Jul 15

First Impressions of the Motorola V600   Posted by sharps, tagged with

I'm not writing a review - but here's one I did read that was useful - http://www.mobiledia.com/previews/motorola/v600/ there are countless others out there.

Ergonomically it's as good a cell phone as I've ever had (and the list is long) - that includes the software. My wife (a classic right-brainer) has the same phone and she got up to speed fairly quickly. It's not the fact that she could that is interesting; it is that she actually wanted to - the phone has some pretty useful features that she actually wanted to make use of  - whereas generally (and surely true for the majority) she typically only uses about 10% of the features.

The first cool feature is the pulsing light show on the front of the flip that you can customize for different callers - not useful in any way; just cool; the second is the fact that it runs Java - I haven't found anything useful to run on it yet but it's great to see the Java logo finally appearing on consumer devices - more of that in the future I hope. The V600 also gas a camera - I used to ask myself why you would need a camera (poor quality at that) on your phone; now I have one, let me try to justify it :

1. try find a new phone that doesn't have a camera bolted on
2. our family is spread across the world and we use email and digital photos a lot
3. It's a camera that can email photos and you can make calls on it too
4. I always have my phone with me, only frequently carry a camera

but the quality really is poor, good enough for email (and I guess weblogs) but that's about it.

Jul 15

Mirror World   Posted by sharps, tagged with

Having read, and enjoyed, various blogs I thought I'd share some of my own inane ramblings with the rest of the world. My employer (Sun Microsystems) is quite keen for employees to 'get out' a bit more to the extent that they kindly provide a blogging site for us.

So why the title "Mirror World" ? I'm just reading (OK listening) to William Gibson's latest novel - "Pattern Recognition". In it, the main character uses the term "Mirror World" when she refers to differences between her own locale (New York) and that where the majority of the story is set (London). I can appreciate these observations (though in reverse) as I lived in the UK for much of my life and now live in California. The US is my mirror world; and I still can't stop noticing things that are wrong (or at least different) - more on that later probably.