Posts tagged phone - Entropy and Ecstasy

Even More Snow

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:55:39 GMT

At this rate, no one is going to believe me when I say New York doesn't get very wintery ;-)

Snow 2.0

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:48:23 GMT

It snowed again last night and when I woke up the snow was still fresh. Taking more pictures seemed like the right thing to do:

Snow in Brooklyn Heights

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:15:29 GMT

There was some snow in Brooklyn Heights last week. Here are some pictures from when the snow was still fresh:

Brooklyn Heights in Photos

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 17:14:05 GMT

I took my new phone out for a walk and took some pictures of the neighbourhood to see how the camera held up. Here they are:

Brooklyn got a wee bit of snow over the holidays. Here's some snow on a used Christmas tree.

1800s brick row houses... yay!

A church.

Another church, this one's at Montague and Henry.

Lower Manhattan. You can see it from my 'hood.

Stack o' Phones

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:34:07 GMT

To the right: the phones I have acquired since moving to New York City (I had a phone before I moved to NYC, but I left it in Canada):

The shitty pre-paid Nokia phone I bough while I was apartment hunting.
My venerable MyTouch 3G. I got after I had an apartment, but only just: Verizon hadn't managed to turn on my Internet nor had I yet managed to purchase a bed.
The Windows Phone 7 phone I got at PDC.
The Nexus S that arrived today. I will post more about it later, but the few hours I have spent fiddling with it have been full of joy.

Yes, that's a crazy number of phones, but I've come to terms with the fact that I will own way too many shiny things with screens.

Mountains

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 10:58:05 GMT

I took this with the camera on the phone I got at PDC and I'm pretty impressed with the result. It looks pretty dramatic... though, the subject helps a lot in that respect ;)

This is one of the newer photos on my photostream.

Windows Phone 7: Initial Impressions

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 23:29:17 GMT

I was at PDC in Redmond last week and the cool swag was an LG E900 Windows Phone 7 phone. I dropped in my SIM Card and have been using it as my primary phone for the last couple of days. What follows are my initial impressions.

The Good

The hardware is really responsive. This may be because I'm comparing it to a year+ old myTouch running Android 1.6, but the phone seems really, really fast.
The Facebook app is pretty awesome. How you feel about this depends on where you fall on the sliding scale of idealism versus cynicism with regards to Facebook.
There are actually games available (Yay XNA, I guess).
The design of the home screen is really nice.

The Bad

When the phone runs low on power, it just shuts off. No warning, one minute you're playing Bejeweled, the next you're staring at a black screen. Trying to turn it on again, results in an LG logo followed by a black screen. I would have thought that the: "Your phone is about to run out of power. You should plug it in now." warnings would be standard by now.
The mail client. Other people like it, but I don't. To be fair, that's because GMail has ruined me for all other mail clients forever. The reality is that if it showed me conversations instead of messages and had an archive button instead of a delete button I'd probably love it.
The device is a little awkward to hold. The search/back keys occupy the entire bottom bezel and I find myself accidentally pressing them while typing with disastrous results (... as disastrous as interrupting any Facebook interaction can be, that is). The power/lock switch is on the top of the phone making it difficult to lock/unlock the phone one handed.
Bing Maps < Google Maps.

The Ugly

The browser. It's some hybrid of IE7 and IE, but I gues you can't just jam WebKit on there if you're on Microsoft team.
The name: I've got a Windows 7 Phone 7 phone. Come on!1

Verdict

I need to update my myTouch and get something fast and sexy that runs Froyo ;)

More seriously, since checking my email on the subway into work and using Google Maps to find my way around the city are why I have a phone, it's probably not going to be displacing my Android in the immediate future (I'll still play Bejeweled on it though).

[1]

Quick, which seven is the one that's not supposed to be there? It's easy to pick on names, but it's always good to remember that nobody could say Wii with a straight face for months, but Nintendo ignored them all while sitting atop the largest pile of money every assembled in all of human history.