belt fed.

i can’t even imagine what reloading this baby is going to be like, assuming you can even find all the darts.

i ordered that free treo with at&t the other day. that’ll be 1.3mp onboard, with 60 meg of usable flash memory, and a mini-sd slot good for up to 4gb. so no worries there. unlimited messaging means i can abuse the keyboard as well. who can’t wrap their heads around texting with a nine-key? me!

which is fine. except that neither of the nokia’s i like have keyboards. one of them doesn’t even have a nine-key! i guess what i need is a bluetooth thumboard? i have wierd ideas about technology.

anyhow, all the pictures from my motorola are now on flickr. please to observe.

that would also be nice on mobile phones, albeit harder to pull off due to the weight issues. flip out mini-usb and it comes with a pocketable adapter cable? that could work. ideally it’d be a long retractable cord with a mini-usb plug, but that could get tricky very fast.

i love the form factor of this thing, and while it’s impractical as an actual media player, it’s adorable. the technophile in me simply wants one. conveniently, i’ve also been meaning to buy a multi-gig thumbdrive. this is cheap enough that that just about works out.

is it a smartphone running symbian os, with 16gb of internal flash memory, and a micro-sd slot for even further action, and a FIVE MEGAPIXEL CAMERA?!!! why yes! it is those things!

could i use it to run apps developed by the symbian open source community? i could! could i load it up with video and use the included kickstand to prop it up and watch tv shows and the like while i’m eating such as my lunch? i could do that as well! could i use the aforementioned bluetooth full-size keyboard and run this as a word processor? use the touchdial thing to easily navigate menus? do all kinds of ridiculous phone things? browse the internet at least via wifi, albeit without thumboard or touchscreen so it’d be tricky on the go? pick up mobile tv signals while travelling europe? download games via the restructured n-gage virtual gaming platform and utilize the built-in gaming controls? (probably usable for some kind of snes emulator?) very likely a twitter client and flickr uploads? indeed!

but mostly, it’s a hella smoove phone with a 5mp camera. five. five megapixels. on a phone. and with a high-end carl zeiss lens. nothing says casual snapshots like 5mp on a phone. here i spent the last couple days talking myself into an iphone because i want to have a nice easy camera of good quality on me at all times, and bam, nokia drops this into my consciousness.

i was already planning to pick up some kind of canon camera for carrying around with me, possibly in the elph line, so that’s $300 there. add the $500 i was plotting for an iphone or an ipod touch, this does everything those do via media playback, but with a more open development platform and a slightly less ascetic interface. so even at the likely $800 price tag, this is actually a good value for the functionality. throw in $50 for a bluetooth keyboard and i don’t need a laptop either. (this is the upgrade from the n95 which is what lord ellis used before he started eee-ing.)

all i have to do is jump-ship to att and plan on not taking advantage of the 3g broadband network (which i wasn’t already) due to non-us hdspa standards in-built. although even on wifi it doesn’t have a thumboard or a touchscreen, so i wouldn’t exactly be googling on this thing on the go anyways. (not that i’ve had much more luck with the iphone keyboard when i’ve tried it; very much something you get used to, not something that comes to you intuitively…)

oh wow, is att having a three day sale where i can get a free refurb treo online, right now? oh snap!

playing with the mii’s is far more entertaining than it should be, given that they don’t actually do anything on their own. i would love if i could plug them into animal crossing.

and it’s affordable. ish. i mean, i have nothing like this kind of money right now, but maybe i should think about getting a nice laptop as a desktop replacement instead of a new monster?

or i could get that tiny fujitsu tablet convertible and a 32 gig compact flash card to go with it. and a 16 gig sd card as well. 48 gigs of removable flash memory (plus the 40gig hdd with the os) on a laptop the size of a moleskine. with a touchscreen. and it’s actually just as powerful as my desktop, meaning it can do anything i’m capable of right now, unless it requires an optical drive. (yes yes, the eee costs half as much and has a solid state drive, but it’s twice as big and has only one cardslot, and no tablet mode…)

okay, so i need two and a half grand now. oh, and the 12″ cintiq. great.

now, the movie isn’t even started yet. not due out until 2011. but that’s okay, because as it turns out? joseph kosinski is awesome, and we already know this. go look at the ‘work’ section of his site.

in addition to some smoove hummer, chevy, saab, and nike commercials, he directed the mad world spot for gears of war, and the starry night halo 3 teaser.

he’s also signed on for the remake of logan’s run, due in 2010.

(i can’t link directly to the wiki article because it uses the apostrophe in logan’s run, but go read about the book, which was notably different from the movie. it’ll be interesting to see if the new movie errs closer to either incarnation or does a full galactica.)

((watchmen looks great, tr2n exists and looks great, the hobbit is go for launch, now please, someone, anyone, give bungie and weta and neill blomkamp money to make the damn halo movie? microsoft, seriously, fund this movie and i’ll buy two zunes.))

the centro runs palm os, which is kind of clunky, but mostly because it’s five years old. it is, however, designed for mobile devices, runs snappily, and has plenty of useful applications. a tiny but functional qwerty keyboard, touchscreen, 1.3mp camera of good enough quality, and micro-sd slot means this would be a good companion to my pocket notebook.

meanwhile, the htc smt5800 has a vastly larger and more usable keyboard, but fails in every other aspect. it runs windows mobile, which is clunky and badly adapted to mobile devices, but looks pretty. it lacks a touchscreen, so all the navigation is done with the tiny dpad. it has a 2mp camera, but tints everything orange. and the ram is barely enough to handle the operating system, whereas the centro has more than enough.

what i think i’m leaning towards is just getting a phone as a phone with some basic applications; the centro would let me type stuff out and edit shopping lists, which is 90% of what i’m looking for anyways. anything else, media playback or whatever, would be better served by the 32gb ipod touch.

in fact, the ipod touch has everything i want short of a tactile keyboard. or something like the nokia e90 running xp. (actually, the e90 would be fantastic, if i had the $800…)

i think my ideal setup would be a 32gig ipod touch, the nokia 7380, and an eee. i wouldn’t be surprised if, a year from now, that’s about what i’m running with.

of course, if i stick with verizon, i can’t use that nokia ridiculousness. which is back to jumping ship to at&t and sim card based freedom.

youtube link via mr. heilemann, crap video taken at nerd prom, full-screen that bastard for full effect.

it’s a spectacularly bad version, and still, even in grainy one tenth of a youtube file vision, i’m already there opening day.

and buying all the action figures. and hoping like hell that the video games are worth a damn.

ironically i was just today looking up the wall:e games on gamespot. apparently the 360 and ps3 versions are gorgeous but vapid, while the ps2 and psp versions are superfun. and the ds version looks clunky and reviews poorly but i like the look of it anyways. maybe when it’s cheap?