Stodge.org

Until very recently I would have been willing state publicly that all “smart phones” are stupid. While gaget industries have been able to make perfectly functional personal organizers, and sleek mobile phones, the combination of of these concepts is usually less than the sum of it’s parts.

PocketTunes running on my Treo 650. This application gives the device capabilities similar to an iPod mini. With the 1GB SD card I can store and play plenty of Ogg-Vorbis tracks.

I’ve been fooled into parting with cash for the latest upgrade; my crisp pounds exchanged for flaky plastic: I’ve grown so jaded with the category that I had the lowest expectations when I placed an order for the new PalmOne Treo 650 from Orange. It turns out that I was wrong to be so glum – the new Treo is one of the niftiest gadgets I’ve owned in a long time.

The major selling point of the Treo series is it’s use of Palm OS. Most smart phones these days run Microsoft’s bloated “Windows Mobile Edition” or the rather annoying Symbian family of operating system.

Palm OS, one of the oldest mobile operating systems was originally designed to run on 3Com’s range of Palm-Pilot organizers; tiny machines which could run for days on a pair of AAA batteries. The reason Palm were able to do this was that they take a stripped down approach to computing; While palm apps tend to have fewer features than their Windows equivalents the minimalist approach seems more suitable for tiny devices.

Returning to Palm OS felt very comfortable; my last Palm device was the Palm 3c, which I destroyed by dropping in a puddle almost five years ago.

While the Palm OS is superficially as minimalist as ever, there are a lot more bells and whistles included in the latest version of the software: It’s now a fully multitasking system with impressive multimedia capabilities and support for high-resolution screens. Most importantly, it worked perfectly with the Kpilot, my preferred Linux-based synchronization tool. Being able to synch with my Linux Desktop is a big win gain.

The biggest change is the addition of the thumb-board in place of the graffiti area. The original palm-pilots had an excellent handwriting recognition system which was very easy to learn. I guess the success of the Blackberry proved that busy executives prefer thumb-boards and are unwilling to learn how to use a stylus. While I miss graffiti, I have found the thumb-board very easy to adapt to.

My Treo came with a suite of standard Internet tools; Oddly enough, their icons have been made slightly orangy – and put into a category called ‘Orange’, a feeble attempt by my phone company to brand the Internet. This was easily defeated by renaming the category which allowed me to debrand my palmtop.

The tools include web-browser called ‘Blazer’ which does a very good job of rendering most pages. I was able to visit my favorite sites and read them without difficulty.

Palm also provide an excellent email program called Versamail which supports POP3 and IMAP with SSL. A nifty feature of this program is that it includes standard configurations for the 50 biggest ISPs, meaning that setting up an email account requires little more than typing in a login and password.

When the machine was launched, palm gurus complained that the machine was less efficient than previous generations at managing memory; apparently the new filing system takes a less granular approach to storage and has a tendency to waste a few kilobytes if a database or resource partially occupies a page of system memory.

Having not used a Palm OS machine in five years, I cannot say I noticed a memory shortage. Just in case I also bought a 1GM SD RAM card which provides storage for documents and MP3/Ogg files. With the supplied headset, I can use my Palm somewhat like an iPod mini.

Minor quibbles aside, this is a good machine. It feels solidly built and is very easy to use. I expect that Palm will win back a group of users like myself who have defected to Sony and Nokia products in the absence of a credible Palm OS based alternative.

I have owned this camera for about a month, and on the whole I am delighted with it. It was an upgrade from my older Casio EX-Z40, which is still a very respectable ‘point and shoot’ super-compact. The P700 is substantially chunkier but does a whole lot more.

The best things about this camera are the inclusion of manual modes, and a large Canon lens. The screen is good, and the addition of a thumb-control allows mode-switching to be done with less annoying menu-navigation. This combination of features allows the P-700 to take the kind of strange images that delight me. For example, I bagged this on on holiday in Cape-Town, it’s a 1 minute exposure with a widest possible appeature.

This camera is too big to be called a super-compact. The lens projects forwards from the camera by about 1cm, and the screen sticks out by about 0.5cm at the back. The P700 is too big to fit into your trouser pockets, but is quite comfortable in a jacket pocket. I got mine with a faux-leather carry case that fits neatly in my camelback.

The only thing I dislike about this camera is the bulging optical viewfinder (the plastic bit above the lens). I dont see the point of an optical viewfinder on a digital compact camera. I am sure these things are very important on an SLR, but I have never needed or trusted the optical viewfinders on compact cameras. The plastic bit on the front really runis the camera’s looks, and in my opinion Casio should re-consider this feature.

What on earth were they thinking? Did you know that the original Sony HD walkman products could not play MP3 files? At the time, Sony’s market-droids said that it was possible, however the process of playing an MP3 involved tediously converting MP3s to Sony’s proprietary ATRAC format; Loss of quality due to transcoding is inevitable.

Sony’s refusal to drink the MP3 kool-aid comes from a corporate conflict of interest. Sony makes more money from licensing music than it does from selling equipment to play that music. Consequently, their portable music hardware has to be crippled to eliminate the possiblity that their machines could be used for any kind of piracy. By making a player that could not understand MP3, Sony customers would have little desire to obtain pirate MP3 files, and a greater desire to buy music from legitimate sources.

Of course, the only legitimate source of ATRAC files, is Sony Music’s own on-line music store (Windows Only). or ripping your own ATRACs from CD using the Sony-Walkman software (Windows Only). If you do not own a Windows computer, then you may be out of luck.

It came as no surprise at all when Sony eventually relented. Just in time for the Xmas rush, they announced that henceforth, all new players would support MP3, however what they did not tell buyers was that these files needed to be loaded-on with proprietary software that encrypts the MP3s. The player could not play a normal un-mangled MP3 file. I guess this is what record companies call ‘Rights Management’, however truthfully, this system only deprives customers of their rights.

Anyway, somebody has cracked Sony’s encryption algorythm, rendering it all rather pointless. Doubly so when you consider that almost nobody has a Sony HD Walkman. I prefer iRiver’s H Series players. They play all common media formats including Ogg-Vorbis without any silly mangling at all.

An imposing slab of plushness invites you to spend the rest of your life sleeping. ‘The Lavenham’ calls to my body, wishing to recieve me in it’s softness. This monolith of spring, foam, fabrics and timber is the culimation of sleep technology. Compared to this bed, ‘Silent Night’ is like a blast of happy-hardcore.

This mound of ultra-plush costs about as much as a 2nd hand Lexus, but offers comfort in excess of anything Alan Partridge could wish for, for this can transport me to the land of dreams, where Hypnos and Morpheus reign supreme. To lie on this bed is to be as one with those slumbering gods. Behold my super-king sized rectangle of the night.

Tasting somewhat like tar flavoured bile, machine coffee is a form of orally administered caffene. It’s sole purpose is to shock you into getting back to work. It is only barely fit for human consumption; an inspiring drink for ‘knowledge workers’.

An artists impression of a coffee room in a regional financial institution…

At the regional financial institution where I work, coffee is provided on each floor by a number of vending machines. The machines do not charge, yet we may be paying a high karmic price for their continued use:

Press a button and the device will offer to dispense any of seven kinds of fluid ranging from insipid tea to acrid coffee. A further button press will allow you to sweeten your beverage. As far as I am aware, nobody ever presses these additional buttons. These drinks cannot be improved by mere sugars.

My usual machine beverage is “Kenco Really Smooth“; an example of wishful-thinking in product naming. The drink is neither smooth nor real. It has the appearance of runny treacle, and becase it is served in a miniture paper cup it goes from scalding to ambient temperature by the time you have got it back to your desk.

I felt a profound sense of relief as the postal teller accepted the parcel containing the iRiver PMP-140, which I had only obtained four days earlier. For the reasons outlined in my previous article, this gadget completely failed to live up to my expectations, so I had to return it.

Fortuantely, iRiver are not the only company attempting to build a Linux based pocket PVR

These days there are plenty of companies that make “Personal Media Centres” – pocketable devices with the capability to play back video files. Most of these are based on Windows CE and are little more than cut-down Windows CE computers with bulked up storage. These depend somewhat on Windows Media Centre, and can only be trusted to play heavily DRM’d content – the sort you have to pay for.

Of course, the Microsoft flava is not for me – I rip most of my own content, and as a Linux user my preferred formats are XviD and Ogg Vorbis – these are not standards that Microsoft has any interest in supporting.

It was for this reason I was thrilled when the Korean firm iRiver announced that it would be adding the Linux based PMP-100 series to it’s rather nifty range of multi-format jukeboxes. Styled somewhat similar to the windows media devices – and resembling the original Gameboy Advance, the PMP claimed to be able to play all my audio files, plus DivX and XviD files – the most common video formats on the linux, amd possibly the Internet.

It was some excitement that I placed my order and unfortunately an equal amount of disapointment when I received it.
(more…)

As an owner of an iRiver iHP-140, I both love it’s cool hardware features and have an intense dislike of it’s trashy incomplete firmware. While the machine is great, the software is somewhat lacking compared to what Creative or Apple offer users.

Playerblog and Slashdot are reporting on the announcement from alternative firmware group RockBox to standardise on the H-series as their preferred target for their next generation firmware.

RockBox started out by making alternative firmware for the now very obsolete Archos music players. The iRiver machines are technically more capable, and are made from parts which are better documented – it is to be expected that a porting effort should yield faster results.

It was widely reported that the current firmware release was Delayed for more than 4 months, and I even mentioned this in a previous report on this blog. It’s possible that the existance of a 3rd party firmware maker will encourage iRiver to compete, and perhaps meet their own deadlines for a change.