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

So what’s up with Twitter? Everyone’s going ape over this thing that seems to be a huge waste of time.

Ok, so it’s like a little one-liner blog type thing. You post a sentence at a time saying what you’re doing “right now”. Doing something else? Update your Twitter status. Eek. Are people so attention starved that they really need to tell the world what they’re doing at every moment? How about some Twitters like:

• Shaving
• Washing a load of towels
• Dropping the deuce
• Cleaning up cat puke
• Changing a diaper
• Changing the oil in my car

Awful mundane, eh? Web 2.0 apps for life can be cool, even useful like del.icio.us or flickr. But this? It’s just dumb.

Big thanks go out to Phil A, who yesterday pointed out to me the method by which music tracks can be shuffled in the N95’s music player.

So, you go into your playlist and start playing it, then go to the menu, choose shuffle and do what comes naturally. It’s shown here..

While this wasn’t a difficult thing to figure out, per se, it wasn’t obvious, at least to me. I guess I’ve been using an iPod for too long. On the iPod, you setup shuffle before you start the playlist, not after.

Phil, good luck on your quest to find the perfect phone too. For the remainder of the population that wasn’t on the phone with the two of us yesterday, Phil’s in search of his ideal phone:

• Works well on Cingular or T-Mobile US (so it needs the 850 Mhz band)
• Good quality phone first
• 3+ MP digital cam with autofocus
• Mini or MicroSD storage
• HSDPA nice, but EDGE would be fine as well
• Wifi not needed
• Bluetooth a must, of course
• Charge/Data over Mini-USB would be ideal

That last one makes most Nokia devices a bit harder to swallow with the big, ugly, gangly Pop-Port interface. Yes, Nokia gives you the cable in the box with the phone (finally!), but it’s still yet another proprietary cable. So, to my former employer from Finland, I’ll say what I’ve been saying ever since I saw the hugeness of the 9500. Mini-USB kids! Dump the stupid proprietary connector that nobody on the planet uses. Also, while I applaud Nokia for only having two charger types (the thick & thin barrels) – and even including free adapters to convert your thick barrel into a thin barrel, it’s time, boys & girls. A single, Mini-USB port for data connection & charging is the wave of the future, at least until we’ve got super cool inductive surfaces on tables that charge devices based on proximity.

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.