All entries for Wednesday 31 October 2007
October 31, 2007
Red Arrows

© Nathaniel Ho 2007
Camera: Canon EOS 350D
Lens: Canon EF USM II 55-200mm f4.5-5.6
Filter: UV
Date: 8th July 2007, 12:04 BST
Location: Silverstone, UK
Focal Length: 165mm (equivalent focal length: 264mm)
Shutter: 1/800s
Aperture: F/6.3
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3
Post–processing: none
Comments: One of the arrows was not present due to an injury.
A Dork's Digital Dilema
Follow-up to Web 'n' Walk from nathanielho.com :: blog
(Phonewang - if you don't speak in 1's and 0's, look away now)
My Sony Ericsson K800i has been serving me very well for over a year. Its has a decent AF 3.2MP camera with xenon flash which gives decent pictures. I can stream BBC News over the net, or download podcasts. I can encode episodes of TV into 3GP format to play on it when I'm bored on the train. With the excellent Web 'n' Walk internet tariff I can take a picture that's 800kB large, right click, send via email and its off very quickly. It checks my emails all the time, updates my RSS feeds and with 4GB of storage it has enough for music.
I've made myself think for quite a while that I want the Sony Ericsson K850i (the successor to the K810/K800). It looks awesome (yet to see it in real life though), has more megapixels (3.2MP was enough to print photos on 6x4 but 5MP should be better). It has HSDPA which means the net will be 5 times faster than normal UMTS, but without connecting it to a computer, I won't notice much difference. The main problem is that its not a smartphone - I guess its not designed to be one: Just an ordinary phone that could blow the doors off everything else and yet still work with MyPhoneExplorer. But I want a phone to do a bit more. I want to use messenger, Skype, SIP (the latter two limited by my data tariff - so WiFi or 3-mobile would be needed).
The Sony Ericsson selection is currently about compromises, you can only have one or the other: Do I want WiFi or HSDPA? The Nokia N95 probably sorts out all these problems by having both and an operating system which people write a lot of apps for. So I could get Fring to use messenger, skype, SIP etc. But if I've gone this far (in specs and price), I could keep the K800i and get a laptop instead (which would do a whole lot more!), and a laptop has probably got the same battery life as a N95!
Maybe the real solution is the £49.99 3-Skypephone on PAYG, unlimited skype-to-skype calls and chats, plus MSN messenger for £10/month. But we all know how much I like carrying twophones and how well I got on with 3-Mobile in the past...
Nathaniel Ho
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