Saturday, March 13, 2010

Brian's Blog

Tech, Life and Everyday Living

Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Palm Pre Plus (and Pixi Plus) Review

Posted by Brian On March - 3 - 2010

Let me preface this by saying that this is the first time with the Palm Pre, I didn’t have the chance to use one of the originals, and my main phone is an iPhone 3GS. I also tried to keep my iPhone in my pocket and use the two Palm phones exclusively during the time that I had them. That said, here is my review.

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The Palm Pre Plus is the same old Pre with a few upgrades. They got rid of the home button, but it still has that cheese cutting edge on it, they changed the color of the keyboard. The Pixi on the other hand is a non-slider unit that feels a little bit more sturdy, and the Pre has a cheap plastic cover on the MicroUSB door that has almost come off a few times, but the Pixi has a small flap that feels a lot sturdier and stays in place a lot better. With the inclusion of the word Plus on the phones, Palm has upped the storage in the Pre to 16GB and in the Verizon version they doubled the RAM, the Pixi doesn’t change except they included WiFi.

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My Experience With The Motorola Droid

Posted by Brian On November - 13 - 2009

The Motorola Droid is official, and I’ve had a week to get to know the device. Being an avid iPhone user, I set up this phone and used it exclusively for the week. Here’s the breakdown:

The Hardware

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The phone is made of two pieces, the display and the keyboard, it has a 3.7 inch capacitive touch screen with a resolution of 480×854. It has an ARM Cortex A8 CPU (a 600MHz OMAP3430 chip down-clocked to 550MHz), 256MB of RAM, 512MB of ROM and comes with a 16GB microSD card. The device is speedy, and is similar in specs to the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS, but I was somewhat surprised that some of the functions like pulling down the notification shade was a little too sluggish for my tastes.

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Verizon Blackberry Tour Review

Posted by Brian On September - 22 - 2009

blackberry-tour-modem.jpgThe Blackberry Tour is a fairly decent offering in the Blackberry line of phones. I am a heavy iPhone user, so I was a bit worried about using this phone with the hardware keyboard and scroll wheel interface. Let me say that the keyboard was very difficult to use for me because the keys are very small and hard to press without making a lot of mistakes, and making a phone call without any contacts to choose from took some effort.

Let me go into more detail about why I didn’t have any contacts to choose from, it seems that Blackberry software isn’t compatible with the Mac (They did finally release version 1.0, but I didn’t get a chance to use it), which I exclusively use, and without purchasing any 3rd party software, I was out of luck, so dialing a number was very difficult while in the car and moving.

I do have to say that the blackberry software was snappy, and somewhat easy to use, however I do think that the home screen needs to be a little more organized, I couldn’t access unread sms messages off the home screen without going into the menu and then into the sms app, and it was not easy to move stuff around.

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Blackberry Tour

Posted by Brian On August - 27 - 2009

I just recieved a Blackberry Tour today. I will be giving it a hard test drive over the next week or so and will post my full review in two weeks. Being an avid iPhone user and since my full time switch to the Mac, we’ll see how this goes. I reviewed the Blackberry Storm a few months ago, and the Tour is a lot different, so we’ll see how it goes. I haven’t even turned the device on yet as it came with no charge, so tomorrow will be my first full day with the device.

Mophie Juice Pack Air

Posted by Brian On July - 1 - 2009

I wasn’t impressed with the battery life on my iPhone 3G, but the 3GS is a lot better. Planning on going on a little trip this year, I decided to start looking at battery packs for the iPhone. I decided upon the Mophie Juice Pack Air (Amazon Link). This product is great. It doubles the life of my iPhone battery, and it’s smart about it. It has an on/off switch, so you can turn it off, but the thing I like the most is that when it’s on, it will drain the juice pack air first, and then the iPhone battery. It comes with it’s own cable, so when you plug it into the computer it will charge the juice pack or iPhone, and you are also able to sync, it will also charge if you plug it into the power adaptor that came with the iPhone. I got the white version because I have a white iPhone, but they have black and purple available as well.

It retails for $79.95, and it’s worth the price.

Buy the Mophie Juice Pack Air from Amazon

Juice Pack Air Photos