Palm-Mac

Hello....it's Deathwatch 1969 here

I do love my podcasts and listen to quite a few on a weekly basis. One of the things that gets me (you can interpret that as annoys me) are the ones with phone-ins where people can phone a number and eiether leave a question or there is a "real time" phone link.

Honestly, the amount of times people phone up and say something like... "yeah it's Swordmaster 657 here..."...what??....Swordmaster!?... Haven't you got a real name?...you're not living some World of Warcraft fantasy life (sorry Dieter) here and hiding behind your computer anymore...this is the real world matey peeps and in the real world people...get this...have real names....like Frank Smith and Stanley McDonald.

It wouldn't be so bad if they had the gumption or originality to call themselves something unique instead of having to settle for being the 2987th person to use the moniker "DeathHead". It's all part of this cross over and blurring of reality between internet and real life and, guys'n'gals, I do not like it one jot.

Treo 680 updater working well or not?

I still haven't bothered to "update" my 680 mainly because of 2 reasons, if it ain't broke don't fix it being the main one and sheer laziness being the other. I've not had an issue with battery life since I got the Seido 1600 extended but still normal size battery nor has stability beena problem for the 680.

Poor Statto has had some problems judging by his recent posts. I think I will continue to hang fire on this one.

Still, it is good to see people who were using 680's and then "moved" to windows mobile talking about using their treo's again...Shaun is in the same boat too. All that glitters is possibly not gold when it comes to the supposedly superior and more powerful WM o/s, certainly in the speed stakes.

The Treo is super quick. The keyboard is placed where it should be, on the front, and is still one of the best on the market. The voice sound quality is much better than the TyTN and there is an ease of use and responsiveness that the TyTN does not have. The TyTN does have built in GPS, HSDPA, more third party application support and so many other obvious advantages that it would be silly to say that the Treo is a better phone. The Treo, however, has simple touches of pure genuis: in a meeting I can switch to mute by sliding the top key (takes a second), I can add a calendar entry by pressing a button, typing the entry and pressing one more button.

Meet Bento

What do you think of when you hear the word "Bento"?

Moi, I think Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney pie...the one in the tin which you stick in the oven, top off of course, and 30 minutes later the pastry is burnt to a crisp on top and soggy as hell on the bottom no matter how much you try to avoid it.

Well, in fact there is a new Bento in town and it's brought to you by the people who make FileMaker for mac. This new app has had some fantastic reviews in various Mac mags I have read and on several sites. It's something I'm going to give a serious try to very shortly. Be warned though, it is a Leopard only application.

"Bento organizes all your important information in one place. So you can manage your contacts, coordinate events, track projects, prioritize tasks, and more — faster and easier than ever before....Bento is designed exclusively for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It takes advantage of many of the new features of Leopard, including live linking to iCal data, core animation, advanced find, Time Machine backups, and multimedia features"

I've bought a treo 500v

Ha ha!! That eXpansys refund money from the failed HTC Advantage experiment sat all of a week in my paypal gadget account saying "please spend me"...so I did. I've been itching to get my hands on a treo 500v so came to a deal with a "celebrity" owner for his barely used one. Have a guess who it is...

Hopefully it will be arriving very shortly and I'll give some pics and thoughts on it at the start of next week. The only thing that concerns me about this latest-ish treo is that it comes with NO threaded SMS application....a treo with no threaded SMS??!! Does anyone know of an application for Windows Mobile Standard that could do the job?

Treo 750....bad boy

Initially I was pleased with the 750 after the WM6 upgrade, mainly because of the added HSDPA support it provided. Since then however things just seem to have gone downhill with the device.
For example, getting the phone to turn on is a major task & invariably involves a couple of soft resets. After that, getting some of the apps on the treo that use the internet to connect can be problematic & involves a further battery out reset job. How very convenient.
I'm also convinced that the 750 is now slower through the menus, I seem to see that spinning beach ball far too often these days. Quite frankly, it is becoming a dog to use...often, when trying to launch the email app it just stops. I'm really not convinced now that WM6 has helped out here, it has sucked away a big dollop of available memory for running apps and slowed things down to the point where it has become near intolerable and for what? To get HSDPA and the "delete" button as a soft key in messaging....not a good deal...please give me back my WM5 speedy 750. Is it possible to get WM5 back??

Bottom line here is that I have seriously fallen out of love with the 750 and wish I hadn't pulled it off ebay at the last minute...it's a no-return device that is very much bottom of the pile in the likely to get used stakes. Changed days indeed.

TimeShift...excellent xbox game

I finished playing Timeshift recently and must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. It got better and better with each passing level, some of the later levels were stupendously good with fab scenery & were pretty adventurous. I loved it. It reminded me graphically and game play wise of bits of Doom, Half Life 2 and a bit of Halo thrown in.

It's strange because I wasn't expecting much as the game got generally lukewarm reviews on release and was quickly lowered in price. It starts off a bit humdrum but soon speeds up & gets into its stride. What surprised me was not so much the variety of gameplay as that is undeniably a bit samey but rather the variety of the actual levels themselves. You never know where you are going next or where you will be dumped at the start of the next level. And of course it includes what every game should have...the ability to save it when YOU want and not when the developer thinks you should be saving.

Your powers consist as usual of a selection of weapons of which the two sniper type ones are the most fun to use. There is no hand to hand combat at all but you do have, as the name suggests, the ability to alter time by stopping it, reversing it or going forward. Stopping time in a fight with the bad guys is so  much fun as you can use the sniper to pick them off from afar or run up to them and grab their weapons and use them to blast them. Very satisfying.

It is basically a shooter but is a jolly good romp. The scale of some of the levels visually is amazing, there's a heck of a lot of thought gone into this game to make it look good with it's slightly futuristic, metallic like and grey-ey settings. It also lasts a long time too unlike some game I have played of late (Halo 3) and although you can say with justification that in bits it is a bit repetitive combat-wise, nonetheless it is a hell of a lot of fun along the way.

Highly recommended.

HP iPAQ 114 - PDA 24/7

Link: HP iPAQ 114 - PDA 24/7.

Interesting review of this new HP iPAQ at 247. This sort of standalone pda appeals to me to use along side the iPhone, in particular the big screen is a plus point as is the big battery.

Shaun always manages to get good photos of the stuff he is reviewing, makes the device look attractive.

HP have also launched another similar model but it has a bigger screen and comes in black, it's more expensive of course at £240 but may be worth it for the vga screen? Debatable I suppose.

The screen on this beast is 4 inch, compared to the miserly 3.5 one on the 114 and is the higher resolution VGA too. Again, the specs look impressive with in particular a fast sounding processor (not that that means much in the win mob world sometimes), big 2200 mah battery, wifi etc etc etc.

Quite tempting....not that it takes much to tempt me these days.

o2 bump up iphone minutes

Caught this at another site...o2 are about to increase your minutes and texts under your iPhone plan.

For example I am on the cheapo plan at £35pm. Soon I will get 600 anytime minutes and 500 texts per month plus truly unlimited data downloads for the same cost.

Sounds jolly good to me. I wonder why o2 are doing this though.

HTC "class action"...

I'm sure this is nothing more than just a temporary embarassment for the mighty HTC but nevertheless it is good to see them getting a bit of well earned stick for this oversight(?). Their Kaiser is a flagship model and deserves the best that is out there in terms of drivers and chips etc etc.

Still, for us non- winmo guys it is really difficult to suppress a snigger after having had months of "power" this and "power" that rammed down our throats.  However, you guys'n'gals all know that I am not the type to gloat (NOT!) and thus instead I will point out this little snippet which I'd forgotten I'd read but was reminded of during the excellent MoDaCo podcast number 3.

Yep, part of HTC's defence was that the Kaiser was along the lines of well, the Kaiser is a Jack of all Trades device, master of none. Fair enough but I do not want a device that can do 50 different things but only do 15 of those really well...no sirree, I want a device that may only be able to do 12 things but...and here is the crux for me... it will do 10 of those things really really well and those 10 things will be the reason why I purchased that device in the first place.

The Kaiser does not appeal for many reasons, being a relative jack of all trades being up there with the most important, but there is more.... I do not need GPS on a phone nor do I want a device that can hardly play back video properly (on a £500 device?) as the latter is something I need a device to be able to do really well. I'm now also not so keen on smartphones where you have to slide out the keyboard to be able to type, it just feels too inconvenient. Basically, I don't want to pay over the odds for a device that has a whole lot of stuff on it that I will more than likely never use.

I think I'm now at the stage where, when I look at a possible new smartphone (as opposed to plain old standalone PDA), I'm thinking I need this to be good at certain things....email, browsing, playing music and videos. In addition, it has to be quick and stable, be able to sync  easily with my chosen home computer platform, have good simple navigation and that is about it. Hence why I like my iPhone so much....okay it doesn't do nearly as much as the likes of the TyTn11 but I'll tell you this, what it does do it does a heck of a lot better than the apparant slowcoach that is the HTC flagship model. I'm talking there about video and music, email too in my opinion, internet browsing unquestionably is superior and I also think it is far quicker than a TyTn11 and just as stable.

Useability is something that seems to be becoming more and more important for me these days.....must be an age thing....now, where did I leave that pipe?

Palm Treo 650 at eXpansys UK

Link: Buy a Palm Treo 650 (Multilingual, QWERTZ), #1040DE - eXpansys UK.

How odd...back in stock at eXpansys is supposedly the treo 650. I thought they'd stopped making it and selling it here in the UK as it failed some "health" regulations...can't remember which one and can't be bothered googling to find out.

Errr...grab yerself a bargain?

It's only about £50 cheaper than the current 680 but does have far better battery life and you get a free antenna thrown in as well.