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The Samsung SGH-E250V

June23

Two weeks ago, during exam week, my sister got a phone call while she was at school. This phone call was from MTV and they called her to confirm her address so they could send her the prize she had won. The prize, it was a Samsung SGH-E250V phone. The next morning, there was a package on our doorstep. It was the phone. My sister had already gone for her exam and wouldn’t be home till later on in the afternoon so I wouldn’t get to see it till then.

When she did get home, she quickly opened it and there is was, a little red box with a cellphone in it. I quickly got the camera and asked her if I could unbox it and take pictures of it. She said it would be okay. I did that and then we put the phone on the charger and left it overnight. Just by looking at it, and reading the instruction manual (who reads instructions anymore) we worked out that her current LG phone is a lot better than the new Samsung, so she would let me use it till I got a real (i)Phone.

I turned it in and had a good 10 minute play with it. It doesn’t have 3G but it has a music player, bluetooth, FM radio, camera that can record video, and the other basics that a phone has. Now I needed a SIM card so I could take the phone. My sister went on for another exam that day and got me one while she was in town. Now I could actually use the phone.

Its a decent phone, I’m pretty happy with it. One of the things I have never had a good chance to play with is Bluetooth. Sending files to and from a computer using Bluetooth is amazing. Its quite quick and pretty easy to do, and the best thing about it, no wires! There is also an issue that I have with the phone. Since is it a slide phone, to access the numberpad, you need to slide the screen up. This is not a simple task, it doesn’t just glide up like the LG Chocolate, you really have to push it. On top of that, it is really hard to grip to slide it up. While this is not really a huge issue, it is really annoying, even more so if you really don’t want to touch the screen and get fingerprints on it.

Other that that minor problem, I am pretty happy with the phone. It is a temporary phone until I get my hands on a Jesus Phone, aka, the Apple iPhone. I can’t wait to be able to carry around one device, a cellphone, a music player, and an internet device. If there is a downside to this phone, and many other phones, its that I expect more from them, and they just don’t deliver like the iPhone :( Hopefully the temporary phone is very temporary!

posted under Life, Technology | 5 Comments »

Making The Frontpage

September17

Yesterday I managed to make the frontpage of Digg. This is a difficult thing to do in my opinion, although there are people that are naturals and get heaps of stories on the frontpage daily. Anyway, I strategically got a story that was bound to make it to the frontpage to get there before someone else submitted it.

First off, I needed to work out what the reader wanted to see and/or know and find a place that would be able to provide that information. I decided to go with the big topic of Apple’s new iPods, one that is seen on Digg at least 5 times a day. I was going to submit one of those stories!

One thing that hadn’t been done is the dissection of the new iPod Touch. Okay, it may seem like nothing but one question that is on a lot of people’s minds is Bluetooth, is it or is it not in the iPod Touch? The only way this could possibly be answered if in one of two ways, either Apple confirms it, or someone rips apart a unit and discovers a chip for Bluetooth.

I knew where I had to go to find the story. iFixit had recently taken apart the iPod Nano and iPod Classic and I was positive that they were going to do the same to the iPod Touch when they got their dirty hands on it. I frantically waited for signs of them having their way with her, refreshing the page every minute. The iPod was out and they had to have one by now.

After about an hour of refreshing, in fine print down the side of the page was the first sign on life “Check out our first look at the iPod Touch.” I click and saw a bunch of unboxing pictures. When are they going to rip into her? Are they going to? There was no mention on the site about taking it apart, but they had to! I refreshed a couple of times. I went to submit it to Digg, entering in all of the field waiting to submit it. I went back to iFixit. After more minutes of refreshing, finally there as a sign, they were going to take a look inside.

This was when I finally submitted it. I was hoping no one else had submitted it during my period of hesitation. To my luck, I was the only one. My story is bound to be on the frontpage by the time they finished stripping her naked. I get Peppery to digg it, he did as well as twittered it. I submitted it to Pownce, thats where a lot of the Kevin Rose Fanboys… errmm… I mean Diggers hang out.

Every 10 minutes, a picture of the iPod Touch went up, each one more less article of clothing from the last. After two hours, she was completely stripped of her glory and out there for the world to see her bits, every single component, every single chip. Every hour, I got one or two diggs. 6 hours later, my story only has 20 diggs. The problem was the timezone conflicts. I was going to have to wait till the morning to see the progress of my story. I went to sleep. In the morning, I wake up to discover my story hit the frontpage an hour ago. 400 diggs by the time I wake up. Yay! I got there! I win!!!