I've never been so up-to-date on my hardware :).
I purchased a T610, a NextLink Bluespoon, and Parrot DriveBlue this summer. =
I received my AlBook about a week after it was announced, and my T3 two days after it was announced. I also have a new version of the iPod (non-rotary wheel).
15" AlBook
- OSX Came broken. The Apple X11 server was unstable, and had no menu items. The "spoken interface" dialog lost track of "Alert" messages. After two days, the log-in dialog refused to start resulting in a blue screen being shown, dieing, and respawning.
- I tried to install Gentoo Linux. I couldn't get the machine to boot from the Linux (yaboot) partition. My kernel had trouble mouting file systems, even though I thought I had the correct partition table support built-in.
- I reformatted the machine so as to move Linux partitions to the front of the disk as someone suggested a "10GB barrier" even though this didn't seem like the problem, I figured it was worth a shot. Didn't work. OSX then destroyed the Linux partitions when it installed, despite saying "oh, 66.6 GB partition? I'll use this. You now have 74.4GB free." It then pointed a finger at me and laughed a la nelson.
- I installed OSX. I then installed Panther. It broke the tunnel module. You see, OSX doesn't have TUN support by default. Granted, it was expected that it would break the module, but I wanted to try anyway. In anyevent, Expose is damn cool. But I wanted network access.
- So I tried to reinstall Jagwyre again, unfortunately the options were "Upgrade OSX" "Wipe all your data and install OSX" "Install OSX, backing up current system to non-bootable drive". I figured "Install OSX, backing up current system" was the best option since I couldn't actually downgrade (Upgrade was greyed out). OSX, unlike any "real" Unix-like distribution then proceded to overwrite /usr/local which is very ... not good ... and upset me.
- When I rebooted, and before I realized what was going on, I now had 10.2.8 installed. This was a buggy OSX version, so instead of dealing with it, as I had *just* installed 10.2.7 again, I rebooted, wiped the disk, and installed back to the original system. This is what we have now.
- [UPDATE: 2004-07-10] A week ago, I took my AlBook to the Apple store because it stopped updating /etc/resolv.conf (and didn't seem to be using the default route anymore). They told me the solution was to reinstall. I'm now running Gentoo GNU/Linux PPC exclusively because of this, and have decided to stop using proprietary, closed-source software (unfortunately this also includes the full featured JVMs also). [ UPDATE: 2004-11-11 ] 2.6.9 is much better than either 2.6.7 or 2.6.8.
10GB iPod
- I got this with my AlBook for $50 + $25 in tax. When I use it, I have this feeling that I should be giving Jobs more money. One time, when it was paused, I could have sworn I heard something coming out of the earphones that sounded like his voice. [ UPDATE: I'm not the only one ]
Tungsten T3
- I've had very bad luck with Palm in the past, but damnit, this was the best PDA out (that was also less than $700). And all the Clies have those damn annoying keyboards. Bluetooth, a real web browser, and what I expected to be a real IMAP mail client were very attractive.
- The IMAP support, while it does SSL, does not support multiple folders (or at least hierarchal folders). This is irritating, but I'll probably be moving to web mail anyway, so I'll use the decent browser. 64 MB of RAM means 10MB of cache works well.
- The first time it locked up and required a soft-reset was when a phone call came while it was using the phone's GPRS connection. This probably killed the connection to the PDA and .. .well, Palm has crappy networking/time-sharing code.
- The worst problem with it was when it refused to turn on. It dropped to about 27% battery, so I charged it for a few hours. I took it out. A few hours later, I tried to turn it on, and it refused. When I got back home, I put it back in its cradle, and it still wouldn't turn on. I opend it up, it turned on, took a while to actually respond to being open beyond that though (if you've ever opend a T while it was locked, you'd understand--it doesn't draw to the bottom of the screen). Finally I got it to turn on normally. It was at about 87% battery at this point, so its battery wasn't dead earlier ... it just didn't realize it.
SE T610
- I like my phone, don't get me wrong. But it shouldn't lock up.
- The bluetooth also shouldn't sporadically turn off.
- Their service center shouldn't scratch the $@$@# screen either.
Nextlink Bluespoon
- Love it, except I have to turn it "completely off" every now and then or it confuses my phone.
- The Bluespoon died after six months. It took a month to get the company to take it back, and another month for the trip to and back from Denmark required of it. I haven't actually used it since I got it back--I've been using a Plantronics headset since the Bluespoon broke. While I love the Bluespoon, it's limited life time (non-replaceable battery) and poor support (in the US) from the company doesn't make it worthwhile for a future purchase.
