As I promised ear­lier, I would write a review about TOMTOM. I have had the device now a couple of months, although I find the device the eas­i­est to use cur­rently avail­able in the indus­try, I have some real com­plaints, actu­ally I only have two. On the hard­ware side the bat­tery life, which is really shame­ful! I know I can charge the device with my cig­a­rette lighter but thats not really the point of a portable device. With modern Lithium-​Ion bat­ter­ies nowa­days you can expect bat­tery life of 5 hours or more. While it charges quickly, after less than two hours on the road the little bat­tery indi­ca­tor at the lower right would start to flash yellow… bugger. My second com­plaint is about the soft­ware, I would rather see TOMTOM write a native Cocoa appli­ca­tion, JAVA tech­nol­ogy is okay, but one way or an other, JAVA pro­gram­mers seem only to be able to pro­gram buggy and crappy pro­grams, that’s at least my expe­ri­ence. I have tried mul­ti­ple times using the TOMTOM Home soft­ware, it can brick your TOMTOM (the famous blink­ing red cross)! Luck­ily I had backed-​up my device so it wasn’t a prob­lem. I can repro­duce it every time. The soft­ware really sucks balls big time! SO should you buy a TOMTOM? I would say yes, it’s always right in find­ing my loca­tions, traf­fic infor­ma­tion, is really easy to use and when I buy a new car I don’t have to migrate or redo all my data or settings.

Researchers at the Human Media Lab­o­ra­tory, Queen’s Uni­ver­sity in Canada are devel­op­ing pro­to­types of new “non-planar” devices, which are vir­tu­ally com­put­ers that have a flex­i­ble shape. Com­put­ers are nifty, but often too bulky to be car­ried around. Even a laptop is too big to put in your pocket, but imag­ine if your com­puter looked and worked like a mag­a­zine or a piece of paper to be tucked away into your pock­ets. Not only will they take on flex­i­ble forms we’ve never imag­ined like pop cans with browsers dis­play­ing RSS feeds and movie trail­ers com­put­ers of the future will respond to our direct touch and even change their own shape to better accom­mo­date data.
The con­cept behind these next-​generation com­put­ers is “organic user interface”. Every­day com­put­ers live in only two dimen­sions and as a result, have become narrow-​minded. You are essen­tially look­ing at a tiny tunnel into a flat, on-​line world, and that causes people to think in a two-​dimensional way. ”Flatland” inter­faces are incred­i­bly lim­ited com­pared to nat­ural 3D ones”. This is in my opin­ion a rev­o­lu­tion in human-​computer inter­ac­tion. So Apple if you’re read­ing this…

Sadly enough I have to mod­er­ate user cre­ation because of my new Russ­ian “friend” (yes, I know who you are and I have your IP number)! I don’t want to close down user reg­is­tra­tion, so as of now the account cre­ation process will be held for mod­er­a­tion. If you use a corny or fake e-mail address, access will be denied with­out fur­ther notice. You will receive an e-mail after you have requested an account, if approved you will receive a pass­word. My apolo­gies for this inconvenience.

I am the lucky owner of an iPod touch. I’ve bought the device for mobile enter­tain­ment (music & video). Apple deliv­ers a very crappy user expe­ri­ence with their Quick­Time Trail­ers site: I can’t play their default trail­ers, I am being for­warded to their ’special’ iPhone sec­tion, where I get the ultimate-​postage-​stamp-​sized-​crappy-​compressed trailer there is avail­able. Maybe it’s one-​size-​fits-​all con­cept isn’t bad for the “iPod fatty” user, but the qual­ity on my iPod is shame­ful! What hap­pened to all those lovely pixels? Let me decide if I want to down­load the 640×336 ver­sion or the 320×172 ver­sion. I can do it on my desk­top, so why not on my iPod? Okay, 320×172 is small, but that doesn’t mean that the qual­ity has to be so crappy!
So think you can do better huh…! Well yeah! I haven’t got the RAW-​DV footage but I’ve taken the 480p ver­sion to show my point. Even the recom­pressed mate­r­ial is better then theirs. Here’s are the two files for com­par­i­son: the orig­i­nal Clover­field Trailer (320) versus the recom­pressed Clover­field Trailer (640). Just put them on your iPod for com­par­is­ment.