HD or not HD, that is the question

Yes that is a really cheesey pun based on a famous line from “Hamlet”, but it is very relevant to this article and a really good question when it comes to buying a camcorder. Ever since HDTV first came out we’ve seen massive adoption of the technology into peoples homes in the form of PlayStation 3, HD DVD players, BluRay players  HD cable boxes and Home Theatre PCs. The technology really has gone leaps and bounds to get where it is today. mostly because of the steep price drop of HD LCD panels in 2006/2007 which have made them popular and a standard for a new TV not only for image quality but the size advantage too.

However, storing and creating your own memories and media in HD is a real technology gap at the moment and definatly not mainstream … yet. For example if you shoot a video clip with a standard digital camcorder you could fill a DVD with 2 hours of video, given that a dvd is 4 gigabytes of data. DVD resolution is 480p which means there are 480 horizontal lines progressivly on the screen at any one time to build the image, HD resolution is 1080p so there are 1080 lines of data on the screen at the same time. So if you have twice the amount of lines they’ll need to be twice as long to maintain the correct aspect ratio of the image. Which means HD will need four times the amount of data as DVD quality. So now your 2 hours of film in HD will require 16GB of space not 4GB.

So what does this mean to you?

More on the iPhone Data Phones

So Rogers have ‘responded’ to the publics less than favourable attitude to the bad voice/data combination to the iPhone plans and have announced a short term deal to entice iPhone shoppers to commit to Rogers for their data plans.

Rogers are offering 6GB for $30 extra on top of your existing, in-market voice plan.

For mobile internet, daily browsing of facebook twitter, email and adhoc mp3 downloads I think 6GB is more than than enough, its not unlimited but its enough and ample breathing space for the heavy user.

However this plan will not include iPhone’s Visual Voicemail and any essentials like call waiting etc.

If you have had one of those nice unlimited voice plans you kept since 2001 or got given a deal on your voice plan for customer retention you will need to give it up and go for one thats on offer on their website …. this includes EPP and corporate plans too so be very careful before commiting yourselfs to this offer you could end up losing out.

Just read these points and consider them before you setup a tent outside a rogers store tonight

1. Be smart and shop smart
2. Don’t get sucked in by the iPhone fad
3. Don’t forget its just a cell phone
4. iPhone is a design marvel and not new technology!
5. There isn’t much that an iPhone does which other phones that have been out for years can’t do …. yet

Facebook – Windows Mobile Integration

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could relate all your facebook friends to everyone in your outlook contacts and then download up-to-date information to your phone? Well we’re nearly there! There is a great app call Fonebook available to download for free.

The app is installed on your computer and it can automatically download Birthdays, Photos and Status updates directly into your contacts in your Outlook. As far as I can figure out it matches facebook friends to outlook contacts by email but the app allows you to filter all the unmatched friends and assocaite them to Contacts manually. I just found out that you can keep it running in the background and it will automatically run every 10 minutes if you so wish.

Once all your contacts are updated in your outlook you can then sync your phone with your computer to get all the photos and birthday reminders on your phone … pretty cool eh? I haven’t has any issues with the app yet.

iPhone in Canada

Finally the iPhone will touchdown in Canada on July 11th. After scanning most speculation and chatter on the internet about the reason for the delay, I could only think this was a massive political stunt on behalf of Canada’s parasitic wireless telecoms network Rogers Communications. Rogers is Canada’s only GSM cell carrier.

GSM is a section of the wireless telecoms market where the cell phone contains a SIM card which can be removed and placed in another GSM phone. GSM is better technology for world travelers and people that like to change their phones without notifying the network. Today in Canada there are two CDMA carriers (Bell and Telus koodo = Telus by the way)

Parasitic, you might say I’m being harsh but I strongly feel that Canada is long overdue for healthy competition in the GSM market or some decent governing body to stop Canadians getting ripped off for any moderately up-to-date technology. In the UK there is a company called Ofcom (http://www.ofcom.org.uk) which watches over the telecoms network and one of the duties is to ensure a wide range of telecoms services is available to everyone in the UK. This is great as it looks at the big picture and governs the service as a whole … not just on their by own bottom line.

TomTom GO 730 Review

So after loads of research and numerous returnage to find the GPS thats right for me I ended up waiting 2 months to purchase the TomTom 730. I found it a week after it released in the US at www.gpscentral.ca, I was expecting it to take longer to come up to Canada as with everything else but I snapped it up as soon as I saw it on shopbot.ca.

I bet you’re thinking “why wait when there is so much choice on the market?” well reason is that the new features of the 730 are very significant to the previous models and when you compare to other brands for the price you do get alot of features crammed in there.

There is no differences between the 730 and 930 that I found except the 930 came with European, US and Canadian maps however the 730 model only comes with US and Canadian maps.

So let me break down the features I found useful and what it all means to us