Spring is here! To celebrate, I borrowed a friend’s “Bissell”:http://www.bissell.com/ ProHeat ProTech Steam Cleaner that he picked up at “Costco”:http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?prodid=11026784&whse=BC&topnav=&cat=107&hierPath=89*107* for just under $200. The ProHeat is pretty impressive. You load it up with hot tap water in one chamber and carpet cleaner (available at most major supermarkets) in another. Plug it in, turn on the heater and suction, and you’re off. It’s well balanced, so pushing it around is really easy. A trigger on the handle turns on the water/cleaner which you can see getting sucked back up into the dirty-water reservoir (and I mean _dirty_).

My friend said that he had hired a professional to clean his carpets before he purchased the Bissell. He really didn’t like the job the “pro” did, so he picked up the Bissell which he said did a much better job.

The Bissell did a great job on my carpet which had several food stains here and there. I don’t think that I’d buy one for myself, since I don’t have own a house, but it’s great to borrow. If I did own a house that had a lot of carpet, it’d probably be worth it.

Ugh! I just found out that my Audiovox SMT5600 (that I did a mini review on “here”:http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/03/15/10.05.52/ does not mount as a normal drive). You know, something that any “USB drive”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/102-0285871-3760161 does these days. Instead it appears as a special @Mobile Device@ thingy mounted to @My Computer@ in the Windows Explorer. WTF?

Now I can’t use my cool photo-downloading application (”Downloader Pro”:http://www.breezesys.com/Downloader/ from Breeze Systems). It can’t “see” that special @Mobile Device@ thingy.

You know what I think? I think this smells like some sort of DRM(Digital Restrictions Management) fiasco. Smells like someone is trying to protect some lame-ass ringtone downloads from being copied or some such thing. Either that or Microsoft’s Smartphone Product Marketing Managers don’t know what they are doing.

I can help if it’s the latter.

* The Smartphone when connected to the user’s PC shall mount as a drive accessible to applications such as, by way of example, a photo downloading application.

Cut-and-paste that into the damn product marketing requirements document. Either that or stop screwing us with DRM.

I’ve been thinking a long time about upgrading my old “Nokia 8265″:http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/8265 mobile to something a little more modern. The 8265 is a “TDMA”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TDMA phone that runs on AT&T Wireless Service’s network (now part of Cingular). Cingular is moving to an all GSM network, so folks with TDMA phones will be orphaned at some point. That point for me was a couple of months ago when the TDMA service in my area began acting really flaky… dropping calls all the time, service disappearing from areas, etc. This finally convinced me to upgrade both my phone and service.

My criteria for the new phone included: a “candy bar” form factor (as opposed to a flip phone), no external antenna (ruling out Verizon), internet capability and a size approximately equal to the 8265. My preference would have been to stick with Nokia, since my 8265 has served me well over the past four years or so (including numerous hard drops onto hard surfaces). However, all of the current Nokia phones are either two large and/or just plain ugly. Pretty much the only phone that met my criteria was the “Audiovox SMT5600″:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00068577C/.
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I’ve been using “Skype”:http://www.skype.com/ a fair bit lately. More precisely, I’ve been using “Skype Out”:http://www.skype.com/products/skypeout/ a fair bit lately. Skype Out allows you to make calls using Skype’s interface to pretty much anywhere in the world. It’s a prepaid service where you purchase a minimum of 10 Euros worth of talk time which is deducted per their “rates”:http://www.skype.com/products/skypeout/rates/ (calls within the US are €0.017, a little over 2 cents/minute). The international rates are great (it’s €0.017 to a UK landline, but calls to UK mobile phones are €0.205). This is a handy service for me right now, because I keep running over my minutes on my cell phone plan (I’m switching plans soon).

The call quality has ranged from excellent to almost walkie-talkie-ish, but almost all calls are pretty clear. And my set-up is not very sophisticated… just an old boom mike and headset that didn’t cost very much.

The two disadvantages of the service I can think of are the lack of “DTFM”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTMF tone support (being able to send touch tones for voice systems) and the lack of an address book for contacts that don’t have a Skype account (this may exist, but I looked for it twice).

I picked up a Samsung YP-T5V MP3 player for just over $100 a few weeks ago, and I really like it. I picked the Samsung after Adam Curry (aka, "The Prince of Pod) mentioned that he liked his during one of his Daily Source Code podcasts. It comes with 256MB of memory and is very, very tiny. The user interface on the device is pretty intuitive, and offers all sorts of ways to customize the device. For example, you can choose the color on the backlight from blue, red or green, change the default sound level and a bunch of other stuff. The only major issue I have with the UI is the lack of a dedicated file-browser button. Currently, to get to the file browser, you have to press and hold the four way button (pictured next to the LCD in the product shot to the right). This works ok, but if you don’t hold the button long enough, you toggle into the customization menu. It’s a little hard to get the timing right.

Pros

• Very small - So small it is very wearable even when exercising.
• Ability to record from a line-in directly to MP3
• Acts like a USB drive. No software on the PC needed.
• Fairly good UI

Cons

• Voice recorder is not a quality recorder, but it does work
• I’d like a dedicated file-browser button
• It could have better battery life (I think it goes through a AAA battery in about 8-10 hours)
• Weird sub-mini line in, but it does come with an adapter cable that steps it up to a more standard mini plug
• Headphones are just ok… but that’s pretty much the same with other MP3 players (see my Sony headphone review below to see how I solved this problem).
• USB 1.0 slows file transfers
• No variable-speed for fast forward and rewind

Overall, I’d recommend this MP3 player. It only comes with 256MB of memory, but that’s fine for listening to about 4 albums (recorded at a high bit rate) and quite a few podcasts (which are typically recorded at 64Kbs).