Russell posts about Palm’s future on Mobitopia. I too share Russell’s concerns, but well, yeah, the new Treo 600, w/ a BT of WiFi SDIO card is gonna kick so much ass.

And the question is really whether Palm is really even making a “smart phone” right now at all. Or whether the Treo 600 is actually more of a small “PDA Phone” and thus not anywhere near the sweet spot in the mobile phone market. In my mind the Treo is actually competing with all the PDAs and PDA phones like the P800 and other UIQ-based phones. With Nokia pushing one-handed smart phones like the 3650/6600 it’s hard to think that Palm is going to be able to compete in that area at all. I’ve said it before, but despite having a great brand, Palm is not Nokia.

Palm seems to want to change this by repackaging PalmOS 5 as the mobile version of their OS. But *why*!?! That’s not going to be able to compete with Symbian and Windows Mobile 2003, both 32 bit multitasking OSes with real file systems. Why would Palm think that? Why waste developer resources on this sort of thing? Better a mobile version of PalmOS 6.0 than old tech. Unless they’re targeting *really* low-powered devices (think about how little power is in the Zire 71, and that gives you an idea), but then they’re directly competing against J2ME and BREW. *That* to me is a *really* bad idea.

Related blogs:

• Mobitopia
• moblogging.org
• textually.org
• Josh Rubin’s Techetiquette, Cool Hunting

• Chinese Characters and Culture – it took me a second to realize the ‘Zhongwen’ romanization.
  

  Zhongwen.com
  contains the complete text of Amazon’s
  
  best selling, best reviewed
  Chinese-English
  dictionary,
  : Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary,
  which uses the new (zipu) system of character trees.
  Distributed exclusively by Far Eastern Publications at Yale
  and available from
  Amazon.com.

On the mobile-tech end, I’ve gotten the latest Hiptop OTA updates. Some nice features added, but it doesn’t change the fact that I can’t load my own apps onto my own system and that I don’t have an SSH terminal.

• Handspring NYC Treo 600 Launch Coverage
  

  The big news out of the event is the official announcement of four US wireless carriers. Sprint, AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile have signed on to carry the Treo 600 in the US. Orange was announced last week in Europe. The smartphone should be available in the US in early to mid-October. The specific price will vary by carrier and plan, but is expected to be in the $600 – $449 range.

• Mossberg loves the Treo 600
• Treo 600 Mailbag
• Treo 600 Coming to Four U.S. Wireless Carriers
  

  treocentral.com is reporting that Sprint will begin offering this smart phone on October 13 for $399, T-Mobile will also begin carrying in October 13, while Cingular expects begin offering it on October 20 for $549 before rebates, with the final cost expected to be $449.

  This should probably be taken w/ a grain of salt, an eWeek article from the day before gives much longer timelines for the other carriers

  Update: confirmation on dates @ bargainpda

Now the question is, do I stick w/ Sprint or T-Mobile…

I’ve been looking a bit at hardware recently w/ the slew of Athlon 64 reviews coming out. I’m going to hold out for a bit. As I’m doing all my video editing on my Mac right now (what I really need is a dual-G5), the main reason I’m going to need to upgrade is going to be for Half-Life 2 (and yeah, it’s delayed). Hopefully if/when I decide to upgrade, prices will come down, and more motherboards will be available.

I’ve also been taking a second look at building a terrabyte file server. If I combine that project with an Athlon 64 upgrade, i could save some parts money. Most of the price will be the cost of drives. Seagate is introducing its Barracuda 7200.7 SATA drives, which besides having 100GB platters, will also have SATA native command queuing (scheduled to ship in November)

• Wikipedia Phase III Features
• Tricster – Proffesional fireart and poi performance artist
• Trance Music Videos, Singles, Live Sets
• Maaz’s Genre Map, a sub-genre discussion
• Wikipedia: Electronic Music
• linked before, but always good: The Electronica Primer + Timeline

CIA Seeks Probe of White House – I remember the mainstream news not picking up on this earlier (ahh, permalinks would be useful)… I’ve found it interesting how easily distracted and lazy the media has been on covering these types of major, serious wrongs by the the administration (compare to the ridiculous bruhaha’s surrounding Clinton). In my book, compromising national security, walking over the bill of rights, destroying our international good will relations, and the budget are far worse than getting a blowjob, but what do I know?

• Recomendo – Kevin Kelly recommends cool stuff (books, tools, software, videos, maps, gadgets, hardware, websites, or gear that are extraordinarily handy or useful for individual and small groups)
• Virtual Travelog – John Harris’ weblog. Writes a wide range of snippets centered around design/tech/culture
• Orange Cone – some nice thoughts on tech/social effects

20th Anniversary of RMS’s Original GNU Post. h2odragon sums it up:

All HAIL RMS! Agree with him or not, his efforts have made your life better.

Insane: The Borg Megacube – The Complete Star Trek: Next Generation Seasons 1 – 7; list price: £449.99 (at 176 episodes that’s about $4.25/ep)

Random thought: mapping out each blogger’s ‘sphere of interest’ by what they link to; you could make a topic-map out of that w/ some visualization tool if those were categorized, being able to see overlap and also what sites to read to get a variety of sources.