Gadgets

[dwenius]

About 9 months ago, I picked up a Handspring Treo 270 PDA/phone, a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen MP3 player, and a Canon Powershot S400 digital camera. In a perfect universe, I would now be writing about how this technology has enriched my life, giving me the fulfillment for which I always have yearned. Um, no, that more properly describes canetoad. The technology is much more of a mixed bag.

The Good: The Nomad rules utterly. The day I got it, I opened it up and swapped in a 40GB drive for the stock 20. Try that with your iPod. The battery life is outstanding; I get between 10-12 hours regularly. I have the USB2.0 version, not the firewire, and I get 50-60 Mbps transfer rates to an IBM T40 laptop. The Nomad also sounds great, all things considered. The Nomad can play mp3s, WMVs, and WAVs(!)...if laptop sized drives get big enough I may have to go back and re-rip my collection as WAVs. For now I rip all my music with the LAME encoder, VBR, 128k minimum, preset --alt-fast-standard, using a nifty windows program called CDex. I'm listening through Aiwa noise-cancelling headphones in the noisy wheel-screeching environs of BART. The Nomad has a huge amount of headroom; it can get very loud if necessary, but it handles dynamic passages equally well. The only thing I could complain about is the MusicMatch Pro software it ships with, but $25 in the pockets of the fine folks at Red Chair Software for their Notmad Explorer program solved that problem right quick.

The Bad: The first Treo I had went bad after two days with a dead screen. The replacement went bad about a month ago with a dead radio; it worked fine unless you wanted to, you know, call somebody. Palm sent me another replacement unit; this one died Tuesday, apparently with a dead battery. Three completely unrelated failures in 9 months? If it were a run of bad parts, that would be one thing, but this takes the concept of quality control to new lows. I would note that when they sent me the last (third) Treo, they swore it was new from the factory and checked for functionality twice by their crack QA staff yada yada yada. Dead again. My boss has the Treo 600, and he is on his third as well, although he is much rougher on phones than I am. Still, as much as I love the Palm platform, I have to conclude that the Treo line is teh suxx0r. I'm moving back to a Blackberry 7510 ("Blueberry"), which has a superior email service to anything Palm offers. I switched the other way, Blackberry to Treo, 9 months ago, because the BB was a crappy phone; since the Cingular/ATT merge is happening, and after 9 months of improvements to the network, those issues have apparently been resolved. More news as events warrant.

The sometimes Ugly: We have managed to take some amazing shots with the S400, but its primary strength is also its greatest weakness: the small size. It's difficult to get good quality natural light shots, because you can't hold the camera still enough. So I end up taking 5-6 of everything, just in case, and still get some series where every shot is too grainy or blurry. When I get the shot, it's great, very nice colors and amazing resolution. The ability to take little movies has let me capture a few moments that I'll treasure forever (Calvin learns to play ball, Calvin enjoys the swing, Calvin cackles at his reflection in the mirror...). But a move to a slightly bigger, more featured camera mighed be in our future.

Comments

[dwenius.livejournal.com]

Sure, we have used a tripod, but again, that kills the "put it in your pocket and cruise" element that was one of the primary appeals of the camera. Might be unavoidable, though.