Tech update

Urrgh. Dead laptop. Not too fun, but hey, it happens. Which led me of course to get A: a new computer, which inevitably leads to B: other stuff discovered during the process of upgrading.

The big news first. I got a new Mac laptop, a little better than the old Mac laptop. Well.... a lot better. From a 12" G4 laptop to the amazing 17" 2.33Ghz Intel Core 2 duo.

Second are a pair of music enablers.

First is a little pirate radio station. ;) Well, not really. I gots me a RoadTrip. Works exactly as expected. Nothing spectacular, but it makes me smile, especially when I drive for more than ten minutes.

What does make me smile is what I got to go with my cellphone. I got a bluetooth headset. For the record, the Sony Erricson k790a does support stereo bluetooth, more specifically the A2DP. Managed to track down a pair of Motorola HT820's. These rock.

They work flawlessly with my cellphone, with the buttons on the headset handling both volume and also skipping forward and back through tracks on my phone, as well as answering the phone and turning on voice dialling. The sound is quite good, although I can't find Motorola's claimed frequency range. Bass response is respectable, Mids are crisp, and the highs retain their complexity without getting all mushy... this from someone who hates it when cymbals sound crappy.

My usual mix of songs for testing is Crass' Big A Little A, followed by NIN's That's What I Get, and finishing with Fugazi's Waiting Room. All three give speakers and headphones a hell of a workout, but will also reveal noise during the quiet bits.

I tested first over the phone's bluetooth connection then tested with a direct connection over the included wire. These are better than the sony headphones of the same style that I've been using for years, if not as loud.

As a bluetooth headset they're decent, although I've had some problems. Whether it's the phone or the headset, I'm not sure, but one of them seems to get confused between the bluetooth profiles that they both support, so sometimes the headset won't send the right signal to answer the bloody phone. Every time that's happened, the headset has still interrupted the music to alert me to an incoming call, so I've been able to find the phone and answer it. A minor irritation.

Now, I'd like to take a second to call out Apple. SUPPORT A2DP already!!!! The chipset supports it. Your marketing practically begs for it. Make your bloody OS support it.... and Jesus will kill a kitten for every iPhone that ships that doesn't support it. Really

The best part of Bluetooth headphones is that you get to talk to yourself like a crazy person anytime you want, and so long as you have a glowing blue pulse coming out of your ear, nobody thinks anything of it. Kind of cool.

Speaking of Apple's iPhone, I'd just like to make sure that there is some more google hits on the idea of releasing this thing in Canada... Rogers being the obvious choice. I'm hoping that the second gen comes out soon, preferably around October so I can justify it as a birthday present for myself. This thing is a killer app, as far as having it automagically sense whether it should use EDGE or 802.11 to access the internet... using Safari. That kills. The iPhone is going to change the way that the world looks at internet access, and that is what is truly revolutionary about it. Suddenly people are going to take access to the internet EVERYWHERE as a given. I predict a dramatic drop in the cost of cellular data plans, along the lines of the drop in the cost of dial-up internet access when AOL joined it's commercial BBS to the real Internet. Now, middle class people like me are going to be at the vanguard of making the price of this type of device drop, but in ten years, this is going to be what all phones will be like. You want to talk about the internet treating censorship as damage and routing around it. With the penetration and ubiquity of cell phones in the third world, imagine how revolutionary these wireless internet appliances are going to be. As addictive as my iPod is, it was just a better walkman. The iPhone is at the same level of world changing as the original Apple was. Nothing is involved that hasn't been done by others, better; just not integrated and presented in such a way as the fucker actually gets used. The iPod crap that they threw in is just extra stuff. It's the internet appliance stuff that is so much better than anything else on the market... Light years ahead of Symbian or Palm or Windows Mobile or Blackberry.