Hurrah! HTC second gen arrives

Yay!

HTC's much beloved Touch range of smartphones has been revitalised with the arrival of three new phones.

HTC Touch HD
Hailed as the next messiah when it was announced, it took forever to get here, but still looks pretty good. HD screen on a smartphone, of course it makes sense.

HTC Touch Pro2
HTC's business smartphone has been re-released and against my gut feelings, has in fact become more business-oriented. Now with god-knows-how-many productivity tools and a neat keyboard, it is an attractive proposition indeed for any savvy business person.

HTC Touch Diamond2

Now getting into the business end of said HTC Range, the much-loved Touch Diamond has also been refreshed with a new face, new design and new gizzards. And it's gotten bigger (probably not a bad thing)

Interestingly, however, it was released with an old OS. Yes, the HTC range is still running Windows Mobile 6.1. Maybe they were too late to the market to get WinMob 6.5, but my bet is on the other explanation: HTC's version of 6.1 (with TouchFlo, and other mods) was better than 6.5 anyway! I have always thought that HTC made such an awesome version of 6.1 that even Windows would struggle to improve on. I have always thought that HTC's WinMob was better than Symbian, better than, say, Samsung's negligible improvements and, my god, for someone who grew up with a Windows CE PDA (got the Jornada 450!), it's better than any previous iteration of Windows Mobile. Not that that's real difficult...

Kindle 2? What were they thinking!

My opinion of the intelligence of our collective human race has taken a step down since the release of Amazon's latest baby, the Kindle 2.

For those of you not so up-to-date as Yours Truly, Amazon.com, book retailers of the Interweb released a fair while ago, a device by the name of the Amazon Kindle, a portable book reader made for use with Amazon's extensive collection. Now, they've released its successor, the imaginatively-named Kindle 2. It has grown in size, functionality and tech appeal, as has Amazon's Kindle-friendly catalogue. But there is really only one question that comes to mind with this little gadget: Why?

If people want to read a book while sitting around at home, they will probably read a book, available for a much smaller price than Amazon's eye-watering $360 dollar tag.

If they want to read a book while they are out and about, they will probably want to get themselves a decent PDA, a smartphone, or even an iPhone will do it. And if you know the right places *nudge nudge* *wink wink*, you can get the books for free, and in nice .pdb or .lit files, not stupid proprietary type...

If they want something bigger, that they can annotate on, or do things like shop on the go with a full QWERTY keyboard, they can get a netbook, like one of the mini Dell Netbooks (especially the one with Wireless Broadband built in. Hurrah!). Something they can do all kinds of things on... (Waaaaaaaayyyyy!)

Okay, so maybe some of you want something to do all of these things, and only these things. Then you should consider dropping the $360 for a Kindle 2, which in all other regards, does its job very well, even if it is a bit big.

But this all returns to the age-old question: A bunch of devices to do lots of little specialised things well, or just the one to do all of them, but not quite as well?

Is anyone going to dispute the value of, say, a nice Palm TX, or a mini Toshiba netbook with a wireless Broadband card? (cue Godlike choral singing as the clouds open and light floods down upon these pinnacles of technology.)

Judging by the explosion in the smartphone industry (some freaky numbers floating around!), the consumers have decided on the latter, and this particular technophile agrees.

Ha!

I have finally managed the over 18 on Red Square

19.695 seconds, baby! Yeah!

See if you can beat that!, post times in comments, and i'll be wanting proof

WuW, Teleportation, and Invisbility Cloaks

Now not many of you will have heard of this, but WuW is a new technology from some geeky dudes in a basement who need to get themselves a girlfriend, or a hobby...

Yep, those freaks at MIT have come up with Wear Ur World (hence WuW) in a freaky sci-fi move towards the future. It enables you to project a screen similar to Microsoft's Surface, but onto anything and then allows you to manipulate it, with your hands. but unlike the Surface, you don't have to carry around a 3 metre wide table, a large projector and some special paint. They have made it with simple stuff like a webcam, a mobile projector and a mobile phone. How cool is that? You can draw a circle on your wrist and it projects a clock. Bugger watches, i thought the belt-driven Tag Watch was geeky...

Second in our future-themed post is teleportation. This one i'm not so sure what actually happened cos it was all a bit too scientific for me. You should see these formulae. But i think they managed to like move an alpha particle in one piece or something without it looking like a charcoal-grilled turnip. Yay, i guess???

Last up, invisibility. No, i am not getting all Harry Potter on you. Someone rather actually manged to make a mirror with a lump in the middle, and then blast it with all kinds of freaky lights and rays, and it looked like it was flat. Awesome, now the world will be so much better now that we can make all those bloody bumpy mirrors look flat again. Hmmmmm...

Now wouldn't that be a new level of geekdom. Drawing pictures of bumpy mirrors on thin air, then teleporting them to the Bahamas...

If you are wondering why i used the Bahamas, its because i have just found out that i have visitors from the Bahamas!

We're being invaded!

There are now more visits coming to this site from the USA than from Australia. OMG!!

There are now 10 different countries sending me visits, including Bulgaria, and , South Korea... Right...

There are even 18 different cities in the USA alone. Worrying...