everyday

I have had my new iPhone 3G for a little over a week now and I absolutely love it. As some people have noted, the OS on the phone does seem a tad glitchy. I think Apple may have rushed the SDK enabled OS out the door. That being said, I fully expect any minor issues to be fixed with simple software updates. Enough about the issues, on to what makes it the best phone I have ever had…

The iPhone 3G is the best phone that I have ever had. Now, I am not much of a gadget junky, so I have only owned a few smart phones, and that name was a complete misnomer for them. My first foray into the smart phone world was around 2003 with the Motorola MPX220. This phone worked well enough as a phone, but the limitations of the “smart” aspects of the phone left me wishing I hadn’t spent so much money on it. In fact, the phone completely turned me off to the whole smart phone scene. While the phone hinted at the glorious future of a workable mobile computing platform in a phone, it delivered none of it.

My next adventure in smart phone land began in 2007 when my employer decided to provide a number of us with a Nextel/BlackBerry 7100i. This is perhaps the worst phone I have ever seen. It is large and bulky and quite simply doesn’t work. If the phone isn’t answered within the first nano-second of a ring, it goes to voicemail. The email functionality via a corporate BlackBerry server again leaves me wishing for more. When an email is deleted on my desktop, it still shows up on my BlackBerry. The synchronization does not work as well I would like. Also, the web browser is decent, but certainly not perfect. Oh, and it has PTT which is perhaps the single largest hindrance to communication that mankind has ever invented. Why, when it is completely possible to engage in a duplex conversation would anyone opt for simplex? The phone does have a couple of nice features though. It has a good speakerphone and the battery lasts forever, probably due to it’s massive size.

So, on to the iPhone and why it is so nice. First off, the “phone” is rock solid. Calls are clear and the sound quality is really good. I think any smart phone needs to focus on being a phone first and “smart” second. I carry this thing around with me because it is a phone, not because I can read my email on it. “Smart” is a bonus, the phone is a necessity. That being said, the “smart” in the iPhone is really smart, genius level smart. The UI is very intuitive, Apple must have poured money into the development of the UI on this phone.

Perhaps the single greatest feature of the iPhone is also the one that I think about the least, the touch screen. So much of my time is spent focusing on the content being presented that I quite frankly ignore the technological marvel that is the iPhone’s touch screen. Actually, until I began writing this, I hadn’t given the touch screen a second thought. That is truly the hallmark of a great design, I don’t ever think about it. Since the moment I bought it, I have swiped, typed, pinched, scrolled and cursored my way across that screen a million times without ever thinking about the way it works. It works so well, it is so intuitive and natural to use that I simply forget about it while using it.

The last thing that I will write about in this installment are the applications on the iPhone. The whole iPhone and Apple community were up in arms over the lack of native application development support on the original iPhone, so Apple began working on an SDK equipped version of the OS for the second generation of the iPhone. While Apple certainly has delivered, I am not so sure that they wanted to do this. When the first generation iPhone was released, Steve Jobs touted the phones fully functional web browser as the sole target for iPhone development. I think this was a brilliant move and, while not sad to see native applications, I do think that the existence of the SDK will detract from the web based development on the iPhone. Of the few applications I have downloaded so far (Last.fm, Sudoku and Twitterific) I only really use Soduku. I do however use the web applications I have added many times a day. I currently have Digg, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Hahlo on my main screen. These “web apps” work flawlessly and I am truly impressed with them. I think that Apple was correct with their 3rd party development strategy for the first generation iPhone. Limiting development to web apps, while certainly constraining was also the way of the future. I hope that the existence of the SDK doesn’t mean that web app developers will lose momentum.

Credit: William Castleman

I really want a Canon EF 50mm f/1.2L prime lens! Unfortunately, they cost around $1,600.00 so they are just out of my $200.00 price range. This lens has a super wide aperture and is the lens of all lenses. When focused on a 35mm film frame, this lens will produce a field of view comparable to that of the human eye. This lens is supposed to be fantastic for portrait shots and just general everyday shots. The 50mm prime lens is what typically came standard on all SLR cameras prior to the decrease in price of the now ubiquitous zoom lenses. Sure you can get a zoom lens that will cover the 50mm range, I actually have a 28mm - 135mm zoom, the problem with these types of lenses is that they aren’t fast enough (lower aperture numbers allow more light in, allowing for a faster shutter speed) for low light situations.

This camera was released in January of 2005, and it is arguably the best on the market. The competition for this camera comes mainly from Nikon. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with Nikon’s products. I do know that Nikon makes a high quality product that is preferred by many professional photographers, but I believe that is based more on tradition than on the merits of the product. There is a really good review of the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II on Digital Photography Review. I currently own a Canon D60, and I absolutely love it. If I had an extra $8,000.00 laying around, I would buy this camera right now. That is, if I could find one, they seem to be out of stock everywhere.

via: MocoLoco

MocoLoco has an intriguing entry that is part of their weekly picks, the Bitfall. If I were designing a building I would incorporate this right now. How amazing would it be to walk around the corner of a building and see an image composed of falling water droplets sheeting down the wall? This is such a cool idea!

Note: The originating website is in German, a Babel Fish translation may prove to be rather humorous. Also, the original site for Bitfall is down, I have pointed to a mirror.

I found this new music interface, monome, while reading the CreateDigitalMusic blog. The demonstration videos (1,2) absolutely blew me away. The concept is so simple, but the resulting control over music is immense. It isn’t often that something comes along to completely “wow” me, but the monome certainly has. Of course the monome isn’t in full-scale production yet, so hopefully the $500 price tag will drop. Even at that price I still want one, that isn’t really saying much since the list of things that I want is only surpassed by the list of things that I can’t afford.

via: Gizmodo

Where have I been for the last, lets see here… 12 hours maybe? Gizmodo reports that Apple has released the iPod Nano on their website. This thing looks amazing. It is, perhaps, the best of both worlds, small like the iPod Shuffle, pretty color screen (with photo storage) like the iPod. Apple has done it again! Since my iPod was stolen a few months ago, I have learned to live without (mostly because my Motorola MPx220 can play music from the 250MB MiniSD card I have in it). This new evolution of the iPod is begging me to purchase it.

Sony Ericsson will be launching the rather sweet W800 on August 26th. Unfortunately, it will cost $499. This phone pretty much has it all, except for tight integration with my PC, like my Motorola MPx220 does.

Apparently, less is more. Nike engineers have been hard at work on creating a better running shoe since the days when they were selling shoes out of the back of a van. After countless hours and millions of dollars of engineering effort, it turns out that the best shoe, is no shoe at all. They have studied the movements of the unshod runner and have found that they have more agility and have a considerably larger range of motion in their foot. Damn, you would think that after all of that work we could easily outdo (a. millions of years of evolution, b. some deity’s infinite greatness). The point of all of this, well now you can buy a new shoe from Nike (Nike Free) that gives you the best of both worlds. You will be able to protect your feet from goatheads and at the same time be able to run a 4.4-40. These shoes look pretty cool as well. I like the fact that Nike has continually pushed the envelope of athletic engineering, now if they could just find a way to manufacture these shoes without exploiting impoverished brown people.

Engadget has an article (originally from activewin.com) about a new wireless keyboard for Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition. It is very nice looking, has some nice features and isn’t too costly. I would like to know what wireless protocol it uses, Bluetooth hopefully.

This isn’t exactly news, but I am looking for a new cell phone and the Sony Ericsson W800i is definitely a front runner. Some of the features of this phone are 30 hours of music playback, 2 mega-pixel camera, Bluetooth, video recorder and tri-band GSM. It also has a Memory Stick Pro Duo (that name is way too long) card slot which will allow for a sizeable amount of storage at good prices. A 1GB Memory Stick is currently around $99.00. Not bad for the same storage as an iPod Shuffle that goes for $129.00.