[100727]
For the past couple weeks, the updates have been written fairly early, and automatically posted at 12AM, Monday. This post is probably no exception.
Pieces (for the strangest reason, I was about to type Starcrossed) has been moving along at a fairly steady pace. I don’t think I’m going to finish the entire thing in a month as I’d originally hoped, but I am on the eleventh page after just about three weeks. I’m doing like a page on the weekends, and then another page during the week. Either way, it should be done by the end of summer, and I should have enough pages to last (in posts) through like November or something.
I’d like to point out some references used… in d287/a31 the dining hall is based off of the dining hall in the Schwab residential complex at Stanford. In today’s comic, the room in which the characters are talking is based off of the 220 “flex lab” in Meyer Library. More such references on the way; any resemblance between real people and places is purely coincidental…
I finally got around to doing the “genuine, non-thin client Internet test” on the 200T, and got something like 44 minutes on 8% of battery… which is ridiculous because it’s about 9 hours, just like the thin-client test. I think at least for this machine, I need longer run times or I need to pay attention to significant figures. Either way that makes me pretty happy, though. When you’re in the 8 or 9 hour range, what difference is another hour or so?
Okay, today I’m writing about the Dell Aero.
It’s… a pretty generic smartphone (smart phone? – FF thinks smartphone isn’t a word) in the grand scheme of things. But I think I’m going to get one.
I’ve been using a pretty old-school Motorola SLVR L7 (I didn’t realize there were SLVRs other than the L7 until I just tried to look this up) for a while now and it’s pretty messed up by now. It still makes calls, but that’s about it. I suppose there are other functions that might work, but then they’re crappy enough that I wouldn’t use ‘em anyway.
The tape is actually there to hold the middle button in place. It broke off a long time ago.
Currently I usually carry this phone, in my pocket, and my PSP and camera (Sony DSC T7), in my backpack, just around. When I need 3G internet, I borrow my dad’s Droid Eris and tether it to some computer. Furthermore, I only use my PSP to play music and occasionally watch video. Phone and camera are obviously there to make calls and take photos.
What I want from a smart phone is to be able to consolidate all four of these devices into one. It needs to make calls, play music and video (conversions are okay – I need to do ‘em for the PSP anyway, and I don’t watch video on anything but a computer too often), take acceptable pictures (they don’t need to be super, just not crap), and let me get on the Internet. It turns out there’s actually a lot of phones that can do those four things, but there’s a couple additional requirements that just seem to be harder to fulfill…
Ideally, the battery should last at least two days on idle. Two days meaning 48 hours, not the morning of the first day to the evening of the second. This requirement pretty much just lets me keep using the phone for a second day if I forget to charge it on the first. As it stands, the SLVR can do this, but the battery is really starting to show heavy wear. Battery on the PSP and the DSC T7 are equally craptastic, though I don’t really have detailed info on any of this.
The camera needs a flash. Just because most phone pics turn out poorly due to the lack of light. Besides, I’m sure there’s some sort of flashlight application that can make use of this.
The last thing might be a non-issue soon. I want the USB connector to be mini not micro. I current have several devices (including phone, card reader (for the camera), and PSP) that all hook up to my computer(s) via mini USB connectors, so I usually just have a mini USB connector floating off my desktop at home or my E6400 dock at school. I don’t want to have yet another crappy cable going off these machines, nor do I want to carry yet another crappy cable when traveling…
Really, it’s just another case of consolidation, just like for the devices themselves.
Then again, if scrap my camera and PSP, I don’t think I’ll have a need for the card reader, and since the phone will be micro USB, I could go with just micro USB cables instead of the mini USB cables, and you get the point.
Okay, I didn’t actually get to the part about the Aero, but I don’t feel like writing anymore.
