Craig's Musings

This way cool digital camcorder is now pre-orderable from Amazon (is pre-orderable a word?) - although sadly it isn't available until March 15th. This bad-boy shoots HD video (1280x720p), has 10x optical zoom with image stabilization, and can even shoot 5.1MP digital stills while you are recording video. Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

It takes SD cards, and since there are 4gb SD cards out, it will in theory shoot 55 or so minutes of HD video. Sadly, all the literature talks about 2gb SD, and 2gb is the old DOS FAT 16 limit - and a number of cameras implemented FAT 16, including my Nikon D1-X. Hopefully since this camera is being shipped in 2006, it won't implement a 15+ year old file system, but you never know.

See the extended entry for the full specs...

Continue reading "Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1" »

Posted by Craig at 12:08 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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I just got my cool Think Outside Stowaway Universal Bluetooth Keyboard, and I love it. The MSRP is $150, but Amazon.com sells it for $91.

It folds up to a nice 5.5”H x 3.9”W x .5”D and weighs only 160 grams - it fits pretty nicely into a jacket pocket. It unfolds into a full sized 18mm spacing keyboard, and works great with Windows Mobile 5 (Windows Mobile 5 supports bluetooth HID proifle) .

T9 is great for a few sentences, but with this keyboard, my SP5m is now a full mobile email device when I need it to be. Plus it is great for mobile blogging - I used to do short little photo blogs, but I can now write a whole lot more in the same amount of time.

I've included the specs from the manufacturers site in the extended entry.

Continue reading "Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard" »

Posted by Craig at 9:22 AM | Permalink

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I received both my SP5m and GPSlim236 about a week and a half ago. I am blown away by both devices.

The GPSlim236 lasts for about 8 hours of constant usage (just tried it yesterday), and has a high-quality antenna - I can get signal with the device in my jean jacket pocket while in the car. It is a rockin' little device.

The SP5m is AWESOME! The QVGA screen is unbelievably clear - I can't go back to 220x176, I won’t. QVGA is the future.

HTC did a great job with the design. I was worried that the top tiny little set of navigation keys would be hard to use, but I don’t have any troubles.

The media controls are nice, and the built in speaker sounds pretty good. Windows Mobile 5 has Windows Media Player 10 Mobile which is a nice player, I have to say. I loaded up 125 songs on my miniSD, and now have my own “iPod Shuffle”. My big wish is that phone manufactures that wanted their devices to be used as MP3 players would add a standard 3.5mm plug for headphones.

Having WiFi is nice, too – with a 320x240 screen, it is almost a decent web surfing experience.

I have been working on running down the battery, but it looks like their specs of 5 hours of talk time are right – I can use my phone for hours, including using it as a navigation solution, without a problem. More on navigation in my next blog!

Posted by Craig at 7:30 PM | Permalink

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I just ordered this bad ass little gadget off of eBay - it is a bluetooth GPS receiver. But no ordinary bluetooth GPS receiver: with 9 hours of battery life, bluetooth & USB, less than 2 ounces - it fell immediately into my "must have tiny gadget" category (on, and as an added bonus, it can perform 60,000 feet high, moving 700 knots, while pulling up to 4Gs - if I wanted to use my Holux + Sony T laptop to get driving directions while renting a Soviet MIG fighter jet, say).

I discovered it while trolling the internet for how to GPS tag my digital photos. Sadly, things aren't there yet, although I could use this device (using a USB-to-RS232 cable) with my Nikon D1-X, but the Canon website doesn't even have a MATCH for GPS - so no hope of a bluetooth enabled Digital Elph in the nearterm, I guess. Which sucks - I would definitely carry the Holux with me everywhere, and then I would have a permanent geocoding of all the pictures I took.

Hello, it's 2005, what the heck is wrong with all these camera folks - bluetooth & NMEA GPS protocol support, people, let's get to it!

I stole the specs from the eBay merchant's page and reformatted them so I could read them, they are in the full body of the entry...

Continue reading "Holux GR 236 GPS" »

Posted by Craig at 6:00 PM | Permalink

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