resistance to persistence

Energizer’s Energi To Go

Disclaimer: I was given this product for free to try but that does not mean my opinion is being “bought”.

I received a nice bundle of free product in the mail to try out and review. I qualified since I’m a heavy iPod user and take it everywhere with me.

Energizer created a Energi To Go product for people on the go with their iPods. If you’re away from your charger or forgot to pack it on a trip, you can recharge it using battery power.

The box was filled with a bunch of goodies, including a giant stuffed Energizer bunny. A couple of the new Lithium batteries, a mini speaker, a bunch of $3-off coupons towards the purchase of an Energi To Go charger (give me a shout if you want one) and most importantly, 2 Energi To Go chargers (one for me, one to share with a friend).

So the concept is this…you’re travelling and realized you’ve forgotten your charger. You’re about to board a plane and realize if you had your iPod charged you wouldn’t have to listen to the screaming kids you see will be on the flight with you. Rather than face that nightmare, you can purchase a power source to keep you rocking on the long flight.

The Energi To Go adapts to a lot of different iPod models and allows you charge your iPod or listen to it as needed. Once the batteries die, put in some new ones and you’re still in business. I think a set of batteries gets you 2 charges of your iPod or about 20 hours of listening.

My honest thoughts on the product - I think I’d only buy this product in the case I mention above for the traveller facing a long period of time without music. In that case, I would gladly pay for one if I saw it at the airport. But for daily travels, I could deal with a couple hours without music. I usually drop my iPod in the cradle at the end of the day to make sure it’s ready to go the next morning.

At Christmas, I was looking at buying a cigarette lighter charger for the car as there’s been some times when I’m driving out of town for the weekend and I’ve got a low charge but now I don’t have to thanks to the Energi To Go. I’ll leave it in the glovebox for just those occasions.

But now you know for the next time you’re travelling over to Australia without your charger to check the airport shops so you can keep your sanity on the long flights.

When I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, one of my definite destinations was an Apple store. The iPod Touch had just come out and I could finally experience an iPhone in person. But getting to actually try one wasn’t going to be as easy as I hoped.

The tables with iPods and iPhones were crammed with people. There was about a dozen iPhones and a dozen iPod Touchs laid out to try and people were taking their time trying them out. Lineups formed around each one, people looking over shoulders, waiting for someone to put one down just to have it snatched up by the next interested person. I planned my strategy trying to predict who was next to put it down and then running around to the other side of the table, but it was too late - someone had already picked it up.

After about 10 frustrating minutes of cat and mouse, I finally got my hands on one. And it was sweet. It just felt right. I tried as many of the applications as possible. Music and coverflow worked fabulously. Picking music now felt much more like choosing from a CD collection. And I noticed there’s a rocker button on the side to adjust volume up and down. In my previous review, I expected it to all be screen touch.

Photo time. The built in camera takes amazingly clear pictures. Maybe it’s just the screen that makes it look so good, but lighting and crispness of images is amazing. This would be great to have at parties. The screen makes sharing the images so good as well. You can flip through the images, just like coverflow, pushing them to the side. Spread your fingers apart and you can zoom in. Push around and pan the image. I wish Photoshop editing was this intuitive.

The internet browser was the same. I opened a bookmark to a newspaper website and I could zoom into the page, slide it around, click into stories to read. So fast and clear. The text rendering is very sharp.

Actual calls and sending text messages on the phone was disabled for obvious reasons, but you could still get a good idea of how everything worked. The address book was great and visual. I tried to tap out a text message, and I won’t lie - it was difficult. But I expected that. I’ve heard people say you just have to type and not care that you’ve made mistakes - the software will correct it to the right words. But for me, I must have been typing too many wrong letters as it wasn’t correcting my words. I don’t even have large fingers and i found it hard to type the tiny keys. I’ve also read it takes a little bit of time to get used to it, but after a couple days, you’re flying.

Overall, it was just so enjoyable to use and drool worthy.

After my short trial, we grabbed some lunch at a nearby Thai cafe, Peep. The washrooms are hilarious. The door to the 2 individual unisex washrooms are right in the dining area. And once you get in, you’re shocked. When you look back to where you came in, you can see the dining room. It’s one-way mirror glass. And the opposite wall is a mirror reflecting the dining room as well. So at all times, you’re fully aware of people looking in your direction in the washroom, yet only you can see them. Very funny to experience.

Photo copyright of Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press

The reason why I bring up Peep is that there were two girls sitting next to us that must have overheard us discussing the recent Britney Spears MTV VMA debacle. Shortly after, they had an iPhone out on the table, laughing and watching together the Britney performance from YouTube. Could the iPhone be the tool that makes the anti-social internet a social gathering? Will we huddle around it, reviewing photos from our recent trips? Watching the latest episode of The Office together? Listening to the latest album release?

Will you buy an iPhone?

iPod Touch - all that I wanted

I was right! After Apple announced the iPhone, I felt a bit left out…I wanted all those features in an iPod, especially the widescreen video. It’s the reason I held off upgrading to an iPod Video edition. Today, Apple announced the iPod Touch, all the features of the iPhone, minus the phone. Exactly what I asked for when I blogged about it back in January.

Here’s what I said back in January…

Here’s what I want to see…take the iPhone, minus the phone capabilities, take out the internet capabilities (nice, but not essential) and just leave me the widescreen ipod. That’s all I want. I want videos widescreen, the new navigation capabilities with coverflow, rotational knowledge, etc. All that is cool. And maybe leave in the 2MP camera along with iPhoto so I can load up some photos too. I’ll use it to backup my memory card from my camera while I’m travelling.

I was pretty close. They left the internet capabilities…I should have guessed at that…anything that allows you to buy songs online with the updated iTunes wifi music store. I still would have liked the camera to stay, but I’ll make due with my cameraphone instead.

I can’t wait to try one out (and even more to have one). They’re out September 28. Another occasion to have the press watch the large overnight lineups and push the Apple stock even higher.

The controls will take a bit to get used to. I will actually miss the wheel control. When I’m walking to work, my iPod is in my pocket. And I always know where the pause button is and I can even adjust the volume up or down without having to look at it or take it out of my pocket. This is also very important in the winter time. The less I have to take off my gloves the better. With the iPod touch, I’ll have to turn the screen on (I’ll turn it off to save power) with the home button twice and then adjust the volume or pause. But I’ll have to visually see where these buttons…no more blind pocket pressing unless I get really good at remembering where on the screen the pause button is. Sometimes having some tactile buttons are a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Touch and will be anxious to see one and try out the controls in person, especially since we don’t have the iPhones in Canada.

The iPod Touch comes in 2 sizes, 8GB for $299 USD ($329 CDN) or 16GB for $399 ($449 CDN).

What do you think about the new iPod Touch? Are you going to buy one? Leave me a comment.

from Core77…. And remember, this is US prices. Canadian rates are much higher.

AT&T has just announced their iPhone plan rates. So how much will it actually cost you to get an iPhone, including your first month of service? Let’s see: $499 for the 4GB, $599 for the 8GB. Sales tax (for example, 8.375% in New York State). One-time AT&T activation fee of $36.

AT&T iPhone plan rates: 450 minutes, $60 (after taxes more like $72). 900 minutes, $80 (around $96 after taxes). 1,350 minutes, $100 (around $120 after taxes).

So what’s the damage?

4GB with 450: $648.79
4GB with 900: $672.79
4GB with 1,350: $698.79

8GB with 450: $757.17
8GB with 900: $781.17
8GB with 1,350: $807.17

I hope you really enjoy talking on the phone if you want to pay that much. I <3 Apple and the iPod and I would love to have an iPhone, but I can’t spend that kinda cash.Unless I get to try out another phone from a friendly PR company.

Apple’s New York City store

a very interesting article at CNNMoney about how well Apple’s stores are doing and how much effort was spent on perfecting the shopping experience.

“People haven’t been willing to invest this much time and money or engineering in a store before,” says the Apple CEO, his feet propped on Apple’s boardroom table in Cupertino. “It’s not important if the customer knows that. They just feel it. They feel something’s a little different.”

And not just the architecture. Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 - tops for electronics retailers - while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.

“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus.

The most striking thing, though, is what you don’t see. No. 1: clutter. Jobs has focused Apple’s resources on fewer than 20 products, and those have steadily been shrinking in size. Backroom inventory, then, can shrink in physical volume even as sales volume grows. Also missing, at the newest stores, anyway, is a checkout counter. The system Apple developed, EasyPay, lets salespeople wander the floor with wireless credit-card readers and ask, “Would you like to pay for that?”

i always wondered about this as well. and most people always stated that it’s due to market share. why write a virus for <10% (my guess) when you can hit 90% of the market instead with a virus for the PC. an article at The Mac Observer claims that’s not the real reason anymore and is due to a very secure unix base.

The core of Mac OS X is BSD Unix, and that OS has been around for two decades in open source form, inspected by all concerned. That’s why Mac OS X is more secure than Windows, according to InfoWorld.

For a long time, apologists for Windows have been arguing “security through obscurity.” However, if it has a CPU, hackers will try to attack it, and Mac OS X has been a big target for a long time.

“The difference isn’t market share, it’s the foundation of the operating systems. Given that most virus authors and hackers are in it for the ego, don’t you think that there would be a huge incentive to be the first one to write a widespread OS X, Linux, or FreeBSD virus?” Paul Venezia asked.

The key is the foundation of the OS. If the OS is designed on a shaky foundation, everything on top will suffer. When Apple moved its customer based from Classic Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, they did so consciously with the idea that they needed a firm foundation for the future. But that meant leaving every Classic app behind in the long term.

Microsoft has never been able to make that commitment and retained the backwards compatibility with Win32 apps. That has put a strain on their whole Windows OS. “Simply put, Microsoft had the chance to beat Apple to the punch and make a giant leap back in 1997 or so, killing off the existing Win32 platform in favor of an NT-based client and server that did not have to run legacy applications natively. They didn’t, and we are still paying the price for it today. Even if you’re not running an MS OS, most of the spam in your mailbox came from zombie Windows systems in the control of spammers,” the author noted.

While Microsoft was reaping the rewards of this compatibility, Apple took the time to move its entire customer base to a highly secure BSD Unix OS. “Microsoft didn’t. They’re faced with massive-scale exploits like the spreading ANI vulnerability, Mr. Venezia concluded. “That affects every Microsoft OS, server and workstation alike, across the board. This gives us a glimpse into the code shared between generations of Microsoft OSes, and it’s not a pretty view.”

I came across RailRoad today on another blog. Very cool idea. When I had done some work in the past, I found it hard to remember class names and method names. I’m used to a Java IDE like IDEA to do name completion, but that largely doesn’t exist for the Ruby world, or it may be available now. Generating diagrams from your code should help things a lot.

RailRoad is a diagram generator for Ruby on Rails applications. Actually, it’s a simple Ruby script that loads the application classes and analyzes its properties (attributes, methods) and relationships (inheritance, model associations like has_many, etc.) The output is a graph description in the DOT language, suitable to be handled with tools like Graphviz.

RailRoad can produce:
* Model diagrams, showing both inheritance hierarchy and models associations. You can choose to show the model “content columns” and its types.
* Controller diagrams, showing inheritance hierarchy. You can include the controllers’ methods, grouped by its visibility (public, protected, private.)

an example Model diagram

does anyone actually own a zune? have you ever seen one? i keep my eyes open for electronics all the time and i’ve yet to see a zune in a store, on the streets or someone listening to one on the subway or train. it’s like they simply don’t exist in Canada. The big electronics stores don’t have any. And if they’re not being sold there, then where are they being sold?

don’t get me wrong, I love my iPod and don’t think I’d ever part from Apple. the Windows DRM / PlaysForSure annoys me and I don’t really use Windows anymore. But I’ve heard some good things about Zune, especially for video while listening to the DiggNation podcast. The screen and battery life are apparently quite good.

I’d like to get my hands on one to test out to see how it compares to the video iPod.

Motorola Canada is reaching out to bloggers through Hill & Knowlton to get the word out about their latest phone, the MOTOKRZR. Motorola has recognized that bloggers are an influential community and also represent the average consumer. I am lucky enough to be consdered for this bloggers program to try out the phone and give my opinion. Also, I want to be completely transparent that this is my opinion and I’m not biased or being influenced by being given the phone to use. I’ve done this previously to review another cellphone and it’s a successful idea to have bloggers reviewing products.

Included In The Kit

• Motorola KRZR K1 (Rogers Wireless)
• music earbuds with microphone
• 512MB mini-SD card
• USB mini-adapter for existing earphones

Design

The Motorola KRZR is designed beautifully. If you’re into industrial design and appreciate really nice looking and feeling technology, this phone captures it all. Shiny blue reflective glass and plastic cover the top. The top clear glass covers the camera lens (no lint on the lens - great idea) as well as a mini lcd screen which displays a clock when idle and can be used to see what the camera is taking a picture of when the phone is flipped closed. All this reflectiveness collects a lot of fingerprints since it’s hard to keep your hands off it, so I’ve had to give it a little rub on my pants to clear it off every once and a while. It’s slim - as slim as the Motorola RAZR, yet not nearly as wide. A much better form factor. Because of this smaller size, the weight is also reduced so it easily fits in a pants pocket without giving unsightly pocket bulge.

the phone is so reflective you can see the camera taking a photo

Opening up the camera, the lcd screen comes alive. It’s very bright, with high contrast and is so bright you can easily see it outdoors. Very vibrant colours on the screen with a contrasting colour UI which makes for easy readability. After using the phone for a couple weeks, I’m now starting to get faint keypad impressions on the screen. I’d seen this with a previous Motorola I owned and a little cleaning seems to clear it off. A wide recessed opening at the top of the screen is the earpiece speaker. Since it’s wide, you don’t have to be so precise with pointing it into your ear and this ensures good loud sound.

The keypad has rubberized numbers and outlines separating the keys. The key digits light up once pressed, which is great for dialing the phone at night or in dimly lit bars. A circular keypad, common on Motorola phones, controls your directional selection. It’s a flat shape as opposed to the slightly raised edges I’ve seen on Motorola models, so you have to be a little more precise and use your finger tips so you don’t hit the wrong direction or one of the adjacent buttons. There are 2 new buttons that I hadn’t seen on my previous phone - a Back button and a Web Browser button to launch the internet. A small microphone hole is near the bottom of the keypad.

Phone volume is controlled by a rocker switch on the side of the phone. Next to that is the button to activate the camera and take photos. When the phone is flipped open to talk, it’s the perfect distance from the earpiece to the mouthpiece so you can speak and hear correctly without having the mouthpiece in your cheek, like the “candy-bar” style phones.

Overall, it’s a beautiful well-designed phone.

Interface

The phone interface is the standard Motorola interface, nothing has really changed here other than some new colours and themes. The opening screen has date, time and your selection of 4 icons to choose from the direction pad. I won’t go too much into depth here since if you’ve used a Motorola phone, you’ve seen this before. One thing I do love about Motorola phones is the iTAP text entry which guesses which word you’re typing, allowing you to autocomplete words and saves a lot of time and typing. Trying to text messages on a phone without iTAP is just frustrating.

Sound Quality

As explained above, the wide speaker easily aligns with your ear for clear loud sound. I’ve always have trouble hearing calls on cellphones unless in very quiet surroundings. With this Motorola KRZR, I had a conversation walking down a busy city street and could easily hear the person on the other end. I found it comparible to the sound quality of my home phone. The KRZR doesn’t have the slightly distorted voice sound so common with other cellphones.

Camera

Most people don’t care much about the camera in their phone, but I do. Photography is a hobby and passion of mine and I always make sure I have a camera with me at all times. Mostly I carry my DSLR around with me. If that’s too big, I’ll have my Canon A610 point & shoot. If I don’t have room to carry that, I’ll at least have a phone in my pocket with a camera. And there have been times where I’m so glad I at least had a camera in my pocket to capture some important moments. As such, I expect the quality of the image to be very good - likely more than the average person cares about.

The KRZR packs a 2.0 Megapixel camera in it, with adjustable quality and size controls in case you don’t want to fill your memory card. There are also settings to adjust the white balance of the lighting (sunny, cloudy, home, office, etc) which helps the image appearance. As mentioned previously, the lens is under a sheet of glass, keeping it free of dirt and lint after you’ve been carrying your phone in your pocket for a while. Very smart. But missing was a flash for the camera. Many phones now include a small LED to lightly illuminate the subject. A LED flash greatly helps to freeze the image and give a crisp capture. Hopefully Motorola will include this in their next line of phones to make the camera users happy. I’ve taken quite a few shots with the KRZR camera and was slightly disappointed. The images are somewhat grainy and distorted - not the high level I’d expect from a 2 megapixel camera on the highest settings. Again, I’ve got higher expectations for the camera than the average person, so it’s fine for taking fun snaps of you and your friends which is the true purpose.

Video

The KRZR also has video recording through the camera, but I’ve yet to try that out. I’ll likely post some video in the future.

Music

I was impressed with the music abilities. I carry an Ipod(40Gb or Shuffle) with me constantly but I might not need to as much anymore. I loaded the 512 mini-SD card with mp3 files I exported from iTunes and inserted the card in the phone. The phone came with a set of earbuds which also have a microphone so you can use it as a handsfree earpiece as well. The earbuds aren’t as nicely designed as the KRZR phone, but they’re defintely not the worst I’ve seen. Software to play the music is included on the phone and allows you to play by song, artist, genre or playlist. The sound quality of the music was clear and crisp, not metallic sounding.You can also unplug the earphones and play the music through the built-in speaker. I find it sounds best when you rest the phone on a desk or hard surface to bounce the sound.

Games

There’s 2 demo games included on the phone - Tetris and a Pool/Bowling 60second demo. No full version games to play, not even Snake. I’ve bought a few games for my phones and it frustrates me that every time I switch phones, I lose the games. I’ll save my money on game downloads and stick to my Gameboy Micro from now on.

Software

My biggest pet peeve about Motorola phones - there is no freely available computer software to use with your phone. Again, I’m not the average user, so this may not affect many, but I want to be able to sync my contacts and my calendar to my phone. The phone directly connects to my computer to transfer images, video, music, etc. or I can use bluetooth instead of the USB cable. So why not give away software to users to setup their contact list? Who wants to spend hours repetitively programming phone numbers into a phone when it can be done so much quicker on the computer? My previous Nokia phone was bundled with free software to allow you to update your contacts, assign photos to the people, update your photos and videos. And all of this could be done automatically via Bluetooth. Motorola does have additional software to organize your calendar and contacts, but you have to pay for it (approx $40). I had previously bought an older version for my other Motorola, but it wouldn’t work with this phone. Thankfully, Hill & Knowlton quickly supplied me with the latest version.

I’ve tried to get the software working, but have yet to make it happen with either Bluetooth or USB. It won’t synchronize with Outlook, I get communications port errors, and the software hangs in the initialization stages repeatedly. I found this as well with the previous version of the software I bought. Very flakey. I’ll try some more work with it, but for now I’m still left with unorganized contact list and an empty calendar. Thankfully I didn’t have to spend any money on this software. Motorola makes great phones, but the software isn’t up to par. Likely not a problem for most of the users of this phone since they probably don’t want calendar abilities anyways.

Summary

In all, it’s a great phone, with very high quality phone features, which is most importantly what you purchase a phone for. The music is great, the camera is good and the design is beautiful.

Pros

• amazing looking design, small and lightweight
• great sound quality - the best i’ve heard from a cellphone
• fast text entry for text messagers

Cons

• no led flash on camera to help with sharpening images
• no free purchase computer software for extended calendar and contact editing abilities

Who this phone is for?

If you’re looking to have the coolest looking consumer phone on the market today, get this phone. It’s so flashy when I take it out to talk, I feel like I’ve got a luxury item in my hand. If you want a phone for the purpose of using it as a phone, with some additional features thrown in, this phone is also for you. If you’re looking for a phone with crystal clear sound, this phone is also for you. Personally, this phone is not the perfect phone for me as I’d like better camera quality and seamless calendar intergration but that usually comes at the higher price of a smartphone like the Motorola Moto Q or Palm Treo. But the Motorola KRZR is so well designed physically and sounds so good that I can easily overlook some shortcomings.

Rating

8.5/10 - improve the camera slightly and include some better software and this phone gets a 10.

Links

Learn more about the KRZR Bloggers program at krzrbloggers.com
See the photos I’ve taken with my KRZR cameraphone or photos from other KRZRBloggers on flickr

What do you think of the Motorola KRZR? What do you think about bloggers reviewing products? Wish you could be a part of the program? Leave me some comments.

this week is very busy.
gym on tuesday and thursday nights.
prepping for a day of snowboarding this weekend. get the legs ready for the whistler trip.
work is crazy busy with new product releases happening.
i’ve got a bunch of photos to edit from previous weeks plus a photo shoot i did on the weekend.
and last night i was running all over the city.
first i met up with ian barr from hillandknowlton.com. Motorola is doing a phone seeding to some bloggers and I went to pickup my Motorola KRZR phone. very cool, very sleek, well designed - review to follow.
after that, i cabbed over the the AGO for the bloggers preview of the emily carr exhibition opening.
articles to come on both of those events soon.