After reading review after review and probably driving my poor wife up the wall about it, I decided to take the plunge and stick with Sprint(they only have 30 days to prove their worthiness). My obsession with everything iPhone 3G has been outweighed by my necessity to pinch pennies for the diapers my 4 month old Cooper so lovingly annihilates on an hourly basis. So that led me to the much anticipated Instinct, mind you it was purchased at Best Buy as they give you the $129.99 price out the door…no waiting until Halloween for my rebate check! And no the box didn’t get wet, that’s actually how it looks.

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All of you who’ve been waiting to check out the upcoming Samsung Instinct can commence salivating: Vincent has unboxed it and posted impressions, and it looks tasty!

The Instinct is primarily a touch-screen centric featured phone that’s wrapped up in a thin candy-bar form-factor; measuring 4.57 by 2.17 by 0.49 inches thick and weighs 4.4 ounces. The screen measures 3.1-inch offering 262,000-color touch screen, which will be your interface for almost all of the device’s functions including making and ending phone calls. There are three separate touch controls placed right below the display: a Back, Home and a shortcut control that will take you to the calling menu. I’m super thrilled that the Instinct features localized haptic feedback, a faint vibration to indicate you’ve pushed a button.

Before you dismiss it as an iPhone wannabe, you seriously need to go take a look…

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For the past few months I have been using a nice 32″ LCD TV in my bedroom, hooked up to my Vista Media Center PC. Unfortunately, it belonged to my parents, and it was basically being “stored” in my room until they got it installed on the veranda out back. Alas, the day came last weekend when they took it away, and I was back to using my little computer LCD for my TV watching needs.

I decided I should go out and buy my own, since it’s something I used quite often (perhaps a tad too often :P), and therefore worth the outlay. Being a student and only working part time, I had a limited budget to purchase a TV that I would be happy with for a while.

I’ll say it now, I am not a fan of plasmas. They have great black levels, but they have never looked as good to me as an LCD TV, so much selection was narrowed quite a bit. Plasmas are quite cheap now at 42″ sizes, but often have pathetic 852×480 or 1024×1024 non-square pixel resolutions which look terrible, especially up close. Since it was going in my bedroom, it was always going to be close.

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This wasn’t from a presentation, but I thought it was something you all might enjoy. Michael Oryl of Mobile Burn recently received a Samsung Soul, a European Market fashion phone that looks really amazing. He pulled it out on one of our breaks and shared it with me; I found it to be a very sexy little feature phone. The various materials from which is it composed give it a satisfying in-hand weight, and the textures that your hand encounters make it feel…for lack of a better word…”posh”.

Michael says, “Samsung’s new SGH-U900 Soul gets its name from Samsung calling the device the “Soul Of ULtra”, a fitting name for what the company says is the last handset in its original Ultra line of thin profile feature phones.”

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Q.: Judie,

Hope this note finds you well. I need some gadget advice, if you have the time.  I have a birthday coming up in two weeks, and my wife wants a suggestion from me for a present. I am thinking about a new phone.  I have a Samsung Blackjack for work which runs Mobile 5.0 and I like it a lot.  Works very well with our Outlook Exchange server.  I also have a Motorola RAZR2 for weekends, which I also like, but I’d like a weekend phone that has a little more functionality.

I have looked at the N95, but if I am going to put that kind of dent in my wallet, I wanted to see if you have a favorite fun phone that you like and would recommend for a GSM system (I am AT&T).  Anything that really makes you smile?

Thanks for your time!!

Bill

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I’m always looking for alternative sources of power for my electronic devices, which is why the Datexx Sentina Outback Rechargeable PowerBank caught my eye. Billed as a super bright LED flashlight, a motion detector / emergency light, a USB charger for electronic gadgets, a power generator, and an SOS siren, the Outback almost sounds like it tries to take on too many properties, a “jack of all trades” if you will.

Let’s take a look and see if this device lives up to its billing, or if as the famous other half of the “jack of all trades” saying goes, it is a “master of none.”

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I recently received a catalog from Mobile Planet the other day, from whom I purchased my first Tapwave Zodiac.  I love Mobile Planet catalogs, and this issue is devoted to “The Latest in Windows Mobile Powered Devices,” supposedly containing “An amazing variety of Windows Mobile devices.” 

So I opened it eagerly to see what it had, because I love convergent devices.  Here’s the list:

i-mate JAQ:  200MHz, 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM, 2.8″ 240×320 screen, QWERTY keypad
Fujitsu Siemns LOOX T830:  416MHz, 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM, 2.4″ 240×240 screen, QWERTY keypad
BenQ-Siemens P51:  416MHz, 128MB RAM, 128MB ROM, 2.83″ 240×320 screen, QWERTY keypad
MIO A710:  520MHz, 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM, 2.7″ 320×240 screen (no keypad!  shocker!)
E-Ten G500+:  400MHz, 64MB RAM, 256MB ROM, 2.8″ 240×320 screen (no keypad)
i-mate SPL:  200MHz, 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM, 2.2″ 240×320 screen, phone keypad
i-mate Smartflip:  200MHz, 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM, 2.2″ 240×320 screen, phone keypad (but it’s a flip phone!  call AP!)
Samsung SGH-i320:  416MHz, 120MB “User memory”, 2.2″ 240×320 screen, QWERTY keypad
i-mate JAM:  416 MHz, 64MB RAM, 64MB ROM, 2.2″ 240×320 screen (no keypad)
i-mate JAM 128:   416 MHz, 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM, 2.2″ 240×320 screen (no keypad)

Yesiree bob!  An *amazing* variety of Windows Mobile devices!  They are all sooooooooo different!  You can get 240×240!  Or 240×320!  Or be a rebel, and get 320×240, and with no keypad!  Yowza! 

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Over the last year I have grown incredibly spoiled when I travel because I no longer need to pack a tangle of “spaghetti”; instead, I bring along a set of Gomadic Charging Cables. The same single cable charges my PDA, mobile phone and digital music player. It can charge Sarah’s phone and Sarah’s digital music player, too; all it takes is the proper tip for each particular device.

For those unfamiliar with Gomadic, I’ll state the premise in a nutshell: They sell cables with plugs on their ends which will accept their specially made tips; these tips fit many of today’s popular consumer mobile devices. Gomadic’s “Tip Exchange Technology” means that the same cable can be used for years - and as devices are added to the user’s collection, new tips can be purchased to swap out with the old.

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As the owner of a Tapwave Zodiac, I’m pretty far behind the curve (or way ahead, depending on how you look at it) with regard to PDA/handheld/UMPC/convergent device development. I love these gadgets, mind you, but the last time I went to buy one I found such a dearth of Palm OS devices (you can have a LifeDrive, or a Treo, or, um, a different Treo, or, um . . .) that I got depressed and kind of gave up.

So anyway, I didn’t hear about the whole Origami thing until someone on Tapland mentioned it in passing, as it were. (Us Zodiac folks are always on the lookout for handheld devices with decent graphics, you see.) That, combined with a need to get my wife a new cell phone, sent me out looking at the market for convergent devices, SmartPhones, UMPCs, and the like.

As everyone reading this blog probably knows–hey, I said I was behind the curve–there’s an awful lot of overlap in these devices. There are smartphones with 4″, full VGA screens that run Windows Mobile 5; there are PDAs that have Bluetooth and WiFi built-in, but don’t have cell phone capability; there are UMPCs that (it seems to me) might as well be really expensive PDAs with slide-out keyboards. Or even without slide-out keyboards. And on and on.

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Well this is really exciting: Matthew Miller, aka palmsolo, is giving away the Samsung i320 he received at Mobius!

He has also written a review about the device that those interested will defintiely want to check out…

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