The folks at InfosyncWorld just posted a hands-on review of the Nokia N90, and they seem to have enjoyed it quite a bit. The new N-series device is a tri-band phone sporting Bluetooth, GPRS and EDGE connectivity (!), but of course, the biggest draw is the 2.0 megapixel camera with its signature Carl Zeiss lens. As far as I can tell, this is the first time any camera phone has included a Zeiss lens; hopefully the sensor can make good use of it.

Now, the real reason why I’m writing about this (apart from the obvious geek-lust) is that I actually saw this device in the Greenhills FoneZone yesterday afternoon, while shopping with my girlfriend. Interestingly enough, it cost about PhP43,000, which is less than what it’s selling for in Europe (it reportedly costs 725 Euros). 43k is the kind of price that would be hard for me to justify unless the device in question was some kind of full-featured smartphone, so I don’t really see myself breaking my piggy bank to get this.

And speaking of FoneZone, I spent most of last night fantasizing about buying myself a second-hand XDA IIs (first-hand: 45k, second-hand: 30k), but the people I know who have actually put it through its paces have experienced a number of issues (battery failure, or incessant software problems), so it’s not the sort of machine that I’d be risking 30k to buy pre-owned. I also spotted an HP 6515 Mobile Messenger, which is my personal dream machine. It’s also worth over 40k, so I’ll have to figure out some way to jerk the Ayala guys around in to buying it for me (haha).

You gotta love Google. I just came across a game designer’s blog which gave a very positive review of this Flash game I built over a year and a half ago called Blowboat. I happen to have a lot of affection for Blowboat because it represented a period in my life when it was easy to find time to learn new things (it was only the second Flash game I’d ever made, and is so heavily-influenced by Orisinal that it’s almost a tribute game).

Anyway: although the blogger himself seemed to like the game, some of the people who commented didn’t find it quite as enjoyable. It was the first time I received some genuinely useful feedback about the game, which didn’t fall under the usual "that’s one slimey gutter" or "i don’t get how to play this"-type comments. (And this is considering that the game was being played as much as 25,000 times per month when the link was making the rounds online last year.)

One comment in particular made me laugh:

Anyways, It’s a fun game and i like the visuals with the fish and and water. I just don’t understand how all these things are passing by yet the ground and the kids are in one place =P

Too funny. I spent 6 weeks developing that stupid game and it didn’t once occur to me how thoroughly Escher-esque the concept was.

Mike made a comment recently that got me thinking, i.e., why I have this thing for bands with female vocalists. I didn’t actually think I did, but as I look over my collection, a whole bunch of examples stand out: Veda, the aforementioned Rilo Kiley, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Delgados, Ivy, Loquat, Stars … and that’s just the stuff on my iTunes "Recently Played" list.

I couldn’t really think of a way of writing this out without sounding slightly misogynistic, so I’ll just say it with the disclaimer that I love and respect all women, including the ones that are bitches.

The thing is, I love normal testosterone-driven rock as much as the next guy, but I do think that sometimes a male voice tends to limit itself to certain themes. I’m not talking about general concepts like "unrequited love" or "confused about life" or whatever, because we hear that in mainstream emo every day. What I mean is little subtle things, like when Veda vocalist Kristen May sings "Is there anything left in this world that will satisfy me?" or when The Delgados’ Emma Pollack invites everybody to "come down, down, down" — it just feels different when a female is singing it.

That said, I like songs that are grounded in the musical styles that resonate with me (I’m never gonna enjoy r&b or hiphop quite as much as alt.rock), and bands with female vocalists represent a very welcome variation. Veda is actually a great example of this; as I mentioned in an earlier review, emo never felt so sincere as when I heard Kristen May singing it. Stylistically, Veda is fairly similar to other emo bands, but having a non-male vocalist has given their music a dimension that those other bands will never have.

I guess, in a nutshell: I like female-fronted bands because they sound different while sounding pretty much the same.

Lord Northcliffe, of the Daily Mail, on "the news":

News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.

Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley is just super-cute. I suppose it helps that their band has been producing this really mellow, good-guy indie folk for the past 7 years.

I just bought their 2003 Takeoffs and Landings album from Audiolunchbox and it’s got this wonderfully smooth vibe that permeates every note and line of lyric. This is the kind of music that good-natured, happy people make I guess. "Pictures of Success" for example, is a really charming track about growing up and measuring up: "i’m a modern girl but i fold in half so easily / when i put myself in the picture of success / i could learn world trade / or try to map the ocean." (Download it here.)

I haven’t had a chance to listen to their most recent album (2004’s More Adventurous) yet because I’m still working my way through their past releases. The first two full-lengths have been fairly brilliant though.

Our little company has been ripping it up this past month, even if we’re still office-less and working from our bedrooms (figuratively speaking, of course).

Two weeks ago, we completed the Ad Congress website, which earned us brownie points with the McCann-Erickson people and may eventually open some doors for us to begin interfacing with the ad world. A couple of days ago, we worked out a lengthy retainer with a UK-based marketing firm, which will be generating enough regular income to cover all of our office expenses each month, for at least the next year or so. And just this morning, we won a pitch to develop the site of a fairly large local food corporation, which I’ll refrain from naming here for professional reasons (although if I know you personally, I will definitely brag about it the next time we talk).

Meanwhile, smaller projects continue to present themselves at a fairly steady rate, and the workloads are a lot lighter than when I was doing everything myself. It’s all going so smoothly that I’m almost afraid that life is setting me up for a huge disappointment somewhere down the road. Still, appreciating the good stuff when it presents itself does wonders for my otherwise cranky, piss-poor personality.

Now if we can only get that damned office space …

This was a pretty inevitable evolution, but it’s fun to look at anyway.

(spotted at Gizmodo)

I really, really love this phone, and it’s not for any rational, logical reason either.

It’s mainly because it runs an embedded version of Linux I guess, and the current package they’ve been hawking in the malls includes a pair of Bluetooth wireless headphones (not the piddly little thing people use to answer calls, mind you, but a full-sized pair of cushioned cans).

I’ve seen it being sold at about PhP26,000 (about US$450), which is a great deal since you get a full-featured PDA-Phone and a very cool pair of headphones (which are worth about PhP4,000 all by themselves).

So why am I not falling all over myself to buy this thing? (It’s not that I promised not to spend on any gadgets until December … promises are made to be broken after all.) Ironically, it’s for the same reason why I like it so much: it runs Linux.

I spent practically the whole morning reading up on this thing and it seems that the only way to get it to sync with your Outlook folders is to install Moto’s proprietary Mobile Phone Tools suite on your machine, and manually press "SYNC" every time you want the process to run. (No "ActiveSync"-like applications have been written to run under Linux as of yet, so apart from setting up some kind of OTAP Server, there’s no other way to synchronize your data.) Now, that situation by itself, is not a huge issue, but I’ve had a bit of experience with MPT (I used it a lot with my Moto V500), and well … I hated it. Transferring files was always touch-and-go, and synchronizing PIM data was like pulling teeth. And if that’s the only way I can run a synchronization process with this phone, I dunno … I’d probably hate that too.

The thing is, the only reason why I want a pda-phone in the first place is because it’s such a hassle to save contact information in my Outlook address book, then manually re-enter it on my phone. It’s also really inconvenient to be in the middle of a meeting and have to enter meeting dates and schedules on the Tablet (which incidentally, doesn’t always have the most current set of schedules because it’s an equally big hassle to sync it with my desktop). Having a dedicated scheduler device is pretty much the only way I can keep things straight in my head, and I’ve been surviving this long by switching approaches every week. One week, I’ll be writing out my schedule on the Tablet’s InkDesktop, another week I’ll be entering it into my YahooCalendar, and the next week I’ll be managing everything through Outlook. Not exactly the most cohesive (or comprehensible) way of doing this, I know.

But I digress.

Clearly, the fact that the Moto is being marketed as a "music phone" instead of a "productivity device" should have been enough to deter me. I mean, I love my music more than the average person, but even I have to admit that having 2 separate music devices on your person would be too much.

Even so, it took me a couple of hours to convince myself that this wasn’t the phone for me (which was a significant achievement because I swear to God a couple of times I was almost out the door with credit card in hand, before I got a hold of myself). Mostly I did it by focusing my gadget-lust on something else entirely, namely this baby, which won’t be available locally until God only knows when.

"Hey don’t knock masturbation, it’s sex with someone I love"

- Woody Allen

This is a long shot, but just thought I’d throw this one out there to see if anyone’s interested. I’m selling my 20Gb iRiver H320 audio player for PhP10,000. It’s less than one year old (I bought it in October 2004, for Php21,000) and is in reasonably good condition (well … it’s in better condition than my phone anyway). You can see what it looks like here.

To be honest, I actually didn’t want to sell this because it’s got a certain sentimental value (it being my very first mp3 player and all), but I need to liquidate some of my assets to help fund the small company I’m starting.

The only catch is that you’ll need to buy your own pair of headphones for this. I accidentally dropped the original pair in a bowl of soup a couple of months ago and had to buy a mid-range pair of Sennheisers to replace them with (worth about 1k, as I recall). I can’t really include the Senns in the package because I still use them every now and then … unless you want to buy those off of me as well I guess.

So if anyone’s interested, just leave a comment here, or email me directly I guess.