

Book Replacement. Using it horizontally, this could be a very comfortable way to read. Even better than my Zire. The bigger screen compared to my Treo would be nice.

I'm sure there are other uses as well. If it is a hassle to synch both of these devices to my calendar, then maybe this is not as good an idea as I thought. But, if that's no problem, I'm off. I'll bring the Lifedrive whenever possible when I go out and when not will just operate with the Treo 650. Compared to schlepping my 15" Powerbook, the Lifedrive seems like no trouble at all.

I'll probably wait a while on all this because I am still kneedeep in the Treo learning curve and I do live in a world of fiscal constraints no matter how hard I try to imagine otherwise.

Technorati Tags: cellphone, handhelds, lifedrive, mobilephone, mobility, Palm, PDA, smartphone, treo, treo650, Wi-fi, wireless

Decorating my Moleskine

I believe I've fallen from grace as far as coolness is concerned with this moleskine. But, this is the age of personalization and self-expression. Putting one of my Frida Kahlo stickers on this reporter made it fun. The painting shown is called The Little Hart.

If I had it to do over again, I might have preserved my dignity by putting only one sticker on without the extra moleskine stickers. But, alas, I received the stickers as a gift and wanted to use them. As someone who uses multiple moleskines of the same size, I need a way to tell them apart. Hence, stickers! This whole pack of 16 Dover Fine Art Stickers cost $1.50.

More discrete folks put stickers on the inside of their moleskines. But you could advertise your values and artistic preferences for all the world to see like I did. Come on, live a little!

Technorati Tags: decorating, decoration, Frida Kahlo, moleskine, moleskines, personalization, self-expression, stickers, The Little Hart

Treo 650: User Update

This Treo rocks. I totally understand the *I love my Treo* people. I'm one of them. It's gorgeous and great. I was worried about the size when shopping for a cell phone. But, now that I have this amazingly easy to use always connected pocket computer cell phone, the size seems quite small and manageable.

I have two new favorite applications besides the included Blazer browser running on Cingular's Edge network. They're going to make my time away from the computer a lot more fun and probably a little more productive too.

Quick News 1.1. Hand/RSS seems to have morphed into Quick News. Stand Alone, Inc. directed me to Quick News and said my registration code for Hand/RSS would also work on it. This is cool because Quick News is adding features rapidly and is easier to use. It seems bound for full RSS client-hood. I put in about 15 of my favorite feeds for now.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the latest version supports podcasts directly. That's nice but podcasts are big and downloading them live isn't very manageable. This is more of an overnight thing which will be done automatically if you keep your phone powered up and connected while you sleep. I used to read news feeds on my Zire 72 but I couldn't surf the links like I can with my Treo. You can flag, beam, copy or email a post or copy the link. This is good stuff.

iPedia. This little wireless encyclopedia from ArsLexis gives me live access to Wikipedia's 550,000 articles. It sucks them down to my 320x320 screen. It is optimized for the Treo 650 (they have a version for PocketPC also). The search feature lets you gradually narrow down from a big category to a smaller one by adding further criteria. Great! A must have for $29.95.

Email. I haven't yet decided what to do for email as I've got a capable email client for starters with Versamail 3 and am checking out two others that have received kudos: SnapperMail and ChatterMail. I'll be using Versamail in the meantime. More on that soon.

Usability. This is an elegant device. From what I read, there are more cutting edge smartphones out there, but for sheer ease and elegance, the Treo 650 can't be beat. It's a pleasure to use. I realize now that learning curve is a huge deal -- being able to build on my Palm experience is a major plus. Palm users take note. When I got my Sony Ericsson P800 two years ago, I was in shock how hard it was to get the value that was there out of it. I couldn't relate. I never was able to spend the time getting to where I really felt comfortable and was using more than 10% of the functionality. Now I have a chance to use 70% or so. That's a big difference. Part of it is that the Palm UI is way superior to what the P800 has and part is that I'm used to Palm. I can't tell how much is one and how much is the other.

I already had some good third party apps on my Zire 72 and was able to install and use them on my Treo without having to buy them again:

• Memoleaf. A souped up Memos replacement with powerful search functions. $7.95.
• eReader Pro - the best/most dominant ebook reader available. Includes dictionary and other goodies. $14.95.
• HanDBase. A full database development environment for the Palm and PocketPC. Synchs to FileMaker databases. $24.99.
• PhoneMagic. Addressbook replacement. $19.95.
• Shadow Plan. Outliner/To Do List.
• Slap. Lets you type into it and then slap it into email, memo, to do, contacts or calendar. Great capture device.
• TextPlus. Predictive text app with it's own user modifiable vocabulary. $19.95.
• TealPaint. Neat little color paint app. $17.95.
• ZLauncher. A replacement for the basic launcher. $17.95.
• BackupMan. Does complete backup to your SD card automatically at an appointed time every day. $10.

Combining a cell phone with a Palm handheld makes a whole lot of sense. It adds all sorts of value to the PDA and the PDA adds back value to the phone. When I first fell in love with my Palm V, I thought then that what I really wanted was a cell phone built in too. Now I have it!

Technorati Tags: cellphone, Cingular, Edge, mobilephone, Palm, PDA, QuickNews, treo, treo650

OMG: Intel Inside Apple

Steve Jobs dropped the big one today:

When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PoweRPC gives us 15 units of performance per watt, but Intel’s roadmap gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do. - Steve Jobs

My first reaction to the announcement that Apple will be switching to Intel is discomfort and concern. Everyone who has a stake in the Mac platform is likely to flinch. I have to say that I continue to like Apple's boldness. These are turbulent times, a conservative approach would be dangerous too. But I am crazed.

I have all confidence that Intel chips will be excellent. I'm not worried about that. It's all the other stuff. Starting with the question - will people buy PowerPC-based Macs anymore? Will I? I would need to know the timetable of replacement before making a purchase.

Some people will be out there buying the existing models because they'll miss this announcement and won't realize they are buying lame duck hardware.

Will Apple have to drastically discount the prices over the next six months and longer on machines that won't transition that quickly? Apple will have to make all sorts of guarantees to get people to buy into that deal. Here's hoping all that cash from iPod/iTunes will make the likely disruption in sales affordable.

We finally got a successful transition to OS X but now we have to start all over again with another transition. Another *Fat Binary* deal where applications have to come with the ability to run on PowerPC or Intel.

Since there is a cost to this transition stuff, some OS X developers will drop away. Some who might have started down the OS X path won't.

The iPodification of Apple has already got me wondering how important Apple sees its Macintosh business. Are they going more consumer than we thought? Or into movie sales - the year of HD?

I have to admit that the sexy Xbox 360 was making me a little nervous anyway learning it had 3 powerpc processors and that it looks hot and fits with Microsoft's plans to dominate the world. I was wondering how little old Apple was going to find a place at the home entertainment dinner table.

Just lots of questions and not enough answers. I'm guessing that Apple knows a lot more than they are saying right now. Maybe they are playing it by ear waiting for the response from their various stakeholders. Probably.

And, you can bet they won't tell us the new products they want to build that make this Intel road the preferred path. But, hey, Apple is getting into podcasting, maybe they'll open the kimono a little more. One can always hope. I plan to write a second post once the dust settles a bit on this one.

Technorati Tags: Apple, AppleIntel, Appletel, Intel, Macintosh, Pentium, processors, WWDC2005

Chose the Treo 650

I was still undecided at Cellular World this afternoon. I brought my Powerbook with me and was reviewing my various posts and clippings in DEVONthink about the Treo 650 and the Blackberry 7100 as I was waiting to be waited on. And I was even reviewing my own post from yesterday because it's a good summary.

In the end I decided on the software rather than the form factor of the hardware. I really love the Palm UI -- Palm is a descendent of Apple Computer, after all. I like the extra buttons. And now that I have the little machine, I'm loving all those buttons. I've got home, a 5-way navigator, datebook, email, menu, Send, End, volume up and down and an extra programmable button. I'm liking the baby QWERTY keyboard with backlight.

The UI is a thing of beauty, I tell you. Gorgeous. Great screen. I'm in the honeymoon phase obviously but, going through the tutorial, I'm wowed.

I've never had a PDA that could wirelessly communicate before. I've tried to phone - no problem. Cool!

Technorati Tags: cellphone, Cingular, PDA, handhelds, mobilephone, Palm, treo, treo650

Treo 650 vs. Blackberry 7100

I'm just about ready to choose one of these two great handheld phones. I've got a Blackberry 7100t that I've been testing for about 5 days and my Zire 72 doing its best to proxy for the Treo 650. I've read virtually everything on the Net on this subject. I'm still wavering. And there's a reason for this. Here's the problem:

I love the lightness (4.3 oz) and size (large candybar) of the Blackberry. It works as a phone, no questions asked. I'm doing pretty well using the Suretype QWERTY and think it's a boon to solving a key problem with big pdas trying to be cell phones.

Maybe because I'm a geek, I like that the software picks the right keys. It impresses me but I suppose that soon I'll take it for granted. I enjoy the scroll wheel and miss it when I use my Zire. But when I'm using the BB, I miss the dedicated keys and 5-way keypad.

At my local Cingular store (conveniently beside the Apple store), the 7100g is $200 and the Treo is $400 with activation. There's an advantage to paying less when you know there will be something out there tempting you within the year.

But the Treo 650, considering what it brings to the party, is equally tempting even though it's got a heft that I would rather avoid.

You get more screen size and space. Every pixel helps when you are reading ebooks, email or browsing the web as best you can. Photos look better bigger.

Then there's the SD slot -- a major feature to me. I know I'm going to be thinking that they should have given me a slot. Why didn't they give me a slot so I can easily input and output stuff? I view it as a security feature that makes sense to a corporation but doesn't make sense to an individual -- at all.

The camera, even though I usually carry one that's much better, is still a feature that I'm reluctant to go without because it lets me send photos instantly. I could eventually get my photos off my camera's SD card to my notebook and then to Flickr or an email, but that takes time that I have in very short supply.

If you use the Blackberry Server at your office, unless you must have the extras that the Treo offers, get a Blackberry. It's fabulous. I would. But I don't have a Blackberry server so that advantage isn't there for me.

Then there's another consideration that plays in for me. If an ultralight and small notebook with excellent Mac compatibility comes along, I'll be compelled to get one. The Lifedrive is even tempting, except it's big and slow for a PDA. One part of me is wanting to get the 7100 to leave room for a bigger device like the rumored Apple mini notebook between this and my Powerbook 15".

And what about all the Palm software I've already purchased? And the flexibility that software base provides? Blackberry is starting to get some things going there but it is just a start.

Mossberg preferred the Treo 600 to the 7100 when the 7100 just came out and 650 was just a rumor. His analysis is excellent and might tip me over to the Treo. I think...

What would (or did) you do? See my previous big picture post comparing Treo vs BB vs Sidekick.

Technorati Tags: palm, treo, treo650, smartphone, 7100g, 7100t, handhelds, blackberry, mobilephone, cellphone

Back to my iPod 15gb from the shuffle

Just the last couple days, I went back to using my 15gb iPod for walks instead of the shuffle. MUCH better. I really hate not having a screen. Now I can play the exact podcast I want to play.

Neither a big iPod nor the current shuffle are ideal. Yesterday when walking the dog, carrying a leash holder in one hand and my iPod 15 in the other, I got a phone call. So I was trying to hold three devices at once and a car was coming which meant I needed to somehow control the leashholder too. Bad news - the dog lived - but it was too close for comfort - if Duffy had run into the street just as the car was passing - no more dog.

I would have had my shuffle around my neck and could have just dropped it and answered the cell phone with my free hand.

The rumor is that a 2 gig shuffle with a screen is on the way. There are a bunch of rumors about a new flash based shuffle with more space. AppleInsider has a story on it. The most iffy part of the rumor is whether it will have a screen.

I'll tell you right now. I'm not getting a new bigger shuffle without a screen. The one I have now will do for situations where space is in short supply.

However, since most people use their iPods exclusively for music, quite a few will like getting more space for more songs. Then, the only problem they'll have is figuring out which song is playing if they have lots of new songs and just bought a new batch like I did recently. I wanted to know but couldn't find out which song was which - who the artist was, etc..

Don't get me wrong. I love the form factor of the shuffle and it looks cool as all hell. But, without a screen, it sucks for me. Especially for podcasts. It's not like it doesn't matter or it's cool to be surprised by which podcast it is. It's not like with songs where lots of different ones will do. With podcasts, I want a particular podcast - not just anyone's and I want to be able to choose the date of that podcast.

Steve Jobs was just saying that the next version of iTunes (4.9) is going to support podcasting. Hopefully, they'll realize that support of podcasting, should include a shuffle with a small screen.

Technorati Tags: iPod, music, podcasts, shuffle