Screaming Penguin

As some people may or may not know, I have been on a mission from god for a new bag for a number of years now. I had a bag I had carried for decades that was stolen a number of years ago. Since then, I have carried freebies and defaulted back to a (surprisingly durable) messenger I got from The Gap, of all places, when the freebies broke. I finally found a new bag, and it is just shy of orgasmically good. The Union Street from Ona Bags is almost perfect. While it is sold as a camera bag, it meets nearly all of my requirements: heavy gauge, waxed cotton canvas. It is structurally sound. Proper leather accents and antiqued brass fittings. As for quality of construction, feel, and features (including two mobile device pockets, and four memory card slots) it is pretty damned awesome. You might think it just a little pricey, but it is worth every damned penny.

So, I picked up a WiFi Xoom on sunday, replacing my hackdc "HoneyNook." Just wanted to jot down a few notes...

Wow, that was fast. I got an email last week that I'd been selected to take part in the new Google Chrome OS netbook pilot program. I was surprised and very excited by that news, but I figured it would take 3-4 weeks, or more, before I would actually get my hands on a device. I was wrong! It's here!

So Google sent me a Logitech Revue Google TV! First off, thanks Google. I do plan to start doing quite a bit of "TV" app related work, but I am personally more interested in native Android apps for the device, as opposed to web apps. And, the SDK and Market for it aren't available yet, so it may be a bit before I get to that. Anyway, I'll post my early usage thoughts here now, and a more comprehensive review will have to wait until I know more about the platform.

This is the tablet I am really waiting for. Again, I can't stand the limited storage, but at least it has an SD slot:

I have to admit, I am really disappointed in the iPad. The short summary: I want a small Mac, not a big iPod. The form factor is great. I have always thought the MID market was wrong on the size factor. 7-8" screens are too small. 9.7 is just about right. The battery life -- Apple says 10 hours, so I am figuring 6 or 7 in the real world -- seems OK, but not great. Everyone on the interwebs is talking about how fast it is, that is good. There are, however, MUTLIPLE deal breakers for me on the iPad:

So I have had the N1 for two days now, and I think I am ready to post my thoughts. First, this is a great phone. It can't be overstated what a difference the 1gHz Snapdragon makes coming from the 528mHz ARM on the MyTouch3G. It feels wonderful to use, and even with all the animations all the way up, apps just fly by without even a little bit of thought. Android 2.1 isn't much different than the 2.0 the Droid has. Of course, there is the animated wallpaper. And in keeping with Android trends, the first batch is pretty tasteless. The smoke one is nice once you pick a non-assy Lime green that is the default. Seriously. Google needs a few more people with some taste working on this stuff. Physically, the phone itself is the first phone I have seen that I would say squarely bests the iPhone in the "how does it feel in your hand" test. It has a good weight to it (slightly lighter than an iPhone), and the big flat battery inside gives it a good balance. The OLED screen is, literally, mindblowing. The contrast ratio is great. Full brightness and blacks are midnight-in-a-cave-for-Ray-Charles black. The white is not-quite paper white, but doesn't have that yellow lean a lot of the mobiles seem to have. The part that looks like it is metal on the case isn't. It is plastic, but feels pretty good. The back is covered with that grippy polymer felt stuff, so it has the feel of a mid-90s ThinkPad. I love that. The buttons on the bottom are capacitive, and that was a frakking idiotic call. I hate capacitive buttons because it is much, MUCH to easy to accidentally press one. The also seem to not buffer presses when the phone is busy like a hardware button, which means sometimes you might "miss" a press. That sucks. Battery life isn't nearly what is advertised, but seems comparable to the iPhone 3G and MT3G I have had in the past. It does seem to take a long time (3hours or so?) to get a full charge from empty. The audio on the headphone jack doesn't get loud enough for my taste. At max volume it still won't drown out street noise. It does use 3 core mini jack headphones, which is good. It comes with a pair that have a mic and FF, Play/Pause/RW buttons on it that are pretty good. I know that seems like a lot of complaints, but really, I am thrilled. Using the phone, it just feels like a million dollars, and Android just FLIES on it. Apps come and go and you wait for nothing but network IO. There have been some small improvements to the browser, and with the new CPU, it feels much faster than any other phone I have ever seen. I also wonder why, this phone marketed by Google, didn't just come with all the Google apps preinstalled. I still had to go DL Sky Map, Goggles, Translate, Listen, Scoreboard, Finance, yadda, yadda, yadda from the store. Why not just dump the entire Google experience. Also, the "mutliple Gmail accounts" works, but the multiple account support doesn't carry over into Calendar or the other apps. 5.0 out of 5.2.

I am immobilized this weekend (nothing serious, just have to stay off my feet for a few days, doctors orders), so I decided it would be a good time to work on some GWT/AppEngine hacking. Enter my need for a good portable computer (don't want to sit at the desk).