[Originally posted Nov. 29, 2006]
DS Lite
A while ago my gainful employer sent me
some gift certificates to Best Buy. They sent them to the
wrong address,
but due to mrwise's
resourcefulness I got them anyway.
In any case, I used them to buy a DS Lite. I must say, I'm
very
impressed with it. It's beautifully simple, suspends and
resumes seamlessly
so you can play for a few minutes on the subway and then
slip it in your
pocket, and the variety of games is great. The wireless
gaming works flawlessly
too, and the fact that you can play games you don't own is
really cool. I
really like Nintendo's
strategy of
sticking to what they do best: gaming. I feel like with all
the other systems
out there, they just try to be too many things, and end up
getting them all
wrong.
Tréo
I've gone from loving mine to hating it. When I liked it, I
didn't
have data at all, since Fido charges ridiculously for data.
But one
of my main reasons for getting a Tréo as opposed to
something
cheap and crappy was that I'd be able to read email on it,
do Google
Maps, etc. So after
moving down
to NYC, where T-mobile has a reasonable-ish unlimited data
plan, I
went for it, and promptly discovered that doing anything
data-related
on the Tréo sucks.
The non-data stuff, like the phone, contacts and calendar,
are solid,
so if you just want a fancy phone that you can also run Palm
software
on, I'd still say it's a good machine, but if you want to do
email,
web, etc. I would recommend strongly against it:
- Their built-in web browser, Blazer, has about the worse
possible
design I can imagine. The entire UI blocks all the
time. You
can't scroll a loading page until it's completely loaded.
You can't
scroll the current page as soon as you click something.
There are
no tabs. This makes my usual latency-hiding techniques, of
(a) loading
stuff in another tab while I read current stuff, and (b)
clicking a link
and then reading the current page until it loads, useless.
- You can get Opera for it, but only the non-native Java
version,
not a Tréo-specific version. It's somewhat better
than Blazer,
in that it's faster and blocks less, but since it's Java, it
crashes
left and right, and sometimes locks up the machine
completely, to the
point where you have to hit the hardware reset button.
- The built-in mail program, VersaMail, is also a complete
piece of
junk. It completely fails to handle non-7bit-ASCII
encodings, randomly
decides to re-download your entire mailbox, blocks while
downloading,
crashes often, etc.
- The new Gmail phone app is Java-only right now, meaning
that while
it runs, it exhibits all the crashing and lock-up problems
that Opera
has. Using Gmail in a web browser is also a no-go due to the
above
browser problems.
The one bright light is the Google Maps for Mobile app, which is
Palm native and rocks my socks off. But I went to the tech talk,
and believe you me it was no easy task writing that sucker.
Apparently
modern Palms run PalmOS on an Xscale processor which is
emulating
some old 16-bit Motorola CPU or something? Sounds godawful.
I suspect the next PalmOS with Linux and GTK will be
a lot better. Hopefully it will also come with tinymail, which is all kinds of
awesome.
Anyway, one of the reasons I went Palm instead of Crackberry
is that I
thought Palm had a larger software library. This is true, but
it seems that most new mobile apps are Java, because it's a lot
heasier to support a bunch of phones at once that way. All of Google's mobile apps supported
Crackberry right away or soon after launching, because
Crackberry
does Java, for example.
So, dear LazyWeb, how are Crackberries for non-data stuff?
Do the
phone, contacts and calendar work well? Are there 3rd-party
apps for
stuff like reading ebooks? How well does the email work with
Gmail?
I'm unlikely to want to pay for the special Crackberry
"push" email,
unless I can con Google into paying for it :)