"brand spanking new" Engadget Podcast 113

in which:  paul loves the blackberry storm, and josh loves the way those phones look, in general.  nilay can't believe that rim wants everyone to think that they've created some sort of new paradigm around choosing items on a screen:  "Navigation and Execution," when we've all been using mouse devices forever. 

I love thinking about the fact that blackberries were really in vogue at one time.  I don't have my finger on the pulse of the fashionable set, but it's so hard for me to divorce the idea of blackberry from corporate life. corporate life feels about as exciting to me as being the acne-covered middle school girl at her first dance.  

why do I find it so entertaining that these guys engage in dialogue regarding how resistant a click screen is?  I grin when josh mentions how his weak fingers make it hard to gauge click-difficulty.  also enjoyable is paul's joke about nokia haptic technology, "it's like I'm being punished for touching the screen."  I actually laugh out loud for a second when nilay gets paul to admit that his evaluation of the bbstorm browser is positive on the flimsy idea that, "it doesn't destroy the webpage."  I didn't play with the bbstorm, but I had a bbcurve and a bbbold, and I hated both those browsers.  janky is a word that josh used about the noahpad, but I think it serves as a perfectly apt description of blackberry browsers. 

best thing to look up online: noahpad (do it)

g1 is google android before it got all "fractured" and out of control with the names.  am I the only person that finds it kind of annoying that every version of android has some kind of dessert name?  yo yo, froyo.  how many times do you think programmers have said that to each other?  I'm guessing a lot.  mango, ice cream sandwich, blah blah blah.  I actually wrote josh topolsky an email to suggest salty names for future android operating systems (sweetbreads, sloppy joe, chitlins, fois gras, etc.).  yes, I know he doesn't have anything to do with the naming of android releases, but he's got to have a little pull, right?  hey, he's got a good platform from which to popularize the idea, anyway. 

the apple talk mostly bounces away from me.  I have an iphone and a macbook pro now, but I was so far outside of the apple world back then.  the only part of the conversation I'm totally engaged by is when the spec bumps are being mentioned.  it used to annoy me to no end that apple would charge so much money for their products and stagger the release of their features.  no one will ever accuse me of being an early adopter, but I still get in a lather thinking about all the loyal customers jobs soaks with his money-making strategy. but yes, I do love apple design.  I've gone over.  iphones are gateway apple products.  I also find it endearing that josh makes a joke (or a few) about jobs' health.  not because they're so funny, but because they're slightly awkward.

the dsi did not fare too well in the review. I had this device, and I loved it. probably for all the wrong reasons (i.e. non-tech reasons). I didn't have a dslight, so first off, the body design was new to me. my dsi was aquamarine blue, it was perfectly rectangular, it had a camera, and I wanted it to be my best friend. this ties into the comment josh makes about nintendo being a nostalgic passion (delicious and huggable, suitable to make pillow-talk to), and I'm definitely in that camp. I was still exploring dsi possibilities when it was stolen from my fishtown bedroom during an open house. sigh.

I will always pledge allegiance to the camera printer set-up that nintendo released years ago. nilay doesn't even like the dsi (although he supposedly wants to). nilay is obviously a man.  he is a manly man.  nilay is a man who busted josh for name-dropping. the funny part is that I didn't know one name mentioned (except for bono, obviously). I totally agree with nilay that nintendo would have been my hero, had they worked on integration for the dsi/gameboy franchise. I would have been all over it, if I'd been able to get the gameboy photos onto my other file-storing devices.  that would have been awesome.  world changingly awesome. 

the worst joke of podcast was cracked by josh, who made a comment the comment, "it's not a silver bullet," and then said, "it's not a coors..."

way back in the day, when I lived in Manhattan, it was actually cool, amongst a certain set, to own a filofax. do you know them?  they are expensive little binders that hold special little papers with calendars, or notes, or subway maps, or whatever.  they come in an array of colors, have designer versions, and are customizable.  oh, and they sometimes sequester little pens or pencils.

that finish is making my skin crawl. I swear these were
a hit amonst a certain 'artsy' crowd back in the day...

rather than even considering a filofax (they were expensive, and I suppose, status symbols - on many levels), I carried a notepad (a little spiral-bound one - even moleskins were above my budget and sophistication level),  and after a while, a casio diary.  I know, I know, but it was so much better than any stupid filofax, and it was cute, and it was digital.  plus, it told my fortune, and gave me a pet to take care of. 

I had a teensy bit of sidekick lust during the time I was watching veronica mars. I'm wondering if that's due to the relationship I had with my casio diary. if I was aware of the g1 release, would I have wanted that too? I was kind of anti-smart phone for a long time. how much less geeky can a person get?