When I saw on BBCool that the Blackberry 8820 is about to be released, I got slightly worried. The article reported that the phone will combine GPS and wifi in one unit, which as far as I can tell is a first for Blackberry devices. If this phone had a camera, I would have been annoyed because it would be my dream phone - and I just bought my Curve 8310 for $330. But when I checked it out on Gizmodo, sure enough, no camera. A lot of commenters seemed to like that, saying that their employers don’t allow camera phones. Only one person pointed out that the Blackberry camera can be disabled at the enterprise level by administrators. I don’t want a phone without a camera; I first had one with my Color Sidekick (man that thing was crap) and I love it. In fact, the Curve’s camera is so good (2MP) that I haven’t used my regular camera since I got the phone - nothing I’ve taken a picture of has been that important. So even though the 8820 will have both GPS and wifi, it’s not for me.

And neither is the upcoming Curve 8330. It doesn’t have wifi. What’s it take to get a quality smartphone with GPS, wifi, and camera?

I am making this post from ryanmacklin’s iPhone. The web browser is really kickass but this keyboard is very difficult to me. In fact, I was going to say more but I just can’t type with this. Whew!

I am making a real quick post from my new phone. To my amazement, AT&T actually came through with an unlock code - I thought for sure they wouldn’t. But they did! Unfortunately I had already given up on them and ordered another Curve, already unlocked, with the intention of returning this one. The seller said they were willing to mutually withdraw, but then checked their records and saw it was too late - it had already been shipped. Fortunately A isn’t killing me over it, she knows I’ll sell the other one when it gets here. Anyway, new phone! Ta-daaaaa.

Argh! My Blackberry got delivered yesterday, or they tried at least. If my sister-in-law had called me last night like I’d asked her to do when it arrived, I could have rushed to the local post office and picked it up this morning! But no, she didn’t, and I didn’t get over to the house today until well after the post office had closed, so now I have to wait until Monday morning. Fortunately the 7 days “no questions asked” return policy doesn’t start until the USPS shows it as delivered, and that won’t happen until I sign for it Monday morning. But I could have been playing with it right now!

We are spending the night at our own house tonight, to play with our kitties (Tubbles is here on the bed with us) and hang out. I did homework for my Sex & Gender class for six hours today. Arguing the case against gay marriage on Monday is going to be absolutely brutal. And worse, we can’t seem to pick a time to get together to discuss it. It’s going to be fabulous…NOT.

I just bought a fancy new phone. A very fancy, state of the art, not crippled by T-Mobile, phone. I bought a Blackberry Curve 8310 in Titanium, and it is my dream phone. At first my wife said I absolutely couldn’t buy it, but she finally relented! Instead of getting me a PS2 for my birthday (she’s running a tad late on it), she is contributing the $90 cost of a PS2 to my purchase of the phone. I got an AT&T version off eBay, and you can buy unlock codes on eBay too, so I will be unlocking it and putting my T-Mobile SIM card into it.

My bill will go up by $5-15 when I switch to the Blackberry plan, because it doesn’t include unlimited texts like the Sidekick, so you have to pick the 400 ($5), 1000 ($10), or unlimited ($15) text plans. I got it on a trial basis, from a seller who accepts returns for any reason for 7 days. When I had the T-Mobile Dash a few months ago, I knew within a few days that I didn’t like it, so I think I will know for this, too. If I decide to keep it, I have to sell both my GPS device (there’s one in the phone) and my Sidekick 3 (don’t need two phones). It won’t be SUPER easy to do geocaching with the Blackberry - there’s no ideal application for it yet - but it is possible.

The phone has everything I want except WiFi, and I don’t really NEED that because I’ll have the unlimited data plan and I have cell coverage everywhere except my house. But we might be moving to my in-laws’ house soon (we are still house-sitting, but we are going to ask if we can stay in the spare room where we are now) so I don’t have to worry about it, they have cell coverage here.

I figured out my problem with the 4GB SD card I had bought. It wasn’t Dell’s fault that it didn’t work; I chatted with a representative and confirmed the slot is supposed to accept SDHC cards. It turned out to be a Microsoft XP problem, naturally. It fell under KB 934428, in which XP requires a hotfix to make it recognize cards 4GB or larger. Of course, the hotfix system takes forever to respond, you actually have to wait for a live person to respond, so I found the SDHC card hotfix online and that was that! Now my computer recognizes my 4GB SD card no problem. Yay!

Xmas 2007 is over! Whew. It was not too bad, though I was worried all day about the money situation I posted about a couple of days ago. I got to eat a little more than my diet normally allows, but today my wife is back to being strict and I only got to eat one mini peanut butter cup from all the treats I got yesterday! She did make a delicious dinner tonight though, beans in peanut satay sauce and veggie burgers with ajvar spread.

I think the coolest present I got yesterday was the TV Ears system. When we watched Tin Man over at my in-laws’ house a few weeks ago, I couldn’t hear the dialogue at a volume my wife was comfortable with. Their HDTV doesn’t do captions properly, so my usual way of keeping up wasn’t an option. Fortunately my father-in-law has a massive A/V system, and he was able to wire up some headphones and I could listen that way. They were big and bulky though, and I lost outside sound because I couldn’t hear it over the TV sound in my ears. So my in-laws got me the TV Ears set, and now the TV volume at home can be at a comfortable level for A and I can still hear it! Plus the TV Ears allow outside sound too, so it’s a great solution overall.

I’m a little unsettled by a recent post over at gBlog…if you go look, you’ll see what I mean. It’s right after one of my posts, currently on the front page. It makes me all squirmy and I want to respond somehow but I don’t know what to say.

Does anybody remember the “create a card” machines that used to be in greeting card shops? I remember one of these from when I was a kid, because the store in the mall where I lived had one. It was a device that was about the size of an arcade game, maybe a little larger. On the top there was a touch screen where you chose the style of card you wanted and punched in the name of the person it was for, your own name, etc. They had all different kinds of cards - birthday (you typed in the age), Valentine’s, congratulations, thank you, etc. Once you had finished designing your card, you hit “Print” and then you got to watch your card being printed through a window below the touch screen. The printing worked kind of like a pet tag engraver, if you’ve ever seen one of those. The machine would go to the right side, get a colored pen, and go back to the card surface and rapidly color everything in the card that was that color. Then it would go back to the right, get another colored pen, go back to the center, and do that color. I wish I could remember what the name of it was, because I’m having a hard time finding any information about it! Does anybody else remember these?

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I used to have a 1GB SD card, a 256MB SD card, and a 1GB mini SD card with an adapter. The first two were broken (I think by the CatCam, though don’t ask me how) and they won’t take pictures or format or anything. The mini got lost, I have no idea where it is. My Dell Inspiron 1501 has an SD card slot built in, and it accepted all three of these cards before they broke/got lost.

So I went to Microcenter the other day, and they only had a 2GB mini which was more than I wanted, but I bought a 4GB Kingston SDHC card for $30. It works in my camera just fine - the camera says right on it that it handles SDHC - but I’ve just discovered that it doesn’t work in my computer’s card slot. It’s supposed to, other people have gotten other SDHC cards working in their Inspiron 1501 laptops, but this one doesn’t work in mine. I can get pictures off using the good ol’ cable, but that SD slot was awfully handy.

Well, hopefully when I get a 1GB mini card again, it will still work in my laptop. Otherwise I have an SD slot that I can’t do anything with, unless it works with the 1GB card I got as part of my new gBlog job…I bought the 4GB because I wanted more capacity, and A was going to put the 1GB card into her camera, and the 4GB works fine in the camera so I don’t plan to return it, but…

Yeah, hi. I’m a geek.

Here is a good site for tech bargains - they don’t sell things themselves, but rather they direct you to deals on other sites around the web. They update frequently and you can get updates via RSS, which means you’ll have no problem snapping up a limited-time bargain on a great new toy. Like travel websites, you can get an email newsletter with the hottest deals. I was extremely pleased by their Buy a Wii page, which monitors multiple online vendors and tells you who has a Wii in stock and who doesn’t! Of course right now only Wal-Mart has them in a package with extra controllers and games for almost $700, which isn’t exactly a deal! But anyway, they list rebates as well as coupons, so you have multiple ways to get a bargain. Their search function lets you search their site as well as eBay, which is nice because “real” vendors don’t always have prices to beat eBay. I think my favorite page would be their Amazon coupons page. Their site is updated all day and all night, the Amazon page has some that were posted at 5am! It can’t hurt to add TechBargains to your feed reader, can it?