Ok. I got my new phone earlier on this week and I cannot believe how cool it actually is. I got the laptop last week and that’s unbelievably cool too! I’m getting my palmtop soon, and that’s going to rock, especially if its better then the phone, and windows pocket pc edition 2003 second edition is meant to be a LOT cooler then windows 2003 SmartPhone edition. I was sitting on the bus on the way home from work today, listening to a load of WMA files I had copied to the SD card of my phone, set in a random order, when a video popped up. I downloaded a video from the web, the Honda cogs ad, and had it encoded at 67kbits/s as a WMV file. The video started playing and I sat watching it on the phone. Now last year or late in the before that, Nokia where running ads in Europe, and probably the US to, but I never seen them there (since I was never there!) that shows a woman sitting on a bus watching a film. In the video, something happens that makes the woman watching jump, and the guy beside her, who is also watching, jumps to. Kind of a funny ad, but it was meant to be a view of the future. The thing that’s funnier about this was that shortly after Nokia released their first phone with camera that could, badly mind you, play videos. Not a lot of video, but video none the less. With me getting this one though, I can pretty much watch anything that can be encoded in WMV, and probably AVI, on my phone. Pretty cool when you think about it. Not only that, but it does other things. It is unbelievable how cool this phone is. If you have money to spend on a phone and you are left with a decision of Nokia or Windows SmartPhone, go for the SmartPhone! You won’t regret it!

On another topic, the laptop is cool too. I’m sitting in the dining room, just under my bedroom, waiting on my pizza to cook. Wahoo! Timer. BRB. OK i’m back. So, i’m now sitting in my dining room, eating pizza, working wirelessly on my laptop, and it’s a fast internet connection to boot. I’m connecting over WIFI, but I could be as easily be connecting with Bluetooth over GPRS or HSCSD. And I can’t see a problem with this anymore. Last year, if I said I was going to try this you probably would have laughed at me. Well, maybe not last year, but a few years ago anyway. To think that 5 years ago, wireless internet access was probably not even on the drawing board, or could have been but been though of as the future. Not enough people had broadband to make it matter. Windows 98 was only out about a year, windows 2000 was still in beta (I think) and I don’t even think anyone was really thinking of Windows XP or Longhorn for that matter. And look at us now. Broadband is on the increase, in some places like Ireland slowly, but on the increase none the less. WIFI is pretty much everywhere. There are over 100 different WIFI spots around Dublin. Some free, others commercial. With the advent of Windows XP and its WIFI capabilities, I can go to work, connect to a WIFI connection in there, turn my laptop off, come home and connect to a different one, and no reconfiguration. Then you have hardware. This is an Intel Centrino laptop. It has a 1.5Gz Pentium M processor, and built in WIFI and Bluetooth. The battery life is cool too. With the WIFI radio on, I can get about 2 hours out of it. With it off, it’s closer to 3.5hours. Anyway, that’s enough of my waffle for today.