Distant Parts

About a month ago I switched my mobile contract away from O2 to T-Mobile, lured by their web’n'walk data packages, and so far I’m absolutely delighted by the service.

Unitl recently, mobile data in the UK has involved slow speeds (GPRS mostly), high charges, and walled gardens.

Rather, than tying myself into a contract with a branded phone, I went for £7.50 a month sim only deal, with 50 minutes of calls a month, and a one month minimum term (note that I’m not a heavy voice or SMS user). OK, I have to provide my own handset, but the service is cheap, and I don’t have to put up with any carrier branding.

Next I added web’n'walk plus for £12.50 a month. That gives me 3Gb of data (including 3.5G HSDPA), with the only restriction being a ban on VOIP applications.

The experience has been a revelation. I can now get connected almost anywhere I want, without concerns about the cost, and often at very high speed. No problem with connecting via a laptop or my N800.

At long last, the promise of useful 3G connectivity seems to have arrived in the UK.

As a Mac mini owner, I’ve been left rather cold by all the hype surrounding the Apple TV.

The Apple TV is just a crippled Mac mini, without a full OS X license.

Some of the most useful apps on my Mac mini aren’t available unless you install OS X, and that usually means paying for a new OS X license.

VLC, Safari, Firefox, full iTunes, MacTF, Google Earth, YouTube. All these apps run beautifully on my Core Solo Mac mini, and are far more powerful than Front Row.

There’s also an awful lot to be said for having USB and Firewire ports, so that it’s easy to connect to external devices.

Rather than having people hack their Mac minis, Apple should reintroduce the Core Solo Mac mini, with 40Gb of disk space, and sell it for $449 (£299), exactly halfway between the price of a Core Duo Mac mini and an Apple TV. It’s not as if the hardware inside the Apple TV is going to be significantly cheaper to manufacture, so $449 should be a completely achievable price point.

Until Apple do this, I’d recommend a used Mac mini over a hacked Apple TV.

As a related aside, I’ve discovered that a trackball works much better than a mouse when you’re sitting on a sofa. No more leaning forward to move a mouse round my coffee table. However, the fact that I care about this is pretty damning…

Click the image above for a more detailed view, and visit Carsurvey.org if you want to see how the site pictured (one of my sites) renders in a desktop browser.

With a home bathed in wireless connectivity, a Mac mini in my living room, and a Dell Axim X50v in my pocket, you’d think there would be no room in my life for another device for accessing the Internet. That was probably true, until a Nokia N800 came into my life.

I’ve always like the idea of an instant on web tablet, but an affordable and usable device has never quite made it to market. After a few weeks of living with an N800, I’m pretty impressed, but there’s still some work to be done before it’s a device suitable for non-geeks.

On the face of it, the N800 is just a largish PDA, with an ARM processor, WiFi, Bluetooth, and running an Opera browser. Superficially very similar to my Dell Axim X50v then, but when you use the N800, it could hardly be more different.

As is my usual style, I’d going to describe my thoughts about the N800 through several lists of bullet points.

Negatives:

• The Price - At £279 in the UK, it’s too expensive. Thankfully I managed to pick mine up off eBay for £232 inc delivery, which was about the right price as far as I’m concerned
• The Software Quality - It’s patchy. The N800 currently feels like a beta product. A very promising beta, but a beta nonetheless
• The Size - It’s pocketable, but it’s right at the limit of what you can get away with. For comparison, it’s very similar in size to a Nintendo DS Lite. In fact I’m actually storing mine in a DS Lite case
• The Screen - It’s just a bit too small to read comfortably for long periods

Positives:

• Opera - The browser on the N800 bears no relationship to your average PDA browser. It feels like using desktop Opera on a slow notebook with a small screen. That’s light years ahead of any PDA browser I’ve ever used, and that includes Opera on my VGA Dell Axim
• Flash and AJAX support - even sites like YouTube and full fat Gmail work decently
• The Browser Controls - Hardware buttons for fullscreen, zoom in and out, and tab switching. Scroll around web pages just by dragging the page with your stylus. Again, this is so much better than any other PDA browser I have ever used before
• The Screen - 800×480 is just enough resolution to render mainstream websites properly
• Great WiFi reception. At least as good as my Inspiron notebook
• Easy configuration of Bluetooth phones. It was much easier to connect the N800 to my Samsung D600 phone, than connecting to the D600 with my Dell Axim. It even knows about the settings for different mobile carriers around the world
• Dual SD card support. Much better than any of the new fangled micro cards. And custom kernels support SDHC for cards over 4Gb

Things it’s not great at (yet):

• It’s not a good organiser - my Axim is much better as an organiser
• Games or multimedia - again, my Axim has better games and multimedia apps available
• Surfing the net for more than about 15 minutes - the screen is just too small
• Writing long emails - not much fun on an onscreen keyboard
• Browsing late at night - the screen is just too small when your eyes are tired

Things it’s good for:

• Quick web searches when you can’t be bothered to turn on a computer (Wikipedia and IMDB being favourites of mine)
• Internet on the move. It’s significantly better than any pocketable device that I’ve ever used. Hopefully I’ll be pairing mine up with a Nokia N95 soon, so I should have access to HSDPA connectivity, which will keep the N800 connected at almost broadband speeds
• Checking webmail and news

In conclusion, although the N800 is far from perfect, it’s sort of like a beta Blackberry for the web. If that sounds like your sort of thing, it’s definitely worth a look.

The Great Pockets promo site for the Nokia N95 really hit a nerve with me. As friends will attest, I tend to cram as much technology onto my person as possible.

As soon as the N95 is available for a reasonable price, I’ll be picking one up. I doubt it will stop me stuffing my pockets full of gadgets, but you never know…

Just a quick note about The Gadget Show on Channel 5 here in the UK. I’d always avoided it, as techie TV programmes usually end up being complete rubbish. Recently however, I somehow ended up watching The Gadget Show, and I have to say that I quite enjoyed it. The presenters were up-to-date and were giving out genuinely useful advice. It was also refreshing that the prices displayed were realistic Internet prices, rather than irrelevant manufacturer prices.

Just a quick update on my Oppo 981HD.

I’m still impressed with its general playback quality, but I have run into a significant issue. It really doesn’t like playing back DVDs recorded by my old Panasonic HS2 DVD Recorder. Its deinterlacing capabilities fail it, and there are some juddering issues.

Although there’s nothing mentioned on the Oppo site about the 981HD having any issues, I suspect it must be the same issue refered to in the FAQ for the 971H.

Not a major problem for me, but it’s worth considering if you are planning on buying an Oppo, and were planning to play back a lot of your own recordings.

I’m rather enjoying ArithmeTick at the moment. It’s a free Windows Mobile game, which involves performing mental arithmetic against the clock. Very similar to one of the tasks in Brain Training on the Nintendo DS. Very simple, but surprisingly good fun when you’ve got a couple of minutes to kill.

Following on from yesterday’s Macworld Keynote, here are my quick thoughts about the announced products:

Apple TV

Negatives:

• Not flexible enough for the price (£199 in the UK)
• Only 720p. 1080p is inevitable, and compatible sets are now becoming available
• No YouTube - this is a huge mistake in my view
• Video content appears to come only from iTunes, which is very limiting

Positives:

• 40Gb disk and Intel processor. More power and flexibility than I expected
• The ability to sync content from another Mac. I wish I could do this easily with my Mac mini

Overall, it’s not bad, but I’d rather pay twice as much and get a Mac mini, with far more power and flexibility.

iPhone

Negatives:

• The release date is too far away, especially in Europe and Asia. The mobile market moves very quickly, and Apple (like Palm with the Treo) are playing a dangerous game if they stagger their global rollout too much
• No UMTS or HSDPA. For the UK, this is a very big deal. All the cool Internet features are going to be terrible over GPRS
• No memory expansion slot. Not a big deal, but it would be nice
• It’s not clear whether third party apps are supported. This is very important
• No GPS. Again, not a big problem, but it needs to be there in version 2.0
• 2 megapixel camera. This is going to look pretty terrible in 12 months time
• So far there’s no mention of it being available off contract

Positives:

• The interface is an even bigger advance than the Treo was. Nokia and the other mobile phone manufacturers should be seriously worried
• What looks like a serious, grownup OS in a phone
• Wonderful multitasking
• Gorgeous 320×480 screen
• Physically it looks great
• Very clever use of tilt, proximity and light sensors
• Great video and music playback

I’ve very impressed with the iPhone, but the release date and lack of 3G mean it’s unlikely to be my next device. The Nokia N95 is still in the frame for that role. However, an HSDPA iPhone 2.0 in Summer 2008 would be very interesting indeed.

To go with my recent TV upgrade, I also purchased a new 1080p capable DVD player, the Oppo 981 from CRT Projectors for £189. The reasons for buying an Oppo (which only plays normal DVDs, not HD-DVD or Blu-ray) were as follows:

• Multiregion and firmware upgradeable
• 1080p digital output of upscaled DVDs, including DCDi video processing

I haven’t owned a premium DVD player before (I own a Toshiba SD220 and a Tevion 8000), so I’d expected some significant improvements, and so far I’m very impressed.

Very configurable, nice remote, and lightning fast responses. It can’t work miracles with poor quality material, but the playback of recent discs (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire being one example) is the best I’ve ever seen. Good detail (although not a rival for HD, despite what people say), but the most impressive thing is that the motion is silky smooth, with few artifacts that I could notice.

The only issue that I’ve encountered is that it failed to mount a DVD a couple of times (it just kept spinning away without recognising the disc). Opening and closing the DVD tray fixed that problem.

Anyone expecting true HD performance will be disappointed, but if you have a 1080p set and a good sized DVD collection, I doubt that you’ll regret buying an Oppo 981.

Following on from the issues with the Goodmans set, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a 46 inch Sony X Series LCD.

I’d wanted one of these for a long time, but could never justify one as they’re one of the more expensive sets out there (just over £2500 online as I write), and have a few issues that I wasn’t happy with:

• It’s a Sony, and recent things like the dodgy HDMI on my Sony projector, PS3 delays, and PSP firmware updates haven’t impressed me
• The 46″ X Series LCD has a silver surround, and the optional black plastic surround costs about £150, which I find insulting for two pieces of plastic
• 1080p only over HDMI, not component or VGA
• The VGA input only accepts signals up to 1360×768

Knowing all the above, I still took the plunge. This was for three reasons:

• The display always looked good when I checked it out in shops (as long as it was being fed HD material)
• The feedback on AVForums was the best that I’d read for any LCD TV
• Christmas was approaching fast, and I didn’t want to be without a good TV over the holidays

Having now had the set for a couple of week, I’m absolutely over the moon with it. Other than the issues I mention above, it has no problems at all. In particular:

• Great blacks and colours
• No buzzing or banding
• Good viewing angle
• 1080p over HDMI at 50Hz and 60Hz, with no overscan
• Massively configurable through an extensive menu
• Despite its cost, the black surround is a big improvement over the default silver surround
• Very good sound quality (although I mostly use a Denon receiver and KEF speakers for my sound)