I’ve obviously been looking at the MSMobiles site lately since 3GSM (one of the larger mobile conferences) is going on.

So, how cool is it that you can be spun directly by the spin masters these days? What am I talking about? Well, MSMobiles has a podcast of Microsoft’s press conference at 3GSM. The audio quality is not that great, but it portends to how pervasive podcasting will be in the future.

What the fuck is wrong with this headline…
HP’s Fiorina Walks Away with $45 Million

and this chart?

Nothing against Carly, but doesn’t it seem like company officers are being rewarded a bit too richly when compared to the value they bring (or in this case, don’t).

P.S. Rest easy, because Carly also gets $50,000 to help her land a new gig.

Most PDA/phone combinations (e.g., the Treo 600 or Siemens SX66) tend to be on the large size — large enough not to fit in your pocket very comfortably. Microsoft smartphones like the Audiovox SMT5600 are much smaller and easily fit into your pocket, but run Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Smartphone software instead of Windows Mobile Pocket PC software (nice, confusing naming scheme Microsoft). This means that there currently is a lot less software support for Microsoft Smartphones (since they are relatively new) when compared to Microsoft Pocket PC phones.

However, as reported in The Register, a new much-smaller PDA-based form factor called the Magician has just been released by HTC. The Magician is iPod sized, and is almost as small as the Audiovox smartphones.

*Note that the Treo has an external antenna (specifically designed to jab you when in your pocket) not represented in this sizing chart.

Another plus of the Magician is its external SD/MMC slot supporting SDIO (Secure Digital Input/Output), so you could add a Wi-Fi card to the device. The Audiovox only has an internal (you have to remove the battery cover and battery to get at the slot) MiniSD slot… no input/output capability.

Here’s a couple more links on this phone.
MSMobile’s round-up of latest HTC rumors.
Mobile Review’s look at the Magician.

Update: 2005_02_15
Check out this new GPS-enabled, QWERTY-keyboard equipped iPaq Mobile Messenger h6500 at MSMobiles.

If you haven’t tried Costco for digital prints, you might want to — especially for enlargements which are hella cheap. Although shopping at Costco can be a little like hand-to-hand combat, at least you don’t have to run through the regular checkout lines to get your prints, since they can ring you up right at the photo counter.

Walk-in Service
Now have a use for all of those useless 8-32 MB flash memory cards that come bundled with digital cameras. These smaller cards are perfect for loading up the digital images you want to have printed. My local Costco has a slick kiosk that accepts most memory card formats. Using the kiosk you can self-service yourself, and select the finish, size and number of prints you would like.

A quick search on Costco prints brought me to this post. I didn’t know that Costco supports printer profiles (an ICC color profile) , but they do. Since every digital printer has its own unique way of reproducing color, using a profile when editing an image on a calibrated monitor facilitates closer matching of monitor colors to the print colors. If this sounds a bit complicated, it kind of is, but for some background on profiles, read this.

To find out what printer profile is appropriate for your local Costco, just check this page.

Regarding enlargements, make sure you edit your images so that they map to the enlargement size you are printing to. For example, my 4 mega pixel Canon SD300’s largest image size is 2272×1704 pixels which is a ratio of 1.33. A 6×4 print has a ratio of 1.5 and a 7×5 print is 1.4. If you don’t match up the size ratios, you’re going to get random cropping.

Here’s a list of the print sizes and prices that Costco offers (I found these online, so can’t confirm them, but they do seem in the ballpark).

4×6 — $0.14
5×7 — $0.69
8×12 — $1.99
11×14 — $2.99
12×18 — $2.99

Online Service
I haven’t tried Costco’s online photo service, but it looks pretty good. They support printer profiles and have a several print options (glossy or lustre and with or without a border). However, only three print sizes are supported (4×6, 5×7 and 8×10). Prices for the prints are as follows.

4×6 — $0.18
5×7 — $0.69
8×10 — $1.99

It appears that Costco is OEMing the service from Kodak, since you have to visit a co-branded Kodak site to review your archives. Oh, make sure you read the fine print if you rely on any online photo service to store your prints. Certain sites do delete your archives if you aren’t an active member. Of course, I would highly recommend backing up your archives to a hard drive or CD/DVD instead of solely relying on an online service.

Update: 2005_02_15
Check this page for specifics on how to control the cropping of your images when using Costco’s walk-in service.