Saturday, September 3, 2011

Things that I have loved...

Hello there, faithful web audience.  Or not-so-faithful web audience.  Hello there me, the only person who regularly reads this blog.

I'm thinking about pounding out a few blog posts about things I want.  I've done similar posts in the past, about certain netbooks or phones.  Today though, I'm writing about things I have owned and loved.  Not romantically, just out of the utility they brought into my life.  Sure, I'm a weirdo, but not one of those weirdos...

I've recently written a post that touched briefly on my love for the Game Boy.  As I said in the article, the Game Boy was perhaps the first piece of technology that was real that I desperately wanted (I was a little kid at the time, desperation came much easier).  It was portable gaming, something I seem to still value, as I own a M11x, Alienware's 11" gaming netbook.

The Sony MZ-R50 portable minidisc recorder.  Probably the second electronic device I desperately wanted.  Mp3s were just getting big, and cassettes recording from my computer's line out jack seemed to be the bast way to play them anywhere away from home.  I bought this to take my mp3s--and my CDs too, with me everywhere.  I still love this design.  I don't know why, I just love the way it looks, I have since the time I first saw it.  Beautiful.

I've owned three minidisc players in my life, all portable, all recorders.  Minidisc never caught on in the US, though there was a time you could buy a player and discs at any Wal-Mart or Target in the US.  I didn't need them to catch on to work for me though.  They were small, and they allowed me to carry most of my music with me on a few discs.  The last minidisc player I bought used discs that could hold a gigabyte of data, impressive at that point, and they were dirt cheap, like $10.

The minidisc did had one huge advantage that current formats haven't replicated.  Its disk wasn't exposed.  It had a little door like floppy disks that only opened if you inserted them into a drive (or jimmied them open with a pin or something).  I don't know how we went from CDs to DVDs to Blu-Ray, and all of these formats have the disk exposed.  That still pisses me off, it's probably planned obsolescence.  I'm cool with disks, but put them in enclosures like the minidisc had.  Keep me from constantly needing to tell people not to set discs aside silver-side down.

Oh look, another mobile gaming device!  The Tapwave Zodiac was a gaming PDA.  It had an analog joystick, shoulder buttons, and a few decent games.  Some devoted community members even got Game Boy, NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators running on this bad boy.  This was, and still is in my book, the ultimate portable gaming device.

The Zodiac also came through on the PDA side though.  If you held it sideways it looked like any other PDA, with a few extra buttons.  It had handwriting recognition, which was generally as spotty then as it is today.  It had a calendar and other basic office apps.  It had an ebook reader, which I used all the time reading public domain books, the same as I do now on my Nokia N900.  It was a great device, and another one I fell in love with just by it's visual design alone.

The Zodiac also brought my attention to a certain type of finish--anodized aluminum.  That device did not scratch, and let me tell you, the way I treated it, it should have.  It looked cool, it felt cool, and it was practically indestructible.  Why isn't everything anodized aluminum?  Why are manufacturers sticking with brittle, glossy, fingerprint-magnifying plastic?

I really liked this device, and I still have it, thought the LCD screen broke on me.  It was stepped on.  Ok, I stepped on it.  If it wasn't broken, I guarantee you I'd still be using it today, playing my favorite Game Boy or Genesis games on the go.

My Nokia N800, the internet tablet that helped me get by when my laptop broke and my house didn't have internet access (it was a temporary residence), so I could drive to various cafes and surf there.  Still use it occasionally.  Pretty good sound coming from those tiny speakers.  People are still developing for it too, which gives me some confidence that my N900 will still amaze me for years to come, even though Nokia has abandoned it and it's OS.
The Nokia N900.  It's ugly.  It doesn't give a shit.  It's a Swiss Army knife.  It's a FM transmitting, IR blasting, wifi hacking, keyboard having, multitasking, flash photographing (with sliding lens cover), Flash media playing (before it was cool), 32GB powerhouse.

It has a full office suite, maybe multiple ones.  It has NoteCase Pro, Dropbox, SMPlayer, Spideroak, Abiword, Xournal, Rockbox and Transmission.  And that's just off the top of my head.  You can listen to your music in your friends car over the radio--no cables needed.  You can use it as a universal remote.  You can blog from it or write whatever you want--I can write 40wpm on that tiny keyboard, I swear it.  Wears my thumbs out but comes in handy when I'm far from home.

It is the best phone ever, and Nokia practically threw it in the garbage.  Find it in a store in the US, I dare you.  I double-dare you.  It takes full advantage of T-Mobile's cellular radio spectrum, but good luck finding that out without doing a little detective work online.  Hey, you know what would fit in here well?  A mini rant:

<begin mini-rant>Hey, we're Nokia, we've just spent years developing the very best mobile OS ever, Maemo 5.  Then we struck a deal with Intel to broaden Maemo's scope and get it on more devices: the Meego project.  Oh, you know what, this isn't working for some reason (possibly because Maemo 5 is only on one device and you can't buy it at your local cellular phone service provider).  Here's a great idea--Microsoft is famous for great mobile software, right?  Okay, well all the Windows Mobile versions sucked, every phone manufacturer that used it was so embarrassed by it they had to design their own UI to go on top of it.  Oh, and the Zune software is the worst media player software ever, and the device's UI was atrocious (even worse then the Creative Zen Touch, which I owned and you'll notice that it's NOT on this list).  You know what, who cares?  Let's put Windows software on all our phones anyway.  No one knows what the hell Maemo/Meego is--I mean we didn't advertise it or anything, but still it's a failure.  A failure of marketing sure, not engineering or design, but that's splitting hairs.  Why even try to make it work?  Fuck it, let's just partner with Microsoft, whatever.  We designed the world's first smartphone.  We built Maemo 5, the world's best mobile OS, from the ground up.  We've been around since the late 1800s, but what the hell--let's partner up with Microsoft and just go out as a big pathetic joke.  <end mini-rant>  You could have switched to Android Nokia, and at least saved a little public opinion.  You could even have promised to provide hardware drivers to people who would try to port Meego to your new (invisible) line of Windows 7 phones.  Nope, you just had to blow it every way you could, didn't you?  <okay NOW end mini-rant>

Netbooks.  I've owned three, all Asus EeePCs.  A 7" 701, a 9" 901, and a 9" T91MT.

They all have their own benefits and limitations.  I still like the look of the 701 best, a flat finish with beveled corners.  The 901 and T91MT are glossy finish.  Portable devices should not have glossy finishes in my book.  Fingerprint magnets.

The 901 had a bigger screen, and the T91MT is a netvertible, the touchscreen swivels and folds back so you can use it like a tablet.  The T91MT also has two SD slots, which is really, really awesome for memory expansion on the (relatively) cheap. 

I was surprised how quickly I could type on these devices eventually.  To be honest, the 701 drove me crazy at first, I felt like my hands were crippled.  I forced myself to use it though, and for a while I could type faster on it than I could type on a full sized keyboard. In fact, typing on a full sized keyboard became a bit of a strain, I think because I had to move my hands around a lot more to type.

Hmm.  What have I learned?

Well, looking at all of these together, portability was always a big thing for me.  My parents didn't travel much, but we did go on some vacations.  They did drive around a lot, looking at cars lots and houses for sale, and I was constantly kicking myself for forgetting to bring a book along, or bringing a book along that I was so far into I'd finished it before the end of the trip.

I really like the idea of doing what I want to do anywhere.  Being able to write on a netbook no matter where I was, though it's still a bit troublesome in a car or on a plane.  Still waiting for tablet people to have their epiphany and work out a brilliant new way of entering text on a touch screen that's faster, or at least comparable, to typing on a keyboard.

We still don't have one device that can replace all of these though.  The Zodiac is still kind of irreplaceable, having dedicated gaming buttons attached (although I am curious about the Xperia Play).  It'll probably be a long time before another phone is released that does all the N900 can, and I doubt it'll be released by Nokia and run Maemo/Meego, so hopefully Android has its stuff together by then.

I really am waiting for a better text entry system for tablets.  I'm sure as multi-touch screens become more popular, someone's going to have a "Eureka!" moment and throw something brilliant together.  Keyboards are the only reason I'd choose a netbook over a tablet, and it seems I can type fairly quickly on a tablet, though it's a bit awkward.

I do have my eyes on a few more devices, though cash is a little tight so it's killing me that I won't be able to buy any of them for a while.  For the time being, I guess I'll just write about them, and that will have to tide me over.



  1. Thanks for posting this! I've been following my passion for emulated gaming on handheld devices... and stumbled on this page along my way. (yes! I had a gameboy, and played it at work... hours ticked by as I stood at a podium in the lobby of a resort hotel... my intense focus downwards to 'my work', appeared appropriate in such an otherwise formal environment... that no one ever wondered what I was doing!) LOL

    *Oops! I meant to chime in that I also had a mini-disc (recorder)... and a Gigabyte T1028 Touchnote 'netvertible'!!! ;^ )

  2. ...but it was remembering my wonderful Tapwave Zodiac 2 that prompted the google tangent that brought me here: I also, just fell in love with how it looks... and how it's metal casing feel so good in hand... it truly is a work of Art! I'm buying a 'retail display demo' and hope to find the firmware to flash it back to life! Otherwise, I'm gonna gut the case for spare-parts for my 'old one'... and hack my HTC Incredible as it's 'bionic surrogate'! LOL

  3. Coincidence Coordinator -

    You would have loved the Zodiac: as I touched briefly on above, one of it's selling points was that if you held it sideways it looked like a PDA. Perfect camouflage for the office.


    I remember when the retail display kits originally went on the market, I didn't know you could still find them, though I haven't really looked. If I had the money I'd certainly track one down. My main worries would be whether I could find a compatible battery that was still good (but perhaps one could find a newer battery with a much higher capacity) and whether I could find one of those wifi connectors that fit in an SD slot.

    Odd nowadays to think of a mobile device not having wifi...

  4. hehe! I'm the person who posted the 1st 2 comments LOL
    Yup, after reading about the Zodiac's demise, I wrote to the company for a demo model and got no reply... then found a Zodiac 2 at goodwill for $39 (in original bow w/ everything!) in 2008.

    here's the only for sale post on amazon:

    and the best sdio wifi card ('g' instead of 'b')

    *I'm glad I thought to check back for any responses! ;^ )