Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

Finance for geeks. Eric Sinks writes about finances for geeks.

Samsung SCH-i600 smartphone review. PC Magazine review of second in general and first in CDMA version smartphone based on Microsoft’s smartphone OS. This platform is really slow in coming - will it become a major player?

The triumph of good. The triumph of good article is worth reading because it says what I think: convergence of mobile/PDA devices is inevitable. 5 years from now you won’t buy a PDA that doesn’t have one way or another of getting Internet connectivity (e.g. by wi-fi but most likely GPRS/CDMA data connections). What cell telcos should do is, in addition to selling cell phone plans with data, sell just data access over their GSM/CDMA networks for people who don’t care about having phone capability but do care about having internet access for their spiffy new PDAs. Currently high-end PDAs don’t have “internet everywhere” capabilities while those PDAs that do have it (like Treo 600) are usually PDA/phone combos necesserily restricted in their capabilities, mostly because of the size issues.

More information is better. I just went to TypePad (hosted weblogs company) site to find out what kinds of statistics (hits, referrers etc.) are available for TypePad-hosted weblogs. Marketing-wise their website is good but it lacks detailed information about the capabilities of TypePad. That should be changed (a theory exists that having detailed information about products is an effective marketing technique). And if TypePad doesn’t have good statistics then it should have. When running a commercial site (i.e. one that wants to generate a lot of traffic) it’s essential to know how people find the site in order to find ways to improve number of hits and measure those improvements.

C programming tips from Rob Pike. There are never enough of them: C programming tips from Rob Pike. Short and sweet.

Smartphone developement kit. I rarely talk about Microsoft’s SmartPhone but this Smartphone developement kit is interesting. For $499 you get unlocked GSM phone (SC1100 Smartphone) with the latest 2003 version of Windows Mobile OS and all the tools and SDKs you need to start developing for Smartphones. It’s a good example of how platform (i.e. OS) companies should support developers. [via smartphonethoughts.com]

Another positive Treo 600 review.
So there’s another positive Treo 600 review. This is the first PDA/phone hybrid that the author likes. The only complaint is about the (hefty indeed) price.

Review of 3 LCD projectors.
Hardware analysis has a review of 3 LCD projectors for home theatre systems: Dell 2100/2200MP, InFocus ScreenPlay 4800 and Sanyo PLV-Z1. A Slashdot poster opines that they also should include Panasonic’s projectors (Panasonic AE-100, Panasonic AE-300, Panasonic AE-500).

Here’s a bit of my experience with Dell 3100MP LCD projector. I’m not going to repeat info that you can find in your average review but focus on my personal opinion.

Why to buy a projector?. Projector works like that thing they have in a movie theatre: you plug video source to it and it projects the image on any fairly smooth and fairly white surface (e.g. a wall or a special projector screen). Projectors have dramatically came down in size and price in recent years (they used to be as big as half the couch and cost in tens of thousands of dollars while now they can be smaller than an X-Box and you can get one for under $1000). Still, they do cost some so why buy one? For me it was an experienced good: I watched a few DVD movies at my friend’s who has one of those old, big, expensive projectors and the experience was great. I decided to buy a fairly low-end LCD projector for myself and after some web research ended up buying Dell 3100MP LCD projector for under $2000. I was hoping to watch movies, play X-Box games and use it as a wall-size computer monitor for coding.

Did it work out? I do watch DVD movies and play X-Box games on it and for that purpose it works great. I did try to plug a computer (Apple PowerBook laptop and Dell Laptop) but it didn’t work well because text was almost unreadable. Maybe it’s possible to get this working better (I’ve seen much better result from some projector at Fry’s) but I didn’t try too hard - while the idea is cool projectors typicall max out at 1024×768 which is way less than my LCD screen’s 1600×1200 resolution and when working the bigger the resolution the better.

A few practical tips. First be aware that projectors need room. The whole idea and value added of a projector is that the picture is big so you need a big projector screen and projector needs to be far away from the screen (the further away it is the bigger the picture). Also setting it up might involve some manual work (e.g. attaching it to the ceiling).

Darkness is required. Projectors differ in how much light they generate but with Dell 3100MP it has to be very dark in order to watch a movie comfortably. For me the end result is that I can only use it at night because I have very big windows in my room and no way to cover them. Depending on your housing situation it might or might not be a problem; as for me, the “night only” restriction doesn’t bother me.

Da noise. Projectors are loud (around 37dB according to specs) but bearable. My projector is located in the worst possible place (right behind my head). To remedy that I just increase the volume. Placing projector as far from people as possible should also help.

Lamp lifetime. A lamp is quite expensive ($500) part of the projector and manual says that a lamp lasts 2000 hr. Someone commented that changing lamps might get expensive in the long run. My take: not a big problem. Even if you use projector 4 hours a day it’ll last for 500 days (almost 1.5 years). Realistically, I probably don’t use it more than 1 hr a day on average so my lamp should last 2000 days which is enough. Having said that I realize that I mostly use just for watching DVDs. If your usage pattern involves more use (e.g. a lot of gaming, watching TV, using it as a computer monitor) it will get more expensive.

It would be nice to be able to play Divx/mpeg-2 etc. files via the projector but I don’t have a player for those (which is not projector’s fault - it’s just a matter of getting proper player).

Skype as an example of changing nature of social interactions.
I just installed Skype - it’s a terrific program and I was able to make free “phone calls” between USA and Europe (DSL network connection on both sides) with good quality (the only problem were ocasional, short periods of silence). It god me thinking about changing norms of social interactions. Today I was “called” via Skype by 4 people I don’t know. Never in my life was I called on my cell-phone by a stranger (with the exception of “wrong number” cases and telemarketers). So it seems like calling strangers on a cell-phone is not an accepted behaviour while calling stranger on Skype is. Very similar technologies, a big difference in how they are used. I speculate that people adapt IM type behaviour (where chatting up a stranger by sending him a unsolicited IM message is ok) to Skype rather than phone type behaviour.

Ah, telemarketers. I wonder if they’ll start using Skype as well. As of right now there are 120 thousand people running Skype - quite a market of tech-savvy (potential) customers. From the telemarketer point of view the pros are: there are no laws forbidding unsolicited commercial calls, calls are free. On the con side: it might be hard to figure out physical location of the person you’re calling (you probably wouldn’t want try to sell physical goods from US to a guy in Russia). Skype is still very young so we’ll have to wait and see.

Watch TV on the internet. wwiTV is a page listing TV stations from all over the world that can be watched via Internet.