(To the Xangans, just a warning, this post is geek related)

A co-worker sent me a link that revealed a new technology that to alot of people i’ve talked to, all have said the same thing: “Wow, it’s like minority report.” Pretty close, as this is leading us right into that direction.

I didn’t have a favorite to this technology, but if i had to pick one, it would probably have to be either the Map/Globe, or the layered flying lights.

Here’s the link
TED Talks: Jeff Han

So I got this phone a couple months ago. It was a toss up between this and the sidekick 3. The needs i wanted to fullfill were
1) QWERTY keyboard
2) Full Web Browser (not just WAP)
3) Email (IMAP specifically)
4) Camera
5) EDGE speed
6) Instant Messaging
The cingular 8125 seemed to fit the bill, and I was happy with cingular already so I decided to stay (plus a friend who works for cingular was able to hook it up).

I was mostly disappointed, when i setup my new account, with the price of the plans. Cingular offered unlimited data for 39.99 (more than most other places, especially for the sidekick at $20), and then the minute plans at 39.99 for 450 minutes (what happened to 600 minutes??). Would have liked more, but I don’t even use my 450 minutes every month, and i always have a ton of rollover to spare.

So like any person with a new phone, I played with it for a few days to get a good feeling for how it worked. Here are my bits for the different applications and functions of the phone:

1. Camera worked pretty well (for a camera phone) except for in dark rooms. They do have a function for this, but it uses aloooot of memory and actually slows down the phone (it’s even hung on me for 20 minutes until i finally just took the battery out and restarted the phone).
2. Web Browser I was not too thrilled about using internet explorer and decided to go with Opera, but I stuck with IE because Opera wanted some extra cash to have it run. Opera was indeed faster, but i was not ready to spend the money just yet. The internet speed was definitely NOT up to what the EDGE technology claims to specify and i was getting really upset at that. I thought maybe this was just due to my location, and didnt seek a remedy until later which i will mention later on.
3. Taskbar With Windows Mobile 5, the act of closing an application is actually not true, it leaves the application open, but not visible to you. So if you open up several applications (especially on accident) your system (phone) starts to lag because everything is still loaded up. So I went to seek a remedy for this. I found Magic Button which makes somewhat of a taskbar, and lets you physically close the application out of memory. This became very handy, and am glad it was free!
4. QWERTY keyboard is not bad, but i found that i can type faster on the number pad (which this phone doesnt really have) without T9. It works, but i’m not exactly fond of how it works.
5. Instant messaging No instant messaging client came with the phone so i went on to search for one. The free one that i found was Agile messenger which lets you log in to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google (which i have banned, see last post), Jabber/XMPP, and more. I had planned to keep this open all the time, but since the network was sooo flaky, it became more of a pain to have to physically reconnect everytime, and i was not receiving all the messages. so i dropped it and found iMov Messenger. This one was ok, but only let you connect to a Jabber server. this is when i discovered that you can log into a Jabber/XMPP server and add functions to connect to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc, but you need to physically do it on the server through another client (on gnome/linux i found one called Gajim). Another thing was to find a Jabber server that would actually let you add these networks to your account which took me about 2-3 days just to find. So alot of work was put into this which i finally completed, but in the end was not happy with the iMov client. Random noises would spring up, it was inconsistent with logins, and i just found it to be annoying after awhile. So i dropped it and said to hell with messaging.
6. ActiveSync I don’t use windows, so to do any kind of Sync was just not possible unless i wanted to spend extra money for a client on the Mac (none were available at all for linux). I declined to do this and just said screw syncing my phone with my computer. Also cingular has some proprietary email client that is supposed to be very good, but only works with windows and activesync. So in my opinion, this is not very good and have declined to use it.
7. Email/Text I set myself up an email account made for me to check on my phone. Thankfully the phone supported IMAP and this is one thing that it does, and does pretty well. I’m not a huge fan of POP/POP3, which this phone also supports, but could be handy one day. Also Text messaging works pretty well, saves my outgoing messages as well as my incoming, which alot of my phones in the past didnt do a very good job of.
8. The case that came with the phone eventually got on my nerves due to its bulkiness and the fact that it sat the phone sideways on your belt instead of longways. So I ended up just putting the phone in my pocket and i’ve found it to be more safe there than in that damn case.
9. EDGE suxx!! well, thats what i thought originally. Turns out that Cingular by default connects to its own DNS servers, which is very poor. This is in fact the reason why, if anybody has used this phone and has complained, the internet is slow. I changed over the DNS servers to OpenDNS (the link sends to you to the instructions of how to change over the DNS servers on any windows mobile 5 palm or phone), and now the connection is solid. Now Agile Messenger works alot better, but i’m having issues with XMPP, or atleast my jabber server is not allowing me to connect to it through my phone, but AIM, Yahoo, and MSN are working nicely.

A coworker purchased a sprint phone and was able to connect his macbook via bluetooth to the internet, and was able to get pings at about 20-80ms, I did the same with mine, and was able to get them at about 100-300ms, which is ‘alright’, but if i ever do need to connect to the internet in a hurry when theres no wifi available, i’m all set.

Some other useful things for the Cingular 8125:

• pRSSreader a free RSS reader for WM5.
• Agile Messenger a free multiplatform Instant Messenger
• StreamCenter a site that is WAP viewable to search and play your favorite Radio Stream
• HowardForums a specific link to some handy tools and customizations for the 8125

(for the xangans, my wordpress is able to upload again, if it seems like i posted more than once today, i really didnt, xanga’s just now catching up to my real blog)

I have officially banned google. Why? I’ve explained it many times and now I will just use a link to this post for people to understand why.

I’ve been a constant google enthusiast for several years, from the search bar to all of the applications they’ve produced through google labs, Especially Gmail. I’ve pushed and nagged several people to join the bandwagon, and for some it took alot of teeth pulling for them to finally break from their norm. Finally almost everybody i know is on Gmail.

I am also part of a few google groups that send out emails straight to my gmail account. One in particular does a sort of chat like forum for each day where we talk about absolutely nothing, and everything, if that makes any sense. Last week i began to notice that several of the messages coming in were in response to messages i never got. Normally we have about 100 or so messages by 10am, but that day it was 12.30pm and i had only received about 15. I thought, something was up, but would be remedied quickly, at least by the next day.

When i got home from work i noticed alot of the messages i should have gotten finally spring up…..but several hours later. Ok, so it must be fixed now. Nope this continued for another two days until i finally went ahead to look for anybody else with the same problems. Nope, not yet, so what i finally did was send a support ticket to google. They sent an automatic email back saying to “refresh my Cache and restart my browser”. I HATE THIS RESPONSE, because its just bullshit into thinkin that this will truly solve your problems. As many times as i’ve done this through support calls in the far past, This never f@*%ing works!

Which brings me up to another rant I have….I HATE LEVEL 1 Support. You people really and truly do not know a damn thing. I’m not the most tech savvy person in the world, but i know my ish. And when i know somethings wrong on your end, it truly is. I always break it down, and let you know exactly what i’ve done to resolve the issue, whats not correctly outputting, etc. And what do you still do…..start from square one “Ok, let’s do this goto your control panel and double click on….”….ARRRRGGGHHHH. And these people refuse to understand that you don’t use Windows. I’m either on the mac or i’m on my linux box. Everythings terminal….no where in sight is there a darn “Control Panel”, and yes whatever you’re about to tell me is of no relevance. It takes an hour for them to finally say, “ok, we’ve tried everything, let me move you onto Level 2 support”, which i told them to do from the beginning. (end rant)

So back to g00gle, that was the only response i got from them. I sent several emails following, because i’ve tested several emails out of my gmail with no succession, as well as sending several emails to myself from another mailbox i have, with the same result. Soon enough, gmail chat no longer works, trying to manage my google groups account takes an hour or so. Come Tuesday morning when an important email should have come in, never did. Now i’m beyond frustrated, and finally fed up.

So i’m in transitioning all of my accounts and emails to a personal, which i hate to do by force, and when i do this, do not count on me coming back (remember when i did that to you hotmail and yahoo?). I even paid for both services (msn, sbc) and still got crap out of it. Other things that upset me is how google is buying out everybody now. What happened to innovation? People kept saying this was going to happen, google turning into the next micro$oft, and it seems like they truly are. And whats even more upsetting, everthing they have is nowhere near integrated with each other. I have to sign up for an account for everything they setup. This is a minor setback, but its big enough for me to rant about it.

Some of you may think that my actions are a bit overboard, but if you raved to everybody and brought so many people to something you thought was brilliant and good for mankind, and then have that completely screw your system and day to day functionality up, you’d be in my position too. Email is not life to everybody, but for somebody in my field, it’s damn close.

been using Zooomr for awhile now (as you can see on the right). even got the upgrade to Pro account. recently jUploadr announced that they will be the official uploader for Zooomr which is nice considering its easy to use interface. currently its going through beta and will hopefully be released very soon.