I had a few gripes which seem to be fixed out-right by the new firmware, so I’m going to spend a week with the update and see how it changes my view of the device. I’m still very happy with it, and hopefully I’ll be even more happy with it next week.

So, those of you who have the Sprint PPC-6700, go login to your sprint account and go to ‘Phone Details’ then ‘Software Download’, select ‘Windows CE’ as your OS, and the upgrade application should be the first link. Make sure to use your USB cable to install the update, Bluetooth connections are too finicky for such a major transfer.

In fact, I have been thinking SO much about you all, that I decided to take one for the team and make the switch from my Treo 600 to the new PPC-6700. I’ve only had a few minutes to play with it, but the first thing I decided to do is test out how fast EVDO was really going to be. After hearing all the hype I was a little worried I would be dissapointed, I was definitly not:

I know it’s blurry, but my crappy Treo 600 camera was all I have at the moment. If you can’t read it, it says: “1028kbps”. Seriously!?! Over 1 megabit per second wirelessly!?!

I think I’m going to have fun with this thing.

With that out of the way, I thought I’d post an update about my X41 Tablet PC order – it’s back-ordered, and currently showing a July 19th ship date. This is getting dangerously close to my wedding date of August 6th, so unless I get it about a week before I leave for Tahiti, odds are I won’t be able to play with it until the end of August – which would be torture.

I’m also working on some posts about Orb.com and using it to stream your TV recordings to anywhere in the world, using Meedio and DVD Profiler to setup a cool database for your DVD collection, and compressing your recordings for consumption on your Palm OS device using MMPlayer. The first of these should be finished in a couple of days, so keep an eye out.

I’m a freelance film/video editor, and I’m rarely at one employer for long, let alone one computer, so I don’t like installing my favorite programs on every system and I especially don’t like leaving logins all over the place. As a result of this situation, I’ve become especially reliant on my Treo 600 because it’s rarely practical to whip out my laptop to do such things as email, contacts, calendar and todos.

All fine and dandy right? The Treo comes with programs to do all those things, and even a browser to look at blogs – but remember, I’m wasting a lot of time needlessly looking for updates.

Enter QuickNews an RSS aggregator for the PalmOS. I don’t know why it took me so long to think to look for this kind of thing, but it did. Some quick features from their site:

“Looks perfect” I said to myself as I started the trial download. A week later, I can safely say ‘almost perfect’. Here’s what I like about QuickNews:

• No-Nonsense Interface – Just what you need, right there in front of you.
• Automatic Updates – You can set each feed to have a different refresh period, from 1 hour, to 1 week. This is nice as it prevents you from pinging sites that are updated less frequently, it saves your bandwidth, and theirs.
• Automatic Read/Unread – it apparently counts how long you look at an article, and based on the article’s length it will automatically set it as ‘read’ once it has been on the screen long enough.
• ‘Quick Menu’ – (my name for it, I don’t know it’s official name) it only shows feeds that have unread articles, it also shows a little read dot with the number of ‘new’ feeds recieved in the last update. This makes it very easy to quickly go through feeds that are new – there isn’t any clutter and it’s nice.

Now for what frustrates me:

• Treo 5-way support – Wow, it is seriously half-baked. Some screens work, others are un-usable, especially the ‘feeds’ screen. It is also laid out in a way that makes navigation difficult. It’s almost as if each screen was created by a separate team and there wasn’t anyone keeping things in line.
• The shortcut keys change – I’m not sure why they did this, but depending on what screen you’re on commands like ‘A’ for update all change to ‘U’ if you’re on a certain screen. This is really stupid, it’s a pain to learn ONE shortcut key, now I have to learn TWO! Come one guys, be serious – see the above point, and streamline the user-experience. It feels kind of disjointed right now.
• Some links work, others don’t – I haven’t figured out the overriding factor, but links embedded in some feeds link fine, others don’t at all.
• Picture Viewer weirdness – I don’t know why, but nearly every picture I’ve tried to look at in the internal viewer is either skewed, or cropped with no apparent way of changing it.
• External links won’t launch Blazer or ‘email’ – Maybe this is a treo thing, but even after selecting the correct applications, QuickNews can’t seem to launch my other apps. I click a link, and nothing – no error message, no changing apps.

I haven’t tried the pod-cast support because even though I’m on Sprint’s ‘high-speed’ data network, I don’t want my Treo busy for half an hour downloading a podcast, I wouldn’t be able to receive calls. Maybe when I get an EV-DO treo I’ll turn it on, but for now I’ll rely on good old-fashioned web browsers to pull those down. Same goes for the desktop hotsync feeds – I don’t have a need to even install the thing on my laptop. By the time I sync, they’re out of date. I suppose it makes sense to develop such a client because most palms don’t have an ‘always-on’ data connection, but for me that doesn’t apply.

So there’s some room for improvement huh? Even with all those things, I’m still going to purchase it at the end of my trial. There’s a lot to like, and concerning it’s core features it definitely works ‘as advertised’ – I get my feeds in a nice hand-held form factor. Give it a try, heaven forbid you become a little more productive at work.

For the last year and a half I have been drawn into the world of HTPCs. I got bit by the bug hard and after only about 2 weeks of planning (which you’ll find is not very much time for me) I built my dedicated HTPC around a program called SageTV. SageTV is an amazing fit for my living room, rock-solid operation, and a huge WAF – Wife Acceptance Factor. If any of you are considering bringing a HTPC into your house, and you have a significant other, you have to take the WAF into account. If you don’t, the HTPC will never graduate from a side-hobby that lives in your office to a fixture in your living-room.

Admittedly, I’ve always been a gadget-freak, but I won’t buy a gadget unless it’s exactly what I need. The last time I was looking for a cell-phone, I put it off for 6 months waiting for the Treo 600, and used an old flip phone with a broken screen because I decided that a keyboard was an essential feature in a smartphone and the Samsung SPH-i500 didn’t cut it (I’m a sprintPCS subscriber BTW), and I’m so glad I did.

The Treo 600 has been my primary computing device since I got it in November of ‘03, and it is amazing. Do I wish I had a 650? Of course! But to me, the 650 would be an incremental upgade. I’m waiting to see if PalmOne can put one of those 4gb hard drives in there and add EV-DO – Then I’ll be tossing the 600. In the mean time, I’ve found some amazing things that are possible with the 600: I can control my HTPC from anywhere using PalmVNC, get all my email with SnapperMail, watch re-encoded TV shows I’ve recorded with MMPlayer, go online with the built-in browser, and even get my RSS fix with QuickNews.

My most recent interest is in TabletPCs. I’m a film and television editor and a large part of my job is taking notes from producers, directors, executives or whoever and working them into a show. My current system involves my chicken-scratch handwriting in a spiral notebook and highlighters. I highlight the notes as I address them, when the page is day-glow, I move on. This works to a certain extent, but it becomes overwhelming very quickly when dealing with notes about notes and who made them, when they were addressed, what I actually changed to ‘fix’ it, the list goes on and on.

I originally thought I could use my Treo for this purpose, but I found that it is much less acceptable to be punching away on a tiny keyboard than it is to write in a notebook. The same goes for typing into a laptop – they just look at you wierd and say, “Can’t you just write it down?”. They believe it’s overkill, even though I don’t.

So anyways, the object of my gadget-lust is the semi-leaked IBM X41 TabletPC. My current primary computer is a Dell Latitude LS – ancient, I know (There’s a story behind why I’m stuck working on a 400mhz Pentium III, but I won’t bore you with it) but it “works” for me, or at least it has been working for me. It’s time for an upgrade, and I believe that TabletPCs have matured enough for them to handle all I can throw at them.

As for what to expect from my blog, I hope to write about the ways I make my technology work for me, and not against me. I believe that technology should mold to the way we work, and not the other way around, which is why the TabletPC seems like such a great thing to me – at least in theory. There will be commentaries on what I think should be changed, major news postings and what implications I think they might have, my ideas about the future, tips for those who are interested in any of the technology I use, and a light sprinkling of my ‘real-life’ just for good measure. This site will also be filled out with some of the software projects I’m starting work on, some of which I can’t talk about yet, so keep an eye out as I have big things planned for both my favorite HTPC programs.

So I think that’ll do it for now. I went a little longer than I planned, so if you made it through – Thanks for sticking with me.

Vince