Tao of Mac

Oct 12th 2003 · 3 min read

Slacking Off

Have been doing absolutely zilch this weekend, with my brain on neutral and waiting until clutter (both logical and physical) reaches some kind of critical mass so that I absolutely have do do something about it. Meanwhile...

Siemens SX1 Photos

Over at Mobilemania.cz you can find a few nice pictures of the SX1 alongside a :

Although I can't read Czech, there are also a lot of screenshots of the modified UI and icons Siemens did for their Series 60. Highly recommended for the curious.

The N-Gage in Hand

Oh yeah, I forgot. We had the opportunity to fiddle around with an N-Gage again a couple of days back (I had handled a "dead" one a couple of months back under NDA, but this time it had battery and final firmware), and our impressions were more or less like this:

  • The thing is as big as a dessert plate. Hard to carry around in a trouser pocket, and too oddly shaped for a jacket pocket.
  • Feels uncannily like one of those plastic boomerangs. Bit costly to throw around, so we didn't try it.
  • Yeah, you do have to remove the battery to change cards (the card slides out into the battery compartment), but you do have room to carry around another card on top of the active one.
  • The thing can make enough noise to drown out a car stereo (don't pick loud ringtones, folks - they'll sound really LOUD)
  • Radio works nice, but... What do you mean I can't listen to radio without earphones? You can activate the loudspeaker function and listen to the radio through it, sure, but if you unplug the earphones, the audio goes dead. Damn stupid, if you ask me...
  • No camera.
  • Dinky music player.
  • Bah.

Tungsten T3 Micro-Review

Meanwhile, on the PDA front, I was pleasantly surprised to notice that FNAC already has both the Tungsten E and the Tungsten T3 in stock and had a T3 on display. I fiddled around with it for a bit, and first impressions were:

  • It's fast. At least as fast as my 2210, and way faster than the Tungsten T2 I handled a few weeks back.
  • The screen rotation feature is brilliant. Not only does it switch screen orientation instantly, but the built-in apps take full advantage of the extra space (the Calendar, for instance, displays two calendar months alongside the day view)
  • Applications receive slider open/close notiifications and adjust screen usage very quickly.
  • The new Today-like screen is nice, if a bit cluttered.
  • VersaMail apparently does not support IMAP over SSL (I may be wrong, but couldn't see any settings for it)
  • Graffiti 2 works OK all over the screen (feels strange, but works)
  • There are lots of minimal changes to the standard applications (colored icons on notes, for instance)

Of course I couldn't test the browser (which is apparently installed afterwards) or do anything with Bluetooth other than call up a list of nearby devices (no less than 4 Nokia s in range, which is always good for a laugh - why don't people configure Bluetooth properly?), but nevertheless it felt like a very nice little machine.

The large-screen Palm fonts still feel like a waste of space, though, and I don't go in for the new fancy color schemes... Oh well. We'll see in a couple of years whether or not I'll go back to a Palm.

Neat Tricks

The SMS Sender for Windows - not something I'd use, but a nice add-on. Too bad that (apparently) the command-line version doesn't work:

smssender.exe [[/i] /p:<phone> /m:"<message>" [/u] [/l]] [/?]

/i      Phone number is expressed in the international format.
/p:<phone>      Phone number (numerical values only).
/m:"<message>"  Typed message within quotation marks.
/u      Message encoded as UCS-2. By default GSM alphabet is
        used.
/l      Log the sent message.
/?      Displays this help.