Umbral Echoes Blog

Let it never be said that I’m not willing to try new things, and change my opinions.

Many moons ago, before I discovered this magical nugget called the iPhone, I thought that texting was pretty silly.  Why take 30 seconds writing something out when you could call someone and say it in a fraction of that time?  The phone companies charge extra money to add text messaging to your plan (though I’ll be damned if I know why, other than “because we can”), it’s cumbersome, and impersonal.

Well, recently I’ve discovered that text messaging does have a few good uses.

• At work — When at work, or other places you can’t have a voice conversation, text messaging lets you keep in touch with people.
• Noisy environments — When you’re at a concert, it’s sort of a pain to yell into the phone to tell your friend to shave and queue up the porn for some dirty fun later on.
• Low signal areas — I’ve been in several places where you can’t get enough reception to talk, but there’s still enough of that magical digital bandwidth to push a few characters through.
• When you don’t want to interrupt — Need to ask someone something, but it’s not really that high priority, and they might be in the middle of something more important?  A text works nicely.

I find that I articulate myself better in writing than in speaking anyway — or at least, I think I do.  And as much of an IM junkie as I’ve been over the years, it feels pretty natural to communicate in that way.

However, after exchanging 3 or 4 texts with the same person, I’ll generally just dial their ass.  At that point, you’re both just wasting time typing things out.  Texting is also impersonal, which in some cases is appropriate.  But I find that people over-use it as a means of communication.  Which I’m sure the phone companies are loving.  Damn you Apple!  Come out with your push IM service faster, so I can ditch this damn texting plan and just use AIM or Yahoo to text people.  Biggest annoyance with this phone is that when the screen goes off, you’re also signed off instant messengers and don’t get notified of new messages.

And now I’ll stop this before it becomes any more of a tech rant.

This review will be uncharacteristically short and sweet.

The best thing about the iPhone is: it’s almost like a computer in your pocket.  You can surf the web, you can send/receive email, you can download and listen to music, you can install some applications, you can look up directions to some nearby adult novelty stores (more useful than you might think!).  You can hack it to make it do things it wasn’t meant to do.

The worst thing about the iPhone is: it’s almost like a computer in your pocket.  So it doesn’t do a lot of things that I would intuitively expect it to be able to, or otherwise acts differently than I would expect a computer to act.  You can’t open most types of files (PDFs, that sort of thing).  It crashes, much more than one would expect a phone to crash (which would be “never”).  There is no copy/paste functionality.  The touchscreen typing can be annoying sometimes, and the autocorrect feature is a mixed blessing — 90% of the time it helps you out, 10% of the time it “corrects” something you didn’t want corrected.  The web browser is very neat, but can still be a pain to use on most websites, and there’s no option to remember passwords in the iPhone version of Safari.  You can’t actually get turn-by-turn directions with voice prompts, so it’s not quite like a real GPS unit either.

Overall, I do love my iPhone.  Though it is, admittedly, the first smart phone I’ve ever had, so I don’t have a huge basis for comparison.  Until recently, I’ve always wanted my phone to be a phone, and not try to be a Swiss army knife.  But over the past year, there have been so many instances where I’ve been like, “Damn, if I only had an Internet connection right now.”  And really, from what I’ve seen, the iPhone does have the best web browsing experience of any mobile phone, hands-down.  I consider it $200 well-spent, though like everything involving computers… the more functions something has, the more complication (and aggravation) it tends to bring.  Apple has historically made products that break this rule, but the iPhone firmware could definitely use a lot of improvement.

Last night I went to a concert, and my camera ended up falling out of my pocket (one of the disadvantages of a point-and-shoot camera).  No luck with lost and found, so looks like I’m going to need to get a new one.  Which sort of sucks, because I hadn’t really had the previous all that long.

When I went to buy the last one, the main thing I looked at was low-light performance.  I tend to take a lot of pictures indoors and in low lighting conditions, so this was pretty key for me.  The king at that time was the Fujifilm Finepix F31fd (link shows some samples taken at high-ISO settings, compared to some other cameras).  No other compact digital camera even came close.  But they had stopped making those, so I settled for an F40, which ironically didn’t do as well in low light.

So I go researching again, and discover that these days, the king in this arena is… still the F31.  There have been a couple more models released in that line, but none of them has the performance that the F31 does.  What gives?  Aren’t later versions of a product supposed to improve on the original?

I’ve just put in an inquiry with Fuji to see what crack they’re smoking (though of course I put it in much nicer terms), and asking if they ever plan to make a camera as good as the one that they stopped production on 4 years ago.  These things go for close to $300 on eBay — this for a camera that has been out of production for that long, when you can get a new digital camera for about $100 these days.  It performs that damn good — and this isn’t just some cult following.  Looking at the actual results taken at 400 and 800 ISO settings versus other cameras, the F31fd actually looks better than some dSLRs.

I’m actually considering buying one.  I just didn’t want to spend that much, and it also uses an older card format (xD card), whereas I was hoping for a camera that can use an SDHC card (high capacity SD).

I wish someone would just put a dSLR-sized sensor in a point and shoot camera.  It would make it more expensive than other point and shoot models, but the quality would blow the rest out of the water, and would still be much less than a dSLR.

I bought a digital camera for my mother for Mother’s Day — got her a Kodak EasyShare based on the advice of friends (thanks guys!).  I love technology, and I love finding just the right tool for the job.  So this is a post for all the geeks* out there.  Below is a list of programs, services, and mashups (like Twitter + Jott/Facebook, or Wordpress + Livejournal/MySpace) that I use on a daily basis. You probably know about a lot of these things, but maybe not all.  I love to try out new things.  I love to tinker, so every blue moon** I make a post like this.  If any of you out there have anything to add, then by all means leave a comment and tell me what your technological must-haves are.

Being a tech reviewer would be my dream job — I absolutely love testing out gadgets and programs.  I could write a few pages on each of these things, but I tried to keep it as short as possible.  Information below the cut.

* I use the term “geek” in a positive way.  I have never used, nor taken, any such word in a derogatory fashion, even if it was meant that way.  To me, “geek” means “someone who is considerably more intelligent than the average person, so much so that they are constantly using their brain.”

** I had a discussion recently wherein I was told that a lot of people don’t know what a “blue moon” is.  I find this notion staggering.

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