One of the main reasons why I bought my first Palm PDA was because it offered a high level of organization on the go. No more fussing around with diaries, notepads and scraps of papers which I didn’t bring with me all the time. Not to forget the fact that I could edit existing data without messing up everything, plus the benefit of not having to read my own, horrible handwriting! As nice as this all sounds, it never solved my organization problems completely. None of my devices has solved those problems.
Why? Because my data has always been scattered across the various built-in PIM applications. Appointments, to-do’s, notes and even documents. Carrying arround a large amount of data requires different places to store it, based on the type of data. Otherwise, the whole thing would be cluttered with of course. But way too often I forget something, simply because I haven’t looked it up. I can even forget it when I set a reminder for it. It’s just so frustrating having to look at multiple applications for my daily dose of information.
Do you want an example? Sure thing. I’m still in school, so I have to deal with a number of things like appointments, deadlines, homework tasks and notes. If I put my homework in tasks, I won’t see the deadlines for it in my calendar. If I would put all my homework in my calendar, I wouldn’t be able to check if it was completed, plus the fact that I would clutter op my appointments. The notes thing looks easy, since you can add notes to appointments, tasks and even contacts. However, Windows Mobile doesn’t show at first glance whether you made a note within a certain object (Palm OS does). This means that if I don’t click on the object, I will risk missing crucial data that was captured in the note.
To prevent headaches, I tried a lot of manners like putting everything in a note like a big plan. But that didn’t work (neither did it prevent organization headaches). It’s nice to have Calendar, Tasks, Notes, OneNote Mobile, Word Mobile and Excel Mobile on my device, in the sense that it gives me the option to store my information within these applications. But it’s truly awful to get the stuff that you want at the moment that you need it, let alone remembering where you stored your information in the first place. So the search of better organization continues…
I promise that after this post, I will put up something about Windows Mobile. I was planning on doing this before, but this was just to tempting to let it slip. Drums please… Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the kit to turn your favourite ipod into it’s big brother. Well, sort of at least. Mind you that this crazy awesome idea would enlarge your device seriously, and of course you need a wifi connection since you can only make voip calls. Still a cool idea though. And you got to love the anti AT&T logo.
The YouTube website states that it is a video response to “How to get Voip on Ipod touch“, so the author clearly hopes that the modders kick their work up a notch by building an easy to use and decent looking solution. The comments show that most viewers believe that this modification will eventually come to market, or at least they want to believe it. I for one, am not sure. By the way, I found this little jewel on the great, Dutch iPod Touch Blog.
I already complained about Apple not providing their usb charger with the iPods’s, which has been a serious hassle for me. Fortunately, the music player doesn’t consume much power, so when only listening to music I could use it up to a week. However, when browsing and playing games, it eats a good chunk out of my battery. In that case, I have to fire up my laptop and charge it via usb (i.e. painfully slow). This bothers me because a) I don’t use pc’s much (more smartphone/iTouch usage) and b) I’m not always near a computer. Like I said, I think it’s a real shame they took out the adapter of such an expensive device, even more since the adapter itself is also expensive. They did a similair thing by leaving out the dock with the iPhone 3G, while it came with the first gen iPhone. Even if they did this for the “price-cut”, I still don’t believe they did the same with the iPods…
So that’s all for my rants this week, now let’s get back to business. Since the App Store went live my usage went up by about two or three times. And since these activities draw so much power, I had to get a universal USB charger. Take one. I bought the cheapes universal adaptor that I could find, one from Sweex. Boy, was it crap. Before I could discover that it wasn’t able to charge my device, I already made the conclusion that this was the worst build piece of kit that I ever saw. It was able to charge my smartphone, but my iPod simply refused to charge.
After this, I feared that only the original Apple adaptor coul charge their own products. But I still tried another charger, one from Philips which was about the same price of Apple’s. Thank God this one did charge my iPod Touch. So why I bought it? Well, It comes with a retractable USB-cable, a number of charging tips for all major phone brands (plus mini USB) and finally it even has a travel pouch with tip holder. Also handy: the power plug can be folded so that nothing sticks out. Geeky: cool white design with blue glowing Philips logo. Sweet.
Yes, my prayers have finally been answered. Well, not entirely, but sort of. WordPress has developed a native blogging application for the iphone/ipod touch. It’s not brand new by any means, since the application has sat in the App Store since its opening. When scrolling through the free applications, I suddenly saw the “W” icon. I was surprised, expecting to only see the Typepad app. How awesome of WordPress to develop for the iphone, and to keep it free!
Like almost every application for the iphone, it breathes the iphone’s style. Which of course is a good thing. Just a clean interface, showing you a few options. Unlike the Typepad application, the one from WordPress allows you to store drafts locally, so you can save unfinished stuff and keep it for later. That’s why Murray from Palm-Mac doesn’t like the Typepad application for the iPhone. The draft saving comes in handy especially with my iTouch, which doesn’t always has a connection. Write a post, save it as a draft, and post it when in reach of a wireless network. Sweet stuff. I also like the fact that you can upload pictures in your post, but I have yet to try everything out.
So all is good? Not really, but that’s just personal. It’s kind of ironic that I have a device that is perfect for mobile blogging (an always connected smartphone with a keyboard), and that I only can use my ipod for it. I have to admit that it’s a pleasure to use it and so is the software keyboard, but when having a hardware keyboard plus always wireless acces, I would defenitely like a client for my Windows Mobile device as well. Because the mobile WordPress website is only useful for a quick post. There’s no picture uploading, choosing a category or even saving your progress. Or maybe I’m asking to much, like always… I do know one thing for sure, and that’s that I will continue covering the iPhone/iTouch stuff.
I was aware of the Live Mesh service from Microsoft for a long time, but I never tried it. During the last few weeks, the service got a decent amount of attention from blogs like JKOnTherun and WMExperts. I kept reading about it in my feeds and it was also discussed a lot on the podcasts of the two websites mentioned earlier.
At a certain moment, I was eager to try it out. File syncing between multiple devices and five gigs of cloud-based storage sounds really good, don’t you think? Anyway, being free (at least at the moment) I went to the Mesh website on my smartphone. I had to log in with my Live Mail account, which I fortunately already have. After
logging in, I was told that I had to visit the site on my computer to set up the Live Mesh account.
Later on I indeed did this, only to discover that the beta was US-only. So nobody outside the US of A is able to taste some of the cloud goodness that Mesh offers. What a poor show. The only reason I can think of is that they simply don’t have enough capacity at the moment to support the whole world. That would be smarter then what Apple did with the App Store, 2.0 update and Mobile Me, since they weren’t able to cope with the huge demand. There you have it, I just joined the hype of kicking the dead horse that is Mobile Me…
Anyway, I just hope that this tech preview or beta will be available to the rest of us mobile geeks sooner rather than later. Although Live Mesh will probably be out of beta by that time. Can we have a basic, free service with 5 GB storage please? In that case, heavy users could opt for a paid plan with more storage and additional functionality (probably added afterwards). Because I for one am not a fan of paid subscription services (Mobile Me, I’m looking at you).
Of course you have noticed the absence of new posts since my last post on the tenth of July. I took a (very) long vacation, and decided to drop my blogging activities as well. Now that I’m freshed up, it’s time to pick the ball up again. I hope to be more active on PDA Thoughts then before, but I always hope to do more blogging.
The problem is that I live a busy live, and I’m terrible at planning. Hence the reason why I find myself far too often wanting to write about a certain topic, only to be to busy or tired to actually do it. But I keep hoping to kick the posting up a notch. That would improve the quality of the blog and probably also the visitor count. Keep your eyes open for some thoughts this week.
I was planning on doing this before, but this was just to tempting to let it slip. Drums please… Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the kit to turn your favourite ipod into it’s big brother. Well, sort of at least. Mind you that this 
I already complained about Apple not providing their usb charger with the iPods’s, which has been a serious hassle for me. Fortunately, the music player doesn’t consume much power, so when only listening to music I could use it up to a week. However, when browsing and playing games, it eats a good chunk out of my battery. In that case, I have to fire up my laptop and charge it via usb (i.e. painfully slow). This bothers me because a) I don’t use pc’s much (more smartphone/iTouch usage) and b) I’m not always near a computer. Like I said, I think it’s a real shame they took out the adapter of such an expensive device, even more since the adapter itself is also expensive. They did a similair thing by leaving out the dock with the iPhone 3G, while it came with the first gen iPhone. Even if they did this for the “price-cut”, I still don’t believe they did the same with the iPods…
