I have always liked teamwork. OK...maybe not always. As a younger man, I was an extreme introvert...did not like team sports at all. So I played singles tennis for a sport, and ran track for a brief time. I did not want the burden of either having to manage or interact with other team mates, or having to live up to someone else's expectations. I competed for me and only me.

As a young adult, that started to shift. The enjoyment of winning a competition with a team was exhilarating, more so when I felt that I had positively contributed. Football, basketball, doubles tennis, ultimate Frisbee...I never turned down an invitation to do something on the playing field. This led to an even more voracious appetite for working with and managing teams in the workplace, hence my current employ as a project team lead.

As a gamer, this enjoyment has persisted. Nothing is more rewarding in gameplay than participating in a team-based competition, whether against other (human) players or computer-controlled AI, and working closely together to succeed. My first real enjoyment came with games of Rogue Spear played on my home LAN against computer controlled tangoes with ****ates from the training school. Once I experienced the joy of Xbox Live at a friend's house and then proceeded to get my own subscription, I was in an environment that I doubt I will leave for some time.

My time on XBL playing team-based games has been enjoyable, and my excitement at coming titles that will bring more of the same is palpable. As I prep for the holiday season, I have begun a cursory review of both the titles that have brought the most enjoyable team-play for me to date, as well as the impending releases that look to hook me with this same essence.

First and foremost has been my time spent in Sega's game of mechanized combat, Chromehounds. As a gear-head and amateurish engineer, I was first attracted to the game by the ability to construct and design Hounds of your own design. I spent hours in the garage balancing power supply, heat dissipation, mobility, defensive plating, and mobility. As much fun as that was, it paled in comparison to participating and running my online squad. The Undying CTU played the game from its release until November, topping out at 14 members, when the holiday titles of 2006 attracted more of our attention. But the four months of gameplay, establishing standardized and situational tactics, team communications, and Hound loadouts was a blast. And we had a load of fun.

An almost imperceptible gap lies between Chromehounds and Project Gotham Racing 3 Cat-and-Mouse. So intense were some of my friends and I about this mode of gameplay that we organized our own C&M tournament before the official patch came out that supported it within PGR3. We had teams, ladders, eliminations, an entire rule-set that dealt with almost every imaginable contingency. The racing gameplay was very fluid and analogous to a game of hockey or hoops, with players dropping back from wolf tactics against the other team's mouse to defender roles if their mouse was lagging in the rear. Good teams chatted up the status of each of their players and their location on the track, and better players made sacrifices to keep other teammates in the game rather than pursue personal glory. As sharp as the racing experience was in PGR3 when you got into a room full of honorable racers who would not pit-maneuver you or bump-draft you into a wall, Cat-and-Mouse was the pinnacle of interacting with friends in-game. There were many sessions until 2 AM, and much sleep was lost.

Lagging not so far behind is Rainbow Six Vegas 2. With the re-spawns that are now available that were not in the first Vegas iteration, teammate's feel like they are participating much more in pursuing the end-goal. In the first Vegas, if you got wiped out, you just hung out like a nugget, your disembodied voice offering little more than distraction to your remaining teammates, and you honestly just hoped that they would get capped soon so you could get back into the action. The maps are much more challenging, with dozens of fatal funnels of fire presented at multiple corners, and AI terrorists attack from multiple points of elevation. Even in Terrorist Hunt, it takes a team that is not just running around every corner blindly firing like Han Solo in order to survive and do well. I have only been playing for a month or so, but the three members of my friends list who are really into it and I have been having a blast.

Of all the multi-player teamwork experiences that I am looking forward to this holiday season is Rock Band 2. I got in apparently too late on the Rock Band phenomenon and now the trendy appeal of it has lessened. There have been fewer and fewer Rock Band parties, and the payback in on-line multiplayer is diminished by the fact hat you can not have a persistent band career; only set-play is allowed. RB2 promises to bring the Rock Band Tour mode into online play, which means being able to get on the tour bus with friends in neighboring towns and back home without having to leave the comfort of my game room. Rock Band has that allure that I have not experienced since being in the band back in high-school, where you feel like missing a note is letting your fellow band members down.

The original Red Faction is one of the few games that I have actually finished, so I am a little partial to the franchise, although I skipped the second installment due to its poor reviews and departure from the original storyline. I am looking forward to the 3rd episode though, due primarily to the dynamically spawning battlefield events that are wrapped into the multi-player package; that and the thought of experiencing destructible environments with some of my more destructive friends. I expect there will be few buildings left standing, or much of anything else for that matter, when those guys party up. Hopefully the title will keep the full head of development steam that it has apparently gathered, and come across the finish line bringing all of the final polish that its current potential appears to be capable of achieving.

My relationship with Gears of War died a pretty quick death. It is one of those titles that bring the swearing, trash-talking, adolescent-minded denizens that make up a large contingent of the global Xbox Live membership rushing to its game lobbies. That scorned relationship however, has been somewhat repaired by the Wednesday-night sessions with Casual Adult Gamers (CAG). It is a great bunch of guys and girls and playing in our private lobbies offers some refuge from the type of behavior that none of us feel like putting up with after we clear hump-day in cubicle-land. Just about everyone in that core group is planning on shifting to Gears 2 almost immediately upon its release, so COG versus Locust will again be the name of the game. Connectivity is sucking out here in Oakland, so I am unable to do a lot of research, but I believe that I heard that GoW2 will also have multiplayer co-op, beyond the two-player limit in that mode that was imposed in the first version. OK...EDGE connection via my wireless modem is not as bad as I thought...right now, anyway. Confirmed, GoW2 will have a 5-player co-op mode. While not based on the campaign, the mode will offer up to 5 players the ability to participate in a frag-and-chainsaw fest against ever increasing numbers of Locusts which attack in waves.

Team-play rocks. In truth, I would much rather play with a bunch of friends against enemy AI rather than against other people. The cheesy tactics, exploits, and glitches that human opponents employ is removed, and the trash-talking between rounds goes away. Whichever modes these three titles offer, I am looking forward to some well-deserved time off this last quarter of the year. A few decent team-based titles to while some of that time away with will not go unappreciated.

Game-on, and take care.
- Vr/G.

It had to happen. Two phones go into the ring, one comes out.

Let's get it started!!

A lot of these differences are based on the variance seen in the Operating Systems. I am not going to differentiate those items. I am also only going to discuss the factors here that make a difference to me. So for factors like size or form-factor (a lot of people complain about the Tilt's bulk, but I do not care how big my workday phone is), where the issue does not concern me one way or the other, it will go unmentioned. Have at it!!!

5 Interface surfaces - as mentioned earlier today, the Tilt offers you several different ways to input data. The iPhone? Just one.

Keyboard - if you make an error on the iPhone, you'll be going back to either entirely re-enter the entry, or start over with a new entry, or backspace over your error. Although I will admit that it is easier to type in portrait mode (iPhone) than in landscape mode (the only way to type on the Tilt's slide-out keyboard, although you have the option of hand-writing recognition to moderately compensate). On the Tilt, you can use your stylus to select text right away by drag-selecting your selection, and then choosing to cut, paste, or edit that string...just like in any desktop operating system.

Customizable Desktop - the Tilt's desktop is a lot more customizable than the iPhone's. While it was cool when Apple introduced the abilit to have multiple pages in your dashboard and move your widgets around, you still can not have anything other than a dashboard with a bunch of square widgets placed differently. With the Tilt, there are several Today-screen customizations you can select from. Plus all of the free themes available on the 'net. While the system is not that much more open than the iPhone's, it is one that I prefer.

Connectivity SA - it is pretty easy to tell the status of your connection on the iPhone, both with BlueTooth and cellular. Not so with the Tilt. It may just be that I do not understand the icons just yet, but as far as I can tell, there is no way that you can know whether or not you have lost your Bluetooth connection to your headset. You can pull down the health of the current Bluetooth transmitter, which is lumped in with all of the other wireless connection data (cellular and Wi-Fi) in a bubble available as a pop-up off the top ribbon bar. The bubble does not really tell you whether or not a device is actually connected, though. I will say that I have not yet lost my connection to the headset. I have been forcing myself to push the I believe button and initiate calls on the Tilt without checking the connection and in each case audio has come through the earpiece.

Email Attachments - for whatever reason, the Tilt seems to handle email attachments a lot better. First in that they do not take all day to download, even when I am only connected via Edge. I tried downloading an email with the photos from the canoe trip on the iPhone both before and after I had its service disconnected. Pulling the file down over EDGE was basically impossible. It did complete over Wi-Fi. While the email came down, the attachment icons were unpopulated; they were just squares that said "IMG-1560.jpg". I tapped on them to then download each photo individually (there is no automated way to download all attachments in an email that I could find on the iPhone) to start them downloading. In two days of trying, I was never able to get them to download. When I sent them to the Tilt, they all downloaded, were viewable, and I could even play the two videos that I had shot off that camera card. Every single one of them (attachments) actually opens. And they can all be saved. [I can also copy and paste, or save image content from the internet, which the iPhone does not let you do]. While you can open some number of attachments on the iPhone, Apple does not allow you to save them anywhere, which pulls any comment on the advantages of the iPhone's huge memory capacity in comparison to the Tilt's into the realm of questionable validity. I think I prefer to pay to buy aftermarket memory cards that I can store anything I want to on.

Other Comments:

I found out that there are two different Opera browsers for small devices: Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. The Mobile variant is the one you have to pay for. Mini is free. While you can not pinch and swipe like you can on the iPhone, there is a zoom button, and the browser loads pages much faster than Safari, even on Edge. You can open new windows, just like you can in Safari, and when you go back to a previous Window, you can read the page as it is. It does not reload like Safari does unless you need to tell it to.

There would be a lot of people who would bring up the iPhone's Google-Powered Map application as an advantage. But there is Google Maps for the Tilt, too, and it does interface and use the Tilt's GPS antenna. More importantly, Windows Live Search (WLS), a free donload, also uses the GPS to provide the same search nearby, route to/from here, and location triangulation features that Maps does. It has Weather and the wweather automatically pulls from your current GPS location, vice the iPhone's weather app which requires you to manually enter the desired weather location, although it has an advantage in being able to tab several locations for the weather pull. To get multiple weather locations on the Tilt's Windows Live Search, you have to launch the browser link to the actual Weather website.

The coolest thing about WLS? I stumbled across it yesterday while driving in Oakland. I had a route programmed in from the Homewood Suites in the Embarcadero, where I had a 5pm meeting, and my actual hotel in Berkeley. I made a wrong turn. I told the app to center on GPS, and then re-route from here. When I started moving again, the app commenced tracking my car (I could actually see myself moving) and pinged me with audible updates when I was approaching my next turn. Awesome!!! I never got a chance to check out the iPhone 3G's new Maps functionality since that model also has a GPS receiver (my 1st generation iPhone did not). There is a chance that its functionality is just as cool.

I may not have specifically mentioned it, but the Tilt's version of WMDC allows syncing with Microsoft Outlook Notes, which was a instigator to my eventual move to trade it with the Motorola Q I originally bought to replace the iPhone.

My end-state evaluation is this: the iPhone is not a smart phone, and perhaps trying to employ it as such caused me to set different expectations than I should have had. Look it up on any tech site, and you will not find it grouped with the other smart phones. It will be listed as an MP3 phone, Video phone, or Multimedia or media phone. The same is true even on the AT&T site, which does not group the iPhone with the Motorola Q or the Tilt, or the Blackberry Line of phones. I tried tracking down how people are using it [the iPhone] in the corporate world and their thoughts on it, but no joy, other than people complaining about its limited security features.

The things that my iPhone does well are not things that I need it to do well every day. I had used the iPod functionality maybe four times. My usage of it was hampered by the fact that play automatically resumes if it was interrupted by a phone call, which in my case sometimes resulted in explicit lyrics being blared out in the office before I could get my headphones back in. It is a great media player and specifically a great video player. I used it on the flight to watch some of my iTunes episodes of Rosewell. Its display is better than my iPod's for watching video, and I have always disliked using up cell phone battery power for media apps, especially watching video. For the time being, I am keeping the phone, vice selling it to someone on eBay who wants it so that they can jailbreak it. It will be used as an iPod Touch for viewing movies, and obtaining web content via Wi-Fi.

While I am staying on my Sony Ericsson w580i Walkman cell as my secondary, weekend phone for right now, it is not outside the realm of possibility that I will eventually roll my family plan to the Tilt and the iPhone at the turn of the year. I want some time to capture the nicety of being able to use the microSD cards that are common to both the Tilt and the 580i for dual-use of files across the two phones, especially MP3s and pictures. But having both the Tilt and the iPhone up and with service would allow me some more in-depth time comparing and contrasting their capabilities head-to-head on a day-to-day basis.

So far I am very happy with the Tilt. Battery life is bad, or at least not optimal. But so is the iPhone's. And with the Tilt, I can always carry a spare battery and pop it in, something the iPhone can not do. Plus, the battery meter in the Tilt is a percentage indicator, not a graphic with no number tied to it that does not establish what the battery life remaining really is. A downside I discovered in practical use yesterday is that, when using the GPS applications on the Tilt, I have to:

a. set the screen brightness much higher to be able to see the screen in the sunlight with my sunglasses on, further draining battery power

b. set the phone to never go to sleep or turn off the display so I do not have to fumble with buttons to turn the screen back on while I am driving if I do not look at the directions for some time, again, further draining battery power

Another minor issue is that I seem to be faster setting up my calendar in Outlook than I am in OS X. Of course, all of the applications for PIM sync on my Toshiba are embedded in one place, Outllook. Whereas on the MacBook, you have iCal, Address Book, and Mail. Not as slick a package. And I never did like the very lightly, pastel-like color patterns of Excel in OS X. It makes it difficult to see what cell you are working in, and I use a few Excel files to copy and paste stuff out of into PIM files.

I am not going on record as saying that the iPhone is a bad product. It can not be, because I sang its praises both here and elsewhere for several months. It was so good that I was willing to put up with some of the aforementioned issues for several months. But what I will say is that everyone needs to consider all of the alternatives and not just make a 2-year cell-phone contract based on the trend of popular opinion. Had I opened my mind to considering other options rather than thinking of the iPhone as the automatic, sole-source for my smart-phone replacement back in January, I may never have gotten here.

Until next time, take care.

- Vr/GulliverJR.

This topic is simple. What do I Like and What do I dislike about the Tilt? These are my high-level thoughts after the first few days of using the Tilt.

Dislike - Windows Mobile Device Control (WMDC; the sync app for Windows Mobile OS devices for Windows Vista). There is no option to be prompted as to what to do in the event of a device/laptop PIM conflict. What does that mean? It means that if a conflict is detected between a file on the phone and the same titled file on the PC, I have to either pre-configure the app to either write over the phone's version, or overwrite the desktop version. On top of that, you can not change any of the core options in WMDC unless the device is connected and Windows recognizes it. So when I plug the phone in, I have to try and hurry and catch the machine before it starts the sync process if I want to overwrite a different partner than I entered the last time I synced.

Like - with a MicroSD card installed, you can drag-and-drop files from wherever your laptop can access the files (the laptop's hard drive, a USB stick, a shared drive from another PC on the network, etc.). Actually, you can do this without the card, dragging the file directly to the phone's memory, but of course the card expands your total available storage capacity.

Like - Interface Surfaces - the Tilt has a scroll-wheel, 1 button on the left hand side, one on the right-hand side in addition to the Power button, and seven in the lower front-face cluster, all of which can be configured to whatever fits the individual user. Add that there is touch-screen input via an included stylus (not that it's required. You're finger, or a different stylus, works just fine), as well as handwriting recognition.

Like - the device is skinnable. You can download PocketPC themes that alter your background.

Dislike - no hard-mounted number keys. I do not like that there are no hard-mounted keys in portrait mode that allow you to dial a number. There are just soft keys on the device's display, which are a good deal smaller than the pads of my fingertips, especially my thumb. There are number keys on the slide-out keyboard, but I do not normally make calls with the phone in landscape view.

Like - the device has Microsoft Office Mobile pre-installed, as well as Adobe Light Edition. Both of which allow me to open forms I get sent as attachments, and the former allows me to edit them, or even create new documents directly on the phone. The suite includes Microsoft OneNote, one of my favorite apps when using a TabletPC platform. I have not had a chance to try out OneNote on the Tilt yet. I emailed myself my Americna Express travel itinerary, which we receive as PDF documents. The document opened, and was fully zoomable so that I could actually read it. No more need to print out my itinerary, and it is immediately accessible from the phone when I am on the go and traipsing about airports. I worked on blog entries in MS Word 2003 on my GatewayFX on the plane trips yesterday. Just before boarding, I would send the updated document to my email address, do a send/receive on the phone to get a copy off my email account, and then could open the Word attachment on the plane from the phone and work on it there.

Those are the primary highlights for now. Stay tuned for the Tilt vs the iPhone - who gets the beatdown.

Until then, take care.

- Vr/GulliverJR.

And AT&T cut me a deal; they took the phone and all of the accessories, swapped them out for the new phone and corresponding accessories, only charging me for the new-to-new difference that existed in the retail phone prices. Sweet. I won't pit the phones in a head-to-head battle right now. I will focus on the strengths of the phone itself, the things it does well that I know I like because I have actually already used them. Where and when appropriate, I will mention spots that would have fallen short on either the iPone or the Motorola Q. Those are up next post.

Until then, take care.

- Vr/GulliverJR.

It was a long, busy weekend. Not that I got out and did that much. I did a lot out today...a 2.6 mile hike at the Hardware River Wildlife Management Area followed by Shoulders and Biceps at Gold's Gym. Most of the weekend was spent indoors, though, including my day off Friday. Indoors both at home, and at the AT&T store, that is.

Thursday evening, I decided that I had had it with my iPhone. Since I bought it in January, I have had a trend of recurring problems, primarily centered on performance. Call stability and Bluetooth audio have been spotty at best; the iPhone needs to be on the same side of my body as the headset or I start to get static, and that is with two different headsets.. When I was seeing a girl from the beltway earlier this year, in a 2 hour conversation I would have to call her back anywhere from 4 to 8 times, to say nothing of the frequency of dropped calls on the road. I dropped calls in the plant at work quite frequently. Remember that my iPhone was the first generation, not the newer model that came out this summer and has been plagued by 3G connectivity issues.

In addition to that, the thing that really made me cranky was the frequent freezing in my primary PIM apps. Mail, contacts, the Calendar, and Notes, all of which I rely on frequently in my personal life, to say nothing about work. The most frequent culprit was contacts. A lot of the time, when I went into my contacts list, it would hang up, and I would be unable to scroll for several seconds, I would say the norm, when it occurred, was around 20 to 30 seconds. At its worst (I had a one minute lockout set as an option) it would take so long that the auto-lock would kick in. After I put my pass code on when I started keeping my checkbook on the phone, that would mean that I had to re-enter the pass code.

Any idea how cranky this made me when I was trying to make a phone call in the car from my contacts list? With a three week trip coming up tomorrow, I had no patience to deal with it on the road. And I do not think it was the performance affliction that hit people with the 2.0 firmware update, as I have had these issues since I got the phone.

There is a halo effect with the iPhone. One that affects most people and one that I admit I bought into. There are a lot of non-day-to-day things that the iPhone does well [...and web-surfing is not one of them. Yes, Safari renders a web-page in all of its stock HTML glory, but it takes a long time to render, and when it does, and then crashes back to the dashboard, as it does frequently, you have to start all over again. Yes, you can have multiple tabs open, but whenever you move back to a tab you have moved off of, Safari re-loads the page]. And because it does these things well, I tended to give it a by on all of the things it did not do well. Now, there are a ton of things that the iPhone can not do at all (cut-and-paste? Well, maybe that is coming), but I knew those things going into to it, so my choice to jump off the iPhone bandwagon was not an effort to go out and capture more features. I just wanted the things I rely on heavily everyday to work well...most of the time, if not all of the time.

I will get back to the things I am crankier about now in hindsight with regards to the iPhone when I compare it to what I bought to replace it, which will develop later in this series of posts. First, I want to walk through making the choice, since many people are on the fence about going with a smart phone and my tribulations will cover at least the offerings from AT&T.

So let's skip to the part where I have already decided that the iPhone has to go. With the problems that I had with the first-gen model, I was not willing to roll my dice on the updated one as one of the options; at least I wasn't Thursday night as I waded through the options on the AT&T website. I definitely wanted to be back on a smart phone, although through some of my meandering choices I considered the LG Vu and leaving the smart phone world entirely. I did not want to go with a Blackberry. Part of my interest in tech is in trying new things, even when it may not work out so well. Plus, they issue Blackberry's at work. I am on the 8800 now, also from AT&T, and do not like it. I could have gone with the new Curve model, but they are issuing those at work, so there was no point. I didn't want to spend my on money on a personal phone that mirrored what I could get at work. When I first got here and bought the 8700c, that was because they were not issuing those at work yet. I had mine about 6 months before anyone else did, so it had some period of uniqueness. And there is no updated version out beyond the 8800-series or Curve series, and even if there was, again, I saw no point in having two BB's.

My choices came down to four phones:

1. the Motorola Q (TM) Global
2. the Samsung BlackJack II
3. the Blackberry Pearl 8110
4. the AT&T Tilt

Let's go through the elimination:

Blackberry Pearl 8110 - I know I said that I did not want to consider going double-down on Blackberry's. But in my first delve into the smart phone era, I did exactly that. I had the old black-model for work, and then I had the old 7100-series (the predecessor to the Pearl, the first BB with a slimmer form-factor and half-keyboard) for my personal use. I was happy on the 7100, it did things well, and while it took me a long time to wean myself off of handwriting recognition on the PocketPC platform, the 7100 eventually got me off of my Asus MyPal 716 PDA. Besides, I needed enough phones in the mix (on the list above) to feel like I did some level of research and made a well thought-out choice. Four options seemed to be the right number. However, the 8110 was the first to fall when I walked into the store and realized that it was not a 3G phone.

Now, there is no 3G support in my home area right now. But I travel a ton, and am headed out to Alameda, where I know there is 3G support in the greater San Francisco area (where the CNET reporters do most of their cell phone field tests). Plus, there was no EDGE support when I first got here either. But six months after I bought my EDGE-capable Blackberry 8700, EDGE kicked in, and it felt like Christmas. I wanted 3G for the ability to tap into it on travel, and for the potential that sometime in the next two years that I use the new phone, 3G will arrive. [in transit update: I have flown through Charlotte, NC and Phoenix, AZ today, and am now in Alameda, and the phone chopped to 3G in all cases.]

Samsung Blackjack II - I can't say that my elimination of the BlackJack was entirely fair. I was somewhat concerned about the size of the display (small). I was very concerned about losing the landscape display capability that I had on the iPhone. Only the Tilt offered such a capability. I was not hard over on the new phone having it, but I was concerned. In general, I just had the feeling that the BlackJack was a Windows Mobile "Lite" phone. I just did not trust that, if I as going to go with a WM platform, that the full capability of the OS had been squeezed into the BlackJack's lithe frame.

The Finalists:

With my choices narrowed down to the final two, I spent a lot of time in the run-off election determining who was going to go home with me. Remember the 1.5 hours I spent in Circuit City last weekend picking out a digital camera?

So, the Motorola Q had a leg up out of the blocks because it was new. At least the currently running model is. The Q9h entered the AT&T lineup at the end of October of 2007; 27 days after the Tilt arrived. The model has been recently refreshed, and is now listed (in some places) as simply the Q Global. The key update is Windows Mobile 6.1 pre-installed. Other than that, there is a cosmetic change with a silver-gray paint-scheme vice last year's black.

So a large part of my initial identification of the short-list was based on recency. I wanted something relatively new on the market. Buying cell phones that have already been on the market for a year just results in me wanting to upgrade early. I will accept a refresh as a new model, so this is where the Q fell. Either way, both the Q and the Tilt, while not new, were newer than the phone they were going to replace (the iPhone), by about 4 months.

I spent some time playing with both in the store. The Q had another advantage in that it was the phone I as looking most forward to hitting the market while I as on my Blackberry 8700c, until I became a Mac-tologist and started tracking Apple products, and found out about the iPhone. The Q did not do or have anything that blew me away in comparison to the Tilt, but it was cheaper, newer, ran the same OS, and had fewer moving parts. The Tilt was, pound for pound, a closer replacement to the feature set on my iPhone, but the Q could still do all of the same stuff, just not in a landscape display. Plus the Q came with the Opera Browser pre-loaded. At the time, while I knew that you could download the Opera browser for cell phones, I thought that you had to pay for a license. More on that later.

The other issue was time. I hate to admit it, but while I refuse to rush into getting married because I or someone is moving or other factors that make people the world over jump into commitment too soon, I am the opposite with regards to technology. I have frequently paid more for a device because it allowed me to have it "right now". I have frequently gone with my second choice when making a tech purchase because I did not have time to wait for the primary choice it to be delivered via UPS or FedEX. And it was Friday before I flew out on Monday, and I was supposed to go the local college football game on Saturday. That meant that I had to get it, spend that night getting it set up, and hopefully be rocking and rolling by Saturday.

The Q was in stock. The Tilt was not, although there was a unit at a store 30 miles away. Jennifer at the store was willing to go pick it up when she got off work that night, and would have it available for me by 9 AM Saturday. With the game at 3:45pm, I would have time to pick it up, but in order to get some tailgating time in and not fight traffic, I would not be able to take time Saturday to set it up. And just driving home to put in on the charger, and then turn around to come back to the game, when the AT&T store is within a couple miles of the stadium, would be a pain. I did not want to spend Sunday, my packing and cleaning my apartment day, setting up the phone. More importantly, I would then not have a lot of user time with it before I flew out, and could therefore be in for a bad cell phone experience over the three-week trip and not be able to do anything about it until I got back.

Again, the Q was cheaper and newer, and came with the Opera Browser pre-installed. While the Opera experience I had demoing it in the store was not overly impressive, it was better than the Tilt's pre-installed Internet Explorer. I also liked the accessory kit that the Q came with, which included both a standard and an expanded capacity battery, and a USB-to-3.5mm Audio adapter. That all being said, this was no slam-dunk. I vacillated for some time over which of the two to procure, digging into very detailed differentiators like processor speed and display resolution. I talked myself into believing that the processor speed was higher because, while in the store, I believed the Q Global was an entirely new phone, not just an updated refresh of the Q9h (which turned out to not be the case; the Q Global is exactly a Q9h with Windows Mobile 6.1 pre-installed, and a new paint scheme). The fact that I could trade the phone back in within 30-days played a large part in my decision as well, knowing that if I did not like the Q, I could always bring it back and pick up a Tilt...if they had one. I as also concerned with all of the moving parts on the Tilt. While the tilting display and slide-out keyboard were cool, they were also components that could break.

So the Q it was. After leaving the store I had to go into the office to see what my travel arrangements were going to be for Monday. The plan was to go see Bangkok Dangerous that afternoon, so I would have a few hours to hang-out and set the phone up and be at work but not really be working. It just does not make sense for me to go home once I am on that end of town if I have something else to do out there later.

I initially paired the Q with my GatewayFX. I had a few choices of laptops to become my new PIM machine: the GatewayFX, the COMPAL IFL-90, the WindowsXP partition of my MacBook Pro, the Toshiba M300 Fusion, or the Samsung Q1 Ultra. The IFL-90 is very low on storage, and I did not want to add a bunch of synced files and profiles to eat into that. Having to boot my MacBook Pro into XP every week in order to sync, or more often to do incremental syncs was not a pleasant thought. Plus then I would have to store a bunch of stuff on the XP partition in order for the phone to access it, like my MP3 collection and pictures. The Samsung does not have an optical drive, so I as looking at having to copy the installation files to a thumb drive and install them. Plus, I had already not liked doing PIM on my MacBook due to its display size, and the Q1 Ultra's screen is even smaller.

I was not going to stay on the Gateway as my PIM machine most likely. I did not want to be slaved to carrying it with me on travel just to be able to sync, since it is so huge. But for the first few hours of playing on the Q it would do fine. And I could see if I would become more interested in it being my primary PIM machine once I got a chance to use the huge laptop display to work through my first few syncs. I had brought it with me that morning so that I could go to a coffee shop and do some image editing if I had enough time before the movie.

The first thing I noticed was that Windows Mobile had migrated from Active Sync, which is still the sync app for Windows XP, to something called Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) if you are syncing a phone with a machine that runs Vista. The first thing I noticed is that this new app does not offer an option for syncing your Outlook notes. That was after I realized that you still have to install Outlook to sync the phone with, despite the fact that Vista Home Premium comes with equivalent PIM apps pre-installed (Windows Email, Windows Calendar, and Windows Contacts. Why Microsoft does not offer an option to sync with these, I do not know. Oh yeah I do...they want to gouge you for the extra price of Outlook.)

After the initial sync, I had a chance to use the phone while out at the movies. The keyboard was ok...not stellar, but ok. The buttons were larger than those on a Blackberry, which means it might suit some people better than that platform. But I was now used to the smaller keys on a BB. The keys were also very stiff, which I reckon was a result of them being new, and believed they would improve over time. So day-to-day routine use and the interface appeared like they were going to be ok.

Once I got home, though, the issue of not syncing with Outlook notes was really beginning to grate at me. To put it in perspective, when I get up in the morning, after I verify that I have no new emails or voicemails, Notes is the first thing that I reach for on my phone. On the iPhone I had gotten around the non-Note thing (the fact that Notes on the iPhone do not sync in OS X Tiger, which I was still using on my MacBook) by making my notes Contacts in my Address Book, and just populating the Contact Notes sections. Having to use the same kind of work around after paying to go to a different phone was not a position I was willing to entertain.

While at the office, I had only connected once. Back at home, I did several syncs. The Q was only being recognized by Vista maybe once every 6 to 10 times it was being connected, and then only after 37 seconds or more. I downloaded the application SmartPhone Notes from Handango to handle Outlook Notes synchronization while I tried to get some decent metrics on the actual frequency of the connection and recognition problem. Finding the results above, and determining that that was unacceptable, I decided to pair the Q with the Toshiba M300 Fusion. There was a chance that the non-connects were being driven by the 64-bit version of Vista that is installed on the Gateway. The M300 was actually the preferred laptop of the available options to establish my PIM partnership with anyway, since if I as forced to carry it, it was only a 14" laptop, and would therefore be more totable. And the 14" would give me a little more display real estate than I'd had when trying to do PIM on the MacBook.

However, shifting to the Toshiba did not make matters any better. In fact, I had issues getting the SmartPhone Notes app to re-install, as the phone insisted that one of the Sync Cabs could not be uninstalled to make way for the new install. So I was crapped out on getting Outlook notes synced again. More importantly, the frequency of non-connects increased. While I recognize that some of this may have been driven by the laptops themselves, USB ports, particular aberrations in the variant Vista installs, two instances of unacceptable sync behavior across two laptops was enough to make me believe that it was at least partially attributable to the phone. It needed to go back.

Of course, I knew that the AT&T store would now not have a Tilt, since I had told Jennifer that she did not need to pick that one up. I was also not willing to drive all over town and look for one at the two other AT&T stores. All of my PIM data was still on my iPhone. I elected to just have them re-activate it and travel with that one. At least it would not be any worse than it already was. Maybe they would even have an iPhone 3G and I would go ahead and roll those dice anyway.

So I went to the store that morning. I had cancelled on going to the game since Hanna was sweeping rain into our area. With a 12 hour flight on Monday, I did not think that it would be a good idea to be sitting out in the rain all day, and then on an air conditioned aircraft surrounded by dozens of people in an enclosed space. I asked them to take the phone back, give me as much money back as they could or were willing, and to please re-activate my iPhone. As they were pulling up my account, and on a total lark, I added "...unless by some chance you have a Tilt."

They did. I wondered, did Jennifer go pick it up anyway, hoping she would find someone else to sell it to? Amazingly enough, one, and I do mean literally, just one, had shown up in the previous night's or that morning's equipment re-supply truck. When they brought it out and took it out of the box, I also noticed that it was aesthetically different from the model on the wall. Instead of the gray-on-black scheme of the original, this one was completely black. Add to that I actually noticed the bullets on the box while I was being rung up, and saw that the Operating System was noted to be Windows Mobile 6.1, vice the advertised 6.0 of the current models. I am not certain, because it is very difficult to trace the OEM part numbers and designations backwards from AT&T's advertised model number to see if you have a different device but, from what I can tell, the older Tilt was technically the HTC 8900, and my model is perhaps the HTC 8925. Again, more research and some rifling through of various forums will have to be done to make that determination.

Movie: Traitor
Video: From Dusk 'Til Dawn (DVD)
Album: Chris Brown, Chris Brown
Inner Rockstar: Chris Daughtry
Karaoke Song: Hard Habit to Break, Chicago
OnLine Game: Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (360)
OffLine Game: Metroid Prime (GameQube, played on the Wii)
System: Backup Tower (see GearWERKZ Sub-Level 27)

Interesting Link 1: MotoGP Updated Hands-On (Xbox 360)

Interesting Link 2: Dead Space Preview (PS3)

Interesting Link 3: What's Atari Doing with Dungeons and Dragons

I hate Labor Day Weekend. Because there are sales. And it makes me spend money.

The weekend was pretty insane from a mundane point of view. Friday night started with a local high-school football game. Saturday brought some time on the pistol range. Although I took both my CZ40 and Ruger P90, car issues only allowed me time to shoot the former. Afterwards, we headed off to see Babylon AD (a 3 out of 5 stars for me). I had time thereafter to squeeze in a brief appearance at a small get-together before I headed off for an even smaller birthday celebration at a Japanese restaurant. Sunday was spent predominantly at home, with dinner and the movie Traitor (4 out of 5 stars). Monday was the rigorous physical day, with 2.5 hours of tennis and Legs and Triceps thereafter at the gym. Dinner at Outback Steakhouse and some shopping ensued afterwards.

Which brings me to money and things electronic. I downloaded the remainder of Season 5 of the Surreal Life from the XBox Live Video Marketplace (ok, so everything that I do is not necessarily cool). I also grabbed 4 episodes of the History Channel Specials series, which I am really looking forward to. A few of them were also in HD, sucking up more space on my hard drive, which I can foresee needing a second one of before the XBox 720/Xbox 360 Squared comes out. The Video Marketplace is really kicking when it comes to downloadable TV Shows. Not so much with the movie rentals. NetFlix will be a welcome addition, but it is still better than the Playstation Store offerings.

I did meander by the PlayStation Store, and it is better than it used to be. It is now icon driven, instead of the inane web-browser-with-a-joystick interface that it used to sport. I did not get a chance to investigate all of the content, though. I am not sure if that is that much better organized. I have to eat some crow on that topic, but I am not yet certain how much. I'll probably check it out more this week, since I have The Assassination of Jesse James in from NetFlix on Blu-Ray (along with Goldfinger on DVD).

Later Friday, I dumped the big bucks on a new digital camera. I have been jonesing for a dSLR for a long time, and finally pulled the trigger this weekend. I initially was planning on jumping in at the $500 price point for a Sony Alpha a200. But during the day I found out what LiveView was and came to understand that the a200 doesn't have it. LiveView on a dSLR is what allows you to see exactly what you are about to snap via the LCD, without having to look through the viewfinder. Entry-level dSLRs at the low-end do not have this feature, only allowing you see shots you have already taken via the LCD, and requiring you look through the viewfinder for shots in progress. Since a lot of my shots are self-photos while I'm out hiking or pictures of electronics taken from weird angles, I decided it was worth the extra $100 to jump to the Alpha a300, the mid-line model. Of course, when I got to Circuit City they wouldn't have it. I then, over the next hour-and-a-half, considered the Nikon D60, Canon Rebel XSi, Olympus 410, 420, 510, and 520. The elimination went as follows:

1. Nikon D60 - eliminated due to it being the $100 more than the a300, but still not having LiveView
2. Canon Rebel XSi - eliminated due to it being the same price as the high-end Alpha a350, but being a lower resolution
3. Olympus 410 and 510 - eliminated due to being last year's camera models. I insisted that if I was going to drop the coin on a dSLR I wanted a recently released model
4. Olympus 420 - eliminated because I did not like the build construction of the body, and it was the same price as the a300, but did not have image stabilization and did not have as a large a magnification zoom lens in the kit
5. Olympus 520 - also eliminated due to the body construction, and not having as nice a zoom lens. The Olympus' also were eliminated because they used SD cards, which would have required me to buy a new flash-card, which I had to figure into the price.

In the end I up sold myself into the high-end of the Alpha series, the Sony Alpha a350, which if you read reviews on Sony's product positioning of this camera line, is exactly what they want to happen to you in the store. Then I up sold myself even more. There was a good chance of rain at the football game, which I thought I would be able to take the camera to. I also hate the idea of buying expensive electronics and putting them in crap bags. There was a lone Sony Alpha case available, though it didn't have a price tag on it. When they ran the price, it was ridiculously expensive. When I asked them to confirm it, I realized that it was both the case and a spare battery, each of which retail for $80 bucks apiece. They were in a bundle for $99. Now I was at $900, and remembered the ad on the display for a bundle consisting of the camera kit, the case and battery, and an extra 75-300mm Zoom Lens for $950. What's an extra $50 bucks?

So that's the new kit: the camera, a case, a spare battery, and two zoom lenses. I had some serious buyer's remorse walking out of the store. But, I knew that I was buying a camera set that I would not be looking to replace until it broke. This was also the main reason I chose not to go with lower-end, less expensive cameras that were missing features, because I knew I would then want to upgrade later. I did not get a chance to use the camera this weekend due to all of the other running around, but hopefully I will in the weeks coming.

My final error of the weekend was going into Sears with my buddy and his wife on Labor Day. (sale?). He recently got an Xbox 360 and does not have many people on his Friends List. Although I have not enjoyed Tiger Woods on a console, because of how much I do enjoy it on the PC, when he picked up his copy, I obliged him by buying my own copy so we could get some golf going online. It was money well spent, though, if I can convince him to play that instead of our marathon tennis outings.

Good thing there are no other gadgets I am jonesing for. Anyway, it's that time of the year when I get assaulted by everyone else's birthday and Christmas, and receive very few gifts in return. September is my only month off from the Bday/Xmas bum rush that begins in August each year, so grabbing a few things for me maybe isn't all that bad. That's a halfway decent rationalization anyway, don't you think?

Take care, and game on.

- Vr/Zeux.>

Movie: Star Wars: the Clone Wars
Video: Snatch
Album: No Way Out, P. Diddy
Inner Rockstar: David Lanz
Karaoke Song: My Side of the Bed, LSG
OnLine Game: Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (360)
OffLine Game: MechAssault: Phantom War (NintendoDS)
System: Gateway P-6860FX 17" Laptop

Interesting Link 1: Force Unleashed Demo Impressions

Interesting Link 2: Rock Band 2 Updated Hands-On

I am home. Well, not that I have been anywhere. A lot of times I post an entry that discusses the fact that I have recently returned home. But tonight, I have been here the whole time. What I mean is that I am home, back at GearWERKZ OnLine as my primary writing venue.

For about a month I was splitting my writing time between here, my personal webspace, and MySpace. It was an experiment. An attempt to see what all the hubbub was about with regards to Web 2.0 and social networking and all of the other catch phrases that have been given rise in the past 3-some years. It was fun. Well, it was ok. At the end of the day, it was not very fulfilling. At a minimum it felt outside my comfort zone, which is maybe a good thing. At its worst, it felt vapid. I felt like I was just posting comments on other people's pages for the sake of posting comments, not because I had anything of any particular value to add. More incriminating is that all of the mechanisms are there to attract the attention of others. {...and add to that a ton of the so-called Applications are broken and function with a low degree of reliability...}It is sort of like a big "Look at me, I'm worth noticing" kind of software app. I think MySpace is well and good for people who already have a group of friends in their off-line life who agree to maintain pages. And in the generation of the younger, maybe it is a way to maintain contact with geographically dislocated family and friends. But at my age, not everyone in my circle is computer savvy and imbued in living in the web as a portion of his or her life management space. At the end of the day, the people who really know me, know about this webspace, and know to come here periodically to check things out. That being said, I am going to bring back a page that a lot of people have complained about me removing some number of years ago, the GearWERKZ Photo Page. Crap. Another website task I have to take on.

As I return to the 'WERKZ, I am also getting back to my core activities, my continuing investigation and participation of technology, and, yes....gaming. And all is not well.

As I prepare for the reality of potentially beginning a doctorate program next year, I am taking serious stock of things I have spent money on that are not providing a huge return on investment. Not due to the quality of the product(s), but because I either am not finding time to use it all, or because I just do not enjoy using them enough to use them frequently enough. In truth, the main reason I left MySpace was because it was taking up so much time to constantly check my account for messages, bulletins, newly posted comments and the like. I was making very little progress in putting other items to use or participating in the things in my evening, morning, and weekend routines outside of work that I truly find enjoyment in.

Chief amongst the low ROI devices in my place right now is my Nintendo Wii. A part of me is disappointed that the only tech device that I have actually camped out for is the one console that is receiving the least amount of attention. There are, of course, a few reasons why. One, no games. I thought that Nintendo and 3rd party developers would at least provide a handful of decent, mature, and (I hate to use the term, but) more hardcore, or perhaps I should say, more mainstream game titles on the system. To date, they are not forthcoming. And when they are presented, they are typically cross-platform titles that I, of course, would prefer to play on another console if available. While the mechanics of games like Madden NFL on the Wii are more immersive, I prefer the higher res, high-definition graphics and the reliability of a trusty game-pad on the 360 or PS3 to the questionable reception capabilities of the WiiMote. Ever play Madden and sworn that you juked right before your running back was subjected to a monster tackle and wonder what the heck happened? Add the full-body movements required of the Wii control scheme and you begin to go bonkers wondering if any of your commands are making it to the console. And while the movements are typically intuitive when first picking up the controller, once you play a title, leave it alone for some time, and then come back to it, it is not as easy to regain the muscle memory of before without some re-learning time.

Madden tends to control pretty much the same on any console or PC that uses a gamepad control scheme. Shooter controls, with slight differences in button assignments, are pretty much intuitive even when you have not played the game for some time. Every time I sit down to play the Wii, there is a certain amount of time invested in re-learning the control scheme that I do not feel prevalent with other gaming platforms. To say nothing of the learning curve when trying to pick back up a legacy GameQube title that I am playing on the Wii, given that the 'Qube controller defies every gaming control convention ever known to man. The Wii is a good console, and provides good entertainment. It is turning out to not be a very good tertiary gaming platform for single-player experiences. When it comes up in the rotation, I find myself more interested in skipping it for the Xbox 360, PS3, PC, or PSP.

Another platform not getting a lot of love is the PS3. Solid platform, solid graphics, solid everything...except the way in which the manufacturing company and its 3rd party devs manage updates. I spoke recently about the umbrage I took at having to update to PS3 firmware version 2.42 only weeks after updating to version 2.40. Tonight, I was looking very forward to finally getting to play Battlefield: Bad Company, whose attributes have been acclaimed by friends of mine, both online and off. I was quite happy to see that I did not have yet another PS3 update to perform tonight. That joy was quickly crushed by the need to get an update for the game itself, that was significantly more invasive than the Xbox method of game updates. I was booted back to the home screen, told to pull down the update, saw a progress meter, then saw a prompt to install the update. While all of this was going on, I had booted my NintendoDS for some MechAssault: Phantom War and was too immersed in that to be bothered getting back to Bad Company when it was finally done with its ridiculous gyrations.

I the like vein, I have also not been spending a lot of time gaming on the PC. But that one I do not fear. As much as I have to bear the promulgation of the impending doom of PC gaming each year, I never worry about not spending a lot of time on that platform. I always know that I will eventually get back to it. The Wii is potentially moving itself to the auction block. The PS3 is on the verge of being committed to simply being a Blu-Ray player. If I get a true HD TV in the living room before Sony gets some decent titles on the market in order to make up for the abhorrent update system, the PS3 will get kicked out of the living room and be relegated to single-player only games. As I contemplate what is in the computer room that will eventually age, be retired, and will not be replaced, one group of platforms that I am not worried about is my Macs. I'm typing this post on the MacBook and am just as happy with it and the MacBook Pro as ever.

So for those who have joined the small but august readership in the recent past, and have been concerned by the low frequency of posts, I hope that there will be more content here for you to take, absorb, and use or ignore as you see fit. I'm back. Take care, and I'll see you online.
- Vr/Z.

"Good afternoon, Mr. President. Sorry I've been away so long. I won't let you down again."

Movie: Star Wars: the Clone Wars
Video: Firefly, Season 1, Disc 4
Album: Get Rich or Die Tryin', 50 Cent
Inner Rockstar: Maxwell
Karaoke Song: It Ends Tonight, All-American Rejects
OnLine Game: TopSpin3 (XBox 360)
OffLine Game: TopSpin3
System: Gateway P-6860FX 17" Laptop
Website: The Best Special Attacks Ever