Treo?
I’m about at the point where I need to get a new phone and service plan. For the last several years I’ve had T-Mobile service, but I don’t like their slow GPRS data network. I have to get a business minutes plan so that my consulting firm can pay for the phone and service, and if I do that with T-Mobile it eliminates my family plan… So what am I to do?
Well, I’ve been seriously thinking about bolting over to Cingular and getting a Treo 650. Of all the smartphones I’ve used over the years, I’ve liked the 650 the most. It’s built like a tank, it has a nice keyboard, the screen is great, and the Palm OS still beats the heck out of any of the Windows Mobile incarnations. As I go through the motions of choosing a plan and phone, I’ll let you in on what I’m doing so you can follow along.
And of course I’ll be selling my old phones and PDAs on eBay… 
First Man
I’m reading a really great book right now - the first authorized biography of Neil Armstrong. The book, written by aerospace historian James Hansen, goes into a phenomenal amount of detail about the life of the reclusive Armstrong - the first man to set foot on the moon. Since my childhood in the 60s I’ve been fascinated with the space program and the first astronauts, and this book is the first to really talk about Armstrong’s personal life. At 784 pages, it isn’t exactly light reading, but so far I’ve been impressed. Interested? Get it here:
Reviews Are Back Online
All of the reviews published on the old PDAntic.com site during 2005 are now available for your reading pleasure. I’ll be linking to older reviews soon, as well as adding new review of software, hardware and anything else I feel like writing about. I still owe everyone a review of the iMate SP3i (now that it’s been replaced by the SP5) and the Motorola i930, but those will be coming relatively soon.
Just click that reviews button at left to see the familiar old index, or use the popup menu that appears. And if you’re a software or hardware vendor with something you would like me to review, just send an email and we’ll talk.
Reasons I Hate Microsoft - #3
#3 in my continuing series of rants…
RANT ON
People are constantly saying “You can get SO much more software for Windows / Windows Mobile than you can for Macintosh / Palm”
I’m not kidding about this. Let’s face it, whenever a Mac or Palm fanatic talks to someone who has been taken over to The Dark Side, one of the big excuses you always hear is “There’s just not enough software for Mac”.
Bullshit.
It should be the other way around. There’s not enough GOOD software for Windows or Windows Mobile. For example, with my podcast hosting business Podbus.com, I regularly have to tell Windows users to grab a handful of programs if they really want to do their podcasts “right”. FeedForAll works OK, but is flaky. I need to send them to get a tag editor to add descriptions. On the Mac side, I just tell them to go buy one program - Podcast Maker. It works properly, it’s intuitive and it immediately uploads all of the proper info to the virtual servers.
Or how about all of the hundreds of photo packages for Windows? Are there any out there that are as intuitive or easy to use as iPhoto? I love the fact that iPhoto is integrated with so many other packages. If I want to upload a picture to this blog, for instance, I just drag it from iPhoto to the blog page. Done. If I’m using Apple’s Pages software for page layout work, I just drag photos over to the page. Done. And I made my wife very happy when I created a hardbound book for her 50th birthday recently. That capability is built into iPhoto. Click, drag, push a button, and a couple of days later a professionally printed, hardbound book shows up in the mailbox. Cool.
The thing that got me going on this rant today was looking at Pocket PC Thoughts. It seems like at least two to three times a week there is a listing for either a new Today Screen add-in to make the calendar “better” or an upgrade to an existing package. Why doesn’t Windows Mobile just “work right” the first time? I think the reason you don’t see a similar number of calendar add-ons for Palm is that it’s simple to use and intuitive - why tamper with success?
The moral of this rant is that people shouldn’t be basing the merits of an operating system on how many applications have been written for it - they should be more concerned about how many excellent applications have been developed. If you want to see just how much crap there is for Windows, go out to Download.com some day and you’ll see how much garbage has been developed.
RANT OFF
What I'm Reading: 1945 - The War That Never Ended
I read a lot.
I mean, there’s rarely a moment that I’m not working that I don’t have a book in my hand. Mrs. Gizmo and I gave away over 5,000 books last year to the Denver University library association, and we still have a pile of books. That being said, we still buy books!
My current read is 1945: The War That Never Ended by Gregor Dallas. It’s a political study of how WW2 was really an extension of “The Great War” and the precursor to the Cold War. I’ve read a pile of texts about the military aspects of WW2, but this is the first book that really brings home the political background of the era. And did you know that Warsaw was wiped off the map in 1944? I didn’t - until I read this book.
A fascinating read (799 pages):
Press Relase: VITO updates ButtonMapper for Windows Mobile 5.0
VITO is glad to announce the update of its popular application VITO ButtonMapper 3.42 which makes it fully functional in Windows Mobile 5.0. This application is specially designed to increase the standard button mapping capability of your Pocket PC.
There is no need to pull out a stylus every time you want to perform a routine action like checking your inbox for new e-mails or opening a file from a text editor. You can do it by pressing one and the same hardware button by using handy ButtonMapper’s features.
VITO ButtonMapper is the best way to double the functionality of your Pocket PC’s hardware buttons. This is realized by assigning two actions for a single button: short press or press and hold. This alone brings the interaction with your Pocket PC to a higher level. Using ButtonMapper you can start about 8 different applications by pressing only 4 hardware buttons. But this function is only to begin with.
Among its other useful features are
• assigning different actions for one and the same button depending on which application is running at the moment,
• starting all major system applets,
• stylus taps emulation,
• recording macros.
All these functions used aptly greatly simplify interaction with your Pocket PC and at some point can even prove the uselessness of stylus. You can specially benefit from using VITO ButtonMapper when reading e-books, using text editors, checking your inbox for new messages, turning on bluetooth or wireless conection and many, many more…
The most efficient way of using VITO ButtonMapper is to bundle application dependant assignments with macros recording. What you do is simply assign an application to button. Then you choose this application in configuration menu, start it and record a macros of stylus taps. The last step is to assign the newly created macros to the same button that starts application. Now you can start for instance writing a text just by pressing one and the same button two times.
VITO ButtonMapper is available as an exe., zip. or a cab. file for over-the-air download. Provided trial version works without any limitations for 14 days; the full version can be purchased for $9.95 at the company’s web site www.vitotechnology.com. Volume discounts are available.
Useful links:
Company web-site: http://www.vitotechnology.com
Program page: http://www.vitotechnology.com/en/products/buttonmapper.html
Download link: http://www.vitotechnology.com/files/VitoButtonMapper.zip
Buy link: http://www.handango.com/minibrand/basket.jsp?addItem=50265&siteId=674&continueUrl=http://www.vitotechnology.com/en/products/&logo=https://minibrand.handango.com/minibrand/logos/logo.gif
Reasons I Hate Microsoft - #2
Number 2 in my series - Windows is too bloated and makes even powerful systems weak.
A case in point. My wife and I both got new laptop computers back in the summer of 2003. I purchased a Mac PowerBook G4 running at 866 MHz with 684 MB of RAM. She purchased a Sony VAIO running at a much faster speed on a Pentium M, with 1 GB of RAM. Initially her PC and my Mac seemed to work at about the same speed. In other words, it took a similar amount of time to boot up, log in, and start up certain applications.
Since that time, my PowerBook G4 has gone through two OS upgrades (it’s currently running Mac OS X 10.4.3 Tiger), has a lot more applications loaded on it, and is purring along nicely. It boots up slightly faster now that it is running Tiger and certain functions are also faster - email, shutdown, and so on. Barb’s laptop has gone through one “upgrade” from Windows XP Home to Windows XP Home SP2, and it is so unbelievably slow now that it’s almost unusable. Bootup takes an unusually long amount of time, as does the period between logging in and getting to the desktop. Most of the reason appears to be all of the patches and fixes, the Microsoft AntiSpyware software, and McAfee Antivirus, all of which have turned this into a slow and sloppy machine.
I can’t wait to see what Windows Vista will do to her “old” PC in about a year, if indeed it is even possible to run it on what will be a 3 year-old computer when Vista arrives…
Innovative UI on the Neonode
Most of the other PDA / Gizmo sites tend to ignore anything that isn’t A) Windows Mobile Powered or B) Palm Powered. Since they pretty much have the PDA / Smartphone market wrapped up, it’s almost impossible to get any news about new and innovative products.
Take the Neonode N1m for example. It’s a mobile phone (GSM) with a unique user interface. There are no buttons except those that are displayed on the touch-sensitive display, and you use certain gestures — i.e., a “sweep” across the display to dial — to control the phone. It has a pretty decent display, uses Windows CE 5.0 in the background of its intuitive graphical interface, and does most of the functions you’ve come to expect from a Smartphone. It ain’t cheap, with the base model clocking in at €443 (about $520), but I think it’s great to see someone breaking free from the mold and coming out with a very innovative device.
Check it out at http://www.neonode.com
Reasons I Hate Microsoft - #1
There are SO many reasons to hate Microsoft. I’ve decided I’m going to list those reasons here every time something they do pisses me off. Here’s the first!
They don’t follow standards!
I’ve wasted a lot of time today. A client of mine opened up a website I had developed and didn’t like the way things looked. It looked perfect in FireFox, Safari, and Opera, and when I opened it in Internet Explorer, it looked like shit. Nice. So I decided to use a CSS-based web design tool, Macromedia DreamWeaver, to redesign the page. When that was done, the page looked great in FireFox, Safari and Opera. It still looked like crap in IE. So I took the HTML file and opened it up in Microsoft FrontPage running under Windows, figuring that would resolve the issue. Wrong. That program made all the text bold face and it was impossible to get it to return to normal. I chalk this all up to Microsoft wanting to go their own way with web and browser standards while the rest of the industry actually follows the standards that are set.
After six hours of hassling with this problem, I’m no closer to a solution than I was earlier today. I think what I’m going to do is get it looking as good as possible in the other browsers, make it look passable in IE, and then put a “Get Firefox” badge at the bottom of the page.
Press Release: Say Hello To My Little Tank!
THE MIDLANDS, UK - November 9th, 2005 - Attention! Your country needs you! The General invites you to join him behind enemy lines and engage in a little light tank warfare!
Astraware is excited to announce the release of My Little Tank, a fun arcade-style blaster offering hours of miniature tank mayhem! The game is available for Palm OS(R) 5.0 devices with hi-res screens and Windows Mobile(R) for Pocket PC and Smartphone, including support for Windows Mobile(R) 5.0.
Through 60 action-packed levels you must shoot enemy tanks, defend your base, and destroy enemy radar stations and bases. You will encounter a range of hostile terrains including snow, swamp, plains and deserts. As levels progress, tougher enemies will appear that require more than one shot or more effective weapons.
As you carry out each mission a range of powerups will appear to aid your progress including Smart Bombs that destroy all tanks in the vicinity; Health Bonuses to regenerate your tank; Speed to make your tank go faster; Invincibility to protect your tank against the enemy; Weapons Upgrades; and Freeze Bonuses to halt the enemy tanks and make them easier to blast!
Who’d have thought playing with tanks could be so much fun? You can even choose what colour tank to play with!
“My Little Tank is great fun, quick and easy to get into, and even if you’re not normally an arcade style gamer you should give this a try,” said Howard Tomlinson, CEO of Astraware. “We’ve really enjoyed working with Binoteq on the development of this title, and we hope everyone will have just as much fun playing it!”
My Little Tank is released on Wednesday 9th November for Palm OS(R) and Windows Mobile(R) handhelds, with a regular price of $19.95. For a limited period the game is available at the special price of $14.95. Enlist with My Little Tank now at http://www.astraware.com/mlt.
What I'm using for the new site
I had a question from a reader about three minutes after the new site went live this morning - “What are you using to publish the site?”. Good question, and a good piece of fodder for a blog entry.
The software is called RapidWeaver and it’s an excellent and easy to use website development tool from RealMac Software. I wanted a tool that was going to use CSS for a nice look (like the content management systems out there…) but take absolutely no time to set up and use. RapidWeaver did that very easily. One of the standard page types is a blog, so it was a no-brainer to get that working. The Contact Me form doesn’t appear to be working properly yet, but I’m sure I can get that fixed quickly.
Putting pictures into the Mambo-based site was a pain in the ass. Here, I literally just drag the picture to the Rapid Weaver page and it is inserted. Frankly, if Apple really wanted to do something brilliant, they’d purchase RealMac Software and work RapidWeaver into the next version of iLife, then buy PotionFactory and make PodcastMaker one of the iLife tools. You heard it first here at the Gizmo Ranch!
RapidWeaver is a perfect example of what good software design is all about. It lets me be creative without having to spend a lot of time.
Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine Announces the Winners of its Fifth Annual Windows Mobile Best Software Awards 2005
Fairfield, IA 52556 – November 4, 2005 The winners of the Fifth Annual Best Software awards conducted by Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine (formerly Pocket PC magazine) have been announced at www.pocketpcmag.com/awards. Eighty members of the Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine Board of Experts judged Windows Mobile products in 130 Pocket PC, Smartphone, and Developer categories to determine finalists and winners.
Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine publisher, Hal Goldstein, said that “The annual Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine Best Software Awards helps users select software that best suits their Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Smartphone needs by honoring companies that produce outstanding software. The awards process is a huge 6-month undertaking involving the experts of the Windows Mobile communiity and over 3000 Pocket PC and Smartphone products.“
Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine’s New Products Editor, Diane Dumas, and the Board of Expert judges spent two months selecting 768 award nominees, about 25% of the Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine Encyclopedia of Software and Accessories. Christian Forsberg of www.businessanyplace.net and Bob Katayama of www.han-d-solutions.com headed a team of experts to determine nominations for Developer Software.
The Board of Experts who helped select the nominations and then voted for winners are from all over the world. They run prominent Web Sites, serve as Microsoft MVPs, and write for Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine and other orgranizations. These are all volunteers and none are permanent employees of Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine.
Special 21 page report with live URLs
A 4 MB PDF special downloadable report ($5.95) available at www.pocketpcmag.com/awards contains screen shots and descriptions of all Best Software Award Pocket PC and Smartphone winners, as well as the product names and URLs of the finalists. Included are a special 3 page GPS section and 4 pages of judges revealing their favorites and why. The report is given free to new Smartphone & Pocket PC subscribers. The report is excerpted from the Smartphone & Pocket PC 2006 Buyers Guide, mailed to subscribers and appearing on newsstands in November.
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Joy of Tech!
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MacLevelTen
