Tag: gadgets

Disaster of the Year

It seems that I always have one electronic disaster a year. In 2003 it was my PowerBook display hinge broke and required an expensive repair. Last year, it was Leah spilling water on her iBook so she ended up saving for the whole summer and got a 12″ PowerBook.

And today I dropped my Treo when I took it out of my jean pocket. It landed on the hard kitchen floor and the result was a cracked LCD screen. No dents, no scratches, everything works, just a broken screen! I am so ready to trade either of those two for a broken screen. The touchscreen is working fine though. Here is a picture of the damage.

Picture of my Treo and the cracked screen

Unfortunately I didn’t have any phone insurance for the Treo, since Cingular does not provide insurance for a fair large number of their phones including the Treo. Possibly due to their high cost? Anyhow, I was on PalmOne’s website filling out a out-of-warranty repair form (which will cost me $175 to repair the cracked screen) when I remembered that my AMEX card has purchase protection. I called them up and low and behold, AMEX covers accidental damage for 90 days after purchase! It would take them around 2 weeks to come to a decision on how to compensate me but it will be either of these three options: 1) replace my phone, 2) repair the screen, or 3) reimburse the original cost of the phone so I can get a new (perhaps better) one. I am hoping for #1 but #2 is fine with me.

In the mean time I’ll have to put up with a half working screen. Not so bad for most normal use but text messaging is a bit, shall we say, challenging since I have to guess what I type for about half of the time!

Hopefully with this out of the way, there won’t be any more electronic disaster for the reminding year. I am off to play some Halo 2 to vent my frustration…

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Toy Feast

Let’s see. Yesterday I got to play with the following toys because they either arrived or I finally got the chance to play with them.

1) Tiger – Borrowed the Tiger DVD from my friend and installed on my PB (Don’t worry, technically I am not pirating because my copy will be arrived tomorrow in the mail). Took me awhile to install because I had to clone the original drive first, installed a fresh new hard drive and then installed Tiger. In fact it took most of the evening, but thankfully I did it while half-watching TV (NCIS and House). Just like with the upgrade from Jaguar to Panther, Tiger has given my aging TiBook a new lease of life with huge gain in speed. Although I think the speed gain is partly due to my new hard drive which has higher spin speed and larger cache. Oh and the new hard drive is bloody quiet!

2) External hard drive enclosure – Why waste a perfectly good hard drive? So I also bought this very nice hard drive enclosure from Other World Computing to “reuse” my old PB hard drive. Installation is child-play even without any instructions.

3) Wireless surround sound headphones – These new Sony headphones kick-ass! My friend Jeronimo has the older DS3000 model and they impressed me when I tried them out at his apartment a few months back. Mine is the newer model, DS4000, and it has a optical pass-through so you don’t need an extra optical output to hook these headphones up. So now I can play Halo 2 into the depth of night without disturbing the neighbour or the “Sleeping Beauty” (a.k.a. the “Princess”, a.k.a the wife).

4) Halo 2 headset – To go with the headphones, I bought these Plantronics game headset so it will fit my ear/head better. I was doubtful for a long time whether they will be indeed more comfortable but they are. And because the microphone broom can be bent to be closer to my face, now I don’t even need to talk as loud to be heard. The only negative thing is that the cable is slightly shorter than the Microsoft’s headset and thus I kept pulling the headset off slightly.

5) New iPod – Not for me, but for Leah. Still not sure why I have bought Leah a new 20GB iPod to replace her ancient 2nd Generation 10GB iPod 😉 But I guess having a nice bonus from work eases the wallet pain…

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More Moblogging

So I have tried out couple more Palm blogging apps (HBlogger and Vagablog) and I still prefer mo:Blog. Although when I try to post with a picture the first time couple of days ago, mo:Blog throw up error left, right, and centre. No problem at all when I tried again just now.

With HBlogger, it only supports file upload via FTP. Why the hell not via the API? Even though it claims that it supports MT/TP, it doesn’t really. First, you can’t set MT’s properties such as comment, text format, trackback, etc. (mo:Blog can’t do these either. Again, why the hell not if it really support MT’s API?) Then there is the absent of post title support. To me, it looks like HBlogger support the old Blogger API and that is why it can’t do any of these things.

And one more thing… Neither of them support categories properly. HBlogger doesn’t, period. mo:Blog makes you set a category when you set up a blog (see my previous post) but when I actually make a post the category is not set. If that’s all I get then I may as well moblog to TypePad using TP’s email feature. At least I know it works and free.

I am disappointed with what I can find so far. Here I am with a great smartphone/PDA and I can’t even upload my photos along with my blog post unless I have FTP (as is the case with HBlogger) or set categories! Category supports is crucial because I want to set my post category to MoBlog so Technorati will pick it up as tags.

If the next version of mo:Blog support categories properly along with support for MT’s post options, caching blog IDs and categories, ability to edit blog name, etc. I’ll have no problem paying for a license. But for now, I’ll wait.

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Moblogging with Treo

So here is a post made from my Treo using mo:Blog. I like this app a lot, with its support for hi-res screen and html snippets. But the showstopper issue I have with it is its inability to let me choose different category when composing a post. Instead I have pick one catergory during the setup of the blog. WTF??? I won’t be that bad if it caches the category list for offline use but since it doesn’t that mean I’ll have to retreive the list OTA everytime I want to switch.

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Treo 650

I’ve finally scrambled to the temptation and bought the Treo 650 last night on my way home from work. The account migration from AT&T to Cingular was very painless and quick, so full marks there for the Cingular Store in Hoboken.

The phone is smaller and lighter than I expected. The size is perfect for my hand, not too large to carry comfortably (like the Clie) or too small so that compromises the screen size.

I’ve never been a fan for thumb board but after using Treo’s thumb board I am very much convinced that it is very quick to use. It helps that the tactile feedback from Treo’s thumb board is excellent, not some soft/mushy keys that some PDA seems to have. And the way the OS with the 5-ways navigation keys make it very easy to use the phone one handed without using the stylus.

The call quality is excellent when compares against my old SE Z600. It can be due to Treo’s quad-bands capability to tap into Cingular’s 850MHz towers whereas the Z600’s tri-bands can only use the 1900MHz band.

No problem with the phone resetting itself, as reported widely in the web. Probably it is because I did a clean hotsync profile so none of the crap I had for my Clie got onto the Treo.

The only thing I wish to be better is AppShelf support for Treo. Right now the AppShelf doesn’t draw the miniPad icons properly as well as some issues with regular icons. I really don’t want to use other launcher such as Zlauncher but if AppShelf will not support the Treo, I guess I’ll have to switch.

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