I made my first YouTube video today. It is not a great video but it was a pretty rough day.

Typhoon Xangsane hits Metro Manila

A typhoon category 4 passed by today. It pretty much damaged all trees in our garden. Fortunately our house is solid and I hope others were as fortunate as we were. Here are some pictures from our place.

Typhoon Milenya

Finally got my Sony Ericsson P990i. I have been waiting a long time for it and I am in general happy with it.

I am real power user. I have tried almost all features, and many of them I will continue to use regularly. I have a 1GB card for music and it works pretty good as a mp3 player. I have a 4G memory stick duo on order.

What is really great is that it is a completely integrated device that it is pretty smart. If you are listening to music and you recieve a phone call you can smoothly answer the phone and stop the music. I connected the P990i to my car stereo with an old fashioned cassette adaptor. It is a great hands-free device.

I have also been using the Opera with wifi and it works great on PDA sites. And the rss reader also works great.

There is currently no VOIP features and according to S-E sources there will not be any for a year or so. This is not for technical reasons, they need to figure out their and Ericssons business models with regards to VOIP. Third party VOIP applications could become available.

I nice feature is the built-in flash. It is pretty effective. 90% of all camera phone pictures are horrible because they are taken with insufficient light.

I am for some reason looking forward to the next version in the P-series or perhaps a new series. I would not mind for it to be wider in order to fit a better keyboard and bigger screen. It is a bit boring that almost all pda phones currently use the same size 320×240. I would also like to see a built-in GPS. When the successor arrives it should have better video playback capabilities. The P990i supports a few mp4 versions and is pretty useless as a video playback device.

One really incredibly stupid thing Sony Ericsson is doing again, is to set the limit of the memory sticks capacity too low. This time it is 4GB, it is apparently a limitation in the P990i and not the memory stick architecture.

With the rapid development of flash technology it would be possible to cram 16GB on a memory stick duo in 18 months. My P900i had a 128MB limit which was maybe even more stupid. Compact flash and SD are older technologies and have no such limitations. It has been mentioned that the P990i is the last phone with memory stick duo. The successor, memory stick micro, has a upper limit of 32GB.

Exactly one year ago I speculated about what the Ipod Nano would look like. I though it would like the Ipod Mini but smaller. Now there are circulating rumors that the new Ipod Nano will look like the Ipod Mini with a metal case, just like the one I made fake image of last year.

New Ipod Nano

I’ve been spending most of my time on new features for searchengine-analysis.com but I have had some time to create more HDR tone mapped images. I have now created a gallery for all my High Dynamic Range (HDR) images at pbase.com.


HDR Tone mapped high dynamic range images

I am still waiting for my Sony Ericsson P990 but I think it is time for some speculation.

My first prediction is that there will be a P990 Plus within six months with one gigabyte of internal memory.

The replacement will take some time. I think that it will be wider but thinner. A nice possibility would be a GPS.

In regards to software I hope that there will be focus on simplifying rather than adding more complexity to the OS. I think that a task manager is bad direction. It is much better to automatically swap out programs that are not in focus if memory is getting full.

The main reason for me not to consider a Pocket PC based phone is that the operating system does not have the right priorities. It can slow down to a halt and the phone cannot look up a number or make a phone number. Pretty much like a windows PC.

I’ve started working on a image based interface for eBay. The latest version of the eBay API has support for image URLs. Previously it has only been possible to see thumbnails.

I like taking photos and I like new stuff. So I had to try out HDR, High Dynamic Range Imaging using Photomatix.

My first tries can be seen on pbase.