So I carry around a few gizmos, as you’d probably expect. Here’s an overview of a few of them with short reviews. This will be updated as time goes on.
60 GB iPod photo – Purchased from mixitforme. The only reason that is significant is that I bought it for $250 new. The store was just opening and needed to garner word of mouth, so they sold off a bunch of stuff real cheap. I’m a fan of the iPod line, I also own a 3G iPod whose battery has essentially kicked the bucket. A new iPod seemed liek it was in order. I think the color screen was a needed addition and I’m just upset that now I have the almost newest iPod available. Oh well. I dig the Podcasting addition to the menu, I’m an avid podcast fan, so that helps. The menu system is unrivaled in it’s ease of use, and I think even my parents could use it.
Zire 72 – The reason I’m able to keep my business up and running. I’m pretty sure I use this at least 4 days a week. The Zire 72 is a pretty robust PDA, I use it for taking a quick snapshot (all my textamerica pictures are from the 72), keeping my invoices organized in DocumentstoGo’s Excel spreadsheet program, playing an occasional game, organizing my contacts and keeping my calendar. I don’t use it for audio or video playback, as I don’t have an SD card for it, and I have an iPod that plays audio and a cellphone that plays video, I haven’t used the infra-red port yet either. It does, however, handle the Real format and records in .asx video formats. The built-in bluetooth has never given me a problem, and I’ve sync’d it to my computer and cellphone. The 72 is a solid PDA if you aren’t in need of a smartphone, and don’t mind slightly dated technology. While Palm hasn’t released a higher version (they released the Z22, a small step down), there certainly are more recent models available. Don’t be fooled by the 72S either. It’s the 72 wihtout the blue rubber coating (that I removed from my 72 anyway.)
Motorola e815 I’m so frustrated at this phone it’s amazing. I got my first phone and it didn’t send or recieve picture messages. It took forever to get Verizon to realize that it didn’t work and finally replace it. And then a month alter it stops sending and recieving picture messages again. Other than that, the Bluetooth works just fine, the screen is large and bright and the outer screen is large as well. It actually has ringtones on it that sound like phones ringing (this was an issue for older Verizon phones), and also has a silent mode (something my last Verizon phone didn’t). The images are good form the camera phone (see my flickr account for examples) and the video camera works as well as can be expected. Verizon’s crippled the Object Exchange, making it impossible to send images, applications and mp3s to the internal memory. This is of course because Verizon wants you to pay for any customization you do to the phone. Well screw that. You can easily hack the damn thing with some time on your hands, which is what I plan to do once I get a phone that will work for any period of time. Perhaps I’ll trade it in for a RAZR once Verzon releases it. The new ones will have iTunes anyway…
