While Apple and Google may be tossing arrows at each other about the number of applications available in their stores, the fact of the matter is that there are high quality apps available on both platforms. So far, the most useful application to me has been the Amazon App .  Wow, I love this!

Truth be known, I am a heavy user of both Google and Amazon.  The joy of this application is the ability to barcode scan an item and bring up it's Amazon information.  Genius!  I know, Big in Japan was first with their award winning ShopSavvy application.  That genius mixed with Amazon's wellspring of web2.0 data give you instant access to pricing and user reviews.  I took this app through it's paces on a birthday trip to Microcenter.  It performed admirably.  It did pick up one wrong item, but considering I was looking at cheap $10 keyboards all is forgiven. 

Having the ability to read actual user reviews while shopping the aisles is something I did with my 8525.  This is nothing new for me.  What is new, is the ease and speed of working with the Amazon app. Now, if someone could make the same application and instead of Amazon reviews, tap into Newegg's review data.  Newegg, you listening?  Make one for me please.

I have used smartphones for quite some time.  I've been a champion of smartphones since before they were called smartphones!  Seeing how far they have come along is quite amazing to say the least.

I started using smartphones with my Handspring Visor Platinum with the Sprint PCS Wireless Web Digital Link .  Wow, this was a powerhouse.  Prior to this, I was using a handme down TDMA Nokia Cingular phone.  But this, wow, this was amazing.  The springboard module cost a ridiculous $250 in 2001.  Insanity now that I think about it.  But it did things nothing else out there could do.  I could use Eudora to check my pop/imap email!  I could call or text anyone on my contacts lists!  This was seriously amazing stuff.  I could open attachments, I could send them, I could even surf the web using blazer.  It even had 7 hours of talk time and 300 on standby.  This was when I was cutting edge.  The treo wasn't even out yet, nor even on anyones radar.

It was a beast though.  If a smartphone ever had an ancestor like the saved by the bell motorola phone, this was it.  It had two batteries, a rechargable lithium ion for the springboard, and two AAA batteries for the PDA.

Several years later, and a few non smart phones and PDA's in between, I bought the AT&T 8525 out of the trunk of some guys car in the parking lot of LA Fitness in Naperville.  It was like another quantum leap for me.  At the time, I was using my Motorola Razr and bluetoothing it to my Palm TX .  This brought me back to my smartphone days.  I had everything that I had before with my dinosaur and more!  The best windows mobile phone at the time, with bluetooth, wifi, touch screen, slide out keyboard, and a blazing fast processor.

Things have evolved though.  For my birthday, Eliza got me the new Motorola Droid.  This thing is simply ridiculous.  It's amazing to see that in a short eight years, things have gone from gigantic gray scale devices to sleek and outrageously spec'd devices like this.

Now really, what use to make a smartphone smart, was that you could have all of your contacts, email, appointments, and productivity information in once place.  But now, well...  They can do so much more.  Augmented reality layers, barcode scanning, and of course rich web browsing.  These things are more than just smart, and well, these things are probably in need of a new name rather soon.  The phone portion is now not the main draw.  In fact if AT&T and Apple have proved anything, you can simply tack on a horrible voice component onto an oversaturated cell network and people will still come to you in droves and empty their wallets to have a wonderfully coded piece of software on a slick easy to use device.

This device is and has many things.  It is slick, it has great software, and sits on a network that is not oversaturated.  I'm still a bit giddy over having this phone.  It is so much thinner and more useful to me than my 8525 that I can scarcely believe it.  But out of all the accolades that have been bestowed upon this device, i do have a quibble with it.  The ridiculously horrible keyboard.

While my 8525 may have been big and bulky, it had a keyboard that was very liveable.  The keys were big and the keys were smooth and the keys were centered on the device.  Oh motorola, why did you have to put such a large directional pad on the wrong side of the phone?  Have the engineers never played a video game before?  Have you never noticed that every single child intuitively thinks the directional pad should be on the left just like their game controllers? Why did you push the keyboard so far to the left that it's difficult to hit some letters with your right thumb and make your left hand cramp when trying to hit the A key?

For folks that have never used a slide out keyboard phone, well I guess this is good enough for you.  But there are such gems out there.  The HTC Tilt 2 has such a divine keyboard.  Elegently crafted keys, centered on the base, and enough of them to limit the use of the alt or function buttons.  Oh what a phone it would be to marry that keyboard to this phone, even if it raised the profile a milimeter or two, the accolades it would receive.  But I am still smitten.  Android 2.0 is quite the OS.  The amount of polish given to the UI and the ease of use should give any windows mobile phone pause.

As the future unfolds, one thing is abundantly clear.  The days of hardware dominating the scene are not gone, but simply in the garage cooking up the next big thing.  I wait for fusion CPU/GPU's with hundreds or thousands of cores.  But until then, these are the days of software.  Where software is king and it's fortunes driving how the hardware should be designed. Android so far looks and feels like a terrific piece of software.  I can't wait to program my first Hello World on it.

So, like a lot of people, our house plants come inside for the winter.  They go out in the middle of spring, and come back in during the fall.  No big deal.  This year however, one of the potted plants seems to have some sort of bug problem.  Tiny flying bugs are dive bombing my head, trying to go up my nose or fly into ears.  Kind of annoying.

But what do I find in my coke?  A bug, buzzing around in it's new grave.  Unable to fly up the neck of the bottle, eventually it gets stuck to the surface of the liquid, and can't lift off from it.  I guess the surface tension of coke is just too much for these little critters.

It's really ridiculous.  Try as I may, I just couldn't fish the little guy out so I could smash it into oblivion.  Gah!  And this is the good stuff too.  The made with real sugar, in a glass bottle, straight from Mexico stuff.  It didn't stop me from drinking it initially.  I carefully took measured sips so I wouldn't consume the bug.  Eventually, I had to stop though.  For fear of eating it, and I was getting kind of grossed out.