Having read Popular Photography’s “buyer’s guide”:http://www.popphoto.com/article.asp?section_id=2&article_id=780 I am now more confused than ever. It “singles out”:http://www.popphoto.com/assets/download/12182003163311.pdf the camera I wanted saying, ‘The Minolta DiMAGE Xt is a wonderful little 3.2MP camera, full of fun features. But for just about the same money these days, you can get Minolta’s DiMAGE S414, a standard compact with all the Xt’s features and more—as well as a full 4MP of resolving power.’ It’s true that the S414 – “reviewed here”:http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/cameraDetail.php?cam=460 – is about the same price with an extra MP of resolution (and seems cheaper than competing 4MP cameras) but is it cheaper for a reason? Having looked at dozens of reviews for different cameras I don’t know what to think any more…

And practical though it might be, it lacks the ‘coo what a neat little camera’ factor as well.

I’ve been wanting a proper digital camera for a while now (I have a camcorder that can capture 1MP digital images but the results aren’t that great). For a while I was tempted by the “NISIS DV4”:http://www.nisis.com/Products/DigitalCameras/DV4.asp since it can act as a webcam and a storage device and even an MP3 player and is reasonably cheap (£109 from Amazon) but I knew it was what the Brits call a ‘mug’s eyeful’ – lots of features but nothing likely to work terribly well. It only has a 2MP resolution for example which is hardly state of the art these days.

Then I heard about the “Minolta Dimage XT”:http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/minolta/dimage_xt-review/index.shtml via the message boards on “dpreview”:http://www.dpreview.com/ (available in the UK for a little over £200).

It is a 3MP camera small enough to take with you anywhere, has a 3x zoom (surprisingly omitted from some of the low-end digital cameras I have looked at), and works as a webcam (though admittedly a separate webcam would only cost around £25).

A few questions arise, though –
1) Is the Minolta the best small digital camera in this price range or is there another that would be significantly better (without costing significantly more?) Does anyone know if Minolta plans to upgrade it again within a month or two or if some wonderful new cameras are due shortly? The Minolta has been out since the middle of the year.
2) I already have a nice little Canon Elph APS film camera (the original Elph). My wife says it’s a perfectly serviceable camera and a new digital camera wouldn’t give any better images (might in fact be worse) and that we don’t need any more gadgets anyway. Is she right? Should I just get a DV4 to muck about with and wait another year? What other persuasive arguments can I use to justify the purchase of this desireable piece of kit (or its equivalent)? You’ve got to help me out here, guys!

P.S. If you’re looking for a last-minute stocking stuffer, may I recommend the very fine slim volume I wrote earlier this year pictured in the column on the right – “Dealing with E-mail”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789495392/blogorg-20 – a bargain at £6 or $7?

P.P.S. So far I have received exactly nothing in the way of recompense from the thousands of people who read my site weekly. I don’t do this for any financial reward but if one of you did feel inclined to give me something for Christmas it would certainly encourage me to continue and fill me with the Christmas spirit. The cheapest items on my Amazon wish list start at less than £10 – they wouldn’t arrive by Christmas at this point but I’m not fussy!

Alas this offer is limited (though there is no need to commit yourselves) and it only works if you either buy a voice over IP telephone or download the appropriate (free) software and configure it (something which I have found less than straightforward to do in the past). Nonetheless, this is clearly the future of telephony.

By coincidence, the “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/18/technology/circuits/18nett.html?ex=1387083600&en=b28df722ab69712f&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND has just reviewed “Vonage”:http://www.vonage.com/’s Internet to telephone service and says it works just fine. I tried the free Free World Dialup service with my parents and it kind of worked as well but my voice was a little broken up (probably because of my bad habit of running 17 programs at once on my PC.)

I hope France gets connected in a similar way one day – we only pay between 1 and 4p a minute (2 to 7 cents) to call my wife’s friends and family but it still adds up!

See “Free World Dialup”:http://www.freeworldialup.com/ for details.

I wanted a USB data storage device, but it seemed a shame to get one that just did data storage. So I ended up with the Archos Ondio which has 128Mb of storage (but is expandable through MultimediaCards – yet another new storage format to deal with). But that’s not all…
* it’s also an MP3 player
* And has an FM radio…
* But (unlike most other similar players) you can record from the built in radio.
* And it is a voice recorder…
* But (unlike most other similar players) it also has a line-in jack so you can record streamed audio (or any other audio source like tape) directly into the device for later playback.
* And if you send it plain text files you can even read them on the built-in 112×64 pixel screen!
I am also happy that it works on AAA batteries instead of requiring a special charger.

Truly this is a Swiss army knife among USB storage devices!

Minor drawbacks I have come across so far
* I had some teething troubles getting the USB to connect to my home Win2k PC (but it worked trouble-free when connected to two other win2k computers, and the tech support guy I reached was pretty good)
* It did once cause a fatal system crash for no discernable reason when re-attached to a Win98 laptop.
* I can copy MP3 files over to it directly without trouble but the Musicmatch Jukebox software playlist copying doesn’t seem to function – I’ll be nagging tech support about that tomorrow.
* The radio doesn’t pull in the signal terribly well (it’s probably the last analogue radio I’ll buy!)
* The UI is a little clunky (perhaps not surprising since it is so small and has just 5 buttons to work with)
* It’s the size of a (small) mobile phone instead of being thumb-sized, but I’ve got reasonably big pockets.
* To connect it to USB you need to carry around a USB cable – it won’t plug in directly.

I’ve only had it for an afternoon so I may become more disillusioned later.

FWIW I bought it in the UK from Datamind for £120 inc VAT – the cheapest price I was able to find. I’m not amused to note it is $150 direct from Archos, but I thought having a UK supplier was worth a few quid.

P.S. Before you ask, I did consider buying a hard disk-type device instead but
1) The prices are still too high (around double?)
2) They are significantly larger/heavier and not solid state like this is.
3) I don’t think I really need that much portable storage at present and when I decide I do I can buy a storage card for it (and other things like cameras) once prices for those drop further.
4) The iPod doesn’t record or include a radio – what’s up with that?

Another gem from my “blog this one day” archive – Sir Clive Sinclair, who created one of the first attempts at a mass market electric transport – the ill-fated C5 – has told the BBC he plans a successor – details as yet un-specified. Good to see someone still plugging away at alternative transport solutions. I don’t suppose it could be much less practical than the Segway!rugby accrington leaguenokia verizon ringtone free 6015ibasketball adam harringtongirls 21st century ringtone2way ringtoneabsolutely country free ringtones wireless cingularfree 3595 ringtone nokia logocingular a split second ringtone Mapand credit consumer of disadvantages advantagesbarbados in agency accreditationrealtor accredited professional stagingexpress american card credit travel rewardsteam credit agricole cycling 2006accredited reo home loanscredit express earning true card americanpersonal acredited training certifications Map

… and (completely unsurprisingly) first impressions aren’t good. Even months after the much-delayed launch. Oh well – I’ll give it another two or three years at least before it starts to become something I would have an interest in (and I’m certainly part of the target market).

How about this:

A USB toothbrush!2008 stafford federal amounts loanamortization loan calculator tableestate real loans agbank amortization loansloan mortgage get out amcamerican home loans guardiancash advance payday sacramento ok loancar $88 loans Map

The newly-released Panasonic DMRE50EBS DVD recorder is more or less affordable (£388 inc delivery from Empire Direct) and has an extremely cool feature – “the recorder’s Simultaneous Record and Play function enables the recording of one programme and playback of another […] or you can watch a recording that has already started, from the beginning, as the unit continues to record to the end of the programme.

The BBC interviews a bunch of people who think gaming may be a 3G driver. But you can have a mobile phone with a big colour screen without it being 3G and 2.5G – anything that gives you “always on” – is enough to allow multiplayer gaming. You don’t need a lot of bandwidth…

Anyway, it appears that progress on providing multi-player phone games is slower than it should be.

audblog has been receiving a lot of interest recently (and there are other similar projects). It would let you (in effect) phone your weblog and add an entry as streaming audio. While interesting I am not convinced it will be hugely popular, since you can’t caption the entries until later which makes it hard for a browser to know what they will get. I also worry that in future if such technologies become more widely used weblogs will be much harder to index and search.credit tutorial roll elements adobe premiereabilfiy attorney gambling oregonringtone jackson 52005 fees forester click subaru credityouth abs gambling300 credits endingemergency ringtone 51abuse gambling addiction Map