* Warning, this post is entirely subjective and anecdotal.

I picked up a BE 965 and have been running it for a while on an ASUS m4a89gtd(USB3). It's overclocked through BIOS on air(though with an inexpensive aftermarket cooler), to 3.8ghz purely by modifying the multiplier, no voltage changes etc; and has remained rock solid there for ~6 months 24/7. It doesn't compete with the high end I7's, but it easily holds it's own against the rest, and does it at a ridiculously low price. If you look into people's results online, 3.8-4ghz is pretty common for these chips, with 4ghz being readily attainable on air with some effort but I'm too lazy for that, the 3.8's good enough for my purposes.

At that price point, it's an incredible value for the performance you get.

While I'm not familiar with this particular processor, in a great many of these lower-power chips you can get significant overclocking gains without noteworthy increased heat. The Pandora, for example, sports an OMAP3530 SoC (which includes an ARM Cortex V8) rated at 600mhz. People have overclocked this to 1ghz with no heat issues and only minor losses in battery life (the chip doesn't remain at maximum speed but underclocks itself when not under load).

It's not like overclocking a normal desktop processor. Instability occurs long before heat becomes an issue.

Errr, why NOT use a phone as an alarm clock? Virtually every smart phone typically needs to be charged daily. If it doesn't need to be, generally people do anyways. Plug it in, let it charge overnight while you're sleeping, alarm wakes you in the morning, ready to go and fully charged.

It's *better* than your average AC alarm clock, as a power failure throughout the night won't interfere with your alarm. The phone's battery keeps you covered. I've been using my cell phones as alarm clocks for, well, as long as cell phones have had alarm clocks. I've never once had a problem with it.

And I've certainly never once considered getting a 'traditional' alarm clock since having a phone that could do the job just fine and, thanks to the magic of custom alarm/ringtones, much less offensively.

Our (Canadian) Pay As You Go mobile phones have that problem. Seriously. Our "minutes" are only good for a month, so if you buy, say, a $30 phone card, you get $30 worth of minutes which expire in 30 days whether you use them or not.

Some carriers were even selling ones that only last 2 weeks.

It's a load of horseshit. I'm fine with metered billing, absolutely fine. So long as I'm billed for exactly what I use, at a reasonable rate. I'd actually prefer that, to be honest - this "monthly cap" thing is stupid.

Mind you, it's just another straw on the back, really. Add to it the fees for "features" that often have nothing to do with the network at all, such as tethering, or things that have been disabled on your device/account for no other reason than to charge you to re-enable them. Or the *mandatory* voice plans to go with your data plan on smartphones.

Seriously, I'd break my contract, pay out the hundreds of dollars required to do so, and never look back if a new cell provider offered me just a simple, no-bullshit billed-by-use, say, $5/gb. No voice plan at all. No "features". Just a wireless data connection for my handheld portable computer(smartphone).

This is a very good point. While I love a good story, and a story needs an ending, I *really* enjoy games I can play on and on for a long time without just wallowing in endless repetition.

A problem many games face these days, since the addition of achievements, is the addition of many inane tasks that it's easy to get "sucked into" doing, particularly in the RPG-esque games. This is aggravated when these silly achievement acts affect your character beyond just getting an achievement notification - you tend to work harder to get them all done.

What happens, for me at any rate, is that I start trying to get all these little side achievements done, and then grow bored with the now-repetitive and tedious gameplay, lose interest and move on. The difference. This is the bad kind of unfinished game.

On the other hand, we have games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, etc. I've never finished any of them. I deliberately don't. I keep adding mods, developing the game. I get started on the main quests sometimes, but as a rule of thumb I never finish them. This way, I can play the game - enjoying the vast amount of side content - for a long, long time. When I get bored, I can put the game away, knowing that I can come back to it excited. After all, it's a game I haven't finished! Reinstall, start a new game, get right back to it. When I've finished games, it dramatically reduces the replay value for me.

As the poster I quoted noted at the end of his post, whether or not I finish a game is not directly related to the quality of the game, or how much I liked it. Just the type of game.

You can still download this by adding the authors' cydia repo: http://www.litchie.net/cydia

[tinfoilhat]
The REAL reason Apple removed this from the App Store? You can use it to install Windows 3.1 or even... Windows95!

Who needs Windows 7 Phone when you can rock Windows 3.1 on your iPhone?!
[/tinfoilhat]

Seriously, though, this is fantastic. There's a lot of fantastic old DOS games, it's great to add to your emulator collection. Add OpenPandora's iControlPad for proper, physical gaming controls, and Zodttd's excellent emulator collection, and you can turn an iPhone into an amazing gaming machine.

Of course, I could just be a freak who enjoys using ridiculously expensive modern hardware to play old games.

Already outdated? It's not that shabby. Clocks up to 1ghz or so without voiding warranty, max ~64gb of storage space, touchscreen, full keyboard, gaming nubs, etc.

It's generally more powerful than an iPad, fits in your pocket, running a properly open Linux distro - angstrom w/ XFCE (and people have gotten Ubuntu and Debian running on it too).

I've been watching the development for quite a while now, and things seem to be well coming to a head. Realistically still a few more months to go for new orders, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

Wikipedia needs to have a section in it's articles to show other viewpoints/opinions, particularly for more controversial articles. Well, when they can be properly supported, not just any random asshat's opinion mind you. This would go a long ways to calming the ridiculous edit wars, and give people a more well rounded look at the subject matter.
 

Hell, I've had my iPhone fall off the roof of my car; dropped it in the bathtub(Movies+Bathtub=win!) once and had it sit in a half-full mug of coffee overnight.

It's screen had a small chip on the edge from the fall off the car, and I had to open it and clean it out after the coffee incident, but it still works just fine.. though it still smells faintly of coffee.

More on-topic; it actually has replaced pretty much everything listing in the OP for me, too. Except, perhaps, gaming: I'm getting depressingly old, and just can't get into accelerometer controlled gaming. Touch screens are awesome for basic computing/phone use, but terrible for games: Your fingers obstruct view of the screen. I'm thinking of putting together an Arduino based interface for a keyboard; followed by an SNES controller. After that; it's all gravy.

Not that watches are bad! I'm a big fan of wristwatches, though since my last one broke, I've not really had much of a need to replace it. Eventually I will, but my phone does fine as it is.

Regardless, the evolution of the smartphone/MID is going to have extensive impacts on other gadgets, without a doubt. We're already getting to the point where the "phone" part is secondary to everything else, and that's the direction I think manufacturers should be moving in now. You can't really improve a phone any more; it's a simple device by nature.

Instead of thinking "Hey, what else can we cram into this phone", I think a better approach is "What other capabilities can we add to this highly mobile(re: pocket sized) computer."

Of course, I hate phones. I have only the cheapest possible voice plan for my iPhone, and I only have that for emergencies. I'm just looking for a better option. I find it somewhat amusing that my phone has replaced all these other devices, and the only one in the list that it hasn't really replaced... is a phone. Simply because I neither had nor wanted one.

And it depends how much you enjoy monkeying with that old PC. If you have fun getting your lil web server or what have you up and running, then it's time well spent. If you don't enjoy doing it... then yeah, you're absolutely right.

You can with a 3yr contract. You can get a brand new 3G here for 99, or a refurbished one for 49 - and that's regular pricing. You can pick up 3GS's from private owners, take over their contracts for that no problem, or pick up a refurbished one if you get lucky pretty cheap.

Thinking that you're safe running OSX is very foolish. It IS more secure than Windows, but it can get viruses too. As OSX increases in market share, you will find more viruses appearing for it too. It'll take a little longer to get started - Everyone got great Intro Virus Production 101 classes in grossly insecure older versions of Windows, after all. OS X is indeed a more secure operating system, but it is not an invincible one. Assuming you are and will always be safe because you're running it is a very bad idea.

I've used a notebook as my primary computer for years. It still handles the newest games just fine; DMC4, Crysis, etc all play with settings on high at 1680x1050 beautifully. Even in regards to gaming, you can be using comparatively old hardware and still get excellent results if you use GOOD old hardware. It's not like the "old days" where a computer was worthless after 3 years. The reality is that these days the majority of computer users absolutely do not need a high powered system. My wife, for example, runs an old dell notebook, a 1.2ghz dual core amd of some description, with 2gb ram. It'll outperform an Atom, but not by a large margin. She doesn't have the slightest problem with performance. She certainly can't game on it, but it does everything else she needs to do: Largely, web based stuff, non-HD video, etc. Most households have multiple computers these days too - particularly if you count smartphones. There's really only a need for one more powerful system for the odd time you need to actually do something that really requires the horsepower. I'm always on the go. I got my notebook specifically to be mobile with my computing. But really? As a 17" notebook at 8 lbs, it's "portable"... but I never take it anywhere. Packing up it's huge power brick and lugging around the bag, coupled with the awareness that it's still a very expensive machine make it unpleasant to actually travel with. I never, ever game "on the go" I'm looking to pick up a Netbook. The lions share of computer use I do - virtually ALL the computer use I do outside of gaming - is easily handled by one. Further, they are small enough to be stuffed into any random bag, and cheap enough to be moved around freely, without undue concern. If I bang up a $300 notebook, it's not going to hit my like damaging a $2500 notebook. Their batteries (when you get 6 and 9 cell variants at least) power them many times longer than my notebook will run even without doing anything strenuous. Why wouldn't you go Netbook for portable computing?