It’s been a good couple of weeks in terms of new gadgets.

First up was my Galaxy Nexus phone, which by an unfortunate co-incidence, got delivered to work on the day that I fell sick. Thanks again to Piet for dropping it around to our house while I was on my deathbed!

This is Google’s latest in its series of “Nexus” phones, running the spanking new version of Android – Ice Cream Sandwich. Having now owned (at least) one of each type of smartphone (iPhone, Android, and WP7 – I don’t count Blackberry as a smartphone!), I can definitely say that of the three, Android best fits my needs. I’m a huge fan and consumer of so many of Google’s services (GMail, Google Calendar, Picasa, etc) so using a phone that was built to integrate with all of them seems like a no-brainer.

Ice Cream Sandwich is a huge step up for Android! It’s so fresh! So clean! I love the new font that they use, and the usability tweaks are brilliant (e.g. swipe left/right to dismiss nearly anything). And it shines on the phone’s huge, gorgeous screen – 4.65″! I also love the fact that there are no hardware buttons on the front – everything is rendered on the screen instead.

Of course, like all smartphones on the market, it’s not without its faults. Firstly – battery life is terrible. If I unplug the phone at 6 AM, it’s begging to be put back on the charger by 9 PM, and that’s after a day of fairly light usage. The screen is consistently the biggest offender, always topping the “Battery Usage” chart by a fairly sizeable margin. Secondly – I’ll be shocked if anyone can snap an award winning phone on the camera. Why on earth Samsung decided to equip the Nexus with a very average 5 MP shooter is beyond me, especially when the older Galaxy S II has a far superior 8 MP camera on board.

Still – overall, I can live with these two drawbacks, because everything else is awesome. I’ve never enjoyed a phone so much as this one!

Gadget number two – and proof that I’m not the hater of Apple that people seem to think I am – came in the form of a new 15″ Macbook Pro. This is actually the third Macbook Pro that we’ve had, and it replaces our last one which is now about five years old. And boy, haven’t they come a long way! I love the bigger (i.e. higher resolution) screen, and I’m amazed by how many gestures are baked in to the operating system. It’s taken a bit of time to get used to the “natural scrolling” though!

The main reason for the upgrade was that our old machine struggled to edit high-definition video, and I’m yet to find a more user-friendly “home movie” maker than iMovie. So, next time I’ve got a bit of time up my sleeve (and some source video to play with, of course!) I’m going to see how the new machine fares!

No more gadgets on the horizon for now, but I’m always on the looking for new ways to waste invest some money!

Oh, my poor PS3. Already having recovered from one hardware failure (a dead bluray laser), he has now suffered his second major calamity. This time, it’s the semi-infamous “Yellow Light of Death” problem, and I’m not impressed!

My options for having it fixed aren’t great, either:

• Buy a home repair kit from eBay (around $25) and attempt to do it myself. I’m hesitant to take this option because apparently, of the two main causes for the YLOD problem, this only fixes one of them. That, and I’m about as handy as an eel.
• Take/send it to a third-party repairer. This seems like the best option, though it’s significantly more expensive than a home repair kit (around $200). But, from what I’ve read, they won’t charge me anything if they can’t actually fix the problem, plus they provide three months warranty on their work.
• Send it back to Sony for an out-of-warranty repair. On the plus side, they guarantee their repairs for 12 months. On the minus side, they’re about $50 more than a third party repairer (so effectively it’s $50 extra for nine months extra warranty).
• Buy a second hand PS3. I’ve been watching eBay and Gumtree for a good deal, but generally people are asking too much. EB Games are selling them second hand starting at around $340, with a 12 month warranty.
• Buy a new PS3. Though this is by far the most expensive of all options (they start at around $400), it’s probably the only other one worth considering. Plus, a new one would be the newer build of the console (aka the “slim” console), which on the whole have had far fewer reported hardware failures, run more quietly, use less power, etc etc. Plus, they come with a 12 month warranty, and then our credit card gives an extra 12 months on top of that!

I think I’m leaning towards the new one. Plus, I’ve seen someone selling their 40GB PS3 on eBay, which also had the Yellow Light of Death, for $105 (after 5 bids)! Crazy!

So, what should I do?

My stupid lens on my stupid D-SLR had been playing up for a few months. Instead of nicely taking a photo when I asked it to, the camera would report, “Err 01 – Communication between the camera and lens is faulty, check lens contacts.”. I have no idea precisely what that means, however I tried out every fix on the net that I could find:

• Detach then re-attach the lens;
• Cleaning the lens contacts with an eraser;
• Shouting at the camera

Each fix seemed to work for a little bit – perhaps long enough to record a few photos, but the problem gradually got worse over a number of months. By September, it was so bad that I couldn’t take any photos with the lens.

So, off to Jessops we trundled, where we did a bit of a swaperoo to see if the problem was on the lens (my suspicion), or the camera. Unfortunately, the tests were inconclusive, so we had to send both of them back to Canon for a service.

Ten weeks, many frustrated phone calls to Jessops, and a painful-though-it-could-have-been-worse £170 later, the camera and lens are both safely back in our possession. So far, we haven’t had a chance to give it a good run for it’s money, though preliminary tests show much promise – no signs of the dreaded Err 01 message anywhere.

We’re off to Canterbury this weekend which should provide us with ample photographic opportunities. If my lovely camera and lovely lens really are back, I’ll be snapping shots of Matthew and Emily so quickly, they’ll think they’re being followed by the paparazzi. Fingers crossed!

For about as long as I can remember, or at the very least, since a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to build a Media Centre PC. It’s not the easiest thing to research – there’s a few places where you can buy something “out of the box”, but I couldn’t find any that would put a machine together out of the pieces I wanted. So, I finally bit the bullet, bought all the bits, and put it together myself!

I’ve never actually put a computer together from scratch before, so I was a little intimidated. The thing I was most worried about was the CPU, as there’s so many things that can go wrong with it. For example, if you don’t have enough thermal paste between the CPU and the heatsync, and it can overheat, burn out, and potentially damage the motherboard as well. Ironically, if you have too much thermal paste, the same thing can happen!

There were a few other gotchas as well, like just trying to get everything to fit. It’s a fairly large case, but due to the way it’s “zoned” (which helps with cooling), there’s not a lot of space for all the cables to fit in. Plus, I made a few n00b mistakes, such as not attaching both power connectors to the motherboard, and then wondering why nothing happened when I powered on.

But after a few false starts, I finally had everything up and running! Here’s the final product – as you can see, the machine fits perfectly into our existing TV cabinet:

The only thing that I couldn’t get working properly was the sound. I was relying on the sound from the motherboard, but as it turns out there’s no optical output. So after a number of frustrating hours trying to get that working, I’ve given up and ordered a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio card instead. Awesome!

Update: The new audio card has arrived, and has been installed. Just wish I got this one in the first place, it would have saved a lot of headaches!

After much humming and harring, plus a very helpful advanced phone search website that Karl found, I decided to get myself a Nokia E65. Yes, I know what you’re saying – it wasn’t even on the shortlist – but it still seemed like the right choice to me.

For me, the number one feature of this phone is that it has built in Wi-Fi support. Admittedly, I can’t see myself using it to surf the net on unsecured networks all that often (but I guess it’s handy to know that I can if I need to, and the browser is better than I thought it would be). But the big plus of this is that the phone also has built-in support for VoIP. Better yet, you can configure the phone such that if a Wi-Fi network is available and you make a phone call, it will default to using VoIP instead of the cellular network.

Other selling points of the phone – for me at least – were:

• It’s a slider phone. I’ve never had one of these before but I liked the concept and was keen to get one.
• Built in 2MP camera. Admittedly, it’s not exactly time to trade in my dSLR just yet, but still the photos are much better than they were in my 1st-gen Razr.
• Built in bluetooth and IR.
• Long battery life. The battery is rated to 10 days on standby, but we’ll see what that actually equates to.
• Small form factor. Obviously bigger than my Razr was but when closed, this is still a pretty small phone.

So far so good! Oh, and most importantly, it seems to make and receive phone calls quite well, too .

Now we just need to find a new phone for Kristy…

Since I’m now in the market for a new phone, I’ve been searching around to try and work out which one to get. It’s been a while since I bought one and honestly I’m no longer sure what’s best. I remember when buying a new phone basically meant go and buy the latest Nokia and be done with it, however now it seems like there’s stiff competition from lots of other vendors.

I figure for what I use a phone for, the most important features are -

• Bluetooth – and what’s more, it must be able to sync with the Mac address book over a bluetooth connection. (This immediately rules out any Samsung phones unfortunately.)
• Large address book – since my address book syncs with my Mac address book, it brings down ALL the details for each contact – phone numbers, address, e-mail, etc. So a large amount of address book storage is essential.
• Camera – essential for moblog!
• Decent battery life – Goes without saying, really. Oh and speaking of battery life, it would be good to have a phone that charges over USB.

So with that said, here’s my shortlist, in order of price:

• SonyEricsson w810i – about $300.
• Nokia 6300 – about $350.
• SonyEricsson w850i – about $430.
• Nokia N80 – about $450.

The thing I especially like about the last two is that they’re slider phones, and I like the concept of having a covered keypad. But, they’re both somewhat more than I want to spend – $400 should be more than enough for a mobile.

Anyway, I’m putting it out there for comment/votes – which phone do you think I should get, and why? Is there any other phones that should be on the shortlist for consideration? Has anyone had/got any of these phones, and if so would you recommend it?

Spurred on by Nathan’s new earphones, I decided that it was finally time to part with the crapola earbuds that Apple give you with an iPod, and get a decent pair of headphones instead.

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Wifey told me just last week that she simply couldn’t exist any longer without a bluetooth headset, so that she didn’t have to be connected to the computer while she’s Skyping the folks back home. And, being the diligent, subservient husband that I am, I noticed there was a $10 mail-in rebate from Buy.com, so I ordered one for her. (Ohh, and I’ve just noticed it’s gone up by another $10 – looks like I bought at the right time!)

Thus far, the headset has proved fairly good, though my major complaint has been that it’s not very loud. Then again, I’m very much used to Skyping using our premium corded headset, which not only is top-of-the line (in terms of Logitech’s lineup, anyway) but also benefits from having 2 speakers.

Still, you can’t beat the freedom that cordless devices offer. And the range is brilliant, certainly more than enough to cover pretty much anywhere in our apartment (about 10 – 12 metres). And since BlueTooth is built into our laptop, we don’t need any special adapters to get it running. Even bigger bonus, it’s completely compatible with my mobile phone!

Not bad for $30, eh?

There are at least 4 curious Charlies who just can’t wait to find out what my new toy is. Well wait no longer – it’s a Motorola Razr!

Truth be told, I had no real desire to purchase a new mobile phone just yet; I was quite happy with my Nokia 6610. And given that our local contact list consists of about 6 people, and the 2 most frequently called of those people are going back to Sydney in December – well, the need for the latest, state-of-the-artiest phone isn’t really too pressing.

But sadly, my Nokia had started down the path to its death. Namely, it started turning itself off every few hours for no particular reason. Handy when you go to the flicks and forget to switch the phone off yourself, but otherwise rather annoying.

So given that electronics in the USA are so cheap, it turns out buying 2 Razr’s would still have been cheaper than buying 1 in Australia, so I lashed out. I’m most impressed, it’s an awesome little phone – lightweight, bluetooth, in built camera (photo and video), etc. The selling point for me was that not only does it sync to Outlook via an in-built USB port, but the phone actually charges over the USB link! Totally awesome.

Thanks to Brother J for the recommendation!

Just in case you have no idea what the title of this article refers to – it’s a camera. And not just any camera – our brand new digital SLR! That’s right, Kristy and I (mainly Kristy) have entered the world of photography.

So how is it, I hear you wonder? Well, here’s our initial impressions, firstly the pros:

• The colour produced in the images is simply beautiful.
• The shutter sound is also beautiful – it’s so great listening to an SLR fire!
• The control system is totally awesome (once you work it out!).

There’s even a little dial next to the viewfinder that lets you compensate for the eyesightedly-challenged. It actually simulates wearing prescription glasses, which is a huge bonus for Kristy. Also a bonus for me, since happy wife = more money in the gadget budget.

And now the cons:

• Man, that thing is heavy! Much heavier than the old point-and-shoots that we’re used to, anyway. I rest assured that this is a good thing, but it will take some getting used to.
• I was under delusions of grandeur, believing that an expensive camera would take nothing but amazing images. Turns out you can still take bad photos with it, they’re just a better quality of bad.
• And again, with delusions of grandeur, I believed that photos of me would make me look taller, more muscular, and more often than not I expected a slight golden glow to shimmer off the outside of my body – like you were photographing an angel. Again, it turns out I was wrong; I still look tired, rundown, and slumpy – perhaps even more so as the pictures are freakishly realistic.

So overall it’s all good, all the bad points will get better with time, practice, and patience… well, all except for the last one!