The Gadgets Page

My favorite Palm I ever owned was the Tapwave Zodiac.

A full two years before the release of the Sony PSP, the Zodiac looked like it could be the perfect gaming platform. If only the game manufacturers wrote games for the Palm, the Zodiac would have had a HUGE jumpstart on both the PSP and the Nintendo DS. The only games I saw available for the Zodiac was Duke Nukem and Atari’s Adventure, but apparently there were a bunch of others: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4; Mototrax; Spyhunter; Madden NFL 2005; DOOM II; and Warfare Incorporated.

Not only was it a good gaming machine, it had EXCELLENT video conversion to play videos. Before the iPhone was even a glimmer in Steve Job’s eye, I was watching bit torrented episodes of television on my Zodiac during my lunch break every day at work. I could also listen to MP3s using their media player. When my Zodiac finally had to be sold, I truly missed the media capabilities it had and was frustrated to no end that I couldn’t recreate that experience with my Palm Treo.

Of course, the Zodiac had all the normal Palm capabilities that any other Palm device had at the time, so there was a calendar, contact manager, notes and to-do list. I loved that I could do everything that my old Palm used to do AND watch videos on it. It wasn’t until I bought my iPhone four years later that I FINALLY was able to have the same capabilities as I had with the Zodiac.

Sadly, Tapwave had serious problems. Not only did they discontinue the Zodiac in 2005, but they also stopped supporting their warranties on their older models. I had severe problems with the directional pad on my first Zodiac. I sent it in to be repaired. It took several months to come back to me. We feared that we might never get it back because the company seemed to be going out of business. When it finally returned, we sold the returned model.

It came with all this stuff:

I loved my Zodiac and I wish Tapwave could have survived long enough to become a dominating company in the gaming market instead of a fond memory and a footnote.

My brother, Dan, got a iPhone 3GS the day they came out. We were so excited to see it and compare it to our 3G phones. Both he and Mike started loading their favorite game, Peggle, at the same time. We were SHOCKED at how quickly Dan’s phone loaded the game. We were going to film it, but it looks like lots of people out there have already done that, so here’s the best video I found:

Stacey, my sister, bought herself a Palm Pre. I’m sure she’ll be happy to notice the results of this speed test by CNET:

In two out of three of the tests, the Palm Pre kicked butt. When tested against the original iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS, the Pre was a lot faster for web browsing and sending photos via email. On the power up test, however, the Palm Pre REALLY chugged, taking well over twice the time of the iPhone 3G and almost five times as long as the iPhone 3GS. The lesson of that test is: don’t turn off your Palm Pre unless you absolutely HAVE to because it will take almost two minutes to turn it back on.

For Mike and Dan, the increased processing speed for games like Peggle makes the iPhone 3GS the best choice, but for Stacey, she was excited about how quickly she can browse the web and send email. What scares ME is this report of a dog whistle noise coming from the iPhone 3GS.

• 3G S application that Apple forgot to mention: dog whistle

Boy Genius Report estimates the sound to be in the 15 kHz range (here’s a clip of a similar sound for reference), well within the iPhone’s listed range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Your personal experience with the sound may vary, as higher pitched sounds become harder to hear as you age.

A call to Apple’s tech support revealed they had no previous knowledge of this issue. They directed me to do a hard reset (holding down the Home button the Sleep button for ten seconds) but the sound remained. The representative speculated it was a hardware issue, and recommended I take the phone to my nearest Apple Store to get a replacement.

Years ago, I owned a Palm E2. It had an annoying whistle every time I turned on the screen. The store let me exchange it for another one, but the second one developed the SAME whistle within a month (but after the two week exchange period at the electronics store). Palm wouldn’t take it back or exchange it for another one and NEVER admitted that there might be a problem, despite the multiple complaints from MANY E2 owners. It was so bad that some people went to drastic measures to get the high pitched squeal to go away.

• Protichnoctem: Palm squeal/whine/noise repair

Until I can get a final verdict on whether the iPhone 3GS has a consistent problem with a high pitched whine, I’ll wait to get the new one.

For the paranoid, one of the most eagerly awaited benefits of the iPhone 3.0 operating system is the Find My iPhone feature. By logging into a web page, you can click on the Find My iPhone button and it will track down your phone and show it to you on a map. This is a fantastic feature for the absent-minded iPhone owners who can never find their beloved gadget.

For those of us who are paranoid, however, the Find My iPhone feature has the added benefit of being able to wipe all the data from the phone the second you realize that it has been stolen. Sure, you can see where the thieves are with Find My iPhone, but all of your bank account information sitting on your phone and your home address can be wiped from the iPhone’s memory before the cops show up at the thieves’ door. Once you wipe your iPhone, it will no longer be able to be tracked, so make sure the cops are on their way before clearing the data.

This is not just a feature for the paranoid like me. Here is the thrilling story from The Intermittent Kevin of Happy Waffle fame tracking down his phone that he lost during a Lego convention in Chicago.

• The Intermittent Kevin - Find My iPhone works, and it is awesome.

Then an amazingly lucky thing happened. I refreshed the iPhone location and the circle moved, to the corner of the block, and shrunk in size to maybe 100 feet across. I waited a minute and refreshed again. The small circle had shifted southward down Washtenaw.

“THAT WAY!”

Us three skinny white guys walked at a rapid pace in the direction of the circle. We moved past the birthday party, curious if one of the participants might be culpable, but the circle again shifted farther south. I was ready to break for our car if the phone started moving away faster than we could catch it, but it hovered at the very end of the street.

This feature, however useful it is, is not automatic. You must have a MobileMe account with Apple in order for it to work AND you have to set it up on your iPhone.

• Apple - MobileMe - Your iPhone, Mac, and PC. In perfect sync $99/year

• Find my iPhone: How to set it up

I originally signed up for MobileMe when I bought a new iMac computer. I synced my bookmarks, contacts, and all other information on my MacBook to MobileMe and then when I booted up my new computer, had it download all that information from MobileMe. It was the easiest new computer switch over experience that I had EVER experienced. EVERYTHING matched, right down to my dock at the bottom of the screen. It was worth the yearly fee for that alone, but now that I can have the peace of mind of knowing that I can delete all the data on my iPhone if it falls into the wrong hands, I feel incredibly happy that I already had a MobileMe account set up.

Every time Apple updates the iPhone OS, they have added wonderful features that I wished for and even better ones that I had never dreamed of. Find My iPhone is one of those features. All of the telecom companies have had this ability for years, but not one of them have offered it to us until Apple strong-armed AT&T into acquiescence. Thanks, Apple! Glad to know you’ve got my back!

Wouldn’t it be cool if you never had to charge your cell phone again? What if your phone was able to stay charged just by collecting the radio waves that are already flying around the air around you. That is the technology that Nokia is working on today.

• Technology Review: Wireless Power Harvesting for Cell Phones

The Nokia device will work on the same principles as a crystal radio set or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag: by converting electromagnetic waves into an electrical signal. This requires two passive circuits. “Even if you are only getting microwatts, you can still harvest energy, provided your circuit is not using more power than it’s receiving,” Rouvala says.

This is one of those technologies that will eventually show up in our lives and years later, we’ll be saying to ourselves, “Remember when we had to charge our cell phones? We used to have cradles and car chargers and habits in our lives just to make sure our phones were charged and you little whipper snappers come in here with your fancy self-charging phones.” Of course, by then, I’ll sound like an old miner and wave around a cane like I’m going to hit you with it.

It will be cool when it shows up, though!

A special thank you to eyeseenicee for uploading these scans of the Swatch mobile phone.

Long before Nokia started allowing us to customize our phones, Swatch offered cell phones in a wide variety of colors.

Based on these features, it must have been available in the early Nineties.

I never heard about these phones when they were available. Back then, I wanted the Motorola StarTac. I don’t think these would have attracted me. They look awesome to me now.

Someone scanned in this postcard from 1965:

It reads:

Manufacturer of the world’s finest personal telephone answering systems, designed to fit any of your personal or business needs.

Manufactured by Robosonics Incorporated.

The postcard was mailed to Tel-Tek Electronics at 2801 NW EXPY in Oklahoma City. The copyright date on the postcard is 1965. If you notice the touch tone phone doesn’t have pound (#) or asterisk (*) buttons, so it must have been one of the first touch tone phones.

When we were first married, Michael and I owned a Panasonic answering machine that used full sized cassette tapes for the outgoing and incoming messages. We could listen to our messages by calling our home number and punching in the secret code followed by the “splat” button (*).

It took us YEARS of not having a telephone land line to get out of the habit of checking messages. We would be at a hotel room in Vegas and I can remember Mike saying, “I just can’t get used to not having to check messages.” Sometimes our parents don’t even realize that we are out of town because they call us on our cell phones, we talk, answer questions and make plans for our next familial visit without mentioning that we don’t happen to be in Salt Lake City right now.

It’s amazing to me how much technology can change our lives. I went from having no answering machine in my childhood home to being a slave to one as a young adult to carrying my phone around with me wherever I go and with each change, I had to adapt to it.

In 1965, the answering machine was a new gadget that was rarely used and took up more space than the Los Angeles phone book on a table. Now, every single one of us have voice mail on our cell phones in our pockets. Hurray for progress!

I saw this month’s Reader’s Digest and my blood boiled to the surface. The headline screamed in big red letters:

Is Your Child Sexting?

Worse still, the headline was photoshopped onto an iPhone, as if it were the iPhone’s fault.

I’m pretty sick of the fear mongering that EVERY avenue of Old Media is using to make technology the bad guy. Blaming a cell phone for sexual texts between teenagers is like blaming pencils for sexy notes passed between teenagers. The fact that some teenagers are obsessed with sex has NOTHING to do with cell phones or SMS messaging. Unlike most adults, I REMEMBER what it was like to be a teenager. All I could think about was sex all the time. That wasn’t my Trapper Keeper’s fault. It wasn’t my Rubik’s Cube’s fault. Blaming the cell phone for sexual behavior among teens is just shoddy reporting and fear mongering. Bad form, Reader’s Digest, bad form.

I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything more from Reader’s Digest. Ever since its inception, it has pandered to old people. With jokes and quotes from a nearly extinct era, it won’t be long before Reader’s Digest becomes extinct as well. And when they do, they’ll probably blame it on cell phones.

IKEA has great products for gadgets, but this Mackis stationery caddy is so versatile that it can be used to create a charging station.

The Mackis comes unpainted and since you are putting it together, you can choose to put it together like this instead.

You do need to saw one part into three and add two strategically placed holes. With a little white paint and corkboard, you have a perfect charging station for your gadgets all for less than twenty bucks!

More photos here: ikea hacker: A compact Mackis charging station

Tweetie is an iPhone app recommended to me by my friend, Brad McCall. It’s cheaper than most of the other apps and has the most features.

Here is a review of Tweetie:

• Tweetie on iTunes - $2.99

It’s organized a lot like Twittelator Pro and I can even find people who are nearby who use Tweetie. The Nearby feature alone is worth the three bucks. That’s why Tweetie is has quickly become my favorite Twitter app, because sometimes I feel alone and I want to find people in my neighborhood who are using Twitter.

The use of multiple accounts is the easiest with Tweetie. Just a quick click to the left and I can choose a different Twitter account. Instead of using the SubGroups function on Twittelator Pro, I have started putting my friends into various Twitter accounts. All my Utah friends are on CodeAway, all my fitness friends are on the Starling Fitness account, and all my entertaining Twitter friends are on my personal account. Following each group is very easy with Tweetie!

There is also a Tweetie for the Mac application on the computer. You can see an introductory video on their website.

Twitterrific was the first iPhone app that I ever tried. I NEVER use it now. First, it was replaced by Twinkle because I loved being able to see other Twinkle users near me. Then both of them were replaced by Twittelator because it promised me the use of sub-groups. Finally, I’ve settled on Tweetie so I get the Nearby features AND the multiple accounts.

I have always used the free version, which has advertisements on your feed. I don’t care whether there are ads on my screen, so the free version was fine with me. There are a couple other features that the Premium version has that I don’t have. You can see a review of it here:

• Twitterific on iTunes - Free

My biggest problem with Twitterific is the fact that it starts at my last read tweet. If I haven’t loaded it for several days, it will show me the last time I looked at it and I will have to scroll all the way to the top in order to see what’s going on RIGHT NOW. I haven’t been able to find a setting to change that and it is so irritating that I haven’t used Twitterific because of it.

Just like the other Twitter apps, you can read your friends’ tweets, send your own (including photos), and see who is messaging and replying to you. It’s a great app for free with only one drawback that maybe others might consider a feature.