I loved the N95. I hated the N95. I returned the N95 to the Nokia Flagship Store.

What did I love? The convergence. Extreme Convergence, as Dameon calls it. There was a lot to love about the N95:

• Great camera (and I mean great – the best I’ve ever used on a phone, nearly standalone quality)

• Good music player. For a week or two, I left my iPod at home and listened to my N95. It was nice that it had a 3.5mm jack on the side for “normal” headphones. I never bothered with A2DP.

• Built-in Wifi

• Played video from the N95 on a TV a couple of times. It was neato.

There was also a fair bit of stuff I didn’t like about the N95.

• No Access Point Groups – come on, this one’s so easy to implement (and already done in the E-series phones!) and so useful.

• While the music player worked well, the controls were a bit obtuse, like trying to find the “shuffle” feature for a playlist. You have to actually be playing a playlist before you can tell the device to shuffle it. Seems sort of a ham handed way to do it.

• Slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow GPS lock-on. We’re talking in minutes here. I wound up picking up a Garmin Nuvi, which locks on in about 15 seconds if I’m not driving when I turn it on. If my car’s already moving, it takes about 30 seconds.

• Battery life. This was the true deal breaker for me. I just couldn’t take it. If I was actually using some of the device’s potential (not all either!), my battery was out of juice before the end of the day. What was I doing? IMAP mailbox with auto-retrieve over EDGE or Wifi (30 minute sync interval), talking a bit, playing music on the train (1 hour one way), and a bit of web browsing. Maybe a picture a day, on average.

I had shuffled my devices around a bit to accommodate the N95.. My work phone, the E61 is on loan to a friend traveling in Europe. My work SIM migrated to my N73 Music Edition, and my home SIM went to the N95. After the return? I traded in the N95 and left the Flagship Store with an E65, in which my work SIM lives, sending my home SIM back to the N73 ME.

I’ve got an E65 review coming one of these days. It’s probably 90% positive. The other 10% is stuff that will (hopefully) get resolved with firmware updates.

Clearly, the guys at Motorola have gone off the deep end, lost it, gone ‘round the twist, lost their marbles, gone bonkers or whatever.

Eh? Moto has patented a phone that releases a scent while the user is talking. As if there weren’t enough features on a phone to chew up batteries, now we’ve got to expend power to heat a scent pack too.

I’m so not kidding either. Really, I’m not late for April Fools Day here. I’m particularly fond of the name that Engadget hung on the phone.. The MOTOSNIFR.

So, save your pennies kids, it won’t be long until you’ll be dying for a phone that smells like lilacs or vanilla. Or not.

Forbes is running a story about a couple of companies that I’ve never heard of, Media Rights Technology and BlueBeat.com.  Seems the kids at MRT and BlueBeat think they’ve got a DRM solution that would keep people from copying digital media.  Ok, so it’s just another DRM solution, right?

Apparently not.  The brain trusts at MRT and BlueBeat believe that Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Real and others need their products so much that they’re suing.  They’ve send cease & desists to Adobe and Real for “actively avoiding their X1 SeCure Recording Control.”

Ok, so under the DMCA, you can send a C&D for circumventing a security mechanism, but this is a whole new level.  Now threatening lawsuits because I didn’t buy and use your product?  That’s just stupid.

Hey guys, maybe they just don’t want your product.

Wil Wheaton, yes, that Wil Wheaton, posted a great piece about his recent experience camping.

Long story short? Wil takes family camping. Discovers that the campground has Wifi. Watches kid glued to a PS2, rather than playing with the gaggle of other kids all around him. Laments. Wonders. Writes.

One thing he mentioned that strikes a chord with me – parents that have the DVD player going in the car for taking junior to the mall, the supermarket, church, or whatever. Can’t your kid spend 10 minutes apart from animated fantasyland? Mine can. Heck, our minivan has a DVD player in it. We’ve never turned it on in front of the kids. In fact, I’ve only ever turned it on once to test it. Why get it? The van already had it installed.

It gets worse. A couple of months back, Heather went to Target, with Alex in tow. She encountered this lady pushing her 2-ish year old kid around in the cart, complete with an elaborate rig of entertainment. The child safely seated in the cart, strapped into the shopping cart seat liner to keep the germs away (come on, what mom doesn’t have a stack of wipes the size of your head stashed away?) along with a carefully attached portable DVD player playing the Backyardigans for the kid.

Come on people, don’t you think junior can stand to spend an hour away from Pablo and Tyrone? Think back to when you were a kid, back in the days before the DVD. What did you do to occupy the time at the store? Played with a small toy? Read a book? Used your imagination? Amazing how we didn’t need portable DVD players plastered on our shopping carts.

Nice job Wil.

“It’s like trying to put 10 pounds of traffic in a 1 pound bag.”

Thank you Pete Toriello of NJ 101.5.

Over lunch today, somehow, our conversation wound up including the music of Bon Jersey..errr..Jovi. So, it never occurred to me, or my buddy that I was lunching with, that these guys are the masters of the cliche. Consider a sampling of song/album titles from the band:

• Have A Nice Day
• Slippery When Wet
• Last Man Standing
• Last Cigarette
• Story Of My Life
• The One That Got Away
• Lonely At The Top
• Wanted Dead or Alive
• Livin’ on a Prayer
• Bad Medicine
• It’s My Life
• Keep The Faith

Eeek, the list goes on and on and on. These guys have made a career out of putting cliches to hair-band music. We’re hypothesizing that their next smash hit album will include such tunes which will rocket up the charts like:

• One Good Turn Deserves Another
• A Penny Saved Is A Penny Earned
• Don’t Take Any Wooden Indians
• Do Unto Others As You’d Have Them Do Unto You
• Needle In A Haystack

Currently playing in iTunes: Life on the Edge by Eli

For the past three weeks, the citizens of New Jersey have been largely flipping out over Gov. Corzine’s car crash. Should he get a seat belt ticket? Should the Trooper driving him get a ticket? He was speeding (91 in a 65!) to get to a stupid photo opp. The Trooper was answering a text message while driving. Any number of things people are going on about.

Here’s the genius part. Corzine could have put this stuff behind us almost immediately by calling up Col. Fuentes (Superintendent of the NJ State Police) and having a Trooper issue a seat belt violation, publicly, complete with Corzine writing a check for $46 for the ticket. Instead, he’s dragging things out, resulting in the state’s population being dragged into discussions about seat belt tickets and speeding, rather than focusing on the actual problems NJ has.

I certainly do not wish anything bad on the man personally. Politically, however, is another matter altogether. I wish the political figure would start acting like a leader and actually doing something that’s good for the state, even good for us dissenters who chose to vote for someone else. Like, say, fixing corruption in our state government, or say, getting a handle on school spending in this state.

Currently playing in iTunes: You Do It All The Time by Wagstaffe