So the other day I was on 5th avenue on my way to Tiffany's to return something. It was excruciatingly hot out so I took shelter at the Mac Store of course! This was my first time there and it was definitely pretty cool. The place is designed nicely and they have plenty of gadgets out for you to play with. I was drooling over the big Apple Mac Pro towers with their huge LCD monitors. They are so cool, but pricey as hell. I'm good with my iMac for now. They had plenty of iPhones out to play with so I grabbed one and started messing with it.
First thing I noticed is that it is thinner than I had thought and that the screen resolution looked really good considering the screen was touched by who knows how many sweaty, sticky, and dirty hands. The user interface was nice and similar to Mac OS X so it was very familiar. Next I tried watching some videos on YouTube. This was very easy to do and fast. The resolution of the videos was also very good. You see the videos in wide screen mode. However typing is a mess. You can't get the virtual keyboard to appear while in wide screen mode. That really pissed me off. Typing on the iPhone took a long ass time. Next I tried to connect to the internet and read my blog. Its wi-fi worked great but loading a page was slow. Typing into the search box was a pain in the ass. Eventually I was able to do it but honestly I don't think I would want to spend so much time to get to one site. Over time you can bookmark frequently visited pages. It would be good to import your bookmarks or integrate a social bookmarking tool like delicious.
Overall though I would say its pretty cool gadget and they were selling like hotcakes the whole time I was there. Its just too much for this blogger to justify. If they get better apps for it I would definitely consider it. In the meantime I'll wait for the next gen iPhone.
I'm in the market for a new MP3 player. Its been a while since I shopped around for one. I recently lost my beloved iRiver 320 after 3 years of being together. Now I know everyone has an iPod but this just won't do for my purposes. I need something easy to carry, big enough hard drive or flash memory, and it must have a built in mic for recording voice or anything else. This is critical and this is where the iPod fails. Sure I can get the mic attachment but this makes for a big fumbly device that is just too expensive to justify. I'm willing to spend $300 tops, maybe a bit more if I can get more use out of it. Here is what I'm looking for:
Plays MP3sPlays Ogg Vorbis filesPlays MP4 video
Records to MP3 from built in mic
Not fragile
Good Battery Life
Plug and Play
Finally after much research I decided to get the Creative Zen 30 Gb MP3 Player. It beat out the rest because it has a bigger color screen than the iPod. In fact it is strictly widescreen similar to the Apple iPhone. It also was availeble on eBay fro less than $150 . I forgot to keep track of the bid but ended up buying a similar one for $175, $25 more than I was about to spend, but still its a worthy investment if it turns out to work OK.
Lately I've been having too many emotions bottled up that it was leading to increased creativitly that I have to get down on some kind of medium. I will attempt to share these moments with all of you to usher in a new era of recording ideas, now on a new medium.
First thing I noticed is that it is thinner than I had thought and that the screen resolution looked really good considering the screen was touched by who knows how many sweaty, sticky, and dirty hands. The user interface was nice and similar to Mac OS X so it was very familiar. Next I tried watching some videos on YouTube. This was very easy to do and fast. The resolution of the videos was also very good. You see the videos in wide screen mode. However typing is a mess. You can't get the virtual keyboard to appear while in wide screen mode. That really pissed me off. Typing on the iPhone took a long ass time. Next I tried to connect to the internet and read my blog. Its wi-fi worked great but loading a page was slow. Typing into the search box was a pain in the ass. Eventually I was able to do it but honestly I don't think I would want to spend so much time to get to one site. Over time you can bookmark frequently visited pages. It would be good to import your bookmarks or integrate a social bookmarking tool like delicious.
