New phone needed

My contract is up on my 2.5g phone, I currently own a T68 which has been upgraded to a T68i.

But all that aside, I'm going to pass my T68 on to my wife whos on pay as you go. But I need a phone just like my T68 but with a decent camera. Ideally it would beable to take videos not only pictures.

So whats the choices?
Z600

Sony Ericsson Z600, even though I hate flip phones this is better than the T610 I feel.

T610
The Sony Ericsson T610 is the natrual choice and is currently free with a new contract. I noticed the T610's picture resoultion is half of the T68 with the extra camera

I have considered buying a different brand, but I need a phone with decent bluetooth support. Some of the Siemans are looking decent now. The only Nokia I would consider is the Nokia 3650 because its not quite a smartphone so it wont replace the features of my ipaq. But it has a MMC and can record mpeg4 video. And I bet its smoother than my 3g phone. I was also going to say I could get a smartphone and duplicate some features.

Something like the Sony Ericsson P800 or even the P810 now. Or I could consider the Orange SPV or SPV2 if that had a decent camera.

I think I'm gonna wait a little longer before i make the jump.

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Revisiting Be OS

Its been a long time since I looked at BeOS. But reading in the beginning there was a command line and my lack of knowledge about linux, I thought I'll have a look and see what BeOS are up to.

Well to keep things really short, I installed BeOS XP Max edition, as it supports the amd athlon XP processor. Also it seemed fine about most of my other odd hardware. Unlike Linux, correct me if I'm wrong.

But theres a problem!
I've installed it and had no problems, but can someone please tell me how to start it! I swear theres no straight forward way to start it. I would ideally like to add a menu option to the boot menu, so I can decide to drop into beOS rather than Windows XP.

Anyway I'm sure I'll work it out soon. Till then heres a few good links which I picked up.

Creator of the first BeOS/OpenBeOS Distribution
Community of BeOs supporters
My all the web simple search

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Java vs .Net

Miles dropped this into my inbox a while back, good read.

Is Java Finished?

The battle for the hearts and minds of developers is heating up, with .NET starting to compete fiercely with Java. The war is being waged mostly inside corporations — department by department, and project by project. True, many companies will use both technologies. But because Java traditionally is considered more complex and difficult to use, .NET will have the edge in some head-to-head comparisons.

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Your move : 3g update

Its been a while since I've done a update on a few things, one of those updates should be my 3g phone. I was sparked into doing this because Three finally sent me a letter asking me to make a choice by October 2nd.

Also been meaning to share this with my blogger too,
Gsmbox.com tests my 3g phone

I still cant not work out if three have deployed a walled garden or not. Everytime I type a url in manually (when i got 3g signal of course). The phone says not all content is viewable, then it tries and fails, every single time. I even tried wap sites to make sure it wasnt because the browser didnt fully support xhtml.

But then yeah its odd because its says it should work. Then dont even get me started on the java aspect! I still to this day have not got a single java applet working on the phone.

So what am I going to do, well it seems I can keep the phone if I stay on 3toGo pay as you go. If I goto the video price plans they will give me 100 pounds in credit, but would i use it? No chance! My 3rd option is to leave three, and return the handset to them. And sometimes I do consider it to be the best option.

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Eigenradio = Statistically Optimal Music

Ok so Miles dropped this in my inbox the other day, but I was following the convo on alter slash but like most things on slash dot it was lost before you know and replaced with something just as interesting.
This is from slashdot
ShinyPlasticBag writes “'Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live. What you hear on Eigenradio is the best of the New Music, distilled and de-correlated. One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio.

Anyway so yeah this eigenradio sounds like a intersting project but is somewhat not when you actually listen. Maybe its the slash dot effect, but tell you what it sounds pretty poor at the moment.

The slashdotters have gone crazy about the issue, and its all a good read. Heres some of the best.

bobtheheadless (467304)
I wonder if you can do the same thing with video… hm.

Sanity (1431)
I wish they had spent as much time documenting what this actually did as they spent making the website pretty, the one remotely technical diagram on the website has no explanation whatsoever as to what it is about.

IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art. This is the reason why people like Kevin Warrick [sundayherald.com] can stick a dog tag in their arm and go around claiming they are the world's first cyborg – all while being lavished with attention by the mainstream media.

All of this leads to an academic system that increasingly rewards self pubicity at the expense of real reasearch.

Oh, BTW – I listened to the radio station, it sounds like a garbled mess – I certainly couldn't determine the point of this from listening to it, but then I could say the same thing about rap.

JohnGrahamCumming (684871) comments about the website,
1. Horizontal scrolling required
2. Tiny
3. Virtually no links to anything
4. Very small amount of information

I personally think its all good fun but the genres are too wide for any good experience. Also I expected it to generate tones for human listening? Some of it was hardly that. I would like to see it take only a single genre and use the same engine then hear the results.

No matter what the slashdotters say, the author page sounds like he has lots of interesting projects going on, but not much to show at this moment. Some of the papers I will have to read through when I got the time.

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Pocket Internet explorer

Why do Microsoft do it? why? oh why oh why?

Pocket IE 2003 renders CSS stylesheets and if that wasnt bad enough it seems to support limited javascript? I think. I visited a site a while back on the ipaq and it left a big dialogue box on the screen. What on earth is going on with this browser?

I am pleading with Opera to realease there amazing micro browser for pocketpc. There seems to be no real altenative browsers on the pocketpc unless you look at using wap

Saw this on code monkey
So, if you have a PDA running PocketPC 2002 or earler, could you do us all a favor and upgrade? And for those of you who don't, could you see what you can do to get whoever it is who makes your mobile browser to upgrade theirs to some modern web standards? It would make everyone's life much, much easier.

Ok why should people upgrade so you can now design using css on a palmtop device?

Theres no solution to this, I just wish I could turn off css on the ipaq. I also think the new palms support css too. Enough said for now!

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Bluetooth Personal Storage Server

Nizam pointed this out today. Its a nice idea but only uses the bluetooth ftp profile, so streaming wont work I believe.

HOPBIT is a personal mobile server that combines the wireless connectivity of Bluetooth with the storage capabilities of a large capacity hard disk drive. Small enough to slip into a pocket and light enough to carry everywhere, HOPBIT is a powerful personal tool that can transmit, receive and store large volume data sources–including images and music–communicate with digital networks, and provide a new dimension in portable memory for personal information equipment, such as PDA and PC.

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Ups and downs of my ipaq

Recently, my new ipaq has been giving me the metaphorical lip. First of all the sd card started playing up, but it was odd becasue the sd card worked fine but only a few applications picked it up. One of those was pocket music, but others like word, pocketstreets, etc didnt. Some like Pocket MVP saw the sd card but only because they were using the extented file selector. Trust me all this was a pain to say the least.

Anyway, so moving. The biomentric finger scanner doesnt scan too well when its hot or hummid so the pin option was being used during the heat wave.

Then over the weekend the wireless packed up! That was the last straw, i took the battery off the back and replaced it 30 secs later. And believe it or not the wireless came back? Also I put 0 byte file called ignore_my_docs on the sd card and seriously it now works fine. Odd piece of hardware!

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The tablet is back

Over the bank holiday, I reinstalled tabletpc from a fresh back up I did when I first got it. And to my amazement it actually worked. So I have not got my pen and inking back, its a shame I now have to install office 2003 beta once again, but it was time for that beta2 technical refresh anyway. Now if I can just find who nicked the cds…

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Opie (Open Palmtop Integrated Environment)

The question of what I do with my old compaq 3630 ipaq still bothers me. I cant just sell it as I wont get much for it and I would rather make sure it makes a difference to someones life than sell it. As such…

Anyway I found something to do with it. Thanks Infosync. Install Opie Linux on it.

So I did.

Its alot of hassle to put opie on the ipaq, but if you follow the instructions to the T it works fine. The scarey part was when you first boot up the ipaq from cold and it sits there booting up opie without much feedback. Anyway it all looks good now.

When you start up opie the screen is a little low res and it flickers a bit, but my old ipaq screen wasnt the best anyway. Looked at the updated packages and downloaded a few bits and bobs like web server, samba server, etc. To note it doesnt support 3com wireless cards, but it liked the oroncio and compaq cards. Never had a chance to read the opie user manual till now.

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