Got that new mobile phone lust. Some friends at home (Mick McG, and Murph) had Nokia n73 phones. They seemed OK, when I played with them. But, looking at the specs, feature list, and the pretty decent photographs it takes has given me that new phone lust:

Nokia’s N73 Home Page

Nokia N73 Review

All this thing is missing is Wifi support for Web surfing off the phone company’s network. The iPhone looks really cool too, actually cooler, except here in the US you need to sign up with ATT, whom used to be ATT Wireless.

I had an ATT Wireless phone for 2 weeks when I got my first mobile phone here in the US, a Siemen S45 I think. But the quality of the service wasn’t that good, ATT was in the middle of changing their network from CDMA or TDMA to GSM. I had 28 days to return the phone and cancel the service, so I brought the phone back and signed up with T-mobile who allowed internation text messaging and at the time ATT didn’t. For the next SIX months I got bills from ATT claiming I still had service and had to pay. Every time I phoned their Customer Service, whom were always really, really nice, it took 30 to 45 minutes on hold to get to a human. This is why:

ATT System Upgrade goes haywire

Eventually, ATT Wireless got bought by Cingular, whom got bought by ATT. ATT & ATT Wireless were 2 seperate companies, so ATT renamed Cingular ATT Wireless.

Back to the iPhone, neat piece of technology, but I cannot imagine that Cingular were able to digest ATT properly and get their systems meshed and working properly and I doubt if the new ATT Wireless is much better. I’d wait a few years before using ATT Wireless.

Now if I could get an unlocked iPhone and use it with T-Mobile I’d be tempted, but I think to get full use of the iPhone’s phone feature it would need to be an Apple approved company. Articles I’ve read about the iPhone in Europe claim that European phone companies are or were balking at it because the iPhone requires Apple servers or technology embedded in the phone company’s network or systems for it the work as advertised which means it’s breaks the standard for GSM phone.

And, how do you keep the iPhone from getting all scratched to shit like my first iPod? My first iPod was a 3G 20GB, I had it for a week and kept it in the Apple supplied carrying case, and it got all scratched to fecking shite.

Yup, Firefox 2’s tabs annoy me a bit, if you’ve too many open you can’t see them all. Here’s how you go back to the old Firefox 1.x behaviour:

http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2007/04/05/firefox_20_tabs_gone_wrong/

I met Aza, who wrote the above article, at the Ajaxian Conference here in Boston late last year. Nice lad, very smart, interesting ideas, and their product Enso Launcher is a interesting concept. His presentation at the Ajaxian conference really highlighted how you can use the keyboard, via Enso, to do just about everything on the desktop in an easy human thinkable way. It’s too bad they don’t have a version of Linux, I think the type of users who use Linux could really avail and use and promote it.

Finally made a decison and settled on the Panasonic DMC-TZ3 and ordered it from NewEgg.com. Went with the Silver Model as it is $30 cheaper than the Black Model. Other cameras I’d consider were the Canon G7 and the Ricoh R6. The Canon beside various auto-modes also allows almost complete manual control, but is almost $200 more. The Ricoh R6 is comparable to the Panasonic, but is only available from one vendor in North America (it’s widely available in Europe & Japan), and is about $70 more than the Panasonic.

A review of the Panasonic DMC-TZ3:
http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/panasonic/dmc_tz3-review/

And a comparison with the Canon G7 that I had also considered: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1033&thread=22633538

The Canon G7 is $500 vs ~$300 for the TZ3. Looks like the Panasonic takes comparable pictures, whereas the Canon allows one to use more, much more manual settings, looks really cool, is a bit bigger …