Being the geek that I am, I had wet dreams for Nokia's N80/N92 the past few months. But their lack of a qwerty keyboard or touchscreen really kills them for me. Why is it so hard to come up with a phone that has all the hardware/software features that most people need to replace laptops when travelling? Personally, I don't really require that much from a smartphone that one would call it "modern": QVGA web browsing on selected mobile-enabled sites, email client with Gmail and preferrably Hotmail support, IM for all 5 popular protocols, VoIP with Skype and Gizmo/SIP support, mp3 player with A2DP/AVRCP support, enough main memory/RAM and an 1.3 MP camera that actually has a protection cap and a flashlight .

All these features are doable easily on a Windows Mobile 5 PocketPC smartphone, but the reality is that there is not a single model out there that does all that well. For example, check the upcoming HTC "Hermes" PocketPC here. It has unecessary "decorations" that makes it look bulky (haven't they learned from Apple's iPod that SIMPLE is BETTER?), and its new style of qwerty keyboard is much worse than their previous version: all keys are glued next to each other making them really hard to press the right key and not only that, but they don't even use all the available surface to make key-pressing easier. WHAT IS HTC SMOKING??

Yes, the currently available HTC front runner called "Wizard" (sold by T-Mobile, QTek and i-Mate) has a better keyboard but it doesn't do it for me because it only has a 200 Mhz CPU which can't encode on-the-fly for A2DP and so their AKU2 software update has completely removed A2DP support from the ROM. Sucky!

I have looked at *ALL* PocketPC phone models out there, none is doing things right, the way I need them to work. And Nokia doesn't offer an S60 model with touchscreen and Qwerty (the E61 is nice, but no video/snapshot camera and touchscreen? come on!). And Sony Ericsson's P990 is disgustingly expensive (over $1000) with no real application base (it has fewer than 30 applications that work on this phone model, compare that to 1000 Symbian apps and 20,000 Windows Mobile ones). And PalmOS 5 is a dead horse anyway, so the bulky, unstable Treos with their stupid external antenna doesn't do it either for me.

What I need is a well-designed keyboard that uses all available space and slides out of a design that looks like this (this is my mockup). It is imperative that the device is very small and has a very thin bezel around it (just like the iPod video does) and yet it remains fully usable and easy to press buttons. It should have a VGA video call camera, quadband GSM and UMTS, two softkeys for Windows Mobile 5.1 AKU2, a Windows key to open the Start menu and an "ok" button to *close* applications (and so minimizing the need of using the touchscreen), it has a respectable 1.3 or 2 MP camera with a flashlight and protection cap, WiFi 802.11b, Bluetooth 1.2, 416 Mhz Intel XScale CPU, 128 MB of internal storage and 64 MB of RAM, a good 2.8" QVGA touchscreen, a speakerphone, 2.5mm or 3.5mm audio jack, a normal SD/SDIO slot that can read SD disks up to 4 GBs, plus the software features I mentioned above. And if there's space in the device's internals, throw in an FM Radio too, they don't cost more than $5 anyway. The phone should be able to deliver more than 5 hours on GSM continuous calls and have about 250 hours of stand-by (easily doable with a 1440 mAh battery and electronic parts that are not cheap ass crap like O2's XDA Atom (which I reviewed a few weeks ago) and are instead low-power).

I would gladly pay up to $700 for such a device. And I am already offering too much considering how much the parts and software licenses really worth (manufacturing cost of such a device is way below $500 USD in reality). While R&D will be expensive for a brand new company to pull such a device through and bring it to market, it should be child's play for someone like HP or HTC or even Quanta. So, why aren't they doing things right?

Actor Nathan Baesel emailed me earlier with a link of a glowing review he got from the very popular movie site AintItCoolNews. Needless to say that he is extremely happy. ;)

"France is pushing through a law that would force Apple Computer to open its iTunes online music store and enable consumers to download songs onto devices other than the computer maker's popular iPod player."

I liked these news. Now Apple will get a bit of the crazy European taste that Microsoft is getting from EU for its Media Player. They're crazy, crazy I tell you! Run!

For the past 1-2 years the major studios are bitching that the Box Office financial gains are very low, because people don't go to the cinemas as much as they used to, they claim. They also claim that piracy has taken a toll on their business.

Honestly, that's all bull. How do you expect me to go to the theater when their Top 10 movies this week (10 March 2006 results) has only a single "ok" movie among them?? Except the family movie "Eight Below", the rest nine movies are CRAP (and that includes "Ultraviolet" for which I had better expectations from its director -- readers of this blog have already read about my "Ultraviolet" expectations for months now).

If you sum up all the IMDb rating numbers of the top-10 movies currently on the Box Office, you will get the LOWEST overall rating number, EVER. While IMDb is not the most accurate way to evaluate a movie, its reader ratings are pretty damn close. The bulk of the current Top10 movies are not even worth the time and bandwidth to... pirate on. Let alone getting all dressed up, getting to the car, spending gas to drive 8+8km away in San Mateo, fighting for a parking spot, waiting in a long line for a ticket and finally sacrificing a goat to find a good seat.

If the studios want us, consumers, to visit theaters more, then they should stop releasing absolute crap.

"Citi expects Apple to complete its transition to Intel-based microprocessors in August with the introduction of a new, dual-core PowerMac, with Intel-based iBooks coming as early as April. The brokerage also expects Apple to release a new video iPod in April."

This is correct. The x86 platform is a well-understood platform with many ready-made solutions so creating new PCs and testing them is a matter of a single month while it can be as long as 6 months when creating an equivelant PPC machine because Apple had to invent new things on their own each time.

On other news, I finally found the time to rip my favorite songs out of our 400 CDs we own (128kbps mp3 VBR). I still have 1.2 GB free space left on my 4 GB first-generation iPod Mini. I guess you can say that I am "difficult" with art... ;)

Update: Oh, my God, I got to blog about this! Good friend Thom (and I hope he stays so after this blog post ;) has never heard of the The Scorpions! I am sure he has heard some of their songs though, he just doesn't know it. Either that, or he is too young for me to hang out with. ;-)

Google landed me on this web page today. It is a Christian page, trying to answer the question of alien life and the universe. I don't like the 4th paragraph more than anything else. It's absolutely fine to not advocate that might or might not be aliens out there, but when you say that Earth and Humans have a central role in the fate of the whole universe is not only arrogant, but also stupid. Are Christians and all other religions that see Humans as the center of the universe really that blind? I mean, if scientific books are herretic, don't they have Discovery or Science channel at least to try and educate themselves about the vastness of the universe? If an intelligent being created the universe, why only create life on Earth? It doesn't make sense to create life only on a single planet, and yet, create so many planets around it that are nothing but rocks. If life was really so important, he would have planted it elsewhere too. But noooo, religions can't lose their theocratic and one-sided arrogant explanation of the human existance. It would make them lose power. And that's not good for their finances.

I am not going to type the whole story again, read it here. Half an hour on the phone with a Kodak support guy, who was pretty cool and he seemed to like OSNews. ;)

On other news, the interview I hooked Nathan with is now live at TeenHollywood.com. Get the link from the sidebar at his blog site.

And so I downloaded for the first time, a Java runtime for my PocketPC. It's IBM's Websphere. You need to register (free), and in the download screen, you need to pick the first package shown there for "Windows 2003 SE" devices. The file is 45 MBs, it installs some useless crap on your PC (easily uninstallable), but at least the PocketPC installation is only 3 MBs. It worked well, I tested it with Opera Mini. But JavaRuntime+OperaMini take an awful lot of main memory, about 10 MBs of RAM goes away when launching it, which defeats the whole purpose of running the otherwise lightweight Opera Mini. Additionally, Opera Mini/JRE doesn't recognize the fact that my PocketPC is a VGA PDA and so it's double-pixeling.

Today MS and Intel announced their Origami tablets that run a variant of WinXP. Check for some info here and some pics here.

Now, what bothers me is that the exact same concept was already available in 2000 by Be and QNX and others, with their "web tablets" initiatives. All failed.

So why is this new Origami project generates so much buzz while Be/QNX have both failed, I don't know. The only difference between the two systems were that the BeIA and QNX RtP OSes they were running were not full featured, but instead strip-down web-related software (just a picture viewer, a web browser, email, etc). Maybe this variant of WinXP is more complete.

But nevertheless, the Origami project is not a new idea, but it does get all the hype in the world, because it is backed by MS and Intel. This is a good example how lots of money can create lots of interest. You need money in order to make more money. Having a cool idea is *not* enough.

UPDATE: Apparently Thom didn't like this blog post. But it remains MY blog post, and therefore, MY opinion, which I stand by it.

We went to the "Palace of the Legion of Honor" museum in San Francisco today. We saw some really nice paintings and sculptures. However, one particular piece really put me off. It was Picasso's "The Orator" PIECE OF JUNK. There is no way in hell I would place that junk in my home, even if I was given it for free. Picasso is overrated. End of story. That piece of shit was next to Manet, Pissaro and Dali, all, way better artists than Picasso IMNSHO. Even some unknown artists featured in the museum were way better than Picasso. "Modern art", my ass.

My favorite painting on the museum today was this one. I loved the detail and how true it is to the moment. The young sister/friend being close to the bride and doesn't want her to "go away" by getting married, the two very young girls in the corner awaiting to get older to get married too and they smiling to the whole thing, the little kid on the left corner who doesn't give a damn about the wedding and is bored to death, and the father who tries to see the bride-in-the-making but he is rushed out of the room by the rest of the women in the room. So true! That's how the situation is in the weddings I've being into in my village when I was young. Now, that's art! That's capture of a real moment. And the colors and expressions are terrific too. Compare this excellent (and huge) painting to Picasso's crap now. Ah.

My father in law is here for a few days and we went to Frys yesterday, as electronics are cheaper here in the US than in Europe. He bought the Mobile NoteTaker for $99, in order to use it when at work (it's a digital pen that can record strokes and save them as .gifs on a PC).

The problem is that the software wouldn't work correctly. The driver worked, the pen2text companion application also worked, but the main application of the suite, the Notetaker 2.2 didn't. It would complain about a resource file missing and the app wouldn't start.

After fiddling with it for hours, my husband found out what the problem was. The appication does not work if you are not logged in as Administrator! Of course, for such an application, there is absolutely NO NEED to run it as an admin. In fact, the low level driver supports the device just fine, for any user. It's the application that screwed up. And judging from their FAQ, the company doesn't even have a clue that their app is not multi-user compliant.

I wonder if there are grounds to sue the company for false requirements. They claim that their product requires XP or Win2k to work. But obviously, this is not exactly correct, because XP is by nature a multiuser operating system, and their application has not tested with more than one user -- which needs to be the Admin user. Microsoft recommends to not run as an admin, and professional people (like my father in law) can't run as admins on their work laptops. My husband also blogged about it.

Mac OS X has many such problems too. If you don't run with admin privilliges, many drivers and apps won't run (we saw the problem twice on OSX with printer drivers). On Linux, being a most and foremost a multi-user OS, the problem doesn't really exist. People who program for Linux are usually more clueful, at least when comes to multi-user.

On other news, there was an interesting 2-hour documentary about ancient Rome last night on the History Channel and Peter Weller (the Robocop actor) was appearing in it as one of the scholars commenting on Rome! I didn't believe seeing him in that position, I am really impressed, hats off (the actor also guest stars in the "24" TV series). Weller, 58, who holds a master's degree in Roman and Renaissance art and is working toward a Ph.D., has become one of Syracuse University's most popular professors!

I like Discovery Channel. But sometimes they broadcast SHIT. Like last night, they had many hours of UFOs documentaries. And that's ok you know. Some of that looked legitimate, some looked not so much (I don't believe that the Roswell crash was a UFO for example). And that's ok too.

What really bugged me though, was this documentary. In it, there was this ex-socker player British guy (well known in the UFO circles for his conspiracy theory books, can't remember his name now though -- Update: it's David Icke), who was claiming that the world is run by the Illuminati (a high-end Masonry secret society). So far, so good, because this is not really a new theory, it has been around for decades and there are a few (very few) shades of truth in there.

What really pissed me off though, is when this guy started saying that the Illuminati are not humans, but alien-human hybrids. And that their real look is reptoid (look like big reptiles walking on two feet), and that they are living among us in disquise. And that Tony Blair, the Queen of England and George Bush are such hybrids. And that these hybrids are eating human flesh.

WHAT A WHOLE LOAD OF SHIT.

I don't understand how the Discovery Channel broadcasted such a stupid documentary. Any documentary that interviews that guy loses credibility in an instance. Hey, I am open minded and all, but I have my limits. When crazy bollocks are being said, I lose my patience.

Video is the next big thing for mobility, just like mp3 players exploded in the past 2-4 years. iTunes is already the No1 solution for purchasing online video for iPods or computers, but I was thinking about the problem of different resolutions and formats.

What if there was a company with the right backend server hardware to sell DRM-or-not video and was asking different prices for different resolutions? You see, using 3GP or MP4 you can fit an entire movie on 50-60 MBs of space on a low resolution phone (e.g. a 4:3 video at 128x96 or 176x144). PDAs and newer phones would require QVGA (both portrait and landscape resolutions). PMPs would require either QVGA or VGA. Home entertainment would require DVDs or SVCD resolutions and formats.

Let the user come to that hypothetical site, let him register and create profiles for up to 5 devices (each with its own resolution and format needs), then let him pick a movie or video (that you normally store on DVD or full HDTV resolution on your servers) and then let that user buy that video for one of his device resolutions. Check on your terrabytes of storage and see if that video was ever downsampled at the requested resolution and format, and if yes, deliver it to the user after entering his credit card info. If not, then on the fly downsample/re-encode the video and deliver it to the user after payment.

This business idea surely requires some serious hardware --mostly storage and fast specialized CPUs when re-encoding is required--, but whoever has the capital to start such a business and hit a deal with MPAA, there might be able to hit on iTunes. Of course, iTunes is huge atm, it's not possible to beat it completely, but it is possible to take a big chunk of its legal video market share sales because of the customization is given to each movie purchased.

The idea behind this is because people don't want to transcode or re-encode theirs or illegal movies. It takes a hell of a time on a 3 GHz PC to encode a DVD to a QVGA video, and it takes up to A DAY to encode a DVD in h.264 format. But specialized hardware should be able to do this pretty fast, and someone with the right money and business connections, could make money out of this need.

Sure, not everyone wants to watch movies on phones, PDAs or PMPs or DVDs at home. But the video craze is only in its beginning, and there is money to be made in that market. If only we had the right CPU power... ;)

And so we got our HDTV and DVR combo from Comcast yesterday. I can't say that I am fully happy with it. We were given a Motorola DTC-6412 model, which works well with 480p and 720p resolutions, but we encountered problems with the 1080i resolution (there was a certain "wave" on the screen). So we set the box to 480p and we are happy with the 15 HDTV channels that exist so far. Quality is ok on the HDTV channels and on most digital channels.

But the quality of the analog channels is now much worse than before! All channels from 02 to 80 are twice as bad than they were before. I did some googling, and indeed, the Motorola decoders SUCK at boosting the analog channels, lots of people are unhappy with that cable box apparently for that reason alone. Other than that, we are happy with our cable upgrade. HDTV looks ok, DVR is useful.

This is just a major disservice to the Apple customer base. I mean, how the fuck is it possible for Apple to sell a leather case for iPods for a hundrend bucks? It probably costs Apple about $5 to make them and package them! To prove to you that this is a major raping of its customers, the iPod Nano leather case is not any cheaper than the iPod 5G case, even if the Nano case uses about 40% less leather. UPDATE: Haha, this one is cool.

For the rest of the products announced today by Apple, I commented at Thom's blog. The boombox/speaker idea is stupid in general, and the Mac Mini still has no microphone jack or a (faster) desktop hdd instead of a laptop one (although it now comes with a Line-In, thanks God).

On a different note, I might be getting the Dell Inspiron B120 laptop. Good value for the money. Only a firewire port is missing (I need it for my camcorder), I am happy with all its other features it comes with for just $499.