Let me begin by saying that the official branding from Garmin is n

I’m picky about sunglasses.  Being a nerdy sort, exposure to the sun causes severe anxiety, and I need some specs to keep the glare down.

Behold: the Smith Maverick specs.  Why does this count as nerdy?  One word: plastics.  I mean, polarization.  If you don’t wear polarized sunglasses, you’re a real Luddite.  Also, you’re probably squinting a lot. 

Silliness aside, the key things I look for are comfort, sturdiness, and great improvement to vision.  These pretty much nail all three, and they don’t make me look too retarded.

So what makes a great nerd watch also a great every day watch?  I guess the key here is practical technology.  Guys like me enjoy things that are solar powered, and this watch delivers there.  A full charge gives the watch 11 months of battery life (in perfect darkness), and 5 or 10 minutes in the sun gives it a full charge (I read somewhere in the manual that it takes 8 hours under fluorescent light, which is more realistic if you’re a regular reader).  The other fun bit of technology is the automatic time setting from the atomic clock in Colorado.  We’ve got these atomic clocks all over my house; there’s something satisfying about having everything ticking exactly the same.

Another thing about this watch is that it’s very similar to the first real watch my parents got for me, a great old feature-packed Casio with a big black rubber wrist band.  Very nostalgic.  Plus the fact that it’s pretty much bulletproof, being a G-shock and all, just completed the package.

So there you have it, another post of Zarch’s every day gear.  If interested, here’s the page from Casio with all the specs.

When I first went shopping for a camera of my very own (as opposed to a “family” camera), I had a few things I was looking for.  I wanted it to be very small, to have good battery life, and to have some compensati on for my shaky hands, especially shooting landscapes.  I have some terrible photos of the Seattle skyline that were making me think about some sort of image stabilization.  Reviews I read got me thinking about these little Lumix compacts, and after some deliberation, I bought one. 

So, what do I like? 

• Well, it’s very small, just like I wanted.  It’s always in my bag ready to snap a picture if I feel the need. 
• Start-up and picture-to-picture time is quite good, especially for a camera this small.
• The image stabilization works very well; I have far fewer blurry shots these days.
• Image quality is excellent.  I could never say I was a connoisseur, but I like it when my pictures don’t look off-color (as in not the right shade, not as in pr0n) or otherwise crappy.
• It seems like it’s rock-freaking-solid.  My wife’s Powershot, while it’s a great camera, already went back to Canon for repairs, and now it’s done it again.  My little Panasonic, however, has been with me for about 18 months now with no problems at all.
• It’s a sexy little package; it gives me great geek chic credibility when I whip it out for the laydees.

So that’s my current digital camera.  I’ve felt no compulsion to trade it in for something else, which is a sure sign of quality for any electronics that wind up in my hands.  Want a more detailed review?  Check this one out.

One fun anecdote in closing.  I went to a local snobby camera shop to pick up some prints for a friend of mine.  While I was there, I noticed a little Leica C-LUX 1 displayed, and mentioned to the clerk that it was the same camera as my Lumix, only $100 more expensive.  The clerk was dubious until I showed her the Lumix.  Same camera; Leica makes the lens, Panasonic does the electronics (sensor from Matsushita, if anyone is keeping track).  So if I want to sound cool, I tell folks I’ve got a Leica lens in my camera, and that makes them really think I’m legit and smart and all that.

The eTrex Venture Cx is the entry level mapping GPS from Garmin.  The C means it’s a color screen, and the x means expandable memory, in this case through microSD cards.  The next one up the totem pole is the Legend Cx, which includes a 32mb memory card.  First thing I planned on doing was adding a 1gb card anyway, so that wasn’t an appeal.  I lingered on the Vista Cx for a while, since it includes a barometric altimeter and an electronic compass.  Then I got my senses back and realized GPS altitude is perfectly fine for my uses, and I have a great compass anyway, and a decent sense of direction.  Besides, I can walk a few steps and the Venture will give me a heading.  No USB cable is included, but it uses a standard mini cable.  I’ve got about 15 of those around my desk, so no problem.  These can power the Venture Cx when it’s plugged into your computer, or in my case, plugged into the USB power adapter in my car.

Let’s talk features.  The Venture Cx lacks a SIRFstar III chip, but it does include WAAS.  I got a decent fix (up to six satellites) in my home, a one-story ranch in the suburbs.  Driving around the neighborhood seemed accurate enough, and I never encountered any jumpy behavior once I had a fix.  The screen is excellent; it’s readable in sunlight with no backlight, and the backlight is bright if you need it.  The Venture Cx lets you choose color themes for night and day, and switches between these automatically at dusk and dawn.  It’s waterproof, rated at one meter for up to 30 minutes.  It’s very compact and comfortable in the hand, with rubber grips on the sides and a rubber seal over the USB port. 

One thing to be aware of; if you’re looking for more than very basic maps or waypoints, you’ll need to pony up for Garmin’s detailed MapSource software, and a microSD card to load the maps on.  I got hold of their Topo US maps, and found loading them on the device simple and fast.  I was disappointed in the detail of the maps, especially compared to Delorme’s excellent topo maps.  Several well-known trails in my area (the Wasatch Front in Utah) were not included, which makes me uncertain about the accuracy of these maps in the field.  I’ll report on that when I’ve had a chance to get out in the wild with it.  I loaded the Metroguide maps for Salt Lake City as well, but I haven’t had a chance to get out and dig into those yet.  My understanding is that to route on the fly, you need the newer City Navigator software, which I haven’t tried.

My main interests in the eTrex Venture Cx are clamping it onto my motorcycle and hiking; Rudeboy and I make pathetic, wheezing attempts at some of the peaks in the area on occasion (we spend too much time at our computers and not enough time being active).  I plan to test a few things over the next week or so, such as connecting to my laptop to use Streets and Trips and Delorme’s Topo software, and I’ll post more once I’ve tried that.  If there’s anything you’d like me to check or if you have any questions, leave a comment and I’ll let you know.

My main player is a Gigabeat S60 from Toshiba, which is actually about the first mp3 player I’ve been satisfied with to keep for more than four months or so.  I cherish that player so much that I wanted a little flash player to take running, or to use while I ride my motorcycle, or while I’m mowing the lawn, etc. 

I’ve had an iRiver U10, which I ditched because it was too big a pain to use while in my pocket.  I also have a Sansa e280, which is just quirky and kept locking up on me (the latest firmware may help – we’ll see.  I’m holding out for Rockbox on that one).  I loved the Rio Carbon, but the hard drive thing worried me.  Anyway, none of the other players really fit my needs perfectly.

Let me give you some pros/cons for the nano, from the point of view of a non-apple guy.

Pros:

• Tons of accessories.  I mentioned riding the motorcycle with an mp3 player?  Belkin makes a sweet remote that works for just that purpose.  There are also tons of cases and other options for these things.
• It just works.  Audible files work perfectly with no hassle, it never locks up, it’s easy to navigate.
• It’s sexy.  It’s got a great screen and an appealing interface.  Chicks dig it (I assume – I’ve been married for seven years now, so who knows?). 
• It’s 800x more durable than the previous gen nano.  Great work by Apple addressing all the weird quirks in the first ones.

Cons:

• iTunes.  Non-apple guys will know what I mean.  iTunes sort of likes to take things over.  I try to be very careful with my tags and folders and not let iTunes do any damage.  Anyone who’s tried some of the iTunes alternatives, leave a comment and let me know what you think.
• No FM.  Actually, I don’t really care about that.  I don’t listen to top 40 stuff anyway, and if I’m out when one of my teams is playing, I just record it and watch it later.  Besides, if FM is a deal breaker, there’s a kit for that.

So the nano, aside from the iTunes thing, is a great player for jogging, audiobooks, and every day beat-em-up use.  It’s a decent second player, and with the new, more durable design, it’s one you can toss in your pocket and not worry about.  It’s good enough to make a non-apple guy like me buy one and install iTunes.  Props to Apple on the great design and great interface (licensed from Creative =) ). 

The Vision’s design is head and shoulders above any other player I’ve had lately, with the possible exception of iRiver’s PMC-120. There are separate, tactile buttons for each function. As sexy as touch-panel style controls look, they’re pretty lame when you’re in the car or in the dark. It’s fantastic to have a player that lets you feel your way around when you need to.

I also felt that the Zen Vision would have no problems holding up to a little rough treatment. Creative used a magnesium alloy casing instead of plastic, and you can definitely tell a difference. It feels tough. There’s no flew in any of the joints; as far as build quality, the guys at Creative nailed it.

The Vision comes in white or black, and I opted for the white this time. I sort of feel like I should have gone with the black. It’s not that the white looks bad, but once I got it I started thinking that black is the better color for this player. I think the interface would go better with a black player than with a white one; that may be where I’m not as content with white as I thought I’d be.

The player draws attention. On recent plane ride, I could hear people commenting about it in the seats around me before I stuck my earbuds in. The screen in particular stands out – the resolution comes as a little bit of a shock after so long with QVGA screens. The viewing angles are one area where I could gripe, however. The screen was obviously meant for a PDA in portrait mode, not a media player in landscape mode. Side-to-side viewing angles stink, and your eyes may go a little buggy if you don’t hold the player a little further out than is comfortable. Up-and-down viewing angles, on the other hand, are much more flexible.

The Zen Vision feels pretty good in your hand. It’s not as comfortable for long periods as the iRiver PMC-120, however, nor does it have a kickstand so you can set it on your desk. It does have an optional dock, though, which solves the kickstand problem. and a remote control (also optional). Hey iRiver, hook me up with a bigger hard drive, a remote, and a VGA screen, and I’m your loyal media pal again!

The Zen Vision plays music, movies, slide shows, and TV, and it does it all fairly well. The following formats are supported:

Video: AVI, MPEG-1/2/4-SP, Windows Media™ Video (WMV) 9, Motion-JPEG, DivX™2 4 and 5 and XviD3

Audio: MP3 (Up to 320 kbps), WMA (Up to 320 kbps), WMA with DRM, Linear PCM WAV

My main purpose in getting the Zen was to replace an iRiver PMC-120, so working nicely with my Windows Media Center 2005 PC was priority one. Synchronizing TV was pretty much the same experience; just set up the playlists or auto playlists you want to synchronize, and let it do its thing. I have to note that the included video converter from Creative is pretty bad. It’s faster than using Media Center or Media Player 10, but the videos are terrible. They’re choppy and artifacts are more obvious as well. Until Creative gives us a fix, stick with Windows or with some of the other converters around.

The optional remote is a fantastic upgrade, as is the dock. Together they make playback through a TV or home theater very workable. I was able to sync content from my Media Center and play it on a TV in my bedroom, all very easily. Range on the remote may be a little short for some. I guess that’s not unexpected with the little coin-style battery that powers it.

Creative offers a very nice slide show app. Pictures look great on the VGA screen, though the viewing angle issue made it a little difficult to share (as much as I tried to get past that issue, it keeps popping up! Annoying). JPG images only, but here the included Creative converter works pretty well.

The Zen also has the option to synchronize your contacts and calendar, but at this point there’s nothing automatic about it. It takes several steps to import your information from Outlook, and I didn’t find much use for it. It seemed like it was sort of tacked on to stay with the iPod.

Video playback is solid. I’ve watched a lot of TV and a couple of movies on my plane rides recently, and I’ve been satisfied. If you’re into movies, however, playback on the PSP blows the Zen away. The screen on the PSP is better suited for movies, and the wide format is nice too. Where the Zen beats the PSP is in the ease of getting content loaded and (of course) the big old 30gb hard drive.

When watching TV, the controls seem a little sluggish, and there are times when it will seem to freeze briefly when I try to skip forward past a commercial. This seems like something that could be fixed with a firmware update, since slower machines like the iRiver or my older Windows Mobile devices don’t have this same problem. Quality settings don’t seem to have any impact on this little performance bug, unfortunately.

Music playback is excellent. I listened through my Shure E2C headphones and plugged it into my home audio system through the dock, and found nothing to complain about at all.

Slide shows and TV look very good when played back through a television. You will see some artifacts, but nothing worse than your TiVo on a lower quality setting. The included AV cables make sharing pretty simple, provided your friends know how to change the inputs on their TV (some of my friends could stand an intensive two-week Navigating Your Television’s Menu course).

There are a lot of ways to play your music back. A mode I haven’t seen before is the ‘album of the day’ mode, which is actually just a random album chooser. Kind of nice, I guess, but why? It would have been much cooler to dump that feature and give us ALBUM ART. I know it’s a crazy idea, but we’ve got a great VGA screen here and everybody else includes this feature. The screen looks very plain without something there besides the basic track information.

Well, to sum things up, I really like having a Zen Vision around. It’s a good player. Overall, I have very few complaints. The complaints I do have, though, are much more annoying after a while rather than less. The viewing angle thing can be irritating, but not enough to make me put it on eBay (yet). My advice is go see one someplace before you drop your money on one; that will most likely be the deciding factor. It’s a shame that Creative didn’t work that out before the iPod with video came out, since the screen on that is gorgeous. Those of us who want to see some competition to Apple in the media player scene have to be a little disappointed by that little miss.

Another gripe is the lack of album art. Some people might scoff at that complaint, but it seems so simple to throw it in and it’s a shame to waste that screen when you’re listening to music.

In pretty much every other aspect, however, the Zen Vision is a great player. I still own mine, which generally means I like it pretty well. Stuff I don’t love usually winds up on eBay after a few weeks so I can recycle it into new stuff. With a couple of tweaks, Creative can really make this player shine. Here’s hoping they get us some updates soon!

Overall, I was very happy with the PPC-6600. It had a few quirks, which I’ll get into further down in this review, but overall it was a decent handheld. It served as a pretty good phone, too. The onboard keyboard worked as advertised, though it was a bit less usable than the keyboard on my iPaq. The screen was bright and clear. It was fairly quick, if noticeably slower than other handhelds I’ve used.

Voice quality was excellent with the handheld itself, and fair through a variety of bluetooth headsets. Reception was fair, but nowhere as good as the simple little Nokia phone I was using before, nor was it as good as the LG PM-325 I’m using now. I was able to make calls throughout the same area as these other phones, but they were more prone to signal fade or outright loss of signal. The internet connection was also a little spotty at the fringes of the network.

One gripe I had was that the PPC-6600 only comes with Windows Media Player 9, which wouldn’t really work with the Windows Media Center files I had on my system. Luckily, there are hacks on the internet to upgrade this, since it seems Audiovox and Sprint are not going to provide an update themselves. Once updated, it worked perfectly, synchronizing my TV shows with no difficulty at all.

Internet use is a great app for a handheld, but a lot of the things I might want a handheld online for are out of reach with the slow 1xRTT connection Sprint provides. It did work for email and instant messaging, and for checking an address here and there. Using Google Maps or other sites with too many images proved to be more hassle than I cared for, though.

The camera works well, as far as phone cameras go, but Sprint’s picture mail service was not very well implemented. After a few tries, I gave up on sending picture and video mail all together. This was disappointing since it’s such a simple thing to do on most phones and I’d gotten used to firing off quick images to people.

Bluetooth GPS was great for my uses. When I was traveling in new cities, it was great to be able to navigate without a lot of hassle. Pairing with my little Holux GR-231 was completely painless. I used Pocket Streets, DeLorme Street Atlas 2005 Handheld, and Mapopolis. All worked well on this handheld, but only Mapopolis had decent redraw times. The others updated a little slowly. On other handhelds, this wasn’t a noticeable problem. The PPC-6600 even went with me on a gruelling climb (for geeks like me, anyway) to the summit of Notch Peak, which rises about 4500 feet nearly vertically above the Tule Valley in the remote Great Basin desert. It kept us on course after the trail faded an we started the final climb to the peak.

The biggest strike against the PPC-6600 was its poor battery life. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but it made me think about power a lot more than the iPaq did. I had to become obsessive about charging it; I had a charger in my car, at my desk at work, and even kept a battery-powered USB charger in my backpack, just in case. Paranoid? Maybe, but I was just never confident I would have enough power to make a call if I needed to. As the battery settled in, it seemed to hold a charge longer, and I was able to go a full work day without needing a recharge. An extended battery purchased on eBay helped, too.

While the PPC-6600 is probably near the top as far as converged devices go, it’s neither a great phone nor a great handheld. I found myself missing the outright reliability the better signal and battery life of my old Nokia gave me. I also missed how easily the Nokia fit in my pocket so I could keep the phone silent and still not miss calls. Countless times I would hear complaints that I was harder to contact than when I had the previous phone, almost all due to the simple fact that the phone would be in my bag on silent mode rather than in my pocket. I couldn’t feel a vibration, so I missed the call. This may not be a big deal to others, but it became one for me.

I also missed the iPaq’s better keyboard, better battery, and faster processor. Not only that, but I started to wonder whether the kind of money I’d spent on the PPc-6600 justified the performance I was getting out of it.

In the end, I wound up putting my PPC-6600 on eBay. I had it for about 7 months, and I never hated it. I got decent mileage, I think, but I felt I wasn’t getting the whole experience I wanted.

I replaced the PPC-6600 with two new devices, so I’m back to phone and handheld mode. I wound up with an LG PM-325 (which is an excellent phone, in spite of my reason for purchasing it being that it’s the only Sprint phone with bluetooth as of now) and a Dell Axim x51v. The Axim has integrated WiFi, bluetooth, and a marvellous VGA screen. 256mb of flash ROM with 128mb of RAM is nothing to sneeze at either. It also runs Windows Mobile 5 with all the advantages that update has, including WMP10 and a better internet experience. Last, but certainly not least, it’s about $400 instead of $629.

The Axim works beautifully with the Dial-up Networking profile on the LG PM-325. In fact, the experience is almost no different from going online with the PPC-6600. I just hit the icon for Internet Explorer, and after a few seconds, I’m connected and online. Yeah, I have two devices now, but they’re two devices much better suited to the tasks I use them for.

To wrap things up, while I was converged for a few months, it just didn’t feel like what I needed. I hope this review sheds some light on what to expect if you’re looking at this phone.

I got hooked on Audible.com and kind of got irritated with the fact that I had to keep switching from my Karma to my MuVo to listen in the car. Also, Audible makes it difficult to rip their tracks to MP3 or WMA CDs that would work in my car’s CD player. The Carbon is Audible compatible out of the box.

Also, what’s the difference between a 20gb player and a 5gb player when you have 45gb of music on your computer? At first, I thought I’d be able to fit everything on the Karma, and at first, I could. Now, though, I can’t fit the whole collection on anyway, and trying to figure out what music to have on the player and what to leave off was becoming a chore. With the Carbon, I only have to fill 5gb with music I want. So far, I haven’t missed the extra space. That covers my reasons, I suppose.

Let’s dig in to a little analysis of this contraption. As far as form factor goes, probably the biggest thing it’s got going for it is that it’s NOT an iPod. Not that the iPods aren’t nice little machines with a great interface; I’m just sick of seeing them everywhere =). The interface is really well done, and it represents a big improvement over the Nitrus, to which it’s quite similar in overall shape. For one, rather than the eraser-head four way control, it has something more akin to the control you’d find on a PocketPC or Palm-based PDA. This makes navigation much easier. I’m also not a huge fan of touchpad-type controls, like you see on the newer Zens and iPods. The Carbon uses a scroll wheel on the upper right corner that you operate with your thumb, and this gives you a little tactile feedback. That’s handy when you’re driving or running (I assume – I only run when zombies are chasing me and to stay lean in GTA). It also means you’re not sliding your finger repetitively as I’ve seen on some of the Zens from Creative (and on one of the newer iRivers, I think – I’ll have to check). Touchpads are cool and all, but I think the little wheel is better. The wheel gets you through menus and song lists just as quickly as the iPod’s wheel does.

Another improvement over the Nitrus (and the Karma, for that matter) is the lighting. Previous Rios used a blue backlight; the Carbon now has a white light, which is much more stylish. It also lights up the Rio logo and the buttons in red; that looks sharp =).

The Audible.com playback is executed pretty much flawlessly. In the Play Music menu, there’s a new section for Spoken Word. Here you’ll see all the books or periodicals you’ve loaded from Audible Manager. The Bookmark feature works quite well, and you’ve got ten to use if you’re ever in the middle of ten different audiobooks. Music playback is excellent as well; I use a pair of Shure E2C headphones, so I’m not sure how it sounds in crappy phones, but it sounds great in mine. I don’t listen to a lot of MP3s encoded lower than 256kps, so ymmv, but I have no complaints regarding sound quality. Skipping tracks can be a little sluggish, but that’s a minor complaint.

Another major improvement over the Karma or the Nitrus is the ability the Carbon has to act as a normal drive in Windows. Plug it into a USB port, and it shows up like a normal drive in your My Computer screen. No special drivers are needed. I still mostly use the Rio Music Manager to copy music over – I’ve found it’s less picky about tracks with the same title (different versions of the same song, or a song that’s on two different albums, as in the case of Greatest Hits albums) than Windows Media Player 10. RMM is also much less picky with copy-protected content, and will rip any of my CDs right to mp3 without making a fuss. This is not always true of WMP10. Anyway, the added option to use the Carbon to transport files is a great bonus.

Now for the gripes. I miss the docking station I had, both at home and in the car. It was awesome to be able to just stick the Karma in its cradle and have it pumping tunes through my stereo. I use the headphone jack on the Carbon, but it’s just not the same as popping into the dock for a line-out feed.

The appearance of the Carbon is great, but the chrome on the back gets scratched very easily. I haven’t abused it, dropped it, kept it in my pocket with my keys, or anything else of the sort, but it’s still marked up on the back. A minor annoyance, but the OCD side of me is really bugged by that. Fortunately the more sensible sides of my personality make the OCD side sit in the corner with his face to the wall most of the time.

Well, to conclude, the Carbon is really a great little machine. It’s not perfect, but there’s not a perfect player out there. It does what I ask and does it very well.