Now, some would argue that I rail against such an act in order to protect my right to be a pervert and take up-skirt images on trains and buses. This is the content of arguements for such laws as it is with anti-virus software makers whose marketing policy is to engender fear in order to sell. (I may be a hardcore Machead, but I do use Windows, and when I do, I don’t use A/V software, but I also don’t use Microsoft software or do things I shouldn’t. Because of that, I’ve not been infected in 10+ years.) The real argument, and the one Republicans and the Religious Right don’t want you to make, is that its about freedom of speech. Yes, taking pictures is a right we have because its a form of personal expression.

What I’m more concerned about is Republicans fighting as hard as they are to not support our President, Barack Obama. We are in a serious recession, we have a dangerously high jebless rate, we have a large, National population of homeless people, we have banks and other financial institutions ripping us off, the credit market is in shambles, and money fund managers are giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses with TARP funds. We’re in trouble. Deep trouble, and Republicans are up to their same, tired, ridiculous old games claiming that Democrats are all about spending and spending and spending. Its shameful.

Think about it, kids (and I’m no mathematician). If you spend X number of Billions of dollars on a bridge refitting project, where does that money go? Republicans would have you believe that simply making the money available is waste and will produce nothing. Democrats, on the other hand (and who never seem to say anything about this), know that what will really happen is the money will go to planning which will create staff positions for design and implementation which will pay architectural firms to design the refits which will guide the project leaders to determining a contractor who will need to hire people to actually perform the work. I don’t know how many bridges there are in the US, but I know there’s a lot so I imagine that’s several hundreds of thousands of jobs right there.

I have a feeling that some of you will ask yourselves what you can do about it. Don’t. Know that you can call, write, fax, or email your representatives in Congress and tell them what you want them to work on. Tell them that pushing a bill (HR414, in case you were curious) to make mobile phone cameras click by law is less important than reinvigorating our economy. Let them know that you’re not happy about this. I’m certainly going to tell my reps what they should be working on.

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When Vista was announced, it was reveled that Microsoft’s Windows team was yanking features (including WinFS, their new filesystem baby), and then its system requirements, I knew we were in for a rocky road with Microsoft’s obsession with making Windows more Mac-like. I was far from wrong. Vista has turned out to be Microsoft’s least liked OS ever (even less popular than Windows Me, though not nearly as hated as BOB).

Microsoft even stooped to tricking people into liking Vista by showing them Mojave, a tweaked version of Vista. Now, if they’re willing to modify the system to make all references to Vista become Mojave instead, what else were they willing to change… but I digress. I reported here that I would not be upgrading, and for some time I didn’t, but since Microsoft had sent me a press kit with a copy of Vista Ultimate, I couldn’t resist for long.

My fears, however, were well founded, and even on my powerhouse MacBook Pro, the best rated laptop (not Mac laptop, but laptop overall. If you don’t believe me, check it out in PC World Magazine) for running Windows Vista, I was disappointed. I had stability issues, speed problems, application crashes, random errors, and just general lack of cohesiveness, even after upgrading to Vista SP1. So, I removed Vista and reinstalled XP with SP2 back into my Boot Camp partition. I was done with Windows Vista.

But then… along came Windows 7. Microsoft had been telling us that it had been working on Windows 7. Now, my conspiracy theory explanation is that Microsoft determined that they were not going to finish Windows 7 in time to release anywhere near their announced date and so they were going to have a hard time getting rid of Windows XP the longer people used it. Its at the time, I believe, that they plucked a few concepts from their target OS and crafted a version of Windows Server 2008 with the UI elements from the upcoming Windows 7 to cobble together Vista.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. Interestingly, Vista’s release did quell the dissent which was pelting the intarwebs. It didn’t take long, though, for the issues to start cropping up and people to begin complaning. The complaints from all corners of the computing world that it seemingly pushed Microsoft to announce Windows 7 early. They opened beta testing to more developers, and word started leaking out that, while it looked like Vista, it didn’t work like it. The errors were gone, the UI pains were gone or modified to work better, the underlying core was far more efficient, and it all took less resources to do the same thing Vista had so much trouble with.

When Microsoft released Windows 7 to general beta, I hopped on over to my resource and got a copy. I did not, however, want to install it on my MacBook Pro. I already have a nearly year old install of XP SP2 over there, keep it up to date, and play my Windows games over there. Sure, I use Steam, but I’d had to back everything up and it would be a hassle. My wife just stepped on the Averatec AIO, de-tailing the mouse and gouging the screen, so that was out, so my eyes fell to the Averatec Buddy netbook which came with the AIO. I burned the installer DVD (x86, if you’re interested) image to a disc, plugged in my LG external USB DVD burner, and fired it up.

Total install was absolutely painless. It even archived the XP install into the ../windows.old directory and created a boot loader entry for it. I had previously installed Wubi’s Xubuntu, and that boot entry was retained as well. I should note for details sake that I’ve not booted either, removed them from the boot.ini file and deleted them. I wanted to focus on Windows 7 and nothing else. For posterity, Xubuntu 8.10 worked fantastically well, though I was unable to get the wireless module to compile correctly and was unable to test the webcam. Of course, XFce is a fantastic window manager, but its not resource intensive.

That’s good, too, since the Averatec Buddy netbook sports a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB drive, a 10″ 1024×600 display, an integrated webcam, wi-fi and Ethernet connectivity, and SD card slot and an anemic 3-cell 2200 mAh battery pack. Its really no different than just about any other netbook out there and its a repro of the MSI Wind series. From what I can tell, it can even take the replacement batteries designed for the MSI Wind. With less than two hours of battery life, getting a large 9 or 12 cell pack should be a priority. I also wish it had integrated Bluetooth, but you get what you get.

Installation of Windows 7 took approximately one hour, maybe a little less. The process is generally the same as installing Vista, but is cleaner. That may be my imagination. Setup was straightforward, though it wouldn’t accept my key until I entered it correctly (yeah, I’m a dork). W7 intalled drivers for video (Intel GMA950), audio, and Ethernet (everything else is Realtek except the webcam) but was unable to install drivers for the wi-fi adapter, SD card reader, and Buffalo webcam. Installation of drivers spec’ed for Vista was easy, though.

There are a number of improvements to the entire system. I’m not going to get into details in this article. I’ll save that for a full review when it actually ships. I’ve experienced it when Microsoft makes last minute changes to a product after the Beta phase has been passed, so I don’t want to miss anything here. RIght off the bat, though, Microsoft makes it clear that they knew they made mistakes with the Vista interface, so they’ve made nice changes which make it more usable. The first thing you will notice is the intergration of the Quicklaunch buttons, the Start Menu pinning feature, and the list of running tasks all into one neat, clean, tidy, and functional icon.

The taskbar also works slightly differently. You’ll note that the entire Start button fits all the way into the taskbar. This makes the pinned icons or icons from active applications larger and, therefore, easier to see. You can change this behavior by making the icons small (then the Start button protrudes again), add the title, or show all buttons for all windows, just like the old system. The new visual identification system, however, just works better. Its amazing that its taken so many years for Microsoft to get this. Apple finally got it when Mac OS X 10.0 shipped in 2000 and introduced the dock. Linux got it years earlier with various window managers.

The second thing you notice is that everything seems to run faster and more efficiently. One drawback is having to use Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s unfortunate choice for a direction for their web browser. IE7 was bad enough, but it could be tolerated. IE8 is just crap. Like most products Microsoft created based on the successes of others (like Firefox), they have taken what is good from them and created overly complicated and unecessarily obtuse versions. Don’t look to IE8′s add-ons to be anything even vaguely like Firefox’s plugins. I installed one for Skype into both Firefox and IE8, and where the former works just fine, the latter still won’t start, and there’s no clear way to get add-ons to start. Feh.

The third thing I noticed was how theming and interface tweaking has changed. Its mostly the same way as it was in Vista, but they’ve added some important changes. For one, you can now select any number of wallpaper images and arbitrarily decide when they change. Aero also apparently requires far less resources to work right. Linux distributions have proven that transparencies can be done easily on low power systems for years (I don’t count it when the console app shows the wallpaper but not the windows which are underneath… That’s just silly). Aero would not run on a MacBook (pre-unibody) in Vista, but will run on an underpowered netbook in Windows 7. Aero isn’t just some silly eye candy, either. There are subtle little behaviors which Aero can perform which improve readability and object identification.

For software, I promptly installed Firefox for web, Thunderbird for email, OpenOffice 3.0 for productivity, and, for the first time ever, Digsby for IM and social networking. All installations worked perfectly and there were no hiccups. Since I was getting the latest versions of them for installation I didn’t need to do any patching. I also went into Windows Update out of habit and gave that a shot, only to get an error. Oddly, two days later it started getting updates on its own. I don’t know why it happened, but it did. There’s been a long history of Windows fixing itself while giving no indications as to how or why. Maybe it was because I rebooted. Overall, everything I installed works just fine. I also installed Skype 4.0 beta and it works perfectly as well.

SIDEBAR: I’m disappointed and pleased with Digsby at the same time. While its very functional and has a lot of great features, it tries to trick you into installing no less than SIX freaking spyware/cashware/crapware titles onto your machine. You can opt out of each one, but its not a no-brainer. TIP: click the Decline button for everything after the first page where its deactivated (you have to install Digsby). I’d rather donate money to the project. -TCR

Working on a small 1024×600 display isn’t hard, either. Windows 7 has some new features which deal with this (or I didn’t notice them in Vista since I never installed it on a netbook). When you drag a window to the top of the display, it automatically fullscreens it. It will also move dialogs so that the buttons are exposed. They also added a permanent Show Desktop button to the far right of the taskbar. Once I had sussed all of that out, I then installed a few widgets. At first, I thought that they just made the widget bar invisible, but then I added more widgets than will fit, and it showed up in the middle of the screen. That’s when I realized you can place widgets anywhere on the display.

I haven’t tested enterprise networking, directory integration, VPN connectivity, or any of the other elements which made working with Vista a pain in the ass, but most of the crap that Vista dished out seems to have been rectified in Windows 7. Of course, its still running on NTFS and there was no sign on WinFS. I think that Microsoft may be on track to fix the problems they created from whole cloth with Vista, but I don’t think there will be a way to fix the growth Apple has made into their territory, and that’s a good thing. Microsoft needs to do a lot of growing up. It will have to innovate in order to remain relevant. Windows 7 is just a start.

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• Palm will introduce a Linux-based touchscreen device at CES. Sure, that’s mostly already known, but my prediction is that it will actually be freaking cool. I’m also going to guess that it won’t be able to run anything which wasn’t compiled for Palm OS 5.x, or at least not well.
• RIM will continue to lose marketshare to the iPhone and won’t see significant growth for the Storm until they release a version of the OS which is specifically designed for touch applications.
• Apple will update the Mac Mini. They might even incorporate AppleTV into it and kill the discreet AppleTV product. The other option is to turn AppleTV into a real DVR.
• Apple will release a 64GB iTouch model and move the entire product line up, keeping prices the same. They may also release a 128GB model, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet.
• GM will sell Saab back to Sweden and Scania will be returned to the product line badge, right alongside Saab honor and the death of the hideous Saab-badged, GM-made SUV. By 2011, real Saabs will be sold again, and I will buy a new one which will have been made in Sweden.
• Chrysler will die a long, overdue death.
• IBM will buy back the ThinkPad line from Lenovo and start making good ThinkPads again.
• Dell will trim most of its line in a successful effort to become a powerhouse again.
• Microsoft will offer a public beta release of Windows 7 and generally stop marketing Vista after failing to get savvy people to purchase it for 2+ years.
• Microsoft will announce official partnerships with various laptop fabbers to build Windows 7 Approved touchscreen lappies. The plan will generally fail, just like the UMPC, Tablet PCs, and clamshell Windows CE devices before it. (Say hello to Bob, touchscreen Win7 lappy!)
• Nintendo will release a US$99 add-on dongle which will allow the Wii to output up to 1080p video via an HDMI connection, something they had planned on doing all along. If not HDTV, it will be a VGA or DVI or both, which looks really sharp on sets which support that type of input. Think along the lines of Sega’s VGA box for the DreamCast.
• Nokia will finally make the Internet Tablet line an actual phone. At the very least, it will be a data-only arrangement like Amazon’s Kindle or the Peek.
• Google will make all of its applications support Google Gears and offer an update to Chrome which will make it work like a desktop.
• Sony will come to its senses and release a value-priced, non-mobile Playstation Core which will play PSP and PSP2 games at up to 720p and wireless controllers to compete with Nintendo’s Wii. **
• Sega will come to its senses and produce the DreamCast 2 to compete with Nintendo’s Wii. **

And now here are some “doi’s” which you would likely easily guess on your own:

• We will see netbooks from just about every name brand on the planet, including BMW and Sears.
• Apple will continue to take over marketshare in the mobile, desktop, laptop, and PMP spaces.
• Microsoft will continue to lose marketshare to Apple and Firefox.
• Dell will remain the largest single retailer of computers.
• HP will continue to be second in line, but will keep making stupid touchscreen TVs.
• All studios will sign up for Blu-Ray.
• Fox will relent and allow Watchmen to be released, but for 5% of the global profits.
• Toyota will release its Prius plug-in hybrid early to better compete with Ford’s Fusion hybrid.
• Hydrogen powerplants will not make a major splash in any market.

That’s it for 2009, kids! We’ll see how good I am at predicticating. In the past I’ve not been so good.

** Lacking quality skills at prognosticating, these could happen in 2010-11. Not sure. Just a feeling.

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If you see one of these under your tree this Christmas, don’t bother unwrapping it. Take it back to where it was bought from and buy yourself a Sony PSP. The new Mystic Silver PSP-3000 model which comes with a new Ratchet & Clank game and a movie sells for the same price and offers infinitely more functionality and fun. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

I won’t even bother going into the specifications or any real details about the device. I will, however, state that it is not what it says it is. The Sony mylo 2 is not a smaller version of a laptop, as Sony would like you to believe. That would suggest that its a MID, and it is most certainly a MID, just not a very good one. The reasons for why it is not good are simple and clear, and I will outline them for you here.

To be entirely frank, I don’t have many issues with the hardware itself. If I had to be picky, I’d complain about the poor range of the Wi-Fi module and the lack of Bluetooth. The slider snaps open with an annoyingly loud sound, and the unit us twice as thick as Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet, a product its supposed to compete directly with. Sadly, where the Nokia N810 shines, the Mylo 2 falls very, very flat. One of the biggest failings the device has is the complete lack of any additional software in any way, shape, or form.

Yes. That’s right. There’s no software you can add. There’s not even a decent Mylo 2 site or, from what I’ve been able to tell, a development site for the version of Linux which the Mylo 2 uses. I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure that utilizing any related open source code requires that you make that source available. This means that Sony should have a developers site for the version of Linux the Mylo 2 uses. Nokia (I’m sorry I keep dragging them out, but they’re an excellent example) has a complete project for the Maemo project and almost all of the software is available in source form.

Apparently Sony has found a way around this by using Linux as the core, but designing every single bit of UI software in-house and using entirely private and proprietary code. Its possible to do this as long as they don’t use any open source code at all. What this boils down to is that Sony doesn’t have to give out the code, offer any SDK for developers, or really do anything at all. And that’s just what Sony has done… nothing.

The interface is annoying. There’s no software. There are no 3rd party developers. There are no games. There are no tools to convert media. You’re forced to use Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick for storage. There’s really nothing at all that the Mylo 2 can offer. So, either get the aforementioned PSP or go pick up an Acer Aspire One from Costco for a measley US$349. I’m serious. For once, I’m actually telling people to stay away what appears to be a very cool gadget. Please trust me.

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I almost killed my MacBook Pro.

Most assuredly, as if I had picked up a kitchen knife and plunged between the shoulder blades of Barney The Dinosaur, I clicked the wrong “Delete” button. Here’s some history. I have a 15″ glossy-screen MacBook Pro 2.33GHz with 3GBs of RAM. When the Boot Camp beta came out, I held off, but a few months before 10.5 came out, I took the plunge. I had a copy of the RTM of Vista Ultimate from Microsoft, so I installed that to a 32GB partition which the utility created on the then 160GB stock drive. I had issues with Vista right away, so I yanked it and installed XP Pro in its place.

When Leopard I received a 320GB drive from Western Digital when those were first introduced. It took me three hours to install the drive and that was the time when I reviewed the drive, covering its installation and the drive enclosure I got from MacAlly. I did a standing upgrade just to see what would happen. Everything worked out well, so I reinstalled Boot Camp, this time with an 80GB partition and back to try Vista again, allowing for the possibility that a few updates might actually make a difference. They didn’t. It was back to XP Pro SP2 after three weeks with Vista and things went well for a while (though I did note that Half-Life 2 did run better under Vista than under XP Pro, which is likely a driver thing).

Time progressed and I eventually ditched even XP since I was never in it and always using VMware’s superb Fusion to run a local VM. I will admit that I’m a periodic gamer. I cycle through periods of gaming, usually when I get a new game, which isn’t very often. I also always cheat. I can’t win these games without cheating, much less get past the first few levels. I’ve tried to not cheat up until I got stymied, then I’d just cheat. The one game I am unable to cheat on is Call of Duty 2 for the Mac, which I nearly finished before I accidentally deleted it. Really kick ass game, which is a lot coming from me, Mr. Lamer Gamer.

After I got rid of Windows for what I thought would be good, I installed ReFIt, which I had heard good things about, and installed OpenSUSE 10.3 into a 50GB partition. I really enjoy Linux these days and, in my estimation, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Debian are the best distros out there (in order of complexity). For Mac users, if you want or need a Linux distro, go with Ubuntu which is designed to work a lot like the Mac. I’m also pleased with Debian because they are still compiling their most recent versions for PowerPC systems. Fedora is, too, and its looking better.

My only problem was that I couldn’t get OpenSUSE to work with the LILO bootloader through ReFIt. I tried my own tricks and followed various processes, but could never get it to boot without the CD. Feh. Then I got two things in the mail. One was a guide to using Server 2008 as a workstation, which I posted about last week. The other was a guide to yanking some of the crap out of Vista so that it would be more stable. I resolved to try both, and aimed to start with Vista. I have a bum SuperDrive in my MBP (I’m outta warranty and did NOT purchase AppleCare), so I ran it through my external DVD drive.

When I got to the partitioning page and clicked Advanced I did the following:

1. I examined the partition map while watching The Legend of 1900 on IFC
2. I selected a very small partition (approx. 6GBs) and deleted it
3. I noted a single partition for 35GBs which watching the movie on IFC
4. My brain told me that I had allocated 50GB, so I selected the large partition
5. I watched a scene where 1900 was able to light a cigarette on the piano strings after playing a rather furious improvisational piece
6. I clicked the Delete button.

It was then that I actually looked at what I was doing and that the partition which I just deleted was 249GBs and not 50GB. My wife thought I was having a heart attack. I just kept staring at the screen in disbelief at what I had just done. I had deleted my the partition definition for my Mac OS X installation. I finally came around and was able to take in the situation and shut the machine down. Sadly, the damage had already been done, and I blame myself for 80% and Microsoft for the other 20. Its unbelievable that Microsoft hasn’t figured out how to develop a partition manager which allows you to examine your new partition scheme before committing to it.

So, there you have it. Had I not been graciously provided with a copy of ProSoft’s Data Rescue II a few months before, I would not have been able to recover my data. I have since been able to wipe the drive, embue it with a single HFS+ partition, install Leopard, and thumb my nose at Boot Camp. My only wish I would have ProSoft grant Drive Genius 2 would be the ability to locate and restore deleted partition maps, though I’m rather impressed with the utilities other capabilities, which are manifold.

So, the moral of the story is to backup your stuff. Use Retrospect or Time Machine or whatever you like, just make regular, scheduled backups of your data and periodically verify that you can recover data from that backup. Don’t be a Tyler, backup. While I didn’t lose anything, I did misplace my ability to perform a clean install on my own time and on my own terms. I also lost all of that time I had to spend on getting everything back and installed and fetching copies of the applications I was using to install again. There is a cost in that which few people take into consideration. Please, dear lord, learn your lessons from this doofus. Please!

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Now, with the preamble out of the way, what is ImageWell? To keep a long story short, ImageWell allows you to take images from any source, crop,  edit, and resize them, and send them (via FTP and a wide range of other services) to your web server. It then thoughtfully places the URL to that image in your clipboard so you can quickly add an image to a story, much in the way I did for the image of ImageWell you see above. I found it interesting that, despite ImageWell’s integrated screen capture utility, I was required to use Grab.app to capture ImageWell. It can’t capture itself, which is really a feature and not a bug. Really.

ImageWell is, without a doubt, one of the best designed and most utile utilities I’ve used in a very long time. It cleanly and reliably integrates a range of functions for which I would have to normally use an image editor, ftp client, and a watermarking utility to complete. If that wasn’t enough, ImageWell gives access to all of these tools in a fast and functional manner, dramatically cutting the time we need to preparing images to post with our stories. Best of all, its a mere US$20 for the privilege. It can post to a local folder, Apple’s iDisk, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Flickr, SmugMug, and ImageShack.

In a nutshell, before ImageWell, we didn’t post many images as they just took too much time. Now… well you can see that we post images with just about every story now. Its worth it. If you work on a Mac and post images anywhere or just need a fast way to edit and crop images, you need ImageWell. If you don’t own a Mac, get one. Don’t worry, you can run Windows applications on the Mac using Parallels or VMware’s awesome Fusion for Mac.

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Does it thrill me? Yes. I can say that clearly and without quibble. Does it move me, though? No. It cannot and will not move me like the iPhone does. To give you a clear idea of what it takes to move me, here’s a small, incomplete, unqualified list of things which have (in no particular order): the entire Aston Martin line, the Apple Newton MessagePads, the Original Palm III, NEC’s MobilePro line before the 900c, the birth of my one and only child, a month in the Maine wilderness on Outward Bound when I was 15, Apple’s iPhone, IBM’s ThinkPad line (pre-Lenovo), the Atari 800, the Amiga 3000 with Video Toaster at the Pasadena Community Access Channel.

If you note the theme, these are things or events which were singular to me. If you’ll excuse the events from the list and focus only on the technologies you may detect that there are certain forms and functions which I find seminal. It was NEC who developed a truly usable ultraportable with a true convergence of power and usability, with primary focus on its fully typeable keyboard. The Newton’s and the Palm III speak for themselves as the co-parents of the PDA movement. IBM’s ThinkPad line redefined what a laptop should be. The Atari 800 was, at least in my estimation, the first true integration of gaming and computing with any quality behind it. The iPhone is the epitome of all the lessons everyone has learned about a real pocket companion. And really, who the hell can resist falling in love with an Aston Martin.

Now, when you look at the N95 8GB what do you see? Its just another Symbian S60 device at its core, its really thick, the slider slides too easily, the absence of a better keyboard is very irksome, the directional pad sucks for playing games, and there’s no lens cover for the 5MP camera. Yet, despite all of this, people are clamoring for it. Maybe because there’s so much more to the N95 8GB than the laundry list of failings. In reality, there is. There’s so much to this handset and Nokia has done very well making the S60 version of the Symbian OS work good with one hand. In order to clearly see the quality, I’m going to review each element of it separately.

The Phone

Lets face it. Nokia makes phones. They make some really good ones and they make some abysmally bad ones, but the N95 8GB is not one of the latter. This is, in my opinion, one of the finer smart-ish phones Nokia has ever made. Why smart-ish? I believe that any real smartphone must have a touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard. The N95 8GB has neither, but it still manages to do just about everything a real smartphone can do. Just don’t get any ideas that you can really manage your email with it.

Everything you’d expect in a mobile handset is here. It has a call history, quality voicemail access, a complete address book complete with in-depth contacts data fields, and it even integrates VoIP technology via its embedded 802.11b/g radio. Where it excels is in speakerphone mode. The device has stereo speakers, one on either side of the top of the unit, and they sound really good. The mic even works so your other party can hear you. The N95 8GB could truly act as a conferencing system stand-in if the need arose.

The handsets VoIP capabilities appear to also be rather cool, though I didn’t get a chance to review them. It does come with GIZMO integration which is a kind of Skype service. I’ve looked over the site and I even have an account which I created a few years back, but I’ve never really used it. Just to put that in perspective, I’ve had about US$12 in Skype credit for the last two years. Its not that I don’t like the idea. I just never use it. I guess I’m a fuddy duddy in that sense. You have a phone, you use it to call people, and they know you by that number.

The Media Player

Let me make this clear right up front. This is no iPod or an iPod killer. I have a 60GB 5G iPod in black which I keep in its case all the time and generally use as a hard drive based media player for my car. My lappy, a MacBook Pro, is my iTunes when I’m not driving. With that said, Nokia has devised a rather good media player. I’m more than a little miffed that they use RealPlayer for video, but I haven’t tried hacking that just yet, nor have I tried to watch any full-length movies on it. I just don’t like Real or RealPlayer. They’ve never been good. Its just me.

Audio and video are separated into two different applications which are converged via the Gallery tool, which gives you a unified look at all of your media-related files. It also doesn’t care whether its on the phones internal memory or on the Mass Storage drive, as Nokia refers to it. You just pick something and go. The N95 8GB not only runs the app necessary to view the file, but it also tracks your moves so when the video or audio is done, you have a back button which returns you to the Gallery. It makes what would normally be something navigation intensive into something smooth and usable.

On my review handset, I was mostly treated to the UK version of the N95 8GB experience. I was able to subscribe to podcasts, download videos from various providers, look at popular YouTube videos, and even gawk (or guffaw) at some included Nokia marketing material. There’s one video called “Snowboard” which really shows off the N95′s audio and video capabilities, too. I don’t know if that file, however, is included with all N95 8GB devices. At the time of this review, the Nokia Music Store was not yet available.

The Game Console

Back when it came out I reviewed the original Nokia N-Gage, affectionately known as the “Metal Taco”, and I did not like it. Nokia sent me two so I could use the multiplayer capabilities and one of them was DOA. Needless to say, I wasn’t too thrilled about the N-Gage over my then hot Nintendo Game Boy Advance. The controls were good and the games seemed cool, especially Tony Hawk, but it just didn’t fulfill the ideals of all components. It was a miserable phone.

However, the N95 8GB isn’t miserable as a phone, though its not that good as a game console. This mostly sources from the controls. Lets face it. Its a mobile handset. It was designed as a mobile handset. It functions as a mobile handset. The controls just suck when it comes to games. I don’t really understand why all these phone makers keep designing their phone buttons all the same way and then expect people to play games on them.

The idea of to stop putting the Select button in the middle of the cursor controller. If that weren’t bad enough, everyone then clusters the Call, End Call, Left Soft, Right Soft, and various other buttons right around it. Density supports convenience in phones meant to be phones, but not on phones also destined to be game consoles. Once the madness ends, then I’ll be interested. Until then, there are few games I would spend a lot of time playing on a mobile handset.

The Camera

First off, understand that I’m am against combining large megapixel cameras into mobiles. Its not right and its unfair to the consumer who has to either settle or demote their desires in order to own a specific phone. I can guarantee you that when people go to buy a phone, their first thought isn’t about the camera. To whit, when consumers are looking for cameras, they aren’t shopping for phones. The addition of the camera is the markets attempt to converge for the sake of sales and could care less about what you think.

With that said, the Nokia N95 8GB comes with not one, but two cameras. The first one is a massive 5MP auto-focus camera with built-in flash which can take video and has a load of features. The second is a .3MP affair on the face of the phone and is included to facilitate video calls (as if there were any). I suppose you can call another N95 8GB, but I don’t know if you need a specific plan. Its also likely that it could tie into the GIZMO system which does support video over IP connections.

Pictures are nice and video is very clear. I’m not a photographic or videographic expert, so I can’t tell you any of the specifications aside from resolution. The flash seems to work very well, but I’m a big fan of no flash shots, since I feel it ruins the natural light. You switch from Image to Video modes via a menu selection. The Video mode captures MPEG-4 and 3GP, and the Image mode captures… images. Yeah. JPEG, I believe.

How It Talks

What I mean here is how it plays with others. I’m a Mac guy, as you likely know (and if you didn’t, now you do), so I prefer that most, if not all, of my toys be both Mac and Windows capable, even better if they can do Linux. In the case of the N95 8GB, it would not initially mount on my Mac desktop. It would, however, work with Windows inside of Parallels and in Vista under Boot Camp. There are several ways for the N95 8GB to talk with computers. Its primary form is through Nokia’s complex collection of desktop communication software for Windows. While the new interface is cleaner than earlier versions, I still find it overly cumbersome for general use. It would be nice if they could develop a Palm Desktop-like integrated environment instead of having the dozen or so little apps they use now.

What I do find shameful is that it takes about 40 minutes to transfer 1.45GBs of music files over a USB 2.0 connection, in both Windows and Mac OS X. This simply isn’t acceptable. I can sync 20+ GBs to my 5G iPod over USB 2.0 in the same time, if not less. I tested in Mac OS X using the Mass Storage setting, in Windows Vista Ultimate under Boot Camp, and on an HP dc7800p Small Form Factor desktop system running Windows Vista Business Edition. Its not the source hardware, its the phone which I believe is causing the delay. I would have thought that Nokia would have more throughly tested this before allowing it to go to market.

The Wrap Up

Back in early 2007 I was listening to the TWiT podcast and Leo LaPorte was saying how he has an N95 that he loves, but was distressed at how short the battery life was. Jump forward almost a year and we now have Tyler from The Dojo with an 8GB version of the same phone, and I can say that the battery life must have improved somehow. I’m not thrilled by the fact that I can run down the battery in a few hours if I try really hard, but even with music and video playing, I’m not doing a lot of damage, unless I’m using GPS. In any case, you should count on having a car charger.

Now, however, comes the hard part. Sure, its easy to review something, but how objective could I be if I didn’t also evaluate the device’s cost, and herein lies the rub with the Nokia N95 8GB device. It’s priced in the US at US$779, just shy of $800. Add yourself a nice leather case and tax if you’re in a state which has one, and you’re talking close to US$1,000 for a phone. A PHONE. Logically, though, that’s the cost from Nokia direct. They charge based on the cost and don’t subtract a subsidy based on revenue projections per user.

How much would you spend if you were to buy each device separately? First, its a really good phone. That will run you roughly US$300 without subsidy. Getting a decent 5MP camera with quality optics will run you around US$200. An 8GB Apple iPod Nano with video retails for around US$250. Total that up and you you come up with $750. Get cases for all of those devices and you’re look at another $150, so $900. Now, total in the cost of having to juggle all of these devices which is really a subjective concept, and you’re talking at least the same cost, if not more, of the N95 8GB.

So, can I recommend it? Sure. Am I swayed by all of its features and just love it to death forever and ever and ever? No. The one thing that kills me is the standard phone keypad. If it just slid the other way and had a little thumbboard, then I’d be all over it and a half. That I could do, but that’s not what Nokia did.

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I speak, as indicated in the title of this review, the Palm Centro, which is currently an exclusive offering from Sprint. To see the Centro is to love it. Its small, sleek, nicely proportioned, and… well, that’s where it sort of ends. Maybe a few years ago in 2003 I would have been egged on to see the recent growth in the venerable Palm OS, but by this time the changed-in-name-only Access Powered “Garnet OS” has stagnated and festered. Sure, Sprint has managed to eek our some cool abilities, and the hardware certainly does run the beasty quite swiftly, but its just old.

So, I face a quandary. I love the hardware and yet, when faced with a 10 year old user interface paradigm which has changed little, I’m not sure how to evaluate it. Of course, its my job, so here I go. I love it and I hate what Palm has become. Since nobody is ever satisfied with reviews as simple as that, I will endeavor to explain. I love what Palm has done with the handset. They’ve always been good with hardware and it shows here. They have not only devised hardware which supports what Treo users expect, but have also started to integrate more than simple color into their fashion ideals.

The Hardware

The initial Centro from Sprint comes in metallic black (Onyx) or metallic red (Ruby), and Palm is now offering Pink. The Centro is a candybar-style handset, but more like the Treo 680′s antenna-less design. Essentially, everything that is on a Treo 700p is on a Centro, just smaller. There are, however, a few things about the hardware I don’t like. First, is the flimsy stylus. Palm’s been about 50/50 on the plastic (teh suck) stylii and the metal (woot) stylii, but on the hot little Centro, they opted for possibly the worst plastic stylus ever.

Second, since I’m a technology pundit, I don’t read the manual (of course, that’s a Mac users trait, as well) and it took me a while to identify the port for the microSD card slot, and even longer to get it open. Shame on Palm for making it so hard to open. If you face the display towards you, its on the right side just under the black IR rectangle. What kills me is that someone designed a bevel into one edge, but they didn’t then design a slot on the outside where you can stick the odd fingernail. Feh!

Third, though this is true of just about all mobile handsets, the D-pad sucks for games. I’m sorry, but there’s no such thing, as of yet, as a good mobile phone game. Sure, all touchscreen games still rock on the Centro if, and only if, you use another stylus (a sharpened stick would be better!), but using a mobile should be about doing things with one hand. Of course, that brings me to my chief complaint about Palm OS “Garnet”.

All About Ancient Operating Systems You Wanted To Know (But Were Afraid To Ask)

Here’s a ridiculously quick, useless historical recap. Jeff carried around some wood, then 3Com made the Palm, at which point the Palm OS came into being. A load of coders developed for it, but it didn’t grow. Palm spun off, then spun itself off, then bought its name back from itself, then sold its OS to Access. Access promised a Linux version, then renamed the old version Garnet, also know as Palm OS 5.4.

Just like the original Palm OS 10 years ago, Garnet runs one application at a time. You don’t quit Palm apps, you just switch to another one. Even the Application Launcher is an application. Of course, over the years Palm has devised methods of running multiple tasks at the same time, but the general concept of the user interface has never changed. This is where we are at with the Centro. Despite its advanced design and popularity, the Palm OS has never really grown up, even though everyone and their dog has been asking for it forever.

This isn’t to say that they Palm OS isn’t any good. In fact, its rather amazing that the ethics and concepts behind the design have been able to hold on for so long and still feel functional. This is sort of like if Apple had decided to retain the OS9 desktop appearance but added most of the capabilities of Mac OS X into the backend. You’d get something more capable and powerful, but it would still look like 1999. Besides, even on a 320×320 display, the Palm OS interface looks somewhat cramped. Its no surprise that the display on the Centro is smaller than the one on the Treo line, either.

Here comes one of those bumps in the road, though. When it comes to software for mobile devices, there’s little which can compete with Palm. Even in Microsoft Office compatible programs, Palm is the winner, hands down. On a side note, I do find it odd that, in all this time, Microsoft has been either unable or unwilling to improve its only mobile Office applications. Regardless, Palm users have always enjoyed much greater file format compatibility and feature support, and that will hopefully continue no matter what platform is actually running the Palm software.

In that light, Palm and Sprint have gotten together and spiffed out the common application set that generally gets shipped with Palm Powered devices. The big thing now is actual Sprint TV support. The new Palm client is based on Frauhofer and Kinoma codecs, and it works well, but its not as slick as the version Sprint makes for its other handsets. It looks quite good on my MOTO RAZR V3m, for instance. Sprint also includes Palm versions of the Sprint Store and Sprint Mail, and is working on a version of the Sprint Music Store for the Palm. Finally, Sprint has improved the Palm’s ability to bill your account when making software and add-on purchases.

What’s It All Mean, Tyler?

I can’t really sum this up all into one neat little package. On the one hand, Palm is not innovating and growing like they should be, and that’s left the Palm OS hanging out there longer than it should have. On the other hand, the hardware and software support is pretty hard to beat. Its also hard to beat the idea of a real Smartphone for a mere US$99. Of course, that’s after all of the Sprint and Palm Inc. incentives added on to make the price attractive, but hey, why complain!

Now, tie this in with the likelyhood of a 3G iPhone sometime this year and I’d have to say that, unless you don’t want an iPhone, I can’t suggest the Palm Centro. Sales have been too strong for too long and Palm is resting on its laurels, which really aren’t there in the first place. Palm needs to be pushed into the pool to fend for itself again. Its not that I don’t want Palm to succeed. I do! I just don’t want to them to lose, either, and with the way things are going, that’s the direction they’re headed in.

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Witness the advent of SimStapler Arena, the long awaited update to the original, non-networkable SimStapler. Marvel at its extraordinary depth and grace as you staple wantonly and without regard to human safety. SimStapler Arena brings more than personal satisfaction to the table, as it now incorporates an online component which allows you to bring the stapling beatdown to those of lesser quality and lacking in multi-page finishing capabilities.

Playing SimStapler Arena (SSA) is as intuitive as it can get. Simply click the image of the red stapler (don’t think we missed the significance of that, which is interesting since this game was available prior to the release of Office Space) and it staples. A handy score keeper tallies your brutality, but click on the Show High Scores button and the cost of viewing them is high indeed. Your score is returned to zero!

Likely one of the most challenging aspects of SSA is that Freeverse has chosen to make this worthy successor free of charge. We can only surmise the vast number of dollars (or Ziploc baggies of coins found in the sofa and run through the local CoinStar) and the few dozen coffees which were sacrificed to create this clear labor of love (tinged with a spate of madness, I would think). I don’t know whether to thank Freeverse or revile them.

As I come away from this gaming experience I feel that I am changed. I don’t know yet if for the better or worse, but if I cannot withstand the urge to staple my dog to my cat sometime within the next few days, I’ll know. Or will I…

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