Last March, Samsung launched a 32GB solid-state disk. A couple of weeks ago, TDK followed suit with their own offering. Unfortunately, these solid-state drives, as far as I can tell, are still prototypes.
The best feature of these drives, at least in my opinion, is durability. With no moving parts, solid-state drives are much less prone to damage from drops than current drives. Laptop drives, I hear, are more rugged than their desktop-bound cousins - but these babies are in a different class altogether. Like thumb drives and memory cards, you can toss these around without fear of losing data.
If you think that's cool on a laptop, imagine having one of these drives in an iPod or any other DAP. I would get on a bike or go running with a flash-based MP3 player like the Nano, but I wouldn't dare do that with the larger hard drive based players. I wouldn't mind getting a large iPod for my complete music collection and a flash-based player for rough use, but a player with a large solid-state drive gives me the best of both worlds. I bet its battery will last longer too.
Yes, another effect of having no moving parts is efficiency. They sip juice from batteries ever so slowly - supposedly consuming less than 10% of what current drives use. When these drives (as well as other technologies) come out, maybe we can start seeing laptops that run for weeks on a single charge.
September 2006 Archives
Head on over to the Cinema Lobby of Greenbelt 3 in Makati and you can still catch the video works of some of the country's top filmmakers -- all shot on the Nokia N93, which is being promoted as THE videocam-phone (remember the way-cool Gary Oldman ad!).
The exhibit runs until October 1 and features works by Manolo Abaya, Khavn dela Cruz, Pepe Diokno, Raul Jorolan, Mark Meily, Raul Ona and Mark Querubin.
You can also still catch Pepe Diokno talk about the craft on Sept. 30, 3:00pm.
Oh, and if you happen to own an N-series phone, you may get to have free photo prints as well. :)
Rumor has it that Palm will be releasing the Treo 680 as a low-end budget smartphone running the (beloved) Palm OS. Despite lacking many top of the line features (it is a budget PDA after all), it will retain the 320x320 display we've all grown to love. It boasts of a robust feature set, including a 3MP VGA camera, Bluetooth, WiFi, and 3G capabilities.
I'm not sure about the rest of you, but I'd probably be one of the first in line to get this. I miss the Palm OS, and I would gladly give up my XDA iis. No Bluetooth? Well, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. It has an SD / MMC slot at least, right?
It only has a VGA camera, you say? Who needs that when you carry around an 8MP dSLR everyday? Why? Hmm... I think that issue is meant for another post - or another blog even.
In any case, I can't wait for the Treo 680 to hit Philippines.
So now that Apple has released a new iPod Nano, expect vendors to come out with new cases to take advantage of the sales it's sure to generate. Belkin is trying to be first to the game, by releasing new cases for the media player:
- Acrylic Case (Pictured)
- Hard Flip-Top Case
- Neoprene Holster
- Canvas Flip-Top Case (Pictured)
- Canvas Holster
- Sports Armband
- Slider Case
Microsoft's Zune hasn't officially launched, but another player bearing an uncanny resemblance to it is now ready to hit the streets. Meet the MPF2110, Oriphe Industrial Limited's latest MP4 player.
Obviously styled after the Zune, could the awkwardly named MPF2110 match the rest of the Zune's specifications? With no WiFi connectivity and a max capacity of 2GB, it doesn't even come close. We can be sure, however, that the prices will be just as different.
One thing I'm wondering about though, is this: if the MPF2110 is already available, wouldn't the Zune be the clone when it comes out?
Nope, I', not suggesting that you go cozy with your gadgets and do the "jiggy" with it. What I'm trying to talk about here is that in order to make your gadgets work better and last longer, you need to KISS it (KISS = Keep It Simply Simple, or sometimes Keep It Simple Stupid!). As a veteran gadgeteer, I understand the "need" to constantly update the software of your laptop or PDA. As a new gadget comes along, the temptation to "test" each and every new programs on it is very strong -- only to have it un-installed after finding out that you don't need the program at all or worse, when you run out of space on your gadget. This problem is more pronounced on Windows laptops and Windows Mobile-based PDA.
Windows (be it Windows Mobile or Windows XP) has a registry and 99% of the programs installed onto it puts an entry on this registry. Once the registry is filled up, or worse gets corrupted, bad things happen. This is the reason why over time, a Windows-based laptop (or desktop for that matter) slows down over time. The slowdown is more often than not caused by cluttered a cluttered registry. A similar thing happens to Windows Mobile-based PDAs. When a simple clearing of its memory is not enough to speed things up, a hard reset is the only solution when things start to slow down. This symptom -- the slowdown of a system due to cluttered or corrupt registry is known as "bit rot" and to prevent "bit rot", just KISS your gadget!
PalmOS-based PDAs and OS X-based computers are also prone to problems caused by *not* KISSing them. Program incompatibilities and poorly coded programs causes system slowdown on PalmOS and OS X but such things does not happen as often as it does with their Windows-based brethren. For PalmOS devices, installing applications from dubious sources may cause it to do a hard reset spontaneously. As for OS X, some programs (shareware or freeware) may interact with other programs causing slow response time. Again to prevent system slowdown on your Palm and Mac computers, *all together now*, KISS your gadget! In my own personal experience, my gadgets are at their best when I keep them simple. My PDA has only few programs installed in it -- programs I really use and absolutely need -- a book reader (iSilo), a check balancing program (PocketQuicken), a shopping list program (HandyShopper), a "wallet" program (KeyRing) and a backup program (Resco Backup). With these in my Palm, I have a lot of spare room in my memory and my device (a Treo 650) is as stable as an oak... no problems with spontaneous resets, no headaches. The same is true with my Mac. I only keep essential programs in it like an office suite (NeoOffice), a GTD helper (TiddlyWiki) and the built-in OS X apps. Now I have less problems because I KISS my gadgets.
How about you? Are you willing to KISS your gadgets?
I'm Elber Cruz, known to some as driver ng bayan. I'm a freelance photographer, graphic designer, and writer. I'm also a boy scout, or so I've been told. I almost always have a flashlight, a multi-tool / utility knife, a pen, or some other thing that might be useful in a given situation.
Today marks the day I start blogging on Mobile Philippines. Being the geek that I am, I think that's a pretty nice birthday gift.
Yes, that's right - it's my birthday today.
We've uploaded our second podcast which you can download directly here. Guesting here is Adel Gabot with Art Ilano and myself where we talk about the numerous changes we did to the magazine. We also get to play around with the new Motorola Ming as well as talk about the death *shudder* of the PDA.
You can check out all our podcasts in the downloads section.
Say hello to the virtual iPod-like music player. So if you don't own an iPod, you can opt to carry around your computer LCD screen and drag this along whilst being connected to the Internet.
Blogmusik presents the Virtual iPod (sort of). Available in black and white, allowing you to stream songs from the playlists around the world.
Our EIC Adel Gabot writes about the many changes our readers will expect when our next ish comes out next week. Ever since Steve Jobs announced products two quarters in advance, we thought it would be cool to do the same thing a week before our issue comes out. Here's Adel.
I once owned a 10-megabyte external hard drive. 10MB—not a typo—megabytes. It was new and beautiful and advanced for its time, and I loved it.
It was as thick as the three volumes of the Lord of The Rings put together—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of The King—and even heavier. It was made of steel, and it made a horrible racket when it spun its big platters.
It held the equivalent of about 30 single-sided 5.25 floppies—a stupendous amount of data back then, when an operating system fit on a 360KB disk. It was an entire universe of storage space in those days. Having a newfangled 10MB drive, when some people were settling for the less expensive 5MB hard disks, was a cool thing. You could load up the OS, the app, and the data all at the same time! Before that, you needed two floppy drives: one for your operating system, another for your app and the data. Now it was all in there!
But that was in 1986. Twenty years later, it's all different.
Last week, I was thinking of getting a 5400rpm 120GB 2.5" Toshiba laptop hard drive; someone was selling me one for PhP 4, 700.00, and I wanted to get it. It was about the size of a raffle booklet. It held the equivalent of...well, a lot more floppies than I can count.
Things are certainly much smaller in the 21st Century.
In fact, most days I have a Lexar Firefly flash drive hanging off my Hinge ID lanyard from my neck. No larger than my pinky fingernail, it contains the equivalent of almost 30 of those heavy steel LOTR 10MB hard drives I had 20 years ago. The capacity is tiny by today's standards, but I get by shuttling doc files and jpegs back and forth from editorial to creative most of the time.
Today, small is beautiful. What used to take up entire rooms of computing power in the 20th century now fits in the palm of your hand. The entire navigation equipment of Apollo 13 now fits in the innards of a Timex wristwatch. Thus, you have massive power taking up miniscule space—and we tend to take it for granted.
You probably noticed that Mobile Philippines shrunk this month, too:
We had to take the plunge, despite our love for the large format. It was just too damn big. People had trouble keeping it on the shelf with the other half-pint gear mags; it tended to droop on the stands after a week; readers refused to fold the magazine just so they can keep them in their bags; and advertisers were sometimes reluctant to resize an ad just for us.
On the plus side, Mobile was different. To use more than our share of clichés, this week, the mag was larger than life and in your face. It allowed us more creative expression, a bigger canvas and an unmistakable presence. We had humongous pictures and spectacular spreads. And if it rained, you had an instant umbrella.
But it was still big.
So we shrunk it to normal dimensions. Just like the early days. So there.
It's still the same mag. More content, in fact. More manageable dimensions. Thicker. Easier to keep, read, lug around. It's smaller, more concentrated, more feature-packed. Just like a newfangled 120GB laptop hard disk. We retrofitted some things, shoehorned others into a smaller space, redesigned other stuff completely. We worked hard on it.
We hope you like it. So tell us what you think.
We had to take the plunge, despite our love for the large format. It was just too damn big. People had trouble keeping it on the shelf with the other half-pint gear mags; it tended to droop on the stands after a week; readers refused to fold the magazine just so they can keep them in their bags; and advertisers were sometimes reluctant to resize an ad just for us.
On the plus side, Mobile was different. To use more than our share of clichés, this week, the mag was larger than life and in your face. It allowed us more creative expression, a bigger canvas and an unmistakable presence. We had humongous pictures and spectacular spreads. And if it rained, you had an instant umbrella.
But it was still big.
So we shrunk it to normal dimensions. Just like the early days. So there.
It's still the same mag. More content, in fact. More manageable dimensions. Thicker. Easier to keep, read, lug around. It's smaller, more concentrated, more feature-packed. Just like a newfangled 120GB laptop hard disk. We retrofitted some things, shoehorned others into a smaller space, redesigned other stuff completely. We worked hard on it.
We hope you like it. So tell us what you think.
Hi guys, we really appreciate your feedback about our website and the magazine.
Also if you have a device you think you want to see reviewed or a tip for our blog, don't hesitate to send us a note too.
Send us your comments and suggestions using the form below.
One of the niggling problems of using Microsoft Windows is Microsoft's slow/delayed release of critical patches that plugs security holes that allow malware to easily enter a Windows machine. This allows hackers/crackers to be one step ahead of users in terms of protection against security vulnerabilities. In the past few months, there were a couple of "Zero-day vulnerabilities" that are malware (virus, spyware & trojans) released on the day a vulnerability is discovered.
But wonders of wonders, Microsoft was able to deploy a patch that prevents a program called FairUse4WM days after it was released. FairUse4WM is neither a malware nor a security vulnerability. FairUse4WM allows users to strip out the DRM of audio files (mostly music or MP3 files) and allows users who purchased these music to do whatever they want to do with their purchase.
This is a rather disturbing fact since they (Microsoft) prefer to delay legitimate fixes to their inherently flawed OS while they rush over themselves to release a "fix" when their DRM is in jeopardy. What I find really goofy about this is that Microsoft has stopped issuing security patches for "older" Windows versions making users of Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows NT fair game to crackers and botmasters while they have dedicated a team to work around the clock to counteract FairUse4DRM. Is DRM more important than user security? Do they prefer to have a secure DRM than a secure computing environment that is free from virus, spyware and trojans?
FYI: Microsoft releases patches for security vulnerabilities once a month -- a day now dubbed as 'Patch Tuesday'.
So my mom just got a new phone. A Nokia 3650. You know, the one with the outlandish rotary-layout keypad. And this finally replaced the trusty, reliable, and next-to-the-5110-perhaps-the-most-indestructible-phone-around Nokia 3530 which she had been using for ages now. In other words, she has finally entered the graphical interface age.
Problem: my mom's pushing 70. And the entire concept of navigable graphics menus befuddles her no end.
"Here's how you use it," I explained in my slowest, preschool teacher voice. "You push this button up to move the highlight up, down to push it down, left to move it left... and center to click."
She just stared blankly at the phone's screen.
I was contemplating the use of hand puppets to get my message across, but I just had to give up. The entire concept of using a set of keys that can move a cursor around a graphical menu in two dimensions is just too much for her to absorb for now.
Us younger folks are the gaming generations, so we've taken it for granted that graphical user interfaces, whether for PCs or for phones, are so intuitive that any pedestrian can start using them on the fly. Like that scene in Star Trek IV when Scotty sees a 1980s-era Macintosh for the first time and starts clicking away at lightning speed to produce a chemical model for transparent aluminum in less than a minute. We (including Scotty) grew up with joysticks, gamepads and other interface devices, so a phone's navipad is second nature to us.
For those who do not even know what a joystick is, however, the graphical user interface isn't necessarily as friendly as we assume it to be. And it may take some time before these genteel folks get to understand the feedback process that goes into moving a controller and seeing something moving on a screen in response.
But I'm sure that my mom will hack it. Eventually. She did, after all, somehow manage to learn how to send text messages -- after sending out several hundred pesos worth of text to the wrong people and to total strangers. So I'm sure that after a few thousand pesos worth of accidentally using GPRS, inadvertently downloading unwanted wallpapers, and calling up total strangers by mistake, she'll eventually figure out the Nokia 3650's navipad.
Eventually.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
My mom switched back to her old phone.
