Of course, there was no way I could afford one of these mythical things, so I opted for the next best thing: the Amstrad PenPad. In January 1995, when an Apple Newton was weighing in at around £700 (a lot of money for an underpaid IT Manager!) the Amstrad PenPad could be had for less than £100. You get what you pay for, and for reasons that will become clear, it was consigned to the bottom of my work bag within a month of purchase.

The spec on this thing was amazing. For a handheld device. Of the time. Boasting 40 hours battery life, handwriting recognition for calendar, contacts, tasks, meeting notes and Other Things, the PenPad had a capacity of 330 full pages of addresses (“Full” pages, mind you!) or 6000 diary entries.

You could expand the storage (to a whopping 2mb) via a PCMCIA slot on the underside; but you were only able to write to the internal storage or the PCMCIA card; there was no dual usage. There was no wifi, so sharing was done manually – in other words: you printed stuff via the serial cable interface on the top.

The first time I turned up to a meeting packing my PenPad, my colleagues were green with envy… until, that is,  I actually tried to take notes. The handwriting recognition system still didn’t recognise my handwriting, despite hours of supposed training to get it to do just that. I’d input all of my contacts and thought the crappy recognition was all part of the device’s learning process!

After retraining the thing twice more, and even going as far as to adapt my handwriting in an effort to suit, it just wasn’t working and my Penpad’s days were numbered.

Despite it’s failings, I’ve kept it, boxed with manual and handy multi-language help stickers since then! (What can I tell you? I’m a pack rat – which is why I’ve still got a boxed copy of Windows v1.03, too!)

OK, I’ve shared my “dodgy gadget purchase” story; it’s time for you to ‘fess up and share yours – even if you bought the Sega 32x.

(thanks to China Guccio for the Newton photo, used under Creative Commons)

gdgt is the new project from Peter Rojas and Ryan Block – the founder and the former Chief Editor of the mighty Engadget, respectively – and something that has been hotly antipicated (at least within the gadget news world, which I like to inhabit) for a year now, so the launch was big news.

The site is great and is going to attract a ton of traffic, but what struck me most, was this article on Engadget, which closes with:

Look, we’ve found the best way in life to learn about something is to scuttle the user manual and dive right in — we highly suggest you do the same and take gdgt out for a spin. We think you’ll like what you find.

Congrats Peter and Ryan!

I know there’s a lot of history between Ryan, Peter and Engadget, but the hard fact is that Engadget and gdgt operate within the same crowded and very competitive market. Yet here we have Joshua Topolsky saying to his readers, “go and check out the competition; we think you’ll like it“.

OK; it’s not all rosy in the new media garden, but I can’t imagine, for example, the Telegraph newspaper saying to it’s readers, “The Guardian have launched a new tech news site, with content from some awesome writers; go check it out!”, can you?

Not only will Apple’s future updates turn a working handset into a brick, users who suffer this because they chose to unlock their iPhone, won’t be covered by Apple’s warranty, either.

Read the full statement here.

[Update:] the iPhone Dev team, who released the only usable unlock software, have released a statement of their own.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, unlocked, software, firmware, update, brick

Today, after the early adopters, who were prepared to pay a stupid amount of money for the kudos of owning a locked-down, locked-in cellphone-cum-music-player, voiced their unhappiness, the thought of all those torch and, presumably, iPhone-wielding villagers descending on Cupertino was sufficiently scary to prompt Steve Jobs to do an about turn and offer them a $100 olive branch.

While everyone accepts that the price of any consumer electronic device will fall, no-one – especially not the crucial early-adopters who are prepared to pay a premium for, essentially, beta-testing the thing – expects to see it fall by that much, that soon.

In the end, this will cost Apple a few tens of millions to put right, but with the huge margins on the iPhone, it won’t really hurt them financially. The fact that Steve Jobs has acted so quickly speaks volumes about how good Apple are at responding to the mood of their customers, so unless they decide to rebate only those people activated their phones with AT&T, their reputation won’t be damaged by this either.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, mobile, cellphones

I had to replace my cell-phone last week after my trusty SPV C600 died; Orange don’t stock the C600 anymore, so I was given an SPV E650 as a free upgrade – now, I know what you’re thinking, “Dude, it was free, stop complaining!!!!”.

Even though I knew I would have to replace my existing 2gb mini-SD with a micro-SD card; that I’d have yet another power adapter to add to the collection; that my FM transmitter would be rendered useless because the E650 doesn’t have “normal” headphone socket; I was expecting the E650 to be a better user experience than my C600. Sadly, despite the free upgrade, this has not been so; to whit:

I’ve yet to have a day without a crash – that includes recoverable errors (the ones that generate an MS error report) from Comm Manager, Calendar, the messaging applet, and non-recoverable errors (which don’t even respond to the power button, so I have to take the battery out). And on one intensely frustrating day, all of the above within about 2 hours.

If that wasn’t enough, I can’t install the GMail Java client (which worked just fine on my C600) because of a certificate error; Efficasoft’s GPRS monitor installs but doesn’t appear on the Home screen, or monitor GPRS usage (and it worked just fine on my C600).

Wireless almost works – I’ve tried it on two APs; one which is wide-open and one which isn’t,  and the results were the same. I get an IP address, but can’t browse out so the phone resorts to GPRS.

Application installs take forever – seriously; 25 minutes with the rotating Trivial Pursuit pie-icon.

Sliding the keyboard out and then back in hangs the phone.

This thing is so bad it’s practically unusable. There are so many things wrong, that I’m actually beginning to wonder if I’ve got a faulty unit… Am I alone in my growing hatred of this device? If you’re an Orange customer, and you’ve got an E650, I’d love to hear if your experience has been the same as mine; even better, if your experience was the same and you found a way to fix it, I’d especially love to hear from you.

[tags]HTC, Vox, , S710, E650, problems, cellphone, mobile, handset[/tags]