Yeas:

• Keyboard better than expected
• Thin
• Has a hole for wrist strap (finally!)
• E-mail setup was fairly easy
• WiFi
• GPS (yay!)
• Great default settings for profiles, home screen application shortcuts
• Overall excellent use of the home screen (idle)
• Very nice mechanism for releasing the back battery cover (squeeze and lift)
• 3.2 MP camera
• Pre-loaded bar-code reader, which looks cool, but I can’t figure out how it works.

Nays:

• Keyboard arrangement a bit odd
• I know it’s really small for a QWERTY keyboard (that’s why I got it), but the E65 was a more comfortable size
• Slow, slow download of e-mail (even just the headers)
• Not yet synced with my Mac PowerBook G4 (which might be a problem with my iSync)
• GPS use costs extra monthly to activate (oh, well…)
• A bit slippery, despite the dot design on the back
• My outgoing test e-mail hasn’t gone out, even though mail is getting in
• The system doesn’t remember the WAP access key for my home wireless network (as was true with my E65), which means I have to manually enter it every time I take the phone online. This is a royal pain in the neck.
• Shiny metal back is not lovely, and attracts fingerprints
• S60 not always behaving as expected, including some quirky softkey labels in the web browser (Messaging?!)
• I haven’t found out how to turn off the feature that automatically locks the keypad after a few minutes of non-use. It’s OK, but I’d like to have control over that.

I am such a sucker for anything that cleverly mixes the real and virtual — even though the virtual, in this case, is more real than most virtual reality. There are a bunch of other (tangible) funky bikes at the link below.

[via FunTim]

Thanks to @DrimoN for the tip.

Quincunx:  An arrangement of [typically five] objects in a square or rectangle, with one at each corner and one in the middle, like the five spots on dice (from the Latin for “five-twelfths”).

Now there’s a word I don’t remember ever seeing before, and certainly have never heard spoken (seen now in Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, in the context of Galton’s mechanical experiments on Gaussian curve formation). Quincunx. It sounds like a hiding place for Lord Voldemort.

Disemvowlmnt: The process of pruning a word of its vowels in order to cram an idea into the requisite 140 characters allowed in a Twitter post.

[word seen at @Quatrainman]

Patterfamilias: Saying something to your child and then realizing that you sound just like one of your own parents.

The idea is that the camera itself is integrated within a pair of sunglasses. Using your fingers to frame the portion of your viewing field you wish to photograph (like a hot-shot photographer framing a scene), wink with one eye to capture the shot. [via Walyou]

OK, clever interface. I love the conceptually seamless interleaving of real and virtual realities. But… I have not yet bought into the “wearable technology” craze. Yes, I think that much technology should be worn, and I believe in tech-integrated accessories; what I don’t buy is that integrating interface technology into clothing is a brilliant idea.

If I have to wear a certain jacket in order to hear music, have to wear a certain pair of sunglasses in order to take a picture, have to wear a certain pair of sneakers in order to track my workout, then I’m going to feel trapped. Who wants to be locked in to an article of clothing? (Note to those wearing chastity belts: line forms to the right.)

You’ve probably put your finger on the ambiguity by now: where do you draw the line between clothing and accessories? You decide.

While the decisions to buy a particular item of clothing or techno-widget might share common back stories, the daily decisions as to what to wear are different: you change styles and items depending on mood, weather, and the need to make an impression. Most of us aren’t prepared to wear the same clothing every day, although we are prepared to wear/utilize accessories much more frequently, even daily.

@copyblogger is hosting a Twitter-based haiku contest, with a MacBook Air as the top prize.

Here are some of my favorite entries:

• “@John, I am pregnant.” / “@Marsha, will you marry me?” / “Yes @John, my tweetheart.”

• My haiku like a website / running I.E. 6 / really running in reverse
• writing a haiku / I need to use my fingers / counting syllables
• how could anyone/describe their life in only /140
• An Adwords haiku / Google didn’t get the joke / Laughter, ROI
• What’s Occam’s Razor? /// It’s a method for questions /// That cut to the chase.
• The joy of Twitter! / Kevin Rose has sneezed again. / Quick! Blog about it!
  (A quick quip which is a reference to Kevin Rose of Digg fame, who recently created a Twitter account especially for his cold.)
• This one’s so perfect / Clever, funny, all that… wait. / Twitter eats my tweet!
• You’ve been told you can’t / Because you happen to be / A girl. Girls Can’t WHAT?
• This is senryu. / I really don’t write haiku. / It’s not my nature.
  (Technically, haikus are about nature.)

The premise of the contest provided some entertainment for me [a.k.a. @Power2B] this morning:

• Twitter makes me think / Short, declarative statements / What will haiku do?
• Tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet / Self-promoting twitterers / Drive me to delete
• Writing poetry / Serves mostly selfish yearnings / All the moreso here
• Economic melt- / down is pulling companies / Under needlessly
• We thought the lovebird / Had broken free once again / Now he’s got a friend
• Heck, writing haiku / Is so much fun, I might not / Get much done today
• Dearest Twitter friends: / I’d like to hear your feedback / Which haiku to send?

If you have any connection with the mobile industry, User Experience, User Interface design or application design, then this presentation is definitely worth your time:
How people really use the iPhone

I know, I know. I keep harping on the selfishness of social networking. Well, the unselfish side is subscribing to the status updates, blog posts and twitter feeds of people you care about. You get to see a whole side of the person that you might never see, you know where people are visiting, and most important, you hear about what matters to them in a way that would be impossible (or tedious) in person.

Exclave: A portion of a country which is separated from the main part and surrounded by politically alien territory.

But here’s the great part: “The same territory is an enclave in respect to the surrounding country and an exclave with respect to the country to which it is politically attached.”

(definition excerpted from Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, as referenced at Dictionary.com)

Lovely, isn’t it? Came up in the context of the territories of Liechtenstein:

While many of these Liechtensteinian fragments might be considered exclaves, most also border more than one other territory, and consequently only three can be considered enclaves…

[Strange Maps blog]