Category: Gadgets

  • Juicing Up

    Tomorrow I’ll be traveling to Austin in preparation for Sunday’s Wiener Dog Race.

    image

    In preparation for my trip, I am charging my iPad and my Zune and my miniature mp3 player (long story). Also, I need to charge my camera battery and my cell phone. Now that I think about it, I am in the process of charging my laptop. Also, I’m drinking a caffeinated drink. Yes, it will keep me up a little, but there are some days you are meant to stay up most of the night.

    Our gadgets make us more powerful and more vulnerable.

  • Ipad: More Reviews

    image Andy Borowitz reports: iPad Wins Nobel Peace Prize.

    Also, on his twitter feed, he muses, “Someone needs to develop an iPad app that will make people stop talking about their iPads.”

    Beepo the Dolphin reviews the iPad. His verdict? “After repeatedly throwing it up in the air with my tail, the device eventually landed on the nearby concrete and wound up with a cracked face.”

    See also: video of Pee Wee Herman reviewing the iPad, Hitler’s technical complaints and fake Steve Jobs’ Open Letter to the People of the World.

  • Random Ipad Links & Musings

    image A commenter remarks:

    Apple has negotiated a product-placement deal with the fabric of reality itself. All this week, your friends are required to tweet about iPads, and comedians are required to work the iPad into bad jokes. Obama is going to tape his weekly video address while holding an iPad.

    Here are some things that popped into my head after two days of ipad use.

    (more…)

  • My ipad purchase

    I finally did it: I purchased an ipad.  I purchased the 32 gig device without 3g (although the monthly price was tempting indeed).

    My main purpose was professional: to see how it would change reading and to test ebook designs on it.  See Craig Mod’s article about book design on the ipad.

    I am not a big fan of the multimedia magazine (especially since Conde Nast or Wired or Verve seem to be the only ones with the technical resources to do it). Nor am I a fan of branded ebook readers or the iTunes store. I remain relatively happy with Windows Vista and Vista 7 and my  cheapo cellphone. I don’t mind buying a handful of applications, but I don’t relish the idea of buying a large number of single function applications. Nor do I relish the idea of having to sync things between Windows and the ipad.

    On the other hand,  I also look forward to new writing tools like Budding (which like Google Docs or Live Writer are indispensible  to me now). As much as I enjoy the freedom permitted by the e-ink devices, I miss the interactivity and full color of the  world wide web.

    I don’t intend to turn into an Apple Fanboy, but frankly, I see no other device that competes in the same category. I’m sure I will find other things to despise about the iPad, but for now I feel the joy of having spent several hundred dollars on something no one has ever seen.

  • Just ordered: Thinkpad T400 laptop!

    Ok, for the last 6 months I’ve been hunting around for a new laptop.  I need a sturdy powerful laptop which had some bells and whistles which would be  useful especially for giving presentations. I ended up spending between $1250-1300. Some observations:

    1. I thought I was saving money by ordering my RAM and hard drive from a third party. Indeed, I did save about $40. In retrospect, that seemed like needless crimping. For $40 more, I could have had the peace of mind knowing that I had only one vendor for servicing my parts. Now I have two vendors to worry about.
    2. I upgraded to a bright NIT display. That cost about $150 more, but I really thought having a laptop whose screen would be clear and sharp in midday sun would be a good feature to have (and good to show off). The display technology apparently uses just about the same amount of energy as regular displays.
    3. One big factor was whether to buy a laptop with a builtin eSATA port. Esata is a standard which is faster than USB 2, but it only comes on high end laptops. After some checking around, I decided instead to buy a separate eSATA adaptor for my ExpressCard. I don’t plan to use this often, but that seems to be something I would use. (Interestingly, the Thinkpad didn’t seem to have firewire either).
    4. I saw lots of excellent laptops selling for $700 or less. The compromise you made was lack of customizability, inferior processors and 5400 rpm hard drives. Upgrading to 320 gig 7200 rpm cost you another $100 or so.
    5. I never ceased to be amazed at how many laptops still have 32 bit Vista on it. After placing my order, I just realized that Lenovo did not list which version of Vista they would install on it (I will need to call to make sure).  Update: Home Premium is 32 bit; what a pain to change!
    6. For $100 more, I paid for the 2 extra years on the extended warranty. Peace of mind.
    7. I had to choose between a 14 inch model and a 15 inch, and my choice ultimately come down to battery life. The smaller you get, the easier it is to carry and the longer battery life.
    8. Lenovo has one of the best reputations for being friendly to the environment and climate change. This means a lot to me.
    9. Two things I rarely found good information about were the ports on the laptop and the quality of the webcam (and Linux support). These sorts of things don’t make the manufacturer any extra money, and yet they are vital to being satisfied with your laptop.
    10. I did something unusual this time. I asked for advice on what laptop to buy on a forum. On Notebookreview.com I found a good forum entitled, “What laptop should I buy?”. You had to fill in a form giving your price range and preferences. Then, within minutes, you get suggestions by people knowledgeable about what you can get in today’s market.
    11. Lenovo is known for high quality Thinkpads, but in some ways, their website is incompetent. They don’t have 24 hour customer support or even weekend support. Shipping dates are  substantially longer than Dell and HP. They use only Intel processors, and the ecommerce tool is not as friendly. Their laptop prices haven’t declined that much over the last 6 months. On the other hand, they have been putting out 15% off coupon deals (in addition to the normal discount). But Thinkpads is their premiere laptop, and so I know the quality of the parts and the build itself is high. 
    12. I had to shop for a replacement router for my mom. Apparently, according to reviews, no one is happy with the performance of 802.11n wifi routers (even though range and performance of the standard itself is supposed to be better). Many savvy people are sticking with the Linksys 54xxx g router, which is surprising. I didn’t see one router under $100 which people are happy with.
    13. I was trying to deal with the dual boot issue, and someone referred me to wubi, which installs ubuntu as a kind of virtual machine on windows. From the faq:

    Is this running Ubuntu within a virtual environment or something similar?

    No. This is a real installation, the only difference is that Ubuntu is installed within a file as opposed to being installed within its own partition. Thus we spare you the trouble of creating a free partition for Ubuntu. And we spare you the trouble to have of having to burn a CD-Rom.

    I actually played around with the idea of buying a cheap 4 gigabyte laptop, but the quality of the builds were not as good; also you usually compromised on memory and ports.

  • My thoughts on Video on Demand with the Roku

    As you know, I bought that $99 Roku  box that lets me watch 12,000 Instant Videos on Demand on my TV set.

    Instant Video on demand is a freebie if you have any Netflix subscription. (my subscription is $9 per month).

    It has totally overwhelmed me. It has excited me about movie watching in a way I’ve never been before. Details.

    1. Selection is very limited. 12,000 sounds like a lot, and it is. But you will notice a lot of what it doesn’t include for instant viewing.  But they have a lot of classic  movies (Singing in the Rain, Casablanca, the complete Monty Python episodes, Walle. Birds, Psycho).
    2. Think of it as going to a video store which stocked only titles beginning with the letters A-D. You wouldn’t be able to find most of what you are looking for, but some would be there, plus you’d discover a lot of hidden gems.
    3. They have a surprising number of recent TV shows and old ones. Friday Night Lights, Heroes,  South Park, Dexter, Lost,  plus a lot of minor TV series that premiered on cable. The important thing is that they have complete series of these TV shows. Plus complete collections of some old series (Columbo, Dragnet, Adam 12).
    4. Lots of British TV shows from the 1970s and 1980s. Also some hot British shows from 2000s.
    5. Lots of foreign films, a large number from France and Spain, but also a decent number of ones from Brazil, Japan, China, Italy. Lots of South American titles nobody in the US have reviewed.  Quality on these titles varies.
    6. In general, it has a lot of films from the last 3-5 years. Not a lot before 2000. They have multiple films by several famous directors  (early stuff by Godard,Fassbinder, Pasolini). About 10 titles by Hitchcock.
    7. Lots of Hollywood mediocre star vehicles from Hollywood. But also a moderate amount of recent quirky American indie titles from the 2000s.
    8. An extremely good collection of documentaries and TV nonfiction specials. I added about 5+ Imax titles for HD viewing.
    9. The Roku box was dead simple. Required 5 minutes of set up time.  It can connect via ethernet or Wifi.  I used a $20 HDMI cable to connect to my HD TV, but that wasn’t mandatory. Update: Apparently you can buy a HDMI cable for much cheaper than that.
    10. The box has exactly 6 buttons. Play, pause, forward, backward, menu, select. Any 80 year old could use it. (Compare to the  remote control for cable TV,  which I find unfathomable). It is simplicity itself.
    11. When you select Menu, you see all the Netflix Instant Videos in your Queue. You can scroll through these titles and choose any of them easily.
    12. You are allowed to have up to 500 titles in your queue. 1 title could be “Friday Night Lights Season 1”. If you clicked on it, you would choose from the 10-12 episodes from that season. But Season 1 would be considered 1 title in your queue.
    13. You may think that 500 titles is generous for your queue, but in fact,  I am always hovering at 499-500 videos on my Instant Watch queue. Whenever I find a new title for instant Watch, I end up Adding the DVD, just so I don’t exceed my queue quota of 500.
    14. Didn’t find good selection in  Sci Fi, except for sci fi TV shows, which I thought was ok. Children’s selection was below average (in terms of quality), but they had a lot of titles; there’s bound to be something good there. Also, lots of educational/documentaries.
    15. As I said, the interface was simplicity itself. But scrolling through 500 titles can become tedious one at a time. You learn to arrange the order of your queue by going to netflix.com and doing it.
    16. I spent a considerable amount of time adding to my Netflix queue online (that’s how I got 500 titles).
    17. It seems that Netflix has slowed down or stopped the addition of new titles  for instant viewing. I suspect that they are in the process of adding a more expensive membership tier that includes more titles than what is already there.
    18. The first title I watched was Spice World (silly film about Spice Girls). The second title was Being There, and the third title was Pee Wee Hermann’s Big Adventure. I had not seen Spice World (it is totally frivolous and uninteresting but fun), but I had already seen Being there and Pee Wee.  Seeing both again was glorious.
    19. My threshold for what I would consider a “watchable movie” has declined considerably. I sometimes added movies that I’m unsure about, if only because I know that I could always turn it off after watching it for 15 minutes.
    20. Netflix doesn’t have a good search engine for Instant Viewing. However, this site lets you search for titles and list titles more easily.  This site seems slightly out of date, but it basically works. ]
    21. At initial loading, it requires 7-10 seconds to load. This is not that big of a deal, but it makes it difficult to fast forward to another spot (you have to wait every time). On the plus side, Roku will remember exactly where in the movie you left off even if you return to the movie days later.
    22. On Instant Viewing you do not have the ability to view DVD extras or change the subtitles.
    23. Here are some (likely) video gems I can’t wait to watch:  Sherry Baby, Life After Tomorrow, Mimic, Ong-Bak: the Thai Warrior, Good Neighbors, Comizi d’amore, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Series, a Time for Drunken Horses, King of Masks, Blink, Xala, Red River, Hot Summer,  Tully, Kontroll, Avalon, Nanking, Timecrimes, Cool & Crazy, Persepolis, Charlotte Sometimes, L.I.E.  I have no idea how many of these titles are going to be crap, but I smell a few winners here!

    I have had this service for less than a week. Here is how it has changed me:

    • I have stopped watching network TV altogether (except for the 15 minute Tonight Show monologue). Even if I had cable TV, I am pretty sure I would stop watching cable TV (even if I could  tivo  past the commercials).
    • I have had to restrain myself from watching more TV. I can’t wait to sit down and catch up on my list!

    This device has a lot of potential. i could see how Netflix could push all their movies this way. From Netflix’s standpoint, that saves the cost of having to mail the physical media.  As much as I appreciate the convenience of Netflix’s DVD distribution system, once you have instant download, you have no more interest in handling DVDs. You have no more interest in broadcast TV.  For the time being, a lot of quality content will be on DVD only through the subscription services. However,  this will change rapidly. From my standpoint, once you’ve started instant viewing, it is impossible to mess around with commercial TV or DVDs.

    Update: Netflix has a twitter feed of new instant movies it’s been adding.

  • My Camera Purchase

    Last night, after a week of hemming and hawing, I finally purchased my camera. The winner is

    • Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5A 9MP Digital Camera with 10x Wide Angle MEGA Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Blue)” $276.94
    • Lenmar DLP007 Lithium-ion Digital Camera/Camcorder Battery Equivalent to the Panasonic CGR-S007A Battery” Electronics; $9.15
    • LLC1 “Samsonite Adaptor Plug – Europe, Middle East” Apparel; $4.50
    • Joby GP1-0BEN Gorillapod Flexible Tripod (Blue) $21.95
    • Mack 3 Year Extended Warranty For Digital Cameras – Value Up to $500 $29.95
    • 2 “Transcend 16GB SDHC CARD (SD 2.0 SPD CLASS 6) with Compact Card Reader” $46.82

    A few observations about the camera buying experience.

    First, the lowest price on retail isn’t always the cheapest overall. Typically you have to pay shipping or compare things as a bundle, not a single product. Amazon’s camera price wasn’t the lowest, but they had a larger variety of lower-priced accessories, including the Mack warranties. Buydig (also an excellent company) had the lowest price, but they were selling more expensive Mack warranties and didn’t offer the selection of memory cards or the Gorillapod tripod. Of course, the truth is that Amazon merely is the front end for several electronic stores, so they are providing the illusion of an all-in-one-place shopping experience.

    The big choice for me was between Canon G9  ($450) and the Panasonic TZ5A ($276). I went to Circuit City and tested that G9 camera to death…and absolutely loved it. It had several extra features (such as audio recorder, a flash shoe and a great user interface). But at Circuit City the TZ5A battery was dead every time I visited, so really all I was able to do was glance at the outside. Conventional wisdom is that the G9 is great but overpriced (if you want that much camera, why not just buy a low end SLR?). TZ5 is the perfect spot for price, portability and features (although there was a lot of lukewarm feelings about its new HD capability).  As you see, I bought two 16 gig SDHC cards, so that lets me take a lot of video footage.

    I looked at reviews and forums about both cameras and was overwhelmed with information. The expert reviews gave great opinions (I especially liked the ones which dated their reviews and compared them to the competition). I really liked the Cameralabs reviews (and seriously would have clicked on the camera link to amazon through Pricegrabber to give them a commission, but apparently Amazon no longer participates in pricegrabber).

    The Lumix TZ5A has more automatic settings than the G9 (which was good as well as bad). The fact that G9 offered RAW files was actually a reason against buying it. I wasn’t ready at this point to tackle a new set of processing technologies (however superior I’m sure they were).  Not only did the Lumix have HD (sort of), but they had wide angle and 10x optical zoom (which is amazing). Ultimately though, the amount of features is less important than the user interface to allow it. G9 offered lots of knobs and dials ; I felt that many features were within easy reach (That said, I couldn’t figure out how to enable Face Recognition, which apparently is becoming a standard feature these days). Interestingly, the fact that the G9 was so expensive wasn’t as big an obstacle to me as the fact that it would make me paranoid about it getting stolen during my September Europe trip.

    Now there are many places to showcase your videos and often many user groups form around a certain camera. On Vimeo it’s easy to find videos tagged with TZ5. It’s also possible to read hundred of reviews and forum threads and be no more enlightened about a gadget before you read it.

  • Telephones committing suicide

    An unwary telephone customer receives an itemized cellphone bill in the mail listing every website his wacko phone downloaded.

    By late March I was noticing a disturbing trend on my phone. As it sat on my desk during the day it would go into a curious state, displaying odd screens and eventually crashing. I occasionally would watch it through these seizures, perplexed as I witnessed a handheld device commit suicide and strangely reboot in front of my eyes. At first a mild entertainment, it eventually became a nuisance as I tried to use it as, gasp!, a phone.

    By the end of March I had had enough. I returned the phone, paid my $175 cancellation fee and moved on to a Blackberry. Enough is enough, I thought. But no, that would be too simple!

    Two weeks later a large (8.5 x 11 by 2″ thick) envelope was delivered, from Helio. “Oh”, I thought, “some marketing material. Perhaps a cool book!”. But alas, while it was “a book”, it wasn’t cool. It was my bill!! Yes, my bill for the month was 492 pages (double sided, 9 point font) long!! The amount I owed (remember, I had the “all you can eat data plan”) was $8! The postage to send me the ream of paper was $9!!

    What was in the book? Line by line analysis of an RSS reader gone bad – every 30 seconds it downloaded 2k of useless information (which, by the way, is what led to the demise of PointCast – see note above). Besides killing trees, this stupid thing is killing the Sprint network!! Talk about the potential of a success disaster!!

    Why does this happen? Is Helio really this broken? No, sadly, they have no choice. Current regulations require these charges to be broken out to you the consumer in this manner. What if you want to save a tree? You can get it online, but from what I can discern it is still difficult for the carrier to use this as an excuse to end the paper since there is some oddball need for them to prove that you have the ability to see the bill online which ends up in some circular discussion of the fact that you don’t need the paper.

  • Iphone: what needs to change

    With the rise of the iphone, two things are becoming more imperative:

    1. You need to have separate css for handheld devices.
    2. You need to have a strategy for chunking information on your page. Iphone’s dirty little secret is that the screenshots and tv commercials make the iphone look a lot larger than it is. In fact, it has limited real estate (however cool-looking it is).

    For your content to fare well on the iphone, you need to have  a way of displaying content in chunks big enough to satisfy surfers yet small enough that it doesn’t require too many Page Downs.

    (See also: this teleread post)

  • Iphones cost $2280

    Bruce Kushnick does on an expose on AT&T’s iphone deal. Kushnick is a telco expert who I’ve linked to before. He disapproves of the business practices of the telcos. He’s strident but usually has his facts right.

    Update: this Digg discussion highlights a few realities: these gotchas are on almost every cellular contract (true!), receivers paying for minutes is a uniquely American phenomena,  and that the $2280 derives from a 2 year service plan structure typical in US cellphone plans. But for the record, I use the significantly cheaper prepaid Virgin Mobile  service ($7/month) with no contract. (Read my comment below).

  • Dwight Pronouncements & Ebook Progress

    I emailed this to several friends and family members, so I thought my blog should be entitled to have it as well. Dwight Silverman writes his annual reports on the minimum specs for laptops these days. (See also this confession of a Dell Sales Manager). It mentions a few interesting things: better tech support when you buy it from Dell Business than Dell home (and possibly better equipment), 2 years of tech support is still a relative bargain (I agree, but the wait is the price you pay).

    I’ve already told Dwight this (he lives in Houston and helps run the Houston Chronicle website), but I used to read his great columns on technology and PCs. Frankly, it saved me a  lot of money on equipment purchases and inspired me to be the gadget freak I am today (and perhaps I could even say this savvy won me a job at Dell in 2000) .  His techblog has some great stuff (with a local angle) and not too much gizmo-hype.

    Speaking of gizmo hype, Teleread reports that future versions of Sony Reader will be able to incorporate Digital Edition formats. That basically means that you will be able to read the ebook-friendly Adobe format on a dedicated device. That includes the ability to read encrypted files. Also, there are rumors that the next generation of Bookeen devices (soon upon us) will include support for encrypted Mobipocket. That’s real progress.

    It brings us back to an article I wrote previously: DRM sucks, but do we really want devices without it?

  • Importing OPML files into PDA (not the whole thing, please!)

    Can I ask for something? I am having to transfer my OPML files into RSS readers in portable devices. This has been happening often. I can export OPML files from netvibes or bloglines. The problem is I almost never want to import ALL my RSS feeds. I have a thousand or so in bloglines, 200 in netvibes. Does anyone know of an application that lets you pick and choose RSS feeds to be included in the OPML file. I hate having to edit these things manually.

    It’s as if it never occurred to these Newsfeed software developers that users might not want every RSS feed on their portable device. Portable devices have limited RAM and storage. Also, there are reasons we might wish to have certain feeds in our OPML reader.

    In other news, I am going to try out Iliad Software’s Newsbreak feed reader. My hope is that they have a PC syncer which affords you a better interface for managing feeds.

    Update: I have since learned that Newsbreak lets you pick and choose which of the XML foods you want to include on your PDA reader. Sweet!

  • Catcams

    Imagine what it would be like to see what a camera sees. Now somebody built a catcam to find out.

  • Further reasons to hate geekdom

    I’ve been tricking out my Dell Axim and am quickly discovering how –thanks to no documentation –seemingly straightforward tasks seem impossibly hard (and end up wasting lots of time).

    A primary reason I allowed myself to buy another PDA is being able to use it for skype. I did some googling around and found that generally you could use skype on your pda with bluetooth headphones. But then it turns out that bluetooth headphones don’t work adequately with Dell AXIMs. They switched bluetooth stacks in the latest ROM release–much to the consternation of Axim users. (that’s a further reason why Dell is stupid; they have by far the best pocketpc pda for the price range, and yet they abandoned the product in mid-2005, not updating hardware or software, only providing ROM updates every 6 months or so.

    In the meantime WM5 Smart Phones are taking off up to the point where 2007 models are improving to the point where they have acheived about 80% of the power Dell PDAs already had in 2005. The main exception is bluetooth profiles which smartphones have significantly better support for. Apparently bluetooth stacks (roughly analagous to windows drivers) support different standards for telephones and headsets and keyboards, but the version installed by default on Axim PDA doesn’t include this..which means you need to install the Widcomm bluetooth stack. Which is fine, except that the thread for how to do it runs 74 web pages long!

    I didn’t read all 74 pages, but I gathered that the new stack is fairly mature and well-tested, plus it has an uninstall feature, so I could take the risk. So I ask a few preliminary questions, make my backup and then find another roadblock. I’m supposed to add a registry hack. But editing the registry requires care and caution. The user forum just assumes that editing the registry is common knowledge. But in fact it isn’t. I definitely got started, but I am reluctant to take chances on something I don’t know much about.

    So where does that leave me? I spent 2-3 hours preparing for a hack only to get stuck. Instead of doing this, I could have been exercising or writing or cleaning my apartment. This is a timesink. Although I don’t have a problem devoting time and concentration on certain important tasks, in fact this PDA thing is of relatively minor importance to me in the grand scheme of things.

    It just so happens I had today off, so I had time to waste on this. But what if I had a normal working schedule? Where would I have found the time? I’m left at the point of having to wait for someone on a forum to handhold me on a task I’m unsure will actually work.

    Update: Well, the hack turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. I was able to get bluetooth to work even though I haven’t quite figured it out. It looks like Skype is not functioning well with my bluetooth headset profile. Also, the new driver doesn’t seem to worth with my keyboard. Still testing.

    In other news, it looks as though Dell will stop selling Axims as of tomorrow.

  • Which headset solution to choose?

    Ok, now that I have my Dell Axim pda, I have to choose a headset solution for using skype calls. I can choose:

    1. tiny earbed earplugs that fit into my Axim microphone jack (cost: 40$) or
    2. some fancy bluetooth wireless headphone solution (either the Motorola HT 820 for $70 or the more expensive SonyDR-BT30Q at 100-110$).

    Thoughts. Tiny earplugs are somewhat inconspicuous and are easy to pack. Alas, it’s lots of wires and it’s unsuitable for high fidelity listening.

    Contrast with the bluetooth solutions which involve messing around with bluetooth, somewhat spotty reception and time lags (though superior audio quality, and ability to jump from mp3 listening to telephone). This headset looks pretty conspicuous.

    I guess it all boils down to whether you will be doing serious listening of mp3’s on it or whether you’ll be using it mainly for skyping. Also, the fact that more bluetooth headsets will be coming out all the time means that prices will plummet in the next 6-12 months.

    So for now the solution looks clear: go for the cumbersome but cheap solution and then wait for better things to come out. Update: Maybe not. Update: the wired solution is probably the most reliable, albeit the most awkward.

    Update 2: Looks like there’s another bluetooth contender. here’s a thread I made about it. The question now becomes: do I obtain an inconspicuous, reliable but low fidelity headset for skyping only, or a relatively high quality headset whose form factor is somewhat conspicuous?

    Update 3: Looks like I bought both a bluetooth and conventional headset  from a brick-and-mortar store. Internet shopping be damned! (But I do have 30 days to return it).

  • Hardware Update: Dell Axim X51v

    Well, I bought a Dell Axim X51. You may remember I used to have a Dell Axim X50, but my robbers took it from me . I already have a Nokia 770, and I somewhat enjoy it (especially the RSS reader, FBReader  and browser), but other things about it annoyed me. It was not easy to sync things with a Windows desktop, I couldn’t get the ssh shell to work (although honestly, I never got back with it), contacts didn’t import and I couldn’t sync my calendar.  I bought the Dell Axim mainly to test Pocket PC ebook readers, but also to use it as a portable skype phone whenever I am around wifi. That really excites me.

    I was floored by how nicely  Pocket Outlook works with contacts and schedule. Also, I really missed the password saver application (which I paid money for, but was well worth it). Nokia 770 just doesn’t have a mature application for that yet.  Sounds stupid, but I really needed that.

    The list price for the top of the line Dell PDA was $399. But then there are add ons.  You have to make sure you check all the Sales bundles on the startoff page. I found one which was incredible. So for $474 I got:

    1. bump up to 2 years warranty instead of 1
    2. free bluetooth keyboard
    3. 2 gig SD memory card
    4.  free video game
    5.  other things which I bought a la carte: pack of 3 styluses, Wifi Companion Software

    I am delighted at that bundle. (and by the way I bought a battery upgrade and a case at aximcases.com). I actually have leftover software licenses from my last Axim, so I expect to be able to get it up and running soon (it took several months for me to figure out my first Dell Axim).

    (I have yet to buy a bluetooth headset, which you need to use  skype. I forgot what I’m supposed to buy).

    Amazingly, the turnaround was less than 24 hours, but Dell could not give me an estimated delivery date before I made  the transaction. Funny, I can get one for a $10 book purchase on amazon, but not a $500 order on Dell. What’s wrong with that?