Lotusblog

In a previous post , I wrote about “devolution”, and how cell phones seem to be getting bigger and bigger every year. However, it seems that in the world of tech, not all species are necessarily “devolving”. Case in point; Apple’s new hardware. There’s a MacMini, a smart reinterpretation of the Cube at a sensible price, there’s a portable music player which is small and light enough for people like me who are sick of carrying devices, and it’s cheap.

Now, how can I raise the cash to buy some of these toys?

For some reason we are raised to believe that evolution of machines means that they get faster, cheaper and smaller.

Devolution?

So why are mobile telephones getting bigger? That’s my T68i on the left (about 18 months old) and a brand new (less than one month old) Motorola phone on the right.

Is the consumer demanding bigger ‘phones?
Cos I certainly am not. I want to reduce the amount of electronics I pack onto my body each day.

(addendum: these are GSM phones available in the UK and other GSM-compatible regions)

I was so moved I decided to make a new category.

Anyway, I called a friend (overseas) earlier today, and as always, spent the time before and after the call looking for updated IP Telephony software. It turns out that my telephony provider (Nikotel ) did in fact have a new version of software. But they had so much more than that.

They had this:

Technolust

You can read about it here , but basically it is a phone handset that looks for W-LANs so that it can connect to the internet to conduct calls. I’ll say that again, it automatically detects Wi-Fi hot-spots, and then when you make a call, you are using that network to wirelessly send and receive your voice packets. Did I say for free? And combined with the US telephone number that Nikotel will give you, this means that people can call you anywhere in the world, assuming of course that you’re within a 100 metres of Wi-Fi, on your Californian telephone number.

So that got my pulse going like it was no one’s business. But I was in for a bigger shock, when I came across this:

Technolust Redux

You can some beautiful pictures of it here , and read more about it, but basically, apart from being one of the coolest looking pieces of industrial design on the planet, it’s your standard GSM mobile phone with Wi-Fi built in.
Imagine this… you’re at home. You have a wireless network (who doesn’t?) and you call your buddy. The phone automatically uses Wi-Fi since it is available, and you’re happy, because it’s free. Buddy is telling you about the plot of Caligula and he’s taking a really long time and you have to be on a train in 10 minutes, but that’s OK, because you leave the house and walk to the elevator and just when the phone loses the the Wi-Fi signal from your house it automatically switches over to the GSM network. Seamlessly.

Some things are just so fresh and cool, yet so darn simple that kick yourself you didn’t think of it first but are nonetheless ecstatic that somebody did at least think about it.
This is one of those things.

An old-fashioned rotary-dial telephone handset, connected to your mobile phone.

Brilliant.

Fuck fuck fuck.
I can’t believe it…my Palm has gone all weird again. I powered it up today and all my data was gone. It was back in its factory default state. So I tried to restore from my backup. But then on the Tungsten, I couldn’t do anything because I was “missing localization files”.

Whatever.

I don’t need this at the moment. I am incredibly busy.

I was cursing iBlog because it makes it such a pain to blog from two computers. My desktop (naturally) stays at home, while my iBook goes with me where ever I may be (usually it’s work!). I was wondering how to solve the problem when I thought about BlogSnaps…I remember it having been mentioned, but didn’t really know what it did. So I just signed up and now here I am, writing a test entry from a web browser. The blog-syncing and email blogging features are two things that I am particularly interested in.

Stay tuned.

So my head feels like jelly, it’s too late for me to go to the gym, my eyes are screaming and it may all be in vain. Maybe.
The top page (where this site is being hosted) has finally been cleaned up and I feel that I made some CSS progress. But trying to customise the templates and CSS in the iBlog site is no piece of cake. Gosh, there’s just so much to cope with. Maybe a banana smoothie will make things better.