Reed’s Blog

For the past couple months I’ve had a prepaid Motorola phone with service provided by Tracfone. I like not having a contract with huge early termination fees. Previously my phone broke during a contract and I had to pay a lot of money to buy a phone because it was not bundled with a two year contract.

However now I think I’m going to switch back to having what I basically call a “fancyfone”, lol. I want a phone that has a lot of advanced features. I have my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet which fills some of the gap of not having an advanced cell phone, however that only has 802.11 (Wifi) and can use the internet on a fancyfone using Bluetooth wireless. But I don’t have a fancyfone so my N800 only gets internet from Wifi. I miss having the (almost) anywhere cell phone internet via EVDO or EDGE. I had EVDO on the first generation Motorola Q a while back and it was really nice to not require a hotspot to check email or surf the web. My Q ran windows mobile 5 - horrible - beyond belief. Text would lag, appearing on the screen say, 10 seconds after I finished typing a sentence the text was still typing itself on the screen. Extremely annoying. Windows Mobile also is windows only for browsing files on my device, syncing contacts and installing some programs. Yes, I could buy the $40 Missing Sync program that makes Windows Mobile talk to Mac and I could do some hack to get Linux support but I shouldn’t have to. Microsoft should make their software allow a computer to connect to it and browse the file system as if it’s a flash drive. So I’ve decided to steer clear of the Windows Mobile shipwreck and look at other devices and OS’s.

I’ve been thinking about getting a Palm or Blackberry device. Which (tell me otherwise?) requires a contract with a major wireless carrier. My top picks right now are the BlackBerry 8820 and Palm Centro. I plan to use it more for personal than business type proposes.

I am very much avoiding the Apple iPhone for reasons I discussed previously.

So today I went to import a video from my Panasonic HDC-SD1 digital video camera, which records on SD memory cards into iMovie on a Mac. I had to go get that little Sandisk memory card reader I bought from Staples and plug it in the USB port.  SO annoying.

My point is that Apple computers, should have SD card readers.  The Eee PC has an intregrated SD reader and it’s only $400.  Furthermore, Mac’s are considered high-end computers and a memory card reader should not be too much to ask for the price.  With Apple bundleing so much multimedia software a memory card reader to import the pictures from your camera should have been built in by defualt.  Plenty of computers have SD card readers and it would be trivial for Apple to build one in.

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1.
See the Release Notes and Known Issues or just get Firefox 3 RC1.