So, I’ve been on the phone for the past 30 minutes listening to some lady in India working for HP tech support try to convince me that the IP addresses in use on my network are incorrect because they do not begin with 192.168.

Oh my.

This morning, I went out for my morning trip to Wawa to drop $1.27 on a medium chai. Since my return trip would take me within 500 feet of the Apple Store (Sagemore, if you care), I decided to check out the line situation. While I was there, I took a picture and talked to the guys at the front of the line.

In front of the Apple Store, there were about 25-30 people in line, mostly under the cover of umbrellas, some under the awning of neighboring store, Blue Tulip. The 2 guys at the front of the line have been there since 1:00 P.M. on June 28. Ok, not exactly iLoser style, but still, overnight in crappy weather for a phone/iPod/“miracle device” that you’ll be able to stroll in and casually buy in a few days. That’s dedication.

I then took a ride to the other side of the shopping center to check out how things were going at the Cingular, err.. The New Deathstar, err, The New AT&T. Much quieter there.

At AT&T, there were only 5 (empty) chairs, and a few cars with people in various states of consciousness.

What the heck guys? If Apple’s got enough iPhones to give one to every single Apple employee that’s been with the company longer than a year, then I’m quite sure there’s enough to go around.

Darla has this posted on her site. She credits “Joe” for the image.

Wow. Holy half-truths Batman.

While there are technically no lies on that image, it doesn’t really seem to tell the whole tale. Let’s see..

• GPS and turn-by-turn directions – Yes, it’s indeed true, the N95 has a built-in GPS. During the nearly a month that I had an N95 (and no, it wasn’t a proto), I found the GPS nearly useless. It was unbearably slow to lock on. I’m talking like 5 minutes guys. And the turn-by-turn directions – those cost extra.
• Wireless stereo – A2DP is indeed present on the N95 and is missing on the iPhone, at least at launch. Since Nokia was able to add A2DP to recent N73 firmware releases, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to think that we may yet see A2DP on an iPhone software update. Regardless of the device in question, A2DP will drain your battery.
• Second camera for video calling – Since the iPhone is (thus far) only for sale in the US, this is a non-starter. The N95 can only do video calls on a 3G network. The only UMTS band supported in the N95 is 2100 Mhz, not available in the US.
• Video-out port – I believe, like other video-capable iPods that have come before, the video output comes via the headphone jack.
• Removable battery – I’m torn here. Yes, it’s true, the N95’s battery can be swapped, and the iPhone’s cannot be swapped. However, this fails to address the abysmal battery life afforded to N95 users. Less than a day on a single battery? That’s just bad, like on an epic scale.

Kids, there’s room enough for both of you. There are lots of things that both camps can learn from the other.

I’m a big S60 user (work phone is an E65, home phone is an N73). I’m also a fan of Apple products. Neither side has the perfect phone. Fanboi-ism doesn’t help, regardless of what side it’s coming from.

Today, the BBC is reporting that Bigchoice, err.. Blockbuster Video has lined up on the Blu-Ray side of the HD video disc war. It seems that BD titles were rented quite a bit more than HD-DVD titles at the 250 Blockbuster test locations.

In general, I don’t particular care one way or another who wins the format war, but I’ll say that HD-DVD does have some things in their favor, even if they’re the 2007 equivalent of VHS to BD’s Beta. For instance, HD-DVD’s don’t seem to be suffering from the disc rot problems currently being reported over on the AVS Forums. Further, HD-DVD lacks the extra layer of DRM, BD+ that is available on the BD side of the house.  In my book, the less DRM, the better, preferably, none.

Why no DRM?  It has nothing to do with piracy.  Pirates already have proven themselves wildly successful at circumventing copy controls on all sorts of media (VHS, CD-ROM, DVD, various digital music formats even).  DRM has to do with you & me, the consumers.  The ones that pay for their content.  You see, according to the RIAA or MPAA, if we want to shift our media to a different format, preserving our investment, we should have to re-purchase the media.  Don’t even get me started on the commercials urging you to “own it on DVD today!“  You know what you own?  A disc and the box it came in.  What you don’t own is the content that you were led to buy.

In a perfect world, what would I choose?  Blu-Ray’s technical superiority, no DRM, and the dual-format publication system that lots of HD-DVDs are using now (standard def DVD on one side, HD-DVD on the other).  Why?  I’ve seriously pondered buying those, and I don’t even own an HDTV, let alone hi-def player of any format.  But I will.  Why re-purchase the movie?  So, I pay a bit more up front, but (hopefully) save on the back end, and have the ability to play the movies I’ve already got in 1080p, rather than just 480p.

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.

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.

Holy crap. I feel like Rod Serling’s going to come walking out from around the next corner lamenting about a world where all web portals look exactly the same.

Go take a look at Yahoo. Ok, done? Now go to the new AOL 3.0 beta site. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but come on kids, can’t you think of something new to do?

Ok, so it’s been about a week since I got my Nokia N95, and wow, it’s quite a phone. Before we go on, I should mention that up until recently, I was employed by Nokia (in the ES group, not Multimedia, where N-series comes from). That ended on March 17. Consider yourselves disclaimed appropriately. I got mine at the Nokia Flagship Store in NY. The $750 pricetag, while steep, was certainly far more palatable than the $1300+ that other stores are offering, not to mention prices upwards of $1000 on eBay. At least the eBay prices have dropped closer to the Nokia store’s pricing in the past few days. When I got mine, however, the prices were still sky-high.

The specs are very impressive. Rather than bore you with all of them, here’s the highlight film:

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
• WCDMA on the 2100 Mhz band, with HSDPA
• 802.11g Wifi
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
• Built-in GPS – real GPS, not A-GPS
• 5.0 MP digital cam with auto-focus
• Front cam for video calls in 3G areas (i.e. not the US)
• MicroSD expansion slot
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• Dual-slider (slides one way for the dialing keypad, the other for media playback controls)

For the past couple of trips into NY on the train or the bus, I’ve left my iPod at home, in favor of the music player on the N95. It’s a good player, but lacks certain basic features, like the ability to shuffle the tracks in a playlist. Well, either it lacks that function, or I just can’t find it. Either way, if it’s not able to be found, it might as well not be there, right? Otherwise, it works pretty well. Check out the image above to get an idea of what the interface looks like.

The idle screen is pretty much standard S60 v3, with the standard add-ons you’d expect to see – the wifi wizard, integration with the music player, calendar, etc. As usual, you can customize the soft-keys as well as the applications shown in the middle of the idle screen for quick access.

What’s good? Built-in wifi, SIP stack (which integrates with Asterisk with a bit of manual config, or Gizmo with the help of a little application you can get from the Download! application), S60 v3 FP1 browser, IMAP-IDLE support in the mail part of the Messaging app, support for POP3, IMAP and SMTP with both SSL and TLS, as well as every radio under the sun. The 16 million color QVGA screen is quite nice too.

Also included is a new version of Nokia’s “Barcode” application, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It uses the main camera to read barcodes. You can read the barcode in the sidebar of my site with it. So back to the what’s good about it? It actually seems to work this time around. I’ve got Barcode installed on my N73 Music Edition, and while it works, it’s very hit or miss (mostly miss) when it comes to reading a barcode. On my N73, I feel like a bunch of stars and planets need to be aligned, along with some sort of ritual sacrifice to get a successful barcode read. On the N95, that’s not the case at all — it seems to just work. Things that “just work”, as always, make me happy.

Speaking of just working, iSync. While the N95 isn’t directly supported by iSync, there are 2 sources for plugins to make it a “just works” affair. Nokia has made some plugins available, but I chose instead to go with the plugins from the UK-based S60 Themes site, as their plugins work for a wide variety of devices, not just a 1-plugin, 1-device model, like Nokia’s plugins seem to have done. And as always, PC Suite works as well.

What’s not so good? No US 3G bands (850 & 1900 Mhz), battery life, lack of shuffle features in the music player, very slow GPS lock-in. How bad is the battery life? If all I do is make a few calls and leave my mail connected over either EDGE or wifi, I get a bit over 24 hours. If I mix in some web browsing on top of that, just about a day. Throw in a few hours of time on the music player, and I get about 12 hours total. It ain’t pretty kids, but it’s also not the ugliest I’ve seen.

I was also disappointed to find that while my N95 (and N73 for that matter) both work with my Garmin Nuvi 660 GPS for hands-free calling & caller-id display, they do NOT allow the contacts database to be accessed from the Nuvi. Bummer there.

If you don’t need the wifi and/or GPS, go for the N73 or N73 Music Edition. You’ll save a few bucks, get better battery life, give up a bit of screen size, and have 3.2 MP instead of 5. And you’ll keep a few hundred bucks in your pocket.

Hollywood told us that the days of piracy are over. HD-DVD and BluRay would usher in a new era of piracy control, bringing along with it unbreakable DRM that would “help keep honest people honest,” as if suddenly, if DRM vanished, we’d all turn into a bunch of pirates who never paid for anything again. Avast, me hearties! Indeed.

Fast forward to February 11, when some guys on the doom9 forums came upon a solution. A user that goes by the handle “arnezami” thought he had found the processing key, a value used by all (as far as anyone can tell) HD-DVD discs out there (and possibly some BluRay Discs as well). What does the key allow you to do? Decrypt the content on the disc. So? Now you can enjoy your HD content as you choose, not as the publisher chooses for you. You want to show it on your Mac? Go for it. Transcode for your iPod? Have fun. Play your content back on a non-HDMI HDTV? Great.

Nice job guys. It’s about time Hollywood was sent a message about fair use. Recognize that I’m not advocating piracy in any way here.

Currently playing in iTunes: Young Americans by David Bowie

The guy next to me on the train has a Zune. I politely asked him how he liked it. Boy, did he answer.

After first trying to install the thing, his PC just didn’t get along with the Zuneware. He had to reformat and reload his XP PC. Fortunately for him, he said he was using a volume lic key, so didn’t need to call the Microsofties to get permission to use software already paid for. Smart dude, he had a current data backup, and all software bits to reload at the ready.

Round 2 with the Zuneware was more successful. It works, though he thinks iTunes on his daughter’s PC is better designed.

His biggest axes to grind (other than the obvious software deficiencies)? Crippled wifi (ad-hoc, zune to zune only) and the ridiculous point economy of the Zune store. In the Zune world, you buy points, which you use to buy songs. Why not just set a price? To make Zune pricing look cheaper than the iTunes store. Instead of $0.99 a song, you pay 75 points. By the way, the math will tell you that 75 points = roughly $0.99, give or takes a couple of tenths of a cent.

So, does he regret his purchase? It seems. Is he going to chuck it in favor of an iPod? Only when it breaks, he says. With only 2 purchased songs invested, he doesn’t have much skin in the lock-in game.. All of the rest of tunes are ripped mp3s that he used to load on a Creative MuVo.