tech: May 2003 Archives

My trusty Ericsson T39 finally bit the dust the other day, searching in vain for a signal without ever finding one. Looks like its time for an upgrade, but navigating the confusing world of service plans, phones and carriers is enough to confuse even me, who's had a cell phone since high school. You are in a twisty maze of rebates, all alike.

Throw into the mix the fact I'm moving to Seattle in late August, and that I want a phone that is not SIM-locked (restricted to one carrier), and that the company with the best prices on new phones (T-Mobile {née VoiceStream}) refused to deal with me because I'm a current customer and thus not a new SSN for their quota.

I finally went ahead and ordered the Nokia 3650 through ATT Wireless -- after years of loyalty to a Swedish phone, I'm Finnished. I can't find anything in SonyEricsson's current lineup for $150 which has

• GPRS
• HSCSD
• Tri-Band GSM (for use in Europe and Asia)
• IrDA Infrared
• Bluetooth
• VGA-quality camera
• large color screen
• mystifying rotary button layout

I actually played around with a 3650 at NAB, when I was looking into video on cell phones.

I'm under no illusion that 90% of the features will be useful on this phone -- certainly a RealVideo player on a cell phone, at today's GPRS data rates, is a ticket to nothing other than penury -- but a bigger screen is nice for reading CNN's and the BBC's WAP sites. Now to rig up a perl script to automatically post pictures taken with the built-in camera to this blog...

An interesting development: the first Compact Flash CardBus adaptor I've seen. Everything I've seen so far uses the older PCMCIA bus. PCMCIA (later renamed PC Card after too many jokes about People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms) is an implementation of the 16-bit ISA expansion bus in a small form factor. CardBus is more akin to the 32-bit PCI expansion bus, so it should be significantly faster.

Of course, the limiting factor with most CF cards is probably the slow speed of the Flash RAM, but with newer 32x/40x cards, as well as IBM MicroDrives, this could well speed the transmission of the 6- and 11-megapixel images generated from newer digital cameras.

The new Canon digital camera shipped today, so I should hopefully have it by Tuesday. Turns out a bunch of my co-workers shoot with SLR's which use Canon lens mounts, so I may try out a few of their lenses before I pull the trigger one a new one myself.

The leading contender right now is a 28-135mm IS USM lens from Canon. (Due to the 1.6 focal length multiplier in the 10D, this ends up being something more like a 45-216mm). Although a fixed, prime lens would be a lot cheaper, I see a lots of folks raving about the Image Stabilization feature helping them catch shots they'd otherwise miss in the field when they're without a tripod.