First T-mobile had the magenta razr, which was damn close to being hot pink. Now Verizon counters with the fucking pink razr! I’m pretty sure it’ll be a big hit with the uber-girly crowd out there…. and probably a few fags to boot. Amusingly, Motorola makes a pink H500 bluetooth headset that will go with the phone quite nicely. I guess Motorola’s trying to corner the girly market or something. The only real problems I see are the fact that the razr is insanely wide, thus not being a good fit for those girls with really really small hands. Overall, the razr is an ok phone but I think it’s a bit overpriced. The other thing is that most females aren’t very tech savvy and thus won’t really have much use for a bluetooth headset…. or at least they won’t realize that they ARE a huge convenience to have. Either way, I guess it’s kinda cool to see that tech companies have stopped catering exclusively to us geeks of the world. Let’s just hope that they realize that in order for girls to become more accustomed to making use of high tech stuff that it has to be fairly easy to use. The razr DOES have the standard Verizon interface so anyone upgrading from a recent LG or pretty much any other non-Motorola phone made in the past year or so is going to be able to figure out the menu system pretty easily. I’ll be curious to see how many of these things I see out and about once Verizon starts selling it in stores. Right now it’s only available online… They usually do that for about 2-3 weeks before they launch it in stores.
Archive for January, 2006
No, not the techno band “The Orb”… There’s this really neat site called orb.com that I recently discovered after I got my XV6700. Basically it allows you to setup your home PC as sort of a media server, thus allowing you to stream media content on your PC (videos, pics, music, recorded TV shows) to anywhere else you please. All you do is create an account on the orb website, download the orb program and run it on your PC. You then set it up to point to wherever you have all your media, which it then indexes. Then, when you want to stream it from somewhere else, you just login to the orb website from that location and it basically allows you to browse the content on your PC and stream it from wherever you are. The best part is that you’re not limited to just streaming it from other PC’s; you can actually stream it from mobile phones, PDA’s connected via wi-fi, smartphones, etc. Basically any internet connected device can stream the content provided it has a compatible media player. It can re-encode your files into one of three formats: windows media (wma, wmv, mp3, etc), real media and 3gpp2. Obviously, running a windows mobile 5 device I’d pick windows media since WM5 includes Windows Media Player 10. I don’t have realplayer installed either at work or on my XV6700 so I don’t know how well real media works… and I don’t have anything that plays 3gpp2 either. 3gpp2 would be the best (only?) option for regular cellphones (non smartphones) and real media would most likely be the best choice for Symbian-based phones. I tried it out on both my phone connected via Verizon’s EVDO network and my PC at work and it worked great on both. Verizon’s data speeds absolutely suck in the area in which I work, so it buffered quite a bit… However, it worked ok overall and I think it’d work great if I was in an area with better data speeds (1 mile in any direction, for example). Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the service so far… Plus it’s free, so who’s to complain?
After a full week with my new XV6700, I’ve noticed a few more things that I forgot to mention in my initial review of the phone.
First, the signal meter in the top bar is more or less useless. Not because of its size (or lack thereof) but the fact that it doesn’t accurately reflect any sort of dBm readings it seems. Now, I realize that this is more or less typical but this stupid thing seems almost random. Running “fieldtrial.exe” from the \windows folder on the phone gives you a nice in-depth look at what kind of signal strength you really have. At the moment, I’m showing -74dB and 3 bars out of 4 on the phone. That seems fairly appropriate… However, I’ve had several occasions where the phone is showing -80dB or so and will show 1 bar on the signal meter. I’m still able to make a call and everything but given the signal meter, it looks as though I have no signal since 1 bar is basically just a little dot under the representation of a tower in the signal meter. Annoying, but I’m more or less used to it. As long as I don’t see a little X there, I’m fine.
Now for the good part. I was toying around with the wifi and trying to get it to connect to my friend’s wifi router. I’m happy to say it worked perfectly well. He’s using a Linksys WAP54g with SSID broadcast turned off and WPA-PSK for security. The phone supports both perfectly fine. Granted, I had to manually add the network into my list but it worked great. Just type in the SSID (it’s case sensitive!) and select the encryption method (WPA-PSK in this case) and enter the passphrase. Bang, connected just fine! Also, signal strength is every bit as good as what he gets with his linksys wifi card on his laptop.
More bad stuff now… MMS messaging has one annoying trait. From what I can tell, there’s no way to reply to a pix message with a standard text msg. You go into the MMS inbox and “reply” and it gives you two options: pix or flix… no text msg option. So if someone sends you a pic and you just want to reply with something like “haha, cool” and no picture in return, you have to go into the regular “text messages” inbox (they’re separate entries in pocket outlook) and create a new message to the person that initially sent you the pix msg. I think it has a lot to do with MS’s insistence on using Pocket Outlook for everything messaging related. Jerkoffs. 
I also bought a Motorola H700 Bluetooth headset. I must say it probably has the most pathetic range of any headset I’ve owned so far. I’m lucky to get 10ft from either my PM-325 or my XV-6700. Even worse, the phone and headset have to be on the same side of my body or I get quite a bit of static. It does have the advantage of being extremely small and you can turn it on and off just by flipping the boom in and out. I’ll deal with it for now until I can find another headset that really catches my eye.
Technorati Tags: xv6700, pda, cellphone, phone, reviews, geek
… and not the type that comes in a can… I dunno what the deal is lately but I seem to be getting a shitload more spam than I’m used to getting. Both my comcast and my gmail accounts are getting something like 6-8 spams a day (Yahoo considerably more, but that’s to be expected) when before I got that many in a week. Are the spam filters being turned off or are the spammers just getting better at circumventing them? At least with gmail they seem to be getting dumped in the spam folder as they should be. Comcast doesn’t seem to be doing quite as well. Then again, I don’t really use my comcast email all that much so it’s no big deal to me, really. Stupid spammers can go to hell. I don’t care about cialis, viagra, penile enlargement and all that other horseshit.
Well, I splurged and bought the new Verizon XV6700. I must say it’s by far the best phone I’ve owned. I owned a Treo600 on Sprint and this blows it away by far. After having this phone for a few days, I feel like I can say that there are a LOT of things about it I absolutely love and probably a few things I’d change.
I got the phone on the 16th from the local Verizon store for $299 + tax after getting the Advanced Device Discount which gives an extra $100 off the price of any smartphone if you activate the $45/mo unlimited data plan along with your qualifying voice plan. Pretty good deal, if you ask me. In the box, you’ll receive the phone, USB sync cable, sync cradle, AC power adapter with mini-USB end, stereo headphones (they suck horribly, buy the Jabras), fairly thick owner’s manual, “getting started” CD from Verizon and a CD for installing ActiveSync 4.0 (4.1 is available on the MS website) and Outlook 2002. If you wish to sync contacts from your phone to your PC, you have to install Outlook. You don’t have to use it as your default email client but activesync can only sync contacts with Outlook. Shame, since I much prefer Thunderbird to Outlook. Also you get a soft slip cover that’s more or less useless and two styli (one for the phone, one spare).
First off, some quick specs:
- 416MHz Intel PXA270 Processor
- Windows Mobile 5.0 OS
- miniSD Secure Digital Slot
- Bluetooth 1.2
- 802.11b Wi-Fi
- Integrated QWERTY Keyboard
- 240×320 16-bit color TFT LCD
- 1.3MP Digital Camera
- 6.5oz; 5.2″H x 2.32″W x 0.93″D
- 1350 mAh battery (4.7hrs talktime, 200hrs standby)
So here’s the rundown as I see things…. Obviously, my usage may differ from yours so my opinions are just that, opinions.
EV-DO — I generally get anywhere from 200kbps (west knox) to 650kbps (a few areas around town) in speed tests. Plenty of speed to talk online on AIM, Yahoo, MSN and browse the web at a decent speed while still streaming 128kbps audio. Pretty impressive if you ask me. EVDO, by nature, is “bursty” so don’t expect a constant 600kbps over long periods of time. It fluctuates up and down a fair bit but overall it’s fast enough to do most of the things that any normal person would want to do on a smartphone.
Expandable Memory — I can add up to a 1GB miniSD expansion card to hold mp3’s, videos, applications, etc… thus saving precious internal memory. I haven’t bothered to get one yet as I don’t really have enough installed on the phone to cause a memory crunch. Not to mention I own an mp3 player so there’s not really any reason for me to cart around mp3’s on my phone. I’ll get one eventually, just not a huge rush to get one. I’d prefer that they used regular SD since it’s now available in capacities up to 4GB instead of the 2GB miniSD is available in. The phone’s big enough to handle a full-sized SD card, so going with miniSD is rather puzzling.
QVGA Screen – mmm.. purdy! The Treo 700w only has a 240×240 square screen, whereas the XV6700 is 320×240. Basically that means more pixels on screen and a more useful landscape feature. It’s bright enough for my tastes and the colors look pretty good overall. It’s not perfect, though. It’s only 16-bit colors so 24bit jpegs get dithered down and display rather obvious banding. My Moto E815 had an 18-bit display and the colors looked MUCH better than they do on this particular screen. OK, it’s not horrible and the Treo700w’s screen isn’t any better but still. Why not put an 18 bit display on a phone that retails for $519? Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a dealbreaker… just a mild disappointment
QWERTY Keyboard – Perfect for us text whores out there. Slide the keyboard out and just start typing. None of that tapping one key 3 times to get a letter and all that horseshit. No stupid T9 either that doesn’t know all the words in the English language or happens to guess the wrong one (types “of” instead of “me”, for example). Just slide it out type what you want. My only real complaint about the keyboard is that the alternate characters (symbols and numbers) aren’t lit up by the backlight at all so when it’s dark you might as well forget about typing any symbols unless you just happen to know where they are. Also, for those of you with fat fingers the upper row of keys might pose a small problem since they are very very close to the bottom half of the top slide. It’s not a problem for me since I have skinny fingers, though.
Connectivity – Bluetooth & wifi both! Bluetooth for headsets, car kits, etc. Wifi for when you have access to it and don’t want to or can’t use EVDO. I just use EVDO all the time since it’s available everywhere I go. However, wifi is oftentimes faster than even EVDO if the connection on the other side of the access point is fast. Surprisingly, wifi range is really good despite it being a smartphone. I was able to pick up a neighbor’s access point over at my friend’s house. The same access point that his laptop only gets a 12% signal on and barely use. I was able to surf the web and logon to AIM with it. The flip side of all this is that Verizon for some reason loves to castrate their phones. Basically, in its stock form with a registry edit you cannot enable wifi and keep the phone turned on. It’s one or the other. Turn on wifi, no phone calls. Turn on the phone, no wifi. How fucking retarded is that? Shame on you, Verizon! My other issue? The only Bluetooth profile exposed is the handsfree/headset profile. That means no activesync or file transfers over bluetooth out of the box. I’m guessing they might be able to be enabled somehow but I haven’t tried yet.
Windows Mobile 5.0 — I’ve never used WM2003 or 2003SE (which the Samsung i730 has) but I’m pretty pleased with WM5 so far. Pocket Outlook is functional, though it doesn’t appear to do HTML mail. I don’t use Pocket Word or Excel so I can’t report on how they work. Pocket IE does an acceptable job of rendering most pages, though it completely fouls up on Apache directory listings for some reason. Anyone needing a more robust browser may wish to try Opera 8.5 beta, though it’s only free for 45 days. Performance is acceptable with a slight lag when switching from Portrait to Landscape when you slide the keyboard out (even after doing the hack to speed it up). WMP10 leaves a lot to be desired out of the box, so I’ve been using an alternate media player. I’d go so far as to say WMP10 isn’t really even worth bothering with. It won’t open .pls or .m3u files so no streaming audio… You can’t create playlists on the device, which is even dumber. Basically just go download GSPlayer and be done with it. 
Battery life – Here’s where we have our only real problem so far. Granted, because o its power I don’t really expect insane battery life but jeez. 1350 mAh just isn’t enough, that’s for sure. I did about 45 mins of streaming audio and AIM chatting over EVDO, 30-45 minutes of web surfing and such over wifi and just some random playing around with the device to show a co-worker. No phone calls and maybe 3 text messages received. I sent 3 emails and downloaded my IMAP inbox (50 messages or so) over wifi. Also, I took about 8 pics with the camera and the flash was enabled for 3 of them. End result? 50% battery remaining. Ouch. Granted I probably haven’t conditioned this battery yet so perhaps battery life will get better as I go along but as of right now it leaves a bit to be desired. I carry my charger with me so it’s not a huge deal, thankfully.
Size – It’s not as big as you might think. It’s only slightly thicker than a Treo and not a whole lot larger than my E815 was. It’s hardly a hulking behemoth that won’t fit in a pocket, that’s for sure. It fits nicely in my front jeans pockets or my inside jacket pocket. The biggest issue with the form factor is the fact that it’s blocky. Outside of that, I find the size to be perfectly manageable, especially given how many features they’ve packed into this sucker.
Camera – Well, it’s 1.3MP with a flash and a macro feature as well. It’s hardly as good as a cheap digital camera but for taking pics on the go, it works perfectly fine. Pics do tend to suffer from fuzzy edges and over-bright whites and such. Typical cameraphone stuff. It certainly does its job but there’s no way I’d use it in place of a real digicam.
Phone — Yes, believe it or not this thing makes phone calls too. This is where most of the past “convergence devices” have more or less fallen flat on their faces. While this is a little bit more difficult than just a standard phone, it’s not completely horrible. I’ll be the first to admit that the Treo still owns everything else when it comes to one-handed operation and phone features. Other devices still seem to lag behind the Treo in that respect, but the 6700 has made great strides in that respect. Contrary to what one might think, dialing one-handed on the 6700 is utterly simple. I can do it no problem by simply pressing the green button on the front of the phone to launch the phone dialer and then pressing the on-screen keys to dial the number. Also, if the number you wish to dial is in your contacts, the smartdial feature of the 6700 will make suggestions as to what you may be trying to dial. If I want to dial “Sam” I can just hit the “7″ key since his name starts with S and smartdial will automatically pop his name up along with any others that are partial matches. I can then select the one I want with the joystick and press it to dial. No need to even dial the whole number. You can even dial by initials… If you have George Smith in your contacts, you can dial 47 (for GS) and it’ll pop him up and you can dial. Works great. Sound quality during calls is excellent as usual on Verizon, however there’s a small issue with the phone earpiece itself. You can’t hear jack shit! Well, to be fair, you can hear but not as well as I’d like. You’re not exactly going to suffer hearing loss from the earpiece blasting your eardrum out. Ditto the speakerphone. I’d definitely suggest getting a headset to plug in. Watch out, though… the headset jack produces insanely loud audio to the point of having to reduce the volume by 75% just to not cause your eardrums to rupture. That leads me to a small quibble I have with the phone. Why in the heck is the headset jack on the BOTTOM of the phone? Seriously it makes no sense. The headset jack is covered up by the cradle should you decide to leave the phone cradled while not in use. Thus you’ll have to either uncradle the phone to talk on it or just get a bluetooth headset. Kinda annoying but again, not a dealbreaker for me.
Overall, I consider this thing to be as good as it gets right now. While the Treo has a few customizations that might make it a somewhat better phone, its lower resolution screen, less memory, lack of wifi and higher price tag make it much less desireable for myself personally. I would wholeheartedly suggest buying a 6700 if you have the $300 to blow on a phone & PDA. It’s cheaper than buying two devices separately… hell, three if you count the mp3 player capabilities. If you don’t activate with a data plan, it’s $399. $519 is full retail if you’re not eligible for an upgrade. It’s not perfect, but I’d still give it a solid 8.5 out of 10. Definitely recommended for anyone who considers themselves even slightly a geek… or anyone who wants a device that’ll check email, surf the web, IM, play mp3’s & videos, store tons of contacts and various other information.
Technorati Tags: xv6700, pda, cellphone, phone, reviews, geek
TechDirt reports that apple’s share price at the close of trading today unintentionally contained a geek joke. Apple’s share prices closed @ $80.86 today on the day they announced they were releasing the first Intel-based laptop and iMac. The stock price did actually go up to $81.89 in after-hours trading so it’s no longer at $80.86 but that’s still a rather interesting stroke of irony to have stock prices end at that specific price. Now, for those of you non-geeks out there that don’t understand the historical significance of “8086″, it’s basically the Intel chip that started it all and gave rise to the x86 architecture most of us use today. So yeah, strangely ironic that it happens on the same day Apple releases their first Intel-based computers. Both the new MacBook Pro and the iMac are based on Intel’s new dual core “CoreDuo” CPU’s. Both of them look really nice but they’re still a bit higher-priced than an equivalently equipped PC. Still, the iMac looks to be just about perfect for the average home user who just uses their PC to surf the web, chat, listen to music, watch movies, burn CD’s & DVD’s and edit pictures. I wouldn’t mind having one as a second PC, actually. They’re not so hot for gaming but the average user doesn’t care about insane 3D graphics performance. They want it to do what they need it to do with a minimum of hassle…. That’s something that Apple and OSX have in spades. The 17″ iMac will set you back $1300 and includes a dual core 1.83Ghz CPU, 512MB DDR2 SDRAM (upgradeable to 2GB), 160GB serial ATA hard drive, ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card, two firewire, three USB 2.0, GB ethernet, 802.11g wifi, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, built-in iSight camera, speakers, flat panel display… lots of stuff. Granted, it’s a bit more expensive than a similar PC, it’s still a nice piece of equipment and takes up a WHOLE lot less space. Not a bad investment for the average user if you ask me.
HardOCP does it again! They were the first to water cool an original Xbox back in the day. Now they’ve decided to do the same with the new Xbox 360. The difference is that with the original Xbox it wasn’t even really necessary since it didn’t run all that hot. They just did it “because they could”. Now with the xbox 360 running so insanely hot and some people even having heat-related issues, lockups and the like, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. They basically procured parts from Koolance and built their own water cooling system for the 360. The cool part is that they did it with as little external mods as possible so in theory it could be returned back to its original form without much effort. It DID require taking the 360 apart, thus voiding the warranty. Anyway, it’s a pretty neat project and turned out looking quite nice. They ended up lowering the temps 50 degrees Farenheit which is a HUGE amount. Perhaps Microsoft may want to look into upgrading the cooling a bit with newer revisions of the console? I personally won’t be purchasing one as I am not enough of a gamer and don’t see anything compelling enough about it to make me want one. They’re nice and all, just way too much money to play games on a TV.
Wordpress 2.0 has been released and apparently makes an absolute TON of changes under the hood. Granted most of the changes we won’t see but it’ll apparently make it a lot easier on plugin developers to create new and better plugins for wordpress. Hmm… does this mean more must-have plugins? Needless to say I installed it and I’m VERY impressed. It now includes a really nice WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor for your posts (it’s even resizable!!) along with a nice box for uploading files and inserting them in posts. Previously inserting pictures in posts was a major major pain in the ass. So much so that I never even bothered to do it via wordpress; I just uploaded them myself and copy/pasted the URL into my post. You can also add a new post category right from the post screen, which is really nice if you make a post that doesn’t really fit into your existing categories. Previously, you had to assign it to some category, go create the category you REALLY wanted it in then come back and edit the post in order to change the category. Way too many steps, all of which have been eliminated now. Seeing as how I just installed it, I haven’t really gotten a chance to check everything out but it looks like a huge upgrade from 1.5. It’s definitely worth the upgrade (mine went smoothly as usual, but your mileage may vary).
Wow… so 2005 is in the history books now, eh? I’m not sure whether I would say that 2005 was a good year or a bad year overall. I mean, I’m still alive so that’s better than the alternative, right? Nothing new and earth-shattering happened but neither did anything just absolutely terrible. For the first time in forever, I worked at the same job all year! Then again, this is probably the first time I’ve had a job that I really really enjoyed and have no desire to actually part ways with. Sadly, everything in the past year just kinda runs together and if someone asked me what was the most significant thing that happened all year, I’d just stand there and stare at them with a blank look, shrug my shoulders and say something to the effect of “fuck if I know”. At least my last weekend of 2005 was rather memorable. Probably the best New Year’s Eve I can remember even though the roll I took sucked a fat nutsack. Despite that, I still had a great time. I drank quite a fair bit for the first time since my birthday weekend and on top of what little effect the roll DID have (mood enhancement, more energy than usual, etc.) I got a bit more than tipsy but a bit less than smashed. The girl I’ve been sorta seeing went with us to Fiction and ended up spending the night with me Saturday night and most of the day Sunday. It was not only New Year’s Eve for her but it was her birthday, too so I had to make sure she had a good time. Let’s just say I don’t think she’ll be forgetting her 19th birthday anytime soon and leave it at that! Needless to say, Fiction and Tonic were slammed and everyone seemed to have a good time. New Year’s only happens once a year, so I figured I might as well celebrate in style.
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