Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > May > 20 > Entry
The days ahead: gadgets I’m playing with
The last few days, I’ve been playing with a number of tech toys I’ll be writing about soon. I spent Sunday and part of Monday in Dallas for a Radiohead concert and got to try out a few things on the road (how long has it been since I’ve traveled? Too long.) and have also had a few things at home I’ve been trying out. Here’s a few of them and some quick first impressions (longer reviews/write-ups will follow):
- Nokia’s N95 superphone. It’s a very pricey, very robust next-generation phone that runs on a fast 3G wireless network. It’s got an impressive video camera that can live-stream to the Internet using the Web site Qik, but I found the keyboard annoying, the Web browser pitiful and the 3G network to be great for video, but not so great for Web browsing. I took some video at the concert and was impressed that it was able to stream in a crowded location:
- The Intelliscanner Mini allows you to catalog your books, CDs, wine, groceries and other household products by scanning bar codes using a small handheld scanner. (Software costs extra for each package, however.) It’s a brilliant idea, but I had trouble getting it to recognize comic books and some CDs. For people who like to catalog their media collections, it’s great, but I need to spend some more time with it to see if the quirks I noticed have more to do with the device’s shortcomings or my weird collection of household items I’m trying to scan.
- The Flip Video Ultra camera takes surprisingly good video considering its size and price (about $140), but the video editing/importing software is practically unusable. I couldn’t get the software to run in Windows or Mac OS. Luckily you can easily drag video off the camera and use iMovie or some other software for editing, but the bundled software was so bad it put me off of using the camera entirely.
- I’m still playing “Grand Theft Auto IV” and just started on “Boom Blox” for the Wii for future reviews.
I’m also thinking about posting tech-related posts I make on Twitter here, kind of a “Best of Twitter” feed so you won’t have to wade through my various personal and entertainment-related posts. I’ll give that some more thought, but I may try to experiment with that this week and see how it goes.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Applications, Gadgets, Phones, Videogames
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By Marina Martin
May 21, 2008 1:01 AM | Link to this
You could tag all your tech-related posts with a hashtag, so you can easily grab them for future blog posts, i.e.:
"Streaming live on Qik using the N95 #ds360"