I spent most of last night and today creating a new release for my hobby site, Weathernerd.com.  I don't work on a particular schedule with this stuff, but when I get sick of a design or think of new things I want to do, I'll take a couple days and crank something out.  The last design I made was in the Fall, and didn't have much time to do anything with it the way it was.  Luckily it is pretty self-maintaining with how I built the data feeds, so the care and feeding really was minimal.

I wanted to simplify this design.  I used the .NET Framework 3.5, although I didn't really use any functionality specific to 3.5.  I went back to less graphics, used more CSS, and just tried to make the data readily available and easy to use.

The other thing I wanted to do was integrate the blog into the site to provide the same look and feel, as well navigation.  That didn't go as well as I had planned, but the end result nonetheless satisfies what I was looking for.

I'm still trying to understand the premise behind Twitter.  It's one of those projects that really caught on.  Twitter's claim to fame is that they offer a way for people all over cyberspace to see what everybody else is up to.  The question is simple: what are you doing right now?

You can post a response (known as a "tweet") to your Twitter page via the Twitter website, instant message, or third-party applications which support the Twitter API.  It seems like such a simple concept that who would really care to use this?

You'd be surprised.  Twitter went live in March 2006, and though its tough to find exact numbers around their user base, it grew substantially in the first half of 2007.  But why is it so interesting to hear that "I'm painting my bedroom" or "watching Friends re-runs" and sharing that with the entire world?  Who knows, but it certainly seems to encourage the type of behavior that leads to wasting lots of time. 

But there are some interesting dialogues that take place over Twitter.  Last week when Yahoo! was in the midst of layoffs, Ryan Kuder, a (now ex) Yahoo! employee twittered his entire experience from getting the call to pack up his office, to the end of the day turning in his badge and his final campus latte.  You can read "Getting Fired At Yahoo: A Twitter Log" over at Silicon Alley Insider.  It's pretty interesting and makes the Twitter concept a little more intriguing.

So, last week I signed up for a Twitter account to give it a try.  I was more interested in evaluating the API to see if I could find something useful to use it for.  In a couple of nights, I wrote a Windows Mobile application for my phone to be able to send tweets from wherever I was at at any given moment based on the Twitter API and a wrapper that needed to be reworked a little to run with Windows Mobile.  I'm not sure how active I will be as a Twitterer, but I had to see what it was all about.

I had originally ordered this device back at the beginning of November.  What I found most intriguing when I was looking for a new device was that this device was small, light, and had a GPS on-board. I put in my pre-order and expected it to be in my doorstep the week before Christmas.

No such luck.

As product release dates slipped, so did my hope of getting my hands on this powerful little device.  About two weeks ago, the shipment date had again slipped to the end of February.  I decided it was time to cancel that order, and put in an order for what I considered to be the next best device: the S730. 

From my last post, you now know that I received that device.  The problem was, I received a shipping notice for "my shipment" last Friday.  When I clicked on the link, it took me to my original order, which was supposedly canceled.  The difference was it was on a UPS truck somewhere between here and Chicago.

I decided I would take my chances and give the Touch Cruise a try.  So, last night I received my package and proceeded to unbox this device.  What a surprise.  Smaller than I expected, almost smaller than the S730.  How could so much goodness be squeezed into such a small casing?

Well, to make a long story short, I took my S730 and put it on eBay tonight.  I definitely like the Touch Cruise and everything it has to offer.

So, what makes the Touch Cruise so much better than the S730?

Processor & Memory
Although both of these devices have the Qualcomm MSM 7200 400 MHz processor, it seems that something in the way the Touch Cruise is setup makes it noticeably faster.  The Touch Cruise does have 128 MB RAM compared the 64 MB RAM on the S730.

The lag issues that I experienced with the S730 are non-existent on the Touch Cruise.  I run a number of applications at once on the TC with no problems, while running 1 or 2 apps on the S730 yielded memory errors rather quickly.

Size
About the same size as the S730 without the extra thickness as a result of there not being a keyboard on the Touch Cruise.  This is something I thought I would miss, the the onscreen keyboard works decent enough to get around with, and I have found several free iPhone-like keyboard apps available for Windows Mobile online.

Battery Life
Considering what this device is capable of, I was rather impressed with the batter life.  I used the GPS for about 35 minutes this morning, used DirectPush all day long, took several phone calls and with all that, I still had 75% of the battery remaining at the end of the day.  The Touch Cruise ships with the 1,350 mAh battery, compared to the S730's 1,050 mAh battery.

Applications
One of the nice applications that I found on the Touch Cruise was Opera, a web browser with the ability to do screen scaling and a bunch of other features.  You can buy it retail, but its kind of nice to see it included with this device as a competitor to Internet Explorer.

In addition, TomTom Navigator 6 is included.  No maps are bundled, but you get to download one free city map.  That's kind of lame, but I guess it gives you enough of a taste to see if you want to buy the while map package for $150.  I am sticking with my ALK CoPilot Live 7.  CoPilot has some great features.  The only complaint I have is that the maps in my neighborhood are out of alignment, which is annoying when trying to navigate out of here.

Overall Impressions
Like I mentioned, I listed my S73 on eBay tonight.  I really have a lot of faith that the Touch Cruise will be my device for some time to come.  I'm getting used to not having a keyboard and going back to a touch screen, but it won't be long till I don't even realize that I don't have them anymore.  The added GPS functionality is great and can be used for any GPS-aware app like Windows Live Search and Google Maps, both of which I have loaded on my Touch Cruise.

I received my HTC S730 from Mobileplanet.com a couple of weeks ago.  I've been using it now to replace my T-Mobile Wing.  Here's a quick rundown on what it does and my experience with it so far.  I'm pretty particular about what I expect from my mobile devices.  The closest I've been to a perfect device was with my T-Mobile Dash.  Let's take a look at how the S730 stacks up.

Size
The size of the S730 is perfect to slip into your pocket, although a little thicker (about .75 inches) than what I am used to.  Having had the Wing and the T-Mobile Dash, this phone fit the candy bar profile, but obviously wasn't quite as thin as the Dash.  The weight seems lighter than the Wing and comparable to the Dash.  Overall, size is nicer and fits well in the hand.

Battery Life
Battery life so far seems to be pretty decent with DirectPush and Bluetooth all day.  I usually hook it back up to the charger before bed every night.  I haven't used it enough to run it below 40-50%. 

Performance
The S730 has the new Qualcomm MSM 7200 400 MHz processor which is suppose to be pretty fast and also have the GPS capabilities built into the chip, however the GPS functionality is disabled on this particular phone.

Initial indications are that the device really isn't that fast from a visual perspective, but speculation amid the Internet is that HTC is not shipping the correct driver (or any driver for that matter) for the video on the device which shows up in performance from anything like loading an application to screen refreshes.

Additionally, even though the device ships with a 256 MB ROM and 64 MB RAM, on a cold boot the device will only have 10-12 MB of free memory which doesn't leave much for running applications.  This memory problem has also been acknowledged and is suppose to be fixed in an upcoming ROM release.

As far as data performance is concerned, this device supports HSDPA (high-speed data), however, T-Mobile in the US has very limited if any coverage for HSDPA at this time.  Users in Europe have found that HSDPA tends to eat lots of battery.

Applications
This is a smartphone, so it ships with Windows Mobile 6.0 Standard.  This means that the Office Mobile applications included are only capable of reading documents and editing existing documents; they cannot create new files.  For some, this is a shortfall, but then again, I don't know how many people use Windows Mobile to actually create Office content.

Nothing out of the ordinary ships with the S730 from an application standpoint.  The standard Windows Mobile apps apply, as well as a Task Manager, but other than that, nothing special to write home about.  But why include any apps when you don't have the memory to run them? 

Extras
A front and rear camera on this phone is a neat feature especially when video calls become more mainstream.  Until real high-speed data is available in the US, this probably won't be all that useful.  Nonetheless, the camera on the front of the phone is a VGA camera, while the camera on the back is a two megapixel.  I've heard complaints about this, but what do you really expect your phone to do?  It's a high expectation for a device that does practically everything else for you while in your pocket.

Overall Impressions
The size of this device is perfect and it fits the role of phone first, data device second.  This is the type of device I prefer. 

The sound quality is decent and the phone worked when expected.  Again, I use it as a phone first, and then email second.  It's important for me to receive my email and calendar, but its critical that I can answer my phone when it rings and the party on the other end can hear me.

The performance isn't quite there yet for the power user and hopefully with the help from HTC and a new ROM release, these issues will be taken care of.  However, the typical user in most cases will find the performance and capabilities of this phone completely acceptable.