Distant Parts

Cheaper than I expected, and it includes a remote and a copy of King Kong. I had no plans to buy an HD DVD player, but this is pretty tempting. Pity there’s no HDMI connection though.

Microsoft aren’t pulling any punches with Sony, who really better their act together. So many Xbox 360 games are turning out to really rather good. For example: Test Drive Unlimited is pretty much my favourite racing game since the original PS1 Gran Turismo and the original Need for Speed.

Compare this to Sony’s recent announcement of Gran Turismo HD, where Sony seem to want to charge hundreds of pounds if you want all the cars and tracks. If they go that route, I’ll stick with the Test Drive, Project Gotham, and Forza series on the Xbox 360 thank you very much.

I’m serious impressed with the new Nokia N95 that’s going to be announced later today.

It’s a little on the wide side for me (53mm), but I love almost everything else about it:

• Series 60 smartphone
• HSPDA 3.5G for high speed data and Wifi
• Integrated GPS
• 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and “near DVD quality” video
• A slider with a d-pad instead of a tiny joystick (thank you Nokia)
• 3.5 mm audio jack

I want this phone very badly indeed, but unfortunately I’m going to have to wait until Q1 2007 when it will be released.

Tom’s Hardware have benchmarks for Kentsfield, Intel’s new four core processor due later this year. Most applications don’t seem to be able to properly use four cores, but heavy multitasking and media encoding seem to really benefit. At the same time as Intel release Kentsfield, they’re also going to release Clovertown, a multiprocessor version for servers. Fingers crossed that these are available at a reasonable price by next Spring, and that Apple choose to offer them in the next update to the Mac Pro.

Coming back down to Earth for a moment, while I really like the idea of an 8 core Mac Pro, I do struggle to think of how I’d fully use 8 cores on a regular basis, and the chip does seem to be on the hot side. Just as important to me as power is having a quiet system, and two 100W+ processors are going to take a lot of cooling…

I’ve just read details of the new iMac updates

I’m pretty impressed with the new 24 inch model. If I didn’t have my heart set on a 2nd generation Mac Pro running Leopard with virtualised Windows Vista and Ubuntu installs, on a 30 inch monitor, I’d be placing my order right now. Depending on the state of my finances next year, a speed bumped 24 inch iMac running Leopard would be a nice upgrade if I can’t justify or afford my dream Mac Pro set up.

Following on from my post last week about my next mobile phone, details are appearing around another strong contender:

HTC Trinity

Basically this has all the good things I like about the HTC TyTN, minus the keyboard (not that big a deal for me), but with miniSD instead of microSD. miniSD only tops out at 2Gb at the moment, but you can already get 2Gb microSD cards, so surely a 4Gb miniSD can’t be too far away?

If I could get one of these on T-Mobile (UK), who seem to have the best 3G data tariffs at the moment, I’d be very tempted to lose the Dell Axim and go back to a single converged device.

Now that all the major manufacturers have announced or released their major new mobile phones for this year, I’ve been having a look around to see what I should buy when my contract comes up for renewal at the start of November.

First, some details of my past few phones:

Treo 600

• Positives: Battery life, keyboard, integration of PDA and phone features, SD card
• Negatives: PalmOS has become rather limiting these days, poor voice quality, low screen resolution, poor camera

iMate Jam

• Positives: Lots of Windows Mobile software, SD card
• Negatives: Not very stable, no keyboard, poor voice quality, battery life wasn’t great, poor camera

Samsung D600 (with a Dell Axim X50v as a PDA), my current solution

Positives:

• Small
• Good battery life
• Good voice quality.
• Like the slider design
• Narrow (46.5mm - important when you also carry an additional PDA in the same pocket)
• Has a joypad (which I much prefer over a joystick)
• Good camera and great video quality
• Plenty of memory, and expandable through microSD

Negatives:

• Texting is poor - it doesn’t handle capitalisation changes well
• Doesn’t sync easily with other devices - my Mac or my Axim for example
• Not a smartphone or PDA. Would prefer to carry my Axim a little less

With 3G data finally becoming reasonably affordable here in the UK, I want my next phone/PDA combo to be 3G (which the D600 isn’t), and preferably have some more Smartphone functionality. I’ve been looking around, and unfortunately it appears that all the possible devices have some pretty major flaws as far as I am concerned.

One problem a lot of them have, is that I hate small 5-way joysticks with a passion. I briefly owned a Sony Ericsson W800 and found it horrible to use.

The Current Contenders

HTC MTeoR:

• Positives: Windows Mobile OS (so lots of software)
• Negatives: Joystick control, 1.3 megapixel camera (wake up HTC, this is 2006)

Sony Ericsson K800i:

• Positives: Great camera, small (47mm wide)
• Negatives: Tiny joystick, not a smartphone

HTC TyTN:

• Positives: Full Pocket PC (Axim not needed), huge keyboard, HSDPA 3.5G compatible
• Negatives: microSD (this matters a lot on a Pocket PC as microSD only goes up to 2Gb at the moment. I currently have 6Gb in my Axim), not convinced about how good a phone it would be, would miss the VGA screen from my Axim

Nokia E70:

• Positives: Series 60 smartphone, high res screen, large fold out QWERTY keyboard
• Negatives: Apparently very short of RAM, a little too wide (53mm), joystick

Nokia N73:

• Positives: Very good camera, Series 60 smartphone, large screen
• Negatives: Joystick

Nokia N80:

• Positives: Joypad, high res screen, slider design, Series 60 smartphone
• Negatives: Large (50mm wide and pretty thick), battery life is not great

Unfortunately none of the above devices quite work for me. An N73 with a joypad, a slightly smaller N80, or a TyTN with SD (not microSD) card support would probably be good enough to swing the decision, but alas, those products don’t exist.

When I finally make my decision, I’ll write a post explaining my decision. If any mobile phone manufacturers read this - please bring back joypads and SD card support, as your current joysticks and microSD cards are just too small.

I mostly bought my Mac mini for Front Row, and while that hasn’t disappointed me (especially since Apple added the ability to shuffle music by playlist), the real killer app has turned out to be something different:

YouTube

The ability to play almost any music video, movie trailer, comedy clip etc through my TV has proved to be a really great feature. If friends are round and something comes up in conversation, such as the new Portal Trailer, I can have it playing on the big screen within about 30 seconds, with no need to hand round a laptop, or get anybody off the sofa.

Managed to see SKY HD in the flesh today. John Lewis in Newcastle had it running on a 40 inch Sony Bravia LCD (1366 x 768). Cricket was showing, and despite being downsampled from the native 1080i of the feed to the lower resolution of the Sony panel, the picture did look very good.

Looking at in isolation, I would have said that it was like a very very good DVD. But then I looked at the other TVs running standard definition feeds, and they were terrible in comparison. Really pixellated. So if you’re into sport and movies, and can afford a good HD TV, it looks like it’s worth the extra £10 a month that SKY are charging.

There’s not enough content for me at the moment, but if that situation improves (especially the BBC), I could be tempted by a 1080p LCD panel and Sky HD around the year end.

One of my newest toys is this cool piece of running technology from Garmin. Basically it’s an oversized wrist watch, with builtin GPS, and lots of useful features for running and other sports.

For all its clever features, there’s really only one that I use - the Virtual Partner feature that lets me run against one of my previous runs. I just pick a previous run as my Virtual Partner, and the Forerunner shows me how far ahead or behind my ghostly other self I am. It’s definitely a weird feeling when you’re only 10 feet ahead or behind your Virtual Partner.

I pretty much exclusively run alone, and having a Virtual Partner is good motivation when I’m out on a run. And he doesn’t mind if I’m feeling fast or slow that day - I can just run at whatever pace I want and he doesn’t complain. When I am slow, at least it’s only myself on a better day that I can’t keep up with.

One important tip - if you own a Forerunner, resist the temptation to set a really fast run as your Virtual Partner. It’s only odd days that your body is up to running a personal best, and attempting to stay with a hard pace on a normal day will be unpleasant and possibly dangerous. A fast but comfortable run seems work for me.

If you’re a regular runner and enjoy your gadgets, it’s worthy of your consideration.

At the start of March, I posted my thoughts on the new Intel Mac Minis. I finally gave into temptation, and purchased the Core Solo model with 1Gb of RAM a couple of weeks later.

Having used it for almost a month, I’m ready to give my considered opinion. Please bear in mind that it’s being used in my living room for media playback, rather than as a desktop system:

Negatives:

• Price - it’s just a little bit too expensive, especially when you add a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and more RAM. Either drop the base price, or the price of the upgrades
• The WiFi isn’t brilliant. I’m getting better results using a Belkin bridge connected to the Ethernet Port on the Mac mini
• The Front Row remote is a little bit too simple, and I’m not convinced that it’s particularly well made
• For compressing video content, the Core Solo processor is a little on the slow side
• The 40Gb disk is very easy to fill up. Unfortunately my wifi network doesn’t quite seem to cope with playing remote DivX files via VLC
• Front Row seems like a bit of a hack at times. No way to randomly shuffle a specific music playlist is a grave ommission, and I’ve also managed to crash Front Row a couple of times by turning on Visualisation through Salling Clicker while Front Row is running
• The DVD Player doesn’t have full aspect ratio control, and VLC (where you can control aspect ratios) currently has less than perfect DVD playback
• The Apple Bluetooth Mouse that I bought doesn’t seem to track very well. Might have to find a replacement

Positives:

• It’s incredibly silent and the form factor is amazing
• The DVI output into my Pioneer plasma TV looks fantastic
• FrontRow is a joy to use, despite its occasional bugs
• Much as I like my Squeezebox, having full iTunes on a plasma TV is great
• iPhoto Slideshows on a plasma TV with the Ken Burns Effect are gorgeous
• iTunes visualisations look great on a large screen
• Salling Clicker turns my Dell X50v into a killer bluetooth remote. A total bargain for $23.95 (assuming you own a compatible PDA or phone)
• 1Gb seems to be enough RAM for use as a media centre

In summary, although it has a few issues, and is far from cheap, I’m pretty happy with my Intel Mac mini. 1Gb of RAM and the Core Solo were the right choice to make, although I wish I’d bought a slightly larger hard disk. My Squeezebox will soon be on its way to a new home (to be fair to Slim Devices, I wasn’t really using all the advanced features that the Squeezebox offers).

Once Apple sort out PVR functionality and HD content via the iTunes store, they’ll have a great media product in the Mac mini. The current Core Duo system also makes a lot of sense as a premium desktop, assuming that you already own a monitor.