Posted on September 29, 2009
Palm Pre — Succotash
I don’t really like to rant, but sometimes I think a PSA is required…
I picked up a Palm Pre last week, and took it back after like five days. I loved my many Palms — I found the original charger for my very first Palm Pilot the other day. Right now, I have a Treo 700p, which was one of the first touch-screen, web enabled, awesome happy smart phones out there, and after a week with the Pre, I’m more than happy to keep it for a little while.
I actually went through TWO Pre’s. After seeing reviews online about them being “slow”, but still pretty good all around, I make the following prediction: Something is very wrong with SOME Pres — enough to be a big problem, and either Palm is just replacing affected phones or people just aren’t complaining loudly enough. I say this because there are enough people who are happy with their phones that they certainly couldn’t have had the experience I did, so something must be different.
In short, I had two major problems. First, the phone was so slow as to be completely unuseable. Yes, lots of reviews say that it’s slow, but they don’t give any real examples. Here’s one for you: it took me THREE MINUTES to make a phone call not even using the Contacts app (I typed the phone number in directly). The contacts list never worked for me. I waited until it was finished syncing with my Facebook and Google addresses and it NEVER let me scroll to the bottom of my contact list. It would always hang at some point “loading” more contacts and never let me scroll any farther.
That’s just inane.
100341
My screen flickered on and off for no reason — I have video of it taking 45 seconds for the screen to come on and STAY on (not BOOT, mind you, just open the charged, turned on phone). No apps running, no syncing going on, nothing.
Battery life was abysmal. Not “bad” not, “I nearly made it through the day”… no… an overnight charge (9+ hours) got the battery to read 80% charged, and spending less than five minutes browsing the web and trying to make a phone call the phone was DEAD 90 minutes later.
So I took it back, and got a replacement Pre, and exactly the same thing happened.
Either there’s a really crappy batch of Palm Pres out there, largely in the Dayton area, or I’m just really unlucky, or something. I’m at a loss. There are plenty of comments around from other people with the same problems, but we seem to be a small percentage of the Pre population.
Still, even if the apps worked as advertised (Try with spotipromo), the phone wasn’t as useful as an old Treo or the Blackberries out there, so, for the forseeable future, no Palm for me. YMMV.
Posted on June 6, 2009
Cameras and Bicycles
I’ve been getting a lot more bicycling in lately — Xenia, just up the road from Dayton, claims to be the bicycle capital of the world. I have no idea what that means, but they really do have a fantastic collection of bike-friendly trails that meet in their downtown area. If you like e-bikes there are some brilliant collapsable electric bikes at wisperbikes.com. On this particular Saturday, we started there, and headed towards Springfield — one of the four directions from Xenia Station. It was a perfect day for a ride — gorgeous weather, shady trees, mostly-friendly passers-by, and film-worthy scenes involving boston terriers chasing kids on bikes.
Mostly, though, there was an old bridge that we hit five miles in…
See how pretty that is? Right. 12 miles or so past that, turn around, come back, get to the car and do a loop around the parking lot to hit an even 35 miles. On mountain bikes and in bad shape, that’s the longest workout I’ve had since the half-marathon. Got home, relaxed, felt lots of pain and then realized I had no idea where my camera was. Right. The little Canon SD1100 that I got to replace the little Canon SD1000 that I got to replace the little Canon SD800 that I got a really long time ago. It’s always on my hip, except when I don’t wear a belt, and I strap it to my bike’s handlebars. Nope, not there either.
Now, see, I HAVE a picture of the bride up there a paragraph or so. So you’d think that means I found my camera, right? No. After driving back out to look for it, I came BACK to my house to pick up my bike and did the 5 miles BACK to the bridge (the last place I knew I had it — at least I took pictures coming and going so I knew it wasn’t farther along the path). No dice. At this point I’ve done over 45 miles on the bike and I’m in absolutely no shape for that. No camera. If anyone finds it, send it my way. The last few pics should look something like the one above, which I took with my camera just a couple of hours ago.
Nighty-night.
—Chip
Posted on May 6, 2009
Kentucky Derby (Pics!)
Ah, the Kentucky Derby Infield. One of these days I’ll get the $1000 seats, and hit the Barnstable-Brown party the night before, but until then, the crazy people are still tons of fun. Thanks Ma and Pa for ferrying us around and hooking us up with a few meals!
Hope everyone had a good time… I stole pics from Catrina and put them up with the ones from my and mom’s camera’s. If anyone has any I missed, lemme know!
Yay!
Posted on May 3, 2009
Marathon Pic Updates
OK, I’ll update this with derby pics as soon as I get ’em updated, but in the mean time you HAVE to see these pics of Joslyn and Vicki at the Kentucky Derby Marathon (yep, Vicki ran the whole 26). Congrats Joslyn on beating Vicki! Those are by far the cutest running photos I’ve ever seen.
I don’t look completely idiotic in my pics and neither does Joe. Mike, Butch, Jessica, and Emily all have pics up too. I think there are pics from the Country Music Marathon, too, but I can’t find them just now.
Update: The brightroom people keep changing the way they track the photos, so if you clicked a link and there were only stock pictures of the finish, it’s not my fault. I think I have it fixed, but if they change it again, let me know and I’ll fix it again!