Tech Talk
My new iPaq 6515 Personal PC/phone fucking rocks. It runs Windows, is made by HP (just like my home computer), and has MS Office and Windows Media Player built in. It can do anything my old PDA, Phone, and iPod can do, plus a shitload more. I write every day on the mini keyboard, send e-mail, manage all my appointments and adresses, and fry my enemies’ asses with the phaser. The only downside is that it has dick for storage space. Like 12MB built in.
But it accepts memory cards, so I took the 512MB SD card from my old phone and bought a 1GB Mini SD as well, and now have 1.5GB for music and video. Not a lot compared to my 20GB iPod, I grant, but still a considerable amount of content. Certainly enough to get you through a week or so without hearing the same thing twice.
I also just discovered that I can sync it to playlists in Windows Media Player on my PC, and now I have a wide selection of music, videos, and, of course, porn, to listen to/watch.
The only drawback is that I am now forced to actively maintain TWO media players, WMP and iTunes, in order to manage content to my two devices. I also can’t use any of the iTunes videos I’ve bought for Dani’s iPod video, because the software is proprietary. I think you can convert them with Quicktime Pro, but I’m not sure. I need to do the research one day.
Sometimes I wish Microsoft would just defeat Apple and have a monopoly. It would lead to corruption and abuse, but at least everything would be compatible. Barring a monopoly, the two companies could, at the very least, work together a little better to serve their end-users. The pie is big enough for everyone to have a slice. This war is a perfect illustration of the limitations of capitalism. Non-compatible software, like the US’ rejection of the metric system, holds us all back.
There isn’t even really a way to commit to one or the other. Nothing Microsoft offers has the storage space of the iPod, nor the audio/video selection of iTunes. But 99% of the office computers in the world are PC, so having a Mac at home would just cause problems for me at work, and vice versa. Plus, Macs suck in general. One button mice? Hate ’em.
Feh.
Anyway, I love my phone. I think it needs a name. I named my new PC Celestia, which is the home of Celladune, the goddess of Love in my series of Aris novels. (I named her Celladune because there was once a random study of the English language that said the most beautiful sounding words were “cellar door”.)
I could name the iPaq Celladune, I guess, since she lives in Celestia when synching. Or Tara, who is the most prominent priestess of Celladune in my books, since the phone drinks of Celestia’s power and then goes out in the world to share it. I can’t decide.
But whatever. No one cares about shit like that but me.
There’s a new version of the iPaq coming out any day now with Windows Mobile 5, which is supposedly way better than 3 point whatever, which is what I have. It’s frustrating, because there’s no way to upgrade. But if you’re tempted to buy an iPaq after reading this, make sure yours runs 5.0. In the meantime, though, I ain’t got any complaints.
Well, other than stuff I listed above.
Oh, and about the rest of the world. That place is fucked.