Josh Bancroft’s TinyScreenfuls.com

Motorola MPx

Wow. I guess Motorola decided to come clean with the details on their two hotly anticipated phones - first the MPX220 was added to their site earlier today, and now the MPx Pocket PC Phone Edition:

Thanks to Engadget.com for the heads-up. Nothing new as far as the specs - though I don’t see any final word on how much RAM it’s going to have. There’s been some speculation on this issue, since some pre-release specs said 128MB, but the engineering sample that was purchased by a lucky guy in Canada only has 32MB.

I’m starting to have a serious emotional conflict between the MPx and the MPX220. I don’t know which one I want more. When I look at the MPX220, and think of how much easier it is to work with the Smartphone platform compared to Pocket PC Phone Edition, I’m convinced that I’ll go with the MPX220. But then I look at the absolutely gorgeous pics and design of the MPx (see the Moto site for high-res versions), and the feature list (WiFi, integrated QWERTY keyboard, etc.), and I start to wonder if I could live with the limitations of Pocket PC Phone Edition to live with such a beautiful device. 32MB of RAM would be a deal breaker, but if the MPx does in fact ship with 128MB RAM, I’m going to have a serious gadget dilemma on my hands…

Whatever will I do?

We got our new (replacement) Xbox last night. Best Buy didn’t have any more of the translucent green Halo Limited Edition versions, so we just got a plain old black one. I checked the manufacture date, to make sure it was recent (5/8/04). I also noticed that the one we got was manufactured in China (our original one was made in Mexico).

When I swapped it out at home, I noticed that it seemed a bit lighter than the old one, and much, much quieter (thank goodness!). The old one was very noisy (mostly fans) during normal operation, and once the power supply fan started failing, it got almost unbearable. The new one is whisper quiet, which is great.

I was wondering what make of DVD drive we would get. There are three different DVD drives (Thompson, Phillips, and Samsung) used in the Xbox. The Thompson drive is generally considered to be the least reliable, while the Samsung is considered to be the best. Besides reliability, the different makes have varying abilities when it comes to reading CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-R/DVD-RW media. Based on the photos in this thread on www.xbox-scene.com, our new Xbox has a Phillips drive.

Seems to be pretty reliable, but not able to read many kinds of recordable media. Oh well - not a huge deal to me.

We did get a two year replacement plan, which will let us get a complete replacement if anything goes wrong. Normally, I avoid extended warranties/replacement plans as a waste of money, but as I’ve discovered in the Pocket PC realm, they can be quite handy for something you pretty much know you’re going to replace within the coverage period. To me, it was worth an extra twenty bucks to know that I can take it back and get it replaced if so much as a controller dies on me in the next two years.

I also noticed that the cord on the included Controller S is just plain black rubber, instead of the fancy translucent green of my other original controlers. Again, not a huge difference, just something I noticed. At least I have 4 controllers now (2x original and 2x “S”), for games that support 4 players.

I was able to copy all of my save games and my Live! account over to the new box using my memory card. It’s got a capacity of about 500 blocks. Most games (PGR2, Soul Calibur II, Crimson Skies, Rainbow Six 3, etc.) only took up a few blocks, but I discovered that Halo saves are huge - over 250 blocks. I thought it was interesting that the Halo saves were so much larger than the others. I never really paid attention before, because with a 9GB hard drive, running out of space for save games was about the last thing I was worried about.

The last thing I have to do is re-download all of the downloadable content I had, since that was way too big to transfer via memory card. I downloaded the Paris Booster Pack for PGR2 last night, and played around with it. It was pretty cool - I love the Ferrari 288 GTO, and it was great to get to drive it.

If anyone out there is on Xbox Live!, and wants to add me to your Friends list, my GamerTag is Seraph. I’m not online too often, but let me know if you ever want to set up a game.

We finally decided to replace our aging/failing Xbox. I bought it about a month after it was released, in December 2001. It’s widely known that early Xbox models have disc-reading problems (mainly attributed to the Thompson DVD-ROM drive), and newer models have slightly different components (Samsung DVD drives, etc.) that are supposed to make them more reliable. Mine has had a failing power supply fan for a while now, which is noisy and annoying, and has been having an increasing amount of disc read errors (DRE’s). It’s gotten to the point where we can’t play a game, watch a DVD, or listen to a CD for more than 15 minutes or so with gettting a DRE, or having it simply lock up.

So this weekend, my wife finally got exasperated to the point where she gave me permission to go out and get a new one. I’m going to try to snag one of the translucent green Halo Limited Edition units, if they’re still around anywhere. It all depends on what’s available when I hit up Besy Buy tonight.

Now, all I’ll have to do is migrate all of my game saves and Live account over to the new unit with a memory card (I have an orange one that I got as part of the Xbox Live beta). I’m toying with the idea of using the old unit for modding - installing a mod chip that lets you run unsigned code and applications. XMP (Xbox Media Player) looks pretty sweet, and it would be cool to be able to play music/video content from my PC over the network. If I do crack open the case, and whip out the soldering iron, you can be sure I’ll post about it here.

Heard on the news last night that someone tried to steal some guy’s laptop at gunpoint at the light rail station I use almost every day. Nice…

It’s stuff like this that makes me extra careful about carrying/using my gadgets, and being aware of my surroundings in public.

Use your head, and don’t make yourself a target!

Hotmail to offer 250MB of free storage | CNET News.com

Microsoft fires the next salvo in the webmail storage wars.

First, Google’s Gmail stunned the world when they announced they would offer a free webmail account with 1 GB of storage. Then the invitation-only nature of the closed beta drove Gmail hype to stratospheric levels.

Not willing to lurk in the shadows, Yahoo announced last week that they will bump the storage on their free webmail accounts to 100MB, and give their paying customers 2 GB. Take that, Gmail.

Never to be outdone, we now know what Microsoft’s Hotmail is going to do in response to the battle of the gigabytes between Gmail and Yahoo. 250 MB for free accounts, and 2 GB for pay accounts. In your face, Gmail and Yahoo.

I currently pay $19.99/year for Hotmail Extra Storage, which gives me 10 MB instead of 2 MB. It’s been enough for me not to worry about my mailbox filling up, but I still archive the majority of my mail offline in an Outlook PST file, to keep things under control.

I have also been using Gmail for a few weeks, and I have to say, I love it. Once I can access it via IMAP/POP3 (features they’re supposedly working on) from my Smartphone, I plan to switch to Gmail as my main personal address.

Now that the big three are all on more or less equal footing regarding storage, I predict that the determining factor will become how well they can manage spam. I get so much spam at my Hotmail account I had to turn on their Exclusive email filter, which only lets mail from addresses I’ve approved/whitelisted into my Inbox. But that means that I still have to go digging through my junk mail folder to find items that aren’t already on my whitelist. No spam so far in my Gmail account, but I’m sure that will change.

If you use one of these webmail accounts, will the recent increases in storage offered keep you from jumping ship to Gmail? Or is the goodness of the Google aura, plus their pledge to “not be evil” enough to make you switch?