I worked as a UPS loader for a while too (and I won't go anonymous to admit that), although my supervisors were perhaps a bit more responsible than yours. We would never did anything as crazy as spearing boxes or "Darwinism"... but yes, packages marked fragile are not treated any differently than any other boxes, and yes, the conveyer belts will move boxes so fast that they tumble into piles, etc.
Rule of thumb: if you think your items will be damaged if the box gets dropped from, say, twelve feet, you didn't pack it well enough.
Read the Viewsonic product page: ideal for satellite imaging and digital content creation. Says nothing about a playable framerate (with a friggin Matrox Parhelia!) or watching bootleg anime DiVX movies.
This is a problem common to Slashdot readers -- "if it doesn't work for me, it's obviously not good for anybody."
P.S. after a year on a 23" CRT I can't imagine downgrading to anything less; a friend of mine uses two of them!
Not all are that bad. There's a weird little shop in Portland called MacForce, it's located underneath a bridge in what used to be a warehouse zone, now they're surrounded by, well, warehouses, but also artisans, rare and exotic furniture dealers, etc. It's a sexy place, even better designed than the Apple Stores IMHO. Plus it's in a district with some character, not a gawdforsaken soulless mall.
Of course, you still get ignored by the staff, and they are woefully undereducated (I nearly got thrown out once for trying to convince an employee that Windows XP Home Ed. really was of the WinNT/2k/XP line, not "just Windows 98 or ME with a new interface")... but what do you expect from a register biscuit anyway?
There's got to be skads of stories out there about people trying to reprint out-of-print magazines and fiction by deceased novelists (or books from now-defunct publishers).
I'm hardly convinced of the PSP's likelihood of succeeding in the marketplace (looks too expensive, and optical drives in a handheld? meh), but your argument is full of holes, yo.
You haven't explained how the PS1 was a fluke. When other manufacturers were releasing overpriced systems that were slow and too difficult to program for, Sony released a system with a swift 3D processor that was easy to write games for. Plus, Sony offered more reasonable license fees than their competitors. It's not luck that made the PS1 the most successful 32bit console, it was savviness.
The PS2 isn't an underpowered dog because Sony was stupid; they made the calculated decision to be first-to-market, and whether you like it or not, that decision payed off. Again, no fluke.
Ten year life-cycle? Last time I checked the SNES, NES, and Genesis aren't being supported any more despite being considered to be the best systems ever made.
The Gameboy was released in 1989, and remained essentially unchanged until 1997. Even then, it was the same system, just bumped with a larger palette -- a sort of Gameboy v1.5. The true successor, the Gameboy Advance, came out in 2001 -- twelve years after the Gameboy.
You could argue that the dominance of the Gameboy was due to one simple factor: every competitor screwed up by making systems that were over twice as large as the GB. That's the best predictor of the PSP's possible failure, IMHO. But I hope it succeeds, the PSP is cute!
on a related note, the font size of iTunes has always driven me nuts. You get two choices, WENDY'S BIGGIE WITH A FROSTY and MCDONALD'S SUPER-SIZE. eff that, how about nicely aliased 8pt Verdana? I'd like to fit a little more data into my crummy 12" Powerbook screen.
OK, not trying to troll, just a serious question: why on earth would anyone pay $1000 more for the dual-processor XServe over a dual-2ghz G5? I don't get this pricing discepancy at all.
The XServe has hot-swappable bays, but doesn't the Powermac have hot-swappable drives? (I know it's part of the SATA spec) Is the thousand bucks just for OS X Server? What if you already have a copy and want to transfer the license?
On a loosely related note, it's too bad they aren't still manufacturing G4 XServes... there could be a huge market for Cobalt-style, low cost OS X servers for small offices.
The problem with Grim Fandango was that it was mis-marketed. Instead of selling to hardcore gamers, they should have been trying to find a way to make the Soccer Moms who made Myst a blockbuster aware of it.
My guess is that they made this decision based on the sales of the most recent Monkey Island games, which honestly haven't been all that hot.
My rebuttal? They need to re-evaluate their audience. Many would-be adventure gamers are likely older (both the kind of folks who played classic Lucasarts games and Myst, and also people who are just too whooped by twitch-and-shoot games), and are gravitating toward consoles since they aren't hard-core.
Monkey Island did get ported to PS2, of course, but I'm not aware of any real marketing push to non-mainstream gamers.
By the same logic, I hope you won't chew out web developers who don't bother proofing their pages for Safari 1.2 compatibility because they no longer feel like paying the annual Appletax.
I had access to a roommate's 20gig iPod all last summer, and hated it. Too big, too clunky.
The only place I really wanted to use it was at the gym, and the device (in a belt clip) kept tugging my shorts down. And all I want is maybe a dozen albums to pick from while I'm lifting weights, walking to and from home.
(and before you mention solid state devices -- I want something that works with iTunes!)
A mini-iPod would be perfect for me. Unfortunately, I don't believe the rumors at all.
I played Adam Cadre's "Shrapnel" a few years ago... it scared the living hell out of me. Play it on a dark and stormy night. If you're an old school IF fan, you'll dig on the Zork 1 references too.
The naive question is: "Will hypertextual diskettes, the internet, or multimedia systems make books obsolete?"...this question is a confused one, since it can be formulated in two different ways: (a) will books disappear as physical objects, and (b) will books disappear as virtual objects?
I'm not going to touch point b, which is an investigation of "hypertext" and multimedia, and most of his observations are pretty interesting. As an academic and a philosopher, he's good at thinking about ideas. However, his opinions on the possibilities of eBooks (which, unfortunately, most literature-industry types will take seriously) are misguided.
After having spent 12 hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls... [computers] are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating.
The only evidence he offers for this "incapability" is that they make his eyes hurt. What kind of "computer console"? This is really important!
A radiation tube? I hope he had a pair of Clockwork Orange lackeys nearby to administer eyedrops. A desktop LCD? Better on the eyes, but still bad on the back. A laptop is OK, but it pretty much has to stay on the stomach. A tablet PC is even better still, but still to unweildy.
(and don't get me started on "eBook readers," btw... nobody ever suggested that you should carry a separate PDA for an address book, and another for a calendar, and another for a to-do list; dedicated ebook readers are clearly insane and should be disregarded. That Eco doesn't dismiss them outright shows how little he understands gadgetry and human interface engineering.)
But what about PDAs? Simple, unassuming backlit LCDs? Granted, they're mostly too small for truly comfortable reading (I think there's a huge, untapped market for a PDA the size of a "trade paperback"), but they're damned close.
I've read many novels and stories on PDAs (and even one short novel on my cellphone); after reading the Harry Potter books on their Palm handhelds, my sister and her husband now gripe when something they'd like to read can't be found in an "eBook" format. The husband refuses to touch Stevenson's Quicksilver until he can download it, like he did with a bootleg copy of Cryptonomicon.
Yet, up to now e-books have not proved to be commercially successful as their inventors hoped... In general, people seem to prefer the traditional way of reading a poem or a novel on printed paper.
When the cellular phones were invented in the 1980s and failed to become widely successful in the marketplace, the engineers did not decide that their idea was a poor one and give up. They recognized that their implementation was flawed, and went back to the "drawing board" (or their MS-DOS-driven copies of Autocad, and I'm sure there's a point to be made there someplace).
Indeed, there are a lot of new technological devices that have not made previous ones obsolete... The idea that a new technology abolishes a previous one is frequently too simplistic...
Eco just glossed over the answer. "ebooks" (what a horrible term) will never render all books extinct. They will supplement books.
You know those boxes that photocopier paper come in? I have 25 of those, stuffed full of books. Each box is damned heavy. As you might guess, I'm one of those people who loves books.
Many of them -- autographed ones, first editions, books with sentimental value -- I would never give up. But I don't want to (or intend to) part with any of them (I reread nearly all of them). What I'd like is to put 85% of them onto digital media. I just don't need hardcopies of murder mysteries, or pulp sci-fi. Even some of the really good stuff, the Camus and Nabakov and Faulkner, I just don't need to haul around these paperbacks for the rest of my life.
Modern literature is usually published in two phases, an expensive hardback, and then a consumer paperback. When I'd like to see is the later phase supplemented with digital copies. Nobody who's a fan of these suggests a "death of the book." No way. Just a death of some of them, and in the process, making them cheaper and more ubiquitous.
"People ask me all the time if digital technology means the end of books."
"It doesn't mean the end of physical books, because the computer I just spent 12 hours reading hurts my eyes, and eBooks haven't been a success in the marketplace; never mind that it took 20 years for the engineers of cellular phones to come up with the technology and design necessary to put one in every pocket -- digital readers will never be any good because today's suck."
"It doesn't mean the end of the book as a narrative or storytelling device either, because the nature of hypertext is wholly different from linear writing. Hypertext will supplement books and fiction as another form of expression, not replace it."
I hate it when academics write about engineering problems. His points about hypertext (mostly in the last third of the essay) make RTFA worthwhile, though.
Runs great on my Celeron 333mhz laptop, even faster than Win98 did (as long as anti-aliasing of fonts is disabled). Much better than OS X does on my 400mhz G3 iMac, sadly.
Not all music stores have the same selection--I think Napster has something like double the amount of music available. (I'm sticking with iTunes anyway for the superior player... just fill in the missing music however I can I guess;)
The reason he ported iTunes is because it's the best way to access the iTunes Music Store... [and the iPod]
You forgot one thing -- the switch campaign. I started out wondering if Apple could convince other manufacturers (Gateway, Dell etc.) to have iTunes for Windows preinstalled... no way. A lot of Windows users are going to get used to iTunes, and realize that they want a Mac.
Those performance problems though... Apple really needs to step back make iTunes 5 nothing but an optimization project (similar to MSIE4->5!), on both platforms now.
I was really sorry to see Grim Fandango and Homeworld not make anyone's list (aside from a passing mention for GF's art direction). In fact, very few of those interviewed had anything to say about games with decent plots (possible exception: Spector on Ico).
Even games that excel in playability and immersiveness are frequently saddled with sub-par storytelling. Game producers hire professional musicians and artists to do the soundtrack and graphics in their titles, but all to often think anyone can write a damned story and turn in something that a "slash fiction" author would ashamed of.
Grim Fandango had a more polished script and thematic originality than most Hollywood movies. The freakin' manual that came with Homeworld was better than most science fiction novels that get published.
Have a decent plot and story certainly isn't the most important element of a videogame (everyone seems to agree that the ambiguous quality of "playability" is central), but it's probably the most overlooked factor. Game publishers need to stop asking Bob in Accounting to write their scripts and farm out the work to novelists whose books aren't selling because all their audience wants to read are Star Trek and Babylon 5 licensed books.
3D engines aside, Carmack's real genius might be for interface design. His comments about about the game interface perfectly mirror those of people like usability guru Jakob Nielsen, the developers of the classic Mac OS, and even industrial designer Jonathan Ives: good design is made by simplifying and removing elements; less is more!
Carmack has replaced the "use" key in Doom 3 by making the targetting reticle "context-sensitive"; when the character is within arm's reach of a switch or door and the reticle is over it, the gun drops and an open hand hovers over the object. The "fire button" does exactly what you would expect.
This is the reason for Linux's failure to reach mainstream desktops, despite a GUI and window manager that is easily as good as Windows (and even in some ways superior to any version of the Mac OS). Rather than striving for intuitive design that doesn't need excess buttons and options, the designers of desktop software throw as much crap into the forms and menus as they can fit. LESS IS MORE
(note that I understand that advanced users should have the options they want access to; bury stuff that doesn't need to be used constantly and by most users in an advanced options dialog somewhere!)
The Producers The guys who are in charge of anteing up the cash for games are often middle-aged businessmen whose last favorite game was Zaxxon, and everything they know about modern gaming comes from what they heard their nephew say. They walk into the office of a crew who had spent nine months working on a fighter, and say "My nephew just loves Grand Theft Auto, you need to make the game like that."
The Parents The majority of videogames are sold at Christmastime, and they're gifts. Parents buy what looks familiar -- if it's Batman or Frogger or some license they recognize, that's what gets bought.
I've been carrying a Vaio Z505 for about three years now, and have never once been in a situation where I was away from home and needed the optical drive. I just don't install software when I'm working or surfing at a coffee shop.
And flimsy? What, do you mean it's flexible or something? Sony shipped laptops with metal (magnesium alloy) frames long before the "tibook" came out.
That said, I'll be picking up an iBook soon... but I sure wish they would shave a few pounds off it by leaving out the optical drive.
That's funny... I remember seeing that when I was, like, 8 years old, and thinking I could make better special effects with my model X-Wing and a Polaroid camera.
What's up with that low-res screen? I'd take a high-res grayscale over low-res any day. It's all about the TEXT, man.
Also, after carting around a Danger Hiptop for a while, it's completely changed my expectations of a phone/PDA. Without always-available wireless web, you might as well be carrying around a notepad and a pencil.
I want the big screen and the virtual graffiti space. I don't want the freakin' camera. Drop the camera off one of those models and shave off $100 for crying out loud.
Same problem with all these great new cellphones... the Sony Ericsson P800 looks like a pretty awesome device with a killer interface, but darnit, I have a $1000+ digital camera, I don't need a stinkin' webcam making the phone/pda bulkier.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked as a UPS loader for a while too (and I won't go anonymous to admit that), although my supervisors were perhaps a bit more responsible than yours. We would never did anything as crazy as spearing boxes or "Darwinism"... but yes, packages marked fragile are not treated any differently than any other boxes, and yes, the conveyer belts will move boxes so fast that they tumble into piles, etc.
Rule of thumb: if you think your items will be damaged if the box gets dropped from, say, twelve feet, you didn't pack it well enough.
FPS's? TV? dude: this display isn't made for you.
Read the Viewsonic product page: ideal for satellite imaging and digital content creation. Says nothing about a playable framerate (with a friggin Matrox Parhelia!) or watching bootleg anime DiVX movies.
This is a problem common to Slashdot readers -- "if it doesn't work for me, it's obviously not good for anybody."
P.S. after a year on a 23" CRT I can't imagine downgrading to anything less; a friend of mine uses two of them!
Not all are that bad. There's a weird little shop in Portland called MacForce, it's located underneath a bridge in what used to be a warehouse zone, now they're surrounded by, well, warehouses, but also artisans, rare and exotic furniture dealers, etc. It's a sexy place, even better designed than the Apple Stores IMHO. Plus it's in a district with some character, not a gawdforsaken soulless mall.
Of course, you still get ignored by the staff, and they are woefully undereducated (I nearly got thrown out once for trying to convince an employee that Windows XP Home Ed. really was of the WinNT/2k/XP line, not "just Windows 98 or ME with a new interface")... but what do you expect from a register biscuit anyway?
There's got to be skads of stories out there about people trying to reprint out-of-print magazines and fiction by deceased novelists (or books from now-defunct publishers).
You haven't explained how the PS1 was a fluke. When other manufacturers were releasing overpriced systems that were slow and too difficult to program for, Sony released a system with a swift 3D processor that was easy to write games for. Plus, Sony offered more reasonable license fees than their competitors. It's not luck that made the PS1 the most successful 32bit console, it was savviness.
The PS2 isn't an underpowered dog because Sony was stupid; they made the calculated decision to be first-to-market, and whether you like it or not, that decision payed off. Again, no fluke.
The Gameboy was released in 1989, and remained essentially unchanged until 1997. Even then, it was the same system, just bumped with a larger palette -- a sort of Gameboy v1.5. The true successor, the Gameboy Advance, came out in 2001 -- twelve years after the Gameboy.
You could argue that the dominance of the Gameboy was due to one simple factor: every competitor screwed up by making systems that were over twice as large as the GB. That's the best predictor of the PSP's possible failure, IMHO. But I hope it succeeds, the PSP is cute!
on a related note, the font size of iTunes has always driven me nuts. You get two choices, WENDY'S BIGGIE WITH A FROSTY and MCDONALD'S SUPER-SIZE. eff that, how about nicely aliased 8pt Verdana? I'd like to fit a little more data into my crummy 12" Powerbook screen.
OK, not trying to troll, just a serious question: why on earth would anyone pay $1000 more for the dual-processor XServe over a dual-2ghz G5? I don't get this pricing discepancy at all.
The XServe has hot-swappable bays, but doesn't the Powermac have hot-swappable drives? (I know it's part of the SATA spec) Is the thousand bucks just for OS X Server? What if you already have a copy and want to transfer the license?
On a loosely related note, it's too bad they aren't still manufacturing G4 XServes... there could be a huge market for Cobalt-style, low cost OS X servers for small offices.
The problem with Grim Fandango was that it was mis-marketed. Instead of selling to hardcore gamers, they should have been trying to find a way to make the Soccer Moms who made Myst a blockbuster aware of it.
My guess is that they made this decision based on the sales of the most recent Monkey Island games, which honestly haven't been all that hot.
My rebuttal? They need to re-evaluate their audience. Many would-be adventure gamers are likely older (both the kind of folks who played classic Lucasarts games and Myst, and also people who are just too whooped by twitch-and-shoot games), and are gravitating toward consoles since they aren't hard-core.
Monkey Island did get ported to PS2, of course, but I'm not aware of any real marketing push to non-mainstream gamers.
By the same logic, I hope you won't chew out web developers who don't bother proofing their pages for Safari 1.2 compatibility because they no longer feel like paying the annual Appletax.
and of course nothing like it is in this article.
The fashion keyboard ($60) is really the MacAlly IceKey, reconfigured with PC-style ctrl/alt/Win keys.
The keys are laptop-style "scissor keys"; typing on this thing feels like dancing.
Available in a wide array of colors (hence the "fashion" moniker). Also the keys can be had in black, which won't look disgusting after a year of use.
I had access to a roommate's 20gig iPod all last summer, and hated it. Too big, too clunky.
The only place I really wanted to use it was at the gym, and the device (in a belt clip) kept tugging my shorts down. And all I want is maybe a dozen albums to pick from while I'm lifting weights, walking to and from home.
(and before you mention solid state devices -- I want something that works with iTunes!)
A mini-iPod would be perfect for me. Unfortunately, I don't believe the rumors at all.
I played Adam Cadre's "Shrapnel" a few years ago... it scared the living hell out of me. Play it on a dark and stormy night. If you're an old school IF fan, you'll dig on the Zork 1 references too.
I'm not going to touch point b, which is an investigation of "hypertext" and multimedia, and most of his observations are pretty interesting. As an academic and a philosopher, he's good at thinking about ideas. However, his opinions on the possibilities of eBooks (which, unfortunately, most literature-industry types will take seriously) are misguided.
The only evidence he offers for this "incapability" is that they make his eyes hurt. What kind of "computer console"? This is really important!
A radiation tube? I hope he had a pair of Clockwork Orange lackeys nearby to administer eyedrops. A desktop LCD? Better on the eyes, but still bad on the back. A laptop is OK, but it pretty much has to stay on the stomach. A tablet PC is even better still, but still to unweildy.
(and don't get me started on "eBook readers," btw... nobody ever suggested that you should carry a separate PDA for an address book, and another for a calendar, and another for a to-do list; dedicated ebook readers are clearly insane and should be disregarded. That Eco doesn't dismiss them outright shows how little he understands gadgetry and human interface engineering.)
But what about PDAs? Simple, unassuming backlit LCDs? Granted, they're mostly too small for truly comfortable reading (I think there's a huge, untapped market for a PDA the size of a "trade paperback"), but they're damned close.
I've read many novels and stories on PDAs (and even one short novel on my cellphone); after reading the Harry Potter books on their Palm handhelds, my sister and her husband now gripe when something they'd like to read can't be found in an "eBook" format. The husband refuses to touch Stevenson's Quicksilver until he can download it, like he did with a bootleg copy of Cryptonomicon.
When the cellular phones were invented in the 1980s and failed to become widely successful in the marketplace, the engineers did not decide that their idea was a poor one and give up. They recognized that their implementation was flawed, and went back to the "drawing board" (or their MS-DOS-driven copies of Autocad, and I'm sure there's a point to be made there someplace).
Eco just glossed over the answer. "ebooks" (what a horrible term) will never render all books extinct. They will supplement books.
You know those boxes that photocopier paper come in? I have 25 of those, stuffed full of books. Each box is damned heavy. As you might guess, I'm one of those people who loves books.
Many of them -- autographed ones, first editions, books with sentimental value -- I would never give up. But I don't want to (or intend to) part with any of them (I reread nearly all of them). What I'd like is to put 85% of them onto digital media. I just don't need hardcopies of murder mysteries, or pulp sci-fi. Even some of the really good stuff, the Camus and Nabakov and Faulkner, I just don't need to haul around these paperbacks for the rest of my life.
Modern literature is usually published in two phases, an expensive hardback, and then a consumer paperback. When I'd like to see is the later phase supplemented with digital copies. Nobody who's a fan of these suggests a "death of the book." No way. Just a death of some of them, and in the process, making them cheaper and more ubiquitous.
condensed version:
"People ask me all the time if digital technology means the end of books."
"It doesn't mean the end of physical books, because the computer I just spent 12 hours reading hurts my eyes, and eBooks haven't been a success in the marketplace; never mind that it took 20 years for the engineers of cellular phones to come up with the technology and design necessary to put one in every pocket -- digital readers will never be any good because today's suck."
"It doesn't mean the end of the book as a narrative or storytelling device either, because the nature of hypertext is wholly different from linear writing. Hypertext will supplement books and fiction as another form of expression, not replace it."
I hate it when academics write about engineering problems. His points about hypertext (mostly in the last third of the essay) make RTFA worthwhile, though.
Runs great on my Celeron 333mhz laptop, even faster than Win98 did (as long as anti-aliasing of fonts is disabled). Much better than OS X does on my 400mhz G3 iMac, sadly.
Not all music stores have the same selection--I think Napster has something like double the amount of music available. (I'm sticking with iTunes anyway for the superior player... just fill in the missing music however I can I guess ;)
Those performance problems though... Apple really needs to step back make iTunes 5 nothing but an optimization project (similar to MSIE4->5!), on both platforms now.
I was really sorry to see Grim Fandango and Homeworld not make anyone's list (aside from a passing mention for GF's art direction). In fact, very few of those interviewed had anything to say about games with decent plots (possible exception: Spector on Ico).
Even games that excel in playability and immersiveness are frequently saddled with sub-par storytelling. Game producers hire professional musicians and artists to do the soundtrack and graphics in their titles, but all to often think anyone can write a damned story and turn in something that a "slash fiction" author would ashamed of.
Grim Fandango had a more polished script and thematic originality than most Hollywood movies. The freakin' manual that came with Homeworld was better than most science fiction novels that get published.
Have a decent plot and story certainly isn't the most important element of a videogame (everyone seems to agree that the ambiguous quality of "playability" is central), but it's probably the most overlooked factor. Game publishers need to stop asking Bob in Accounting to write their scripts and farm out the work to novelists whose books aren't selling because all their audience wants to read are Star Trek and Babylon 5 licensed books.
3D engines aside, Carmack's real genius might be for interface design. His comments about about the game interface perfectly mirror those of people like usability guru Jakob Nielsen, the developers of the classic Mac OS, and even industrial designer Jonathan Ives: good design is made by simplifying and removing elements; less is more!
Carmack has replaced the "use" key in Doom 3 by making the targetting reticle "context-sensitive"; when the character is within arm's reach of a switch or door and the reticle is over it, the gun drops and an open hand hovers over the object. The "fire button" does exactly what you would expect.
This is the reason for Linux's failure to reach mainstream desktops, despite a GUI and window manager that is easily as good as Windows (and even in some ways superior to any version of the Mac OS). Rather than striving for intuitive design that doesn't need excess buttons and options, the designers of desktop software throw as much crap into the forms and menus as they can fit. LESS IS MORE
(note that I understand that advanced users should have the options they want access to; bury stuff that doesn't need to be used constantly and by most users in an advanced options dialog somewhere!)
The Parents The majority of videogames are sold at Christmastime, and they're gifts. Parents buy what looks familiar -- if it's Batman or Frogger or some license they recognize, that's what gets bought.
I've been carrying a Vaio Z505 for about three years now, and have never once been in a situation where I was away from home and needed the optical drive. I just don't install software when I'm working or surfing at a coffee shop.
And flimsy? What, do you mean it's flexible or something? Sony shipped laptops with metal (magnesium alloy) frames long before the "tibook" came out.
That said, I'll be picking up an iBook soon... but I sure wish they would shave a few pounds off it by leaving out the optical drive.
That's funny... I remember seeing that when I was, like, 8 years old, and thinking I could make better special effects with my model X-Wing and a Polaroid camera.
What's up with that low-res screen? I'd take a high-res grayscale over low-res any day. It's all about the TEXT, man.
Also, after carting around a Danger Hiptop for a while, it's completely changed my expectations of a phone/PDA. Without always-available wireless web, you might as well be carrying around a notepad and a pencil.
I want the big screen and the virtual graffiti space. I don't want the freakin' camera. Drop the camera off one of those models and shave off $100 for crying out loud.
Same problem with all these great new cellphones... the Sony Ericsson P800 looks like a pretty awesome device with a killer interface, but darnit, I have a $1000+ digital camera, I don't need a stinkin' webcam making the phone/pda bulkier.