I must admit though that for all my love of gadgetry, this is my first “smart” phone, so much of my adoration might be due to that. Regardless, here are some thoughts.

Having instant access to email is wonderful. I host my email via Google Apps. IMAP + Gmail (Google Apples) = Amazing. It’s fantastic. I also have Google’s mobile Gmail client as well. It gives more of a true Gmail interface with Searching / Starring, etc but it is slower to update. The Blackberry client updates continuously, while the Google client polls every fifteen minutes. I’ve heard they will make this configurable in the next version, but I can’t find any concrete documentation saying so. If they do, it will literally be perfect.

The web browser works surprisingly well. On the Verizon network, I can browse the internet quite nicely.

I also enjoy the click screen very much. I was unconvinced of this feature when I first read about it, but it is actually implemented quite intuitively, and it works well for me.

The Blackberry Messenger is great for instant communication with other Blackberry users. I am also using the Google Talk client.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the quality from the camera – both for still pictures and video. The touch/drag zoom works very well.

Copying and pasting comes in quite handy, too.

I’ve also loaded a few applications:

The aforementioned Gmail Mobile Client – I already described it, but it functions as you’d expect – very well.

Google Talk – Instant access to other Google Talk users.

Google Sync – Flawlessly synchronizes with my Google Calendars and Contacts.

Opera Mini – This is a terrific little mobile browser. It is not optimized / fully compatible with the Storm yet, so there are a couple quirks, but it is more than useable.

Twitterberry – I’m not a hardcore “Twitterer,” but it is fun and Twitterberry is an excellent client that doesn’t rely on SMS messages.

Weatherbug – Don’t know why – maybe I am a weather nerd. I enjoy having the world’s weather forecast in my pocket.

YouVersion – YouVersion is a terrific Bible application from the LifeChurch team. It is not quite ready for primetime on the Storm though. It is useable for reading and searching though, which is what I guess is the main point. Unfortunately, it cannot download translations to my Storm right now, which would be very nice for the odd occasion when I don’t have a reliable signal. I’m sure it will be though. I’ve played with it on my dad’s iPhone and it works perfectly.

Youtube Mobile Client – It’s just what it sounds like. It let’s you kill countless hours on Youtube.

Flycast – Oh yeah, THIS is nice. In an office where radios aren’t allowed and streaming audio is blocked, this is a wonderful addition to my workday. Flycast allows you to stream radio via the Storm.

To sum up, I love my Storm and in less than a week, have become completely dependant on / addicted to it. I’ll never go back to a “normal” cell phone again!

It’s more personal preference, but I will stick with Amazon’s MP3 Store for now. MP3′s are ubiquitous; everything plays them. I also prefer not to have my name and email address embedded within my audio files. I have bought only two items from iTunes in the past year – a Ray LaMontagne exclusive live EP and a Dave Matthews Band 2008 Live Sampler (which was actually free with concert tickets). I’ll gladly pay a couple dollars to upgrade those – the audio on the encrypted files really is noticeably degraded and it will be nice to get higher-quality versions of them.

This has to be seen as a shot back at Amazon, whose MP3 store seems to be gaining popularity, though it is still a distant second to the iTunes Store. I’m thrilled by yesterday’s annoucenment. The current DRM model needs to be kicked to the curb and I will welcome any step in that direction.

Apple released iTunes 8 to the public on Tuesday. As a major iTunes user, I was more curious about this than the new iPods, the details of which we have known for a while. While iTunes 8 is certainly not a major update, there are some interesting new features.

First of all, the much-touted Genius functionality. Genius is a feature that analyzes your iTunes library and the uploads that information into a shared repository maintained by Apple. The information is supposedly anonymous, etc, but we’re talking music genres, artists, ratings and play count information, so I’m not all the concerned either way. Anyways, once enabled, it allows you to select a track and generate a playlist based on that particular song. I have created several “Genius Playlists” and with the exception of an odd track or two, it has worked remarkably well and has created some very enjoyable playlists. The other aspect is that it can recommend songs to you based on songs in your library. These songs can then be purchased from the iTunes Store. I may use it to discover new music, but I don’t typically buy from iTunes. I despise restrictive DRM and even their non-DRM’ed tracks are in Apple’s m4a format. I buy my digital music from Amazon’s excellent MP3 service.

There is one major problem with Genius right now though: The Beatles. Well, not exclusively The Beatles, but they are the most glaring example. The Genius feature apparently employs some data from the iTunes store, even when simply creating playlists from your own library. As such, artists that are not present in the iTunes Store do not work with the Genius feature. For example, I can not use the song Hey Jude as a source for a Genius playlist because The Beatles are not available from the iTunes Store. This is true for other artists as well. This is poor design and Apple should address it. The Genius feature should be “genius” enough to build playlists based on artists not on the iTunes Store using data from my own library and that of the libraries of others out in “the cloud.” A big thumbs down for this glaring omission. Genius is a great feature overall, but Apple needs to fix it.

Apple has also added a new Grid View for viewing your library by album cover. This is a nice looking view, but it is something other players have had for a while and is a feature I’ll rarely use. Still, it does look very pretty. Check it out here.

iTunes has a new, “improved” visualization now. While it is certainly interesting-looking, visualizations never interested me much back in 1998 with Winamp and not much has changed. I guess it could look cool on a big screen TV or something at a party, but I really don’t care much for visualizations and I can’t imagine too many other people care either.

Another welcome addition to iTunes 8 is the ability to set much more specific preferences for podcast downloads. Bravo! It’s about time!

iTunes is a large, cumbersome, resource-intensive application, but the actual resource utilization in this version does not seem to have increased, which is a good thing. In addition, the application itself seems a good bit more responsive. Moving around within it seems to be much smoother, with fewer pauses or hesitations. Many people complain about the impact iTunes has on a system. It is certainly not lightweight. However, for managing my music library (which is hundreds of GB), iTunes does exactly what I need and want it to do and I don’t plan to replace it anytime soon (though I am keeping a sharp eye on Songbird).

Generally speaking, iTunes 8 is a worthy upgrade. The Genius feature is something I’ll use (but they need to correct its glaring flaw), podcast configuration is much improved and resource impact is about the same. If you are a heavy iTunes user, I’d recommend this latest version.

If you didn’t know, they like to sue people. A lot. In fact, that seems to be their favorite pastime these days.

Don’t get me wrong – I am a fan of copyright protections. I know they protect artists and the revenue allows them to create more music, etc. I understand that. I buy music that I really like. In fact, I just bought a CD from this band that is local to Baltimore called The Bridge. I highly recommend checking them out.

Anyways, back to the RIAA and their seemingly limitless ability to be completely lame and attack all things awesome.

Their latest victim is a great little site called muxtape.com. Muxtape.com allows(ed?) you to upload several mp3′s and then it would stream them back to visitors of your site. Nobody could download the files you uploaded, but it was a great way to create random mixes to share with friends. We all made mixtapes back in the day and muxtape.com is a sort of Web 2.0 (I hate that term) equivalent.

The RIAA apparently had a problem with the site. I don’t know what it is. Their page simply reads:

Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.

I assume the RIAA‘s problem is something along the lines of: “People are enjoying music and we are not directly profiting nor did we give permission.”

See, the interesting thing is this – I found The Bridge through someone else’s Muxtape page. I bought their CD. I have recommended them to at least five different people since I bought their CD Saturday and I know for a fact that two of those people have also bought their latest CD. That is three CD sales as a direct result of muxtape.

You see, RIAA lawyers, your attacks on harmless sites like muxtape do nothing but prevent people from discovering new music or frustrate them into turning to piracy. Seriously.

I’d never recommend people illegally download music, but people do. All the time. Perhaps the RIAA should spend more time developing new and innovative ways of getting their music into the hands of music lovers and less time standing in the way of technological advances and suing people for finding creative ways to listen.

Music lovers will buy good music. Just don’t prevent us from enjoying it.

All of these settings are accessed by going up to your Smart Location Bar and typing about:config. Tell it that “I’ll be careful, I promise!” and continue. Here are a few settings to play with:

• browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped – Changing this from false to true will cause the bar to only search URLs you have actually typed in – it will no longer search your bookmarks or links you have clicked.
• set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults – This defines the maximum number of search results the Smart Location Bar will display. The default is 12. Setting it to 0 will effectively disable the bar altogether.
• places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus – Setting this to 0 will exclude bookmarks you have not visited.
• places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus – Setting this to 0 will exclude bookmarks that you have visited. Setting this and the above option both to 0 effectively removes bookmarks from the search.
• places.frecency.unvisitedTypedBonus – This setting has three possible values and will greatly modify the search results. A value of 0 will give you results based on what you type being present anywhere in a URL, bookmark or history item to be searched, assuming you have not narrowed what is seatched using one of the above tweaks. A value of 1 will result with what you typed being displayed anywhere in a URL, bookmark or history item, followed by results that begin with what you typed. Finally, a value of 2 will show only results where what you have typed is present in the beginning of a URL, bookmark or history item.

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 gives you many more options for tweaking the Smart Location Bar. If you want to check it out, you can get it here. Keep in mind it is an alpha build and is technically intended only for developers. I’ve had it installed for a couple days now though with no problems. You can see a list and examples of changes to the Smart Location Bar here.

The Smart Location Bar (Awesome Bar) is a fantastic new component to a terrific browser. If you aren’t a fan though or just want to change its behavior, hopefully this will help get you started.

It’s like a typical Address Bar on steroids. I can type in a word or part of a word and be greeted not only with URLs containing the text in question, but also links to sites in my history or bookmarks that have that text in the title. Typing “NBA” showed me two articles about the NBA referee scandal that I had read from Fox News.

Sometimes, it’s the simple things.

What fun. If you check back and see parked page, ugly page or no page, things will be back to normal…eventually.

INHOLLAND University used BitTorrent to distribute 3.5GB of patches to 6,500 workstations. That is over 22TB of data. It used to take them four days and over twenty-four servers to push out that much information. With BitTorrent? It took four hours and four servers.

That’s what I call thinking outside the box!

Source: ArsTechnica

Enter VSO Image Resizer. This great little application does everything its Power Toys counterpart did and more. It offers many more configurable image sizes, lets you choose to overwrite or create copies, choose to keep EXIF information and anything else I need.

It’s not a full-fledged photo application, and that is exactly what I wanted.

It resizes pictures quickly and effortlessly and it has become indispensable to me.

Did I mention that it is free?

There are currently two photo sets – 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s.

All of the images are copyright free and offer an incredible look back into the past.

I’ve literally spent the last two hours wandering through the images.

This is seriously one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time.