I have had couple of really bad experiences with Windows Mobile over the years ... remember my 90000 paper weight.

Anyways this are a million times better after getting the HTC Fuze. right now i'm super excited about the Windows Phone (or can I call it the version 7). I'm using WinMo 6.5 at the moment with couple of custom applications from Resco and things are nice and smooth. Looking forward for the new and exciting stuff planned for the next major release of WinMo.

Despite all the ups and downs one thing I love the platform is the support for developers to develop apps. This time things are taking a much cooler route by adapting Silverlight into the core UI of the Phone. So ... Developers who cant wait to get their hands on the new device ... goto http://developer.windowsphone.com/ to get started.

Couple of months back when I got my Lenovo X61 Tablet PC I thought this is it. Being 64bit and with a whooping 4 GB of RAM and Vista Experience Index rating @ 3.5 ... it was a fantastic machine ... until Yesterday.

I got a new Lenovo ThinkVantage W500 with 4 GB RAM. Dang! Vista Experience Index is @ 5.3 ... its super fast, super hot ... and its super super :).

Well! this is going to be my backup laptop for user group and students presentations. Yup! Guys, we now have a laptop for our user groups.

Have you ever wondered how USB have changed the computing world drastically over the last couple of years? I still remember when I first herd about this. It was when I was @ NIBM in 1998. Not that I understood much of it at that time. Actually those days USB devices was kind of rare. But ... see around today ... we have basically almost EVERYTHING coming in USB ... you just plug the damn device to your computer and it works. Right now I have a thumb drive, a mouse, a phone, an external hdd, a mini fridge, a card reader, a camera, a printer and several other stuff on my desk which is just USB plug and play. Recently I went to a digital printing press that prints these large hoardings ... guess what .. that big a** printer is connected to the computer through USB. New car audio setup I put has a built in USB so I can plug a thumb drive directly and listen to MP3s.

I only have3 USB ports in my laptop. With the docking station it's a total of 7, and with the external USB hub I have a total of 15 USB ports. But still there were couple of times which all of them were occupied. CRAZY!!!

I think Universal Serial Bus is one of the most futuristic inventions in terms of connectivity in computers. Hell! still there are many other ports available with our computers and other devices, starting from VGA, HDMI, FireWire, Modem sockets, Network Sockets, PCMCIA ... and the list goes on. I think all these folks should cut the crap and start thinking about moving to USB, may be not everybody due to technical reasons ... but i'm sure most of them can, Because that'll make things easy for us consumers.

Every now and then I want to update my gadget collection. Last set of additions includes a mini USB powered fridge, 320 GB HDD, 3G Model etc etc are there.

It's high time for me to get the next set of gadgets. So what am I looking at? A tiny mini but very powerful laptop and a pico projector is in the top of the list. But as it is the case around the world ... $$$ is a problem.

Saturday I bought a 4 GB MicroSD card and the price was only Rs. 2000. It's really amazing how the memory prices have gone down over the last few years. At the time when the 'thumb drives' were introduced to the market even a 32 MB drive was about Rs. 5000. Now you can get a drive with over 100 times more capacity for less than half of the price. I don't understand this equation.

Anyways it's a very good thing ... because we can have bigger and bigger memory cards every day. Looking forward till the Solid State Disk prices comes down like mad.

Let me start by saying DANG!

Over the last 2 years I bought hard disks as an when required and the number of Giga Bytes never seems enough. Yesterday i just calculated the total disk space I have.

• One 1 TB HDD
• Four 500 GB HDDs
• One 320 HDD
• Two 200 GB HDDs
• Three 160 GB HDDs
• Two 80 GB HDDs
• Three 100 GB HDDs

The total is a whooping 4.6 TB ... and in case if you are wondering what on earth I have on those ... many things ... MP3s, Movies, Training Videos, Backups, Virtual PCs, Photos Collection from 2004 onwards covering every event, projects from my old offices, artwork created for events and other activities etc. Good that I have everything well cataloged.

Couple more TBs to be added very soon to this ... to power up my next big project ... top secret at the moment.

Finally got a HSDPA / 3G / EDGE / GPRS Data Card from Dialog and now I have internet access anywhere. Woo! Hoo! Speed is pretty good.

If you are a camera fan, I mean have a willingness to go beyond the pocket size digital cameras, you know that the optical lenses are bloody expensive. All this time it didn't make scenes to me why. Because an optical lenses looks like a very simple gadget with few lenses, few metal rings etc.

Just found this video in YouTube and now it makes perfect scenes why those are so expensive. Even though the final product is a simple one the process of making it is not simple at all. Impressive!

BTW: this is the first YouTube I'm putting in my blog

Managed to 100% switch to my new tablet PC and it's awesome. It's a Lenovo X61 Tablet, 64bit, 128 VGA and 4 GB RAM.

Vista rating goes up to 3.5 and everything runs very smoothly. So to put it to the ultimate test i just opened up my virtual PC and opened up 2 instances of Windows XP Pro, 1 Instance of Windows Vista and 1 instance of Windows Server 2003 at the same time. Tried opening several applications inside these virtual machines including, SQL Server, Visual Studio 2008, Expression Blend, Express Web etc,. Still it had power to pump in. All 4 Virtual Machines ran without any problem.

Woo! Hoo! ... finally a machine without worries.

Just found this thread in Gizmodo about Toshiba has released 128 GM Solid State Hard disks.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/solid-state-drives/toshiba-introduces-3-new-ssd-flavors-128gb-is-the-tastiest-332171.php

First hard disk I had in my first computer had about 400 MB and the second one had about 8 GB and today it's over a Tera byte. Roughly it has taken over 10 years for us to reach the 1 TB limit in the mechanical old fashioned hard disk (I think it's ok to say its old fashioned now). But Solid State technology within about an year has reached 128 GB. If you to the calculations by the end of the year 2008 we should be able see 1 TB Solid State disks. Awesome, but unfortunately the technology is bit too expensive. Anyways no doubt that the price will come down in the near future.

Couple of days ago I downloaded the movie Transformers Hi-Def version which is a whooping 9 GB. It took almost a day to download it, yeah! just a day ... with my new Dialog WiMAX connection it is possible.

Even though I have a large collection of hi-def video clips, short documentaries etc, this is the first time i got a chance to download a full Hi-Def movie. Gotta tell ya ... it's awesome. The level of detail you can see in a Hi-Def video is unbelievable. I think it's worth paying that extra $$$ to experience the Hi-Def experience. So it's trying to speed up things with 'Wela's Hi-Def movie rig fund' ... anybody want to contribute, donate ... you are welcome :)

As you all know :)  my HP iPAQ sucked big time earlier and even after getting the replacement unit still it sucks with a new set of problems. Things becomes worst when the response from the HP Services team in Sri Lanka is not responsible and reliable. It's even pointless to talk to them regarding this issue. I really don't want to submit this again for warranty replacements and want another 5 months to get it.

So I have given up all hopes on the phone and very soon planning to buy a better Windows Mobile with Windows Mobile 6.0.

I'll NEVER go for any HP branded products. Not even Computers of Printers ... (may be I'll consider only printers, because those are pretty good). Not because they are bad products. Just because the service is terrible. Recently I wanted to buy couple of HP Computers and a Printer. Can u believe that the distributor/supplier took exactly 2 months to deliver it ... I'll avoid mentioning names in this case :) So on the last moment I had to cancel that order. I was given MANY false dlivery dates, may be that was a trick to keep the customer occupied. There were many reasons in the list of excuses given to me. One was delays in shipping. I think even if you ship goods in a small sail boat you can get it faster than this. I'm really pissed about this because I'm still suffering from the losses caused by this delay.

Anyways ... may iPAQ rw6828 goes to hell.

I just gotta my XBOX 360 couple of weeks ago ... and guess what ... Paul Thurrott has published XBOX 360 ELITE photos ... YUP!!! ELITE ... kind of a kick ass version of the normal 360 ... dang! i'm gonna have to live with the 'normal' version ... Dude .. why on earth you didn't publish it earlier :)

Poor me ...............

I hand carried an XBOX 360 Platinum pack from Singapore several days back. Couldn't write about it as things got busy due to I spent every single minute mastering all the games I got. Well! for the time being it's only four games. Halo 2, Gears of War, PGR and N3. Couple more on the way to my games collection. At the moment I'm planing on my 21" TV. So obviously the next attraction is a big screen. Have to wait couple of months for that as expenses are very high these days.

It cost me a fortune + a little bit more (for 2 years extra warranty), but it's all worth it. WOO!!! HOO!!!

Will write more later ... gotta go and gotta play ...

Finally I got my iPAQ replacement, and so far the new unit is working fine.

A big thanks to Mahesh from Trilobytelabs and Hasitha from HP for arranging this.

But in case if this unit also starts giving problems ...............................

This really SUCKS!

It's been almost a month since I posted about my 90000/= paper weight. Even though several responsible guys saw this post (I know they saw it), still there is no response. So I had to call the contact person in Informatics and do a followup regarding my useless iPAQ. In my point of view when a customer has to chase or beg to get the services he is entitled to get, he will NEVER come back again.

Anyways my contact person promised to give a possitive response on monday. so i'm going to wait till monday :)  

Couldn't blog about this earlier because I got busy re arranging my MP3 collection. Yup! I got my Zune. and it's freaking awsome. 3 inch display and radio are the best features.

It does not get detected as a mass storage device. So I have to synchronice everything through the Zune software and I hate that it is taking the same disk space from my hard disk. Other than that everything is cool.

Hey bro Padman ... thanks for purchsing and sending it to me.