Hey guys, you may remember that between pieces I occasionally post brief gadget squees or updates in my tech life – usually on Twitter – or on my blog if it’s something bigger. There have been two big gadget alterations that I’ve forgotten to mention in the past two weeks.
Firstly, you may also remember that around New Year I was writing about weighing up the iPhone, Palm Pre and Android Phones to decide which one to buy. After much deliberation, and a trip to O2 to try the phones on display and piss off the salespeople, I chose the Palm Pre as my new phone. Sure, the devices build quality could be improved a bit, and the app store needs a lot of work (helped by the fact that the store is to start accepting paid apps, giving developers an actual reason to write for it), but it’s a fantastic device, with the physical keyboard which I adore.
Secondly, my eeePC that I’ve been using since before I bought this blog is back in general service. After increasingly prominent bugs and problems making it useable, but very frustrating, my friend Alex convinced me to install Windows 7 on it in place of the heavily-tweaked for “simplicity” Linux distribution, Xandros. Apparently me and UNIX disagree very much on what the basic needs of a computer user are that convinced them to create an OS so simple it didn’t even call Firefox by it’s name; simply web. I was persuaded mainly by the fact that my current bout of lectures are very boring and having Windows 7 means that myself, Alex and several other people on my course can play Worms: Armageddon during the lecture; an increasingly common trend that we’re convinced will have the whole course doing so by the end of term. With my other friend, Steve, having a phone that can run as a wifi hotspot, we can play undetected by the University network; they don’t care about us not paying attention in lectures, just as long as we’re not chocking their network in the process. Now that I’ve had a few days to let the OS adjust to my netbook, it runs surprisingly well, albeit with a paging file that makes up for the insufficient 1Gb RAM my netbook packs under the hood. I’ve even got Aero which makes the side of me that’s part-magpie giddy with anticipation.
I had a post summarising CES in the works, but I got an e-mail from my editor at Spark* asking for a roundup and my style of blog writing, greatly differing from my style of newspaper writing, will not allow me to simply e-mail a copy. To avoid repetition, and for the sake of avian-icide with one article of masonry, I will relent on the post until I have one suited to edited-publication sensibilities. However, given that the paper comes out every other Friday and there was one out today (with my Twitterati article finally), unless I am hindered once more by procrastination, I will finish it long before it goes to print, so you lucky son of a bitches get a preview.
Now I’m off to collect shiny things.
Might even brighten up my gloomy flat