a power user

a power user

Vlad Bobleanta  //  Welcome!
>My Twitter stream is the primary place to get my opinions and what I consider to be the most interesting stories of the day<
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Feb 7 / 4:51pm

Nokia BH-905 review

Bluetooth headsets.

You know, those things that somehow always manage to have a blinking blue led somewhere. Those things that when worn in public, make you look exactly as you would had you actually had a blue tooth.

Not necessarily.

It turns out that not all bluetooth headsets are created equal. Some may not even be that strange in-your-ear-but-not-quite, over-your-cheek-but-not-close-enough-to-your-mouth type of contraptions.

No, no, some may look from afar as a high-end, overhead, professional, normal, wired, headset.

And cost as much as a Nokia E55. And more than the E52, 5800 and almost as much as the E75 (prices based on nokia.co.uk).

Gulp.

Yes, ladies and gents, the BH-905.

No pix, no vids, no gimmicks.

That's how I roll.

So, do I like it?

Yes.

Why?

It's unbelievably comfortable. Seriously. Everything is cushioned. After a minute, you start to not feel it anymore. That in great contrast to a lot of over-the-head headsets, which you *start* to notice and feel after a minute and have to take off after 30. This? 4 hours? OMG, has it really been so much? I must get back to work! :)

The fact that in the beginning you always have to read the L and R designations does take a little getting used to. You have to do this, since the way it's designed means you'll instinctively want to wear it the other way around, if you've ever worn another over-the-head pair before. This design does seem strange at first, but adds a lot to the overall comfort of wearing it.

The sound quality is phenomenal for a bluetooth headset. What I mean, is that when connected via bluetooth (it also comes with all the cables and adapters you'll ever need if you want to use it as a wired headset, including an airplane adapter -neat), it does take you a while to realize that you're listening to music via a wireless connection.

The bass is just a little bit thinner than I like it, but for 99% of the people, this won't be noticeable (it also depends highly on what music genres you're into, mind). Other than that, the audio quality is the same, no matter which connection method you choose.

I haven't done any scientific tests on battery life, but it was more than enough for me. Best estimate? A few hours. Seriously, I didn't pay attention to that at all. Sorry, it's a bit hard to, when you're listening to music in such high quality. Also nice is that it charges via standard Nokia 2mm jack, which means, for example, that I charged it with my N95's charger.

The volume levels on this thing seem illegal for the EU, but trust me, that's an amazing thing, not a bad one. Your eardrums will surrender long before you've maxed this thing out.

The buttons are all big and nicely placed, it will take you less than a day to get used to their positions. You can skip and repeat tracks from the headset. Tested this even with 3rd-party music players on Symbian, and it works.

It also features a noise cancellation switch, you can use this mode if you so wish or if you're in a very loud environment. It works, but does create an odd feeling of pressure in your ears. Not unbearable by any means, and, again, it is a switch. You also notice its effect a lot less when in loud environments.

I've had long phone conversations from this, and have only let the other parties know I was on a headset at the end of each conversation. No one had noticed it. And I say this in all seriousness and honesty. If you read a lot of headset reviews, you'll notice that almost all of them contain this phrase, and trust me, most of the times, it just isn't true. The BH-905 is helped in achieving this feat by its external mics, which also help with the noise cancellation noted above, but they also 'record' ambient noise when you're talking and filter it out. All very well.

So do I recommend you run out and buy one?

As much as I'd like to, no.

See, there are a few things I really can't agree with here.

First off, the case. It comes with a case. Ok, you say. Well, yes. I don't know if it actually is leather, but it sure feels like it. And it's the only thing in the box. Yes, it's that big. Very useful for travelling, indeed. You can store your headset, charger and all the cables and adapters it comes with in there. Because, they all actually come in there.

You can also say goodbye to a lot of carry-on baggage space.

This does seem like a little bit of overkill to me. And as good as it looks, it does feel like it adds a lot to the price.

Which brings me to the BH-905's biggest shortcoming: the price. I mean seriously... It's a headset. A good one, yes. A perfect one? Not without being able to pair to multiple devices at the same time. Not in my book. But anyway, a very good one.

Still, I'd rather buy an E55. Or save a hundred more pounds and get the N86.

You do whatever you want. I mean, if you have the money to spare, by all means, go get it.

Then there's also the minor annoyance of having the 2mm charging jack and the 2.5mm jack used for connecting the audio cable (if you so wish) in the exact same place on the two different earpieces. Since there's only a .5mm diameter difference between them, it will take some getting used to which is which.

Bluetooth transmission of music has come a long way. And bluetooth headsets have come a long way too. They're not quite at the 'prosumer' level of wired headsets, audio-quality-wise, but for many use cases, close enough. Yet paying this much of a premium (for it being wireless? for the case? your guess is as good as mine!) doesn't make much sense to me.

Comments (5)

Feb 7 / 3:57pm

Mobile World Congress 2010: predictions

Next week there's this little annual gathering in Barcelona. I hear it has something to do with mobile phones.
As usual, I won't be there. I know, you're weeping tears of sorrow at this point. 
Also as usual, I'll be here (well, mostly on Twitter these days) reporting on stuff that matters. On the bits that are actually interesting because of the content, not the number of retweets they already have. You know, lame stuff.
I'll try to not get Twitter upset by posting more than a certain number of tweets per hour. Seriously, the number is secret. I got a forced 15-minute chill-out period from Twitter last year during Nokia World. And no, I don't know that his has happened to anyone who actually attended that event. I guess you do focus better from home.

Predictions?

Microsoft will announce something something 7. Or at least show you a nice PowerPoint of it. Cross-marketing and all that. Will they blow that too? Hard to tell. Rumors are coming in that they will, but I don't usually care about rumors. If I did, the iPad would have been one of the major disappointments of this generation of this decade.

I think Steve (not God, the other, more shouty Steve) will wave bye-bye at the end of this fiscal year (hint: that's next year) if they blow this too. Or at least he should. I'm still hoping that instead of blowing it, they'll blow our minds, but... I don't know. Just pure hope at this point. Anyway, it might not even matter to us outside the US, if they decide to pull a Zune HD with it.

The worse it is, the longer my post about it will be, so stay tuned and watch out. Hopefully for nothing.

Nokia won't be announcing any new phones at MWC this year, some very well-documented (and way better monetized than mine) blog said.

And it's oh so very true. Well, I guess they would have announced new phones at MWC if Samsung, LG or anyone else would have lent Nokia the space to do so.

The reason Nokia will, indeed, not be announcing any new stuff whatsoever at MWC is... because they won't be there. At all. They're across the road. You can wave if you want.

Strange, this? Well, yeah, a little bit. But awesome in a very cool way. I have no idea what their real reason is, since just costs sounds too thin for me, but hey...watch out when you do cross that street!

C-series. My guess? C stands for Competitively priced. Which is PR speak for cheap. The first sub-100 euro smartphone? One can dream. 
There also seems to be a successor to the E63 prepped. Some say it will also be a C. Good call in my opinion. Teenagers shouldn't be scared off by the Enterprise designation (not that they're not into Blackberries, at least in the UK, apparently...).

A superphone? A megaphone? :D

Well, we may see the N87. In press renderings, at least (no, those can't possibly qualify to be named pictures, sorry).

Am I excited?

I will next be excited about a Symbian-powered Nokia smartphone when they realize that 256MB of RAM is not that much more expensive for them to buy than 128MB. And Symbian^1^2^3 (had to do that) needs at least 256. Sorry. True.

Maemo?

It's busy killing stuff. Will be right back. In Q3. Or Q4. With Qt. Nothing we don't already know. I am hoping that Nokia got the "it's not cool to announce something 6-9 months before its general availability" clue. If not, N920 it is. Or whatever else they decide on calling it. Excited? If the press documents state the following, black on white : portrait mode fully integrated.

Samsung will do their Bada thing, which sounds like it will feature full Bing integration (I know, easy puns...). A match made in...well, I don't know where. Another smartphone OS? If Apple gets away with being control-freaks, that doesn't really mean everyone should copy that. 

Other than that, I'm sure Samsung will hit us with dozens of new devices, not one of them that you'll remember 5 minutes after you first heard about it. That does remind me of another company's MO of years past... And, as in the case of Nokia (it was them I was referring to), Samsung will sell loads of these devices, of that I'm sure. It's just not the thing you get excited about. And they won't catch Nokia in number of devices sold anytime soon anyway, so next.

Wait, that's all I've got. I'm sure we'll have some interesting stuff from other manufacturers, but we'll have to wait and see. I would however like to see a more aggressive approach from Huawei and ZTE. Now that MediaTek cleared its Qualcomm issues (is that a trend lately? Or are Qualcomm's lawyers just getting soft?), there's no reason not to.

Oh. And I'd also like a Tegra2 demo, Nvidia. And anyone (else) who manages to show a working device fitted with a Cortex A9 gets a free blog post.

The countdown can begin then. One week.

PS: Did you notice I forgot to mention anything about SonyEricsson or Android? There's a reason for that.

Comments (0)

Sep 5 / 4:41pm

getting access to Google Wave

This post is outdated.


Google Wave is the best thing since sliced bread.
Well, it may become the best thing since email. That remains to be seen, however its potential is enormous. If you don't yet know about Google Wave, watch this (lengthy) video of its introduction at Google I/O:


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Being such a complex proposition, it really is best described in the above video. Anyway a lot better than I ever could.

Now, intro over, on to what I wanted to write about.

You may know this already.
But just going to wave.google.com and clicking on Let me know when it's ready will not get you access to Wave before September 30th. And even then, they will only give out 100,000 invites to people who sign up there.

Want to get Wave sooner?
Do this.

Go here and complete ALL the fields in the form. If you're not a developer or don't plan on developing for Wave, please keep in mind that entering information that is at least plausible into the form may help you a lot.

Then wait patiently. My invite came in 8 days. It may be less, it may be more in your case. Or you may not even get one at all. But your chances of getting access this way are a lot bigger than the 'usual' way. Trust me on that one, ok?

And when you do have access, let's try it together. I'm bvlad over there (you might need to append "@wavesandbox.com" to my username to be able to add me as your contact).

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Sep 1 / 7:32pm

Brilliant? Advertisers Pay To Drive Traffic From One Place On Facebook To Another Place On Facebook

And all I can think is, how did these guys manage to set up a system where people pay to drive traffic from one place on Facebook to another place on Facebook? Even Google hasn’t managed to figure that one out yet. I’ve known they (and MySpace) have done this since launching their ad platforms, but it never really hit home until today how brilliant this all is.

All I can think is, people used to (I hope it isn't still happening) pay for "land" on the Moon (or was it Mars?). People will pay for anything, if said anything is properly marketed.

"Brilliant" as this may be for Facebook, I can't help but wonder how brilliant it is for those actually forking the cash for this.

I love the internet too (that's how the linked post ends).
And BananaBucks.

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Aug 31 / 11:36am

is Facebook pulling a MySpace?

Somewhere, somehow, Facebook started evolving into something that wasn’t very desirable. You knew MySpace was going downhill when you logged on one day and saw that you had a friend request from a bottle of Pepsi, or a can of Axe deodorant. With Facebook, it was logging on one day and seeing your mom, and your mom’s friends, trying to become your friend that may have signaled something weird was happening. For others it was the Facebook applications that sprang out of nowhere and quickly turned people’s profiles back into the hideous malformed websites that we all used to remember as MySpace profiles. For me, it was the realization that I was interacting with all my friends in a highly efficient manner that made it just as easy to see what my best friend was doing, as someone who I don’t even talk to, yet accepted their friend request anyway as a gesture of good will.

I never quite 'got' Facebook. I still don't.
I think the UI is overly complicated, thus the UX is horrible. I spend most of my time there (which amounts to 10 minutes every two weeks) trying to figure out what goes where, why is that there, where are the settings for that, are there even any settings for that...

To me, it's confusing.

Yet to 'normal people', you know, the people who haven't ever heard of Jaiku, it seems to work. I have seen numerous friends of mine who normally "visit" the web maybe 10 minutes a month spend hours a day on Facebook.

And watching what they do, I believe the strength of Facebook for the average person is in photos. The ease of use (in that respect only!), the tagging of people... And people (apparently) very much enjoy peeking into other people's lives via photographs.

It's like that real-life fascination with being presented photo albums. I never, ever understood this, but I saw almost everyone around me quite enjoy the experience.

It could still have been a place for me to hang out. In time, I would have got past all the UI quirks, and maybe I would have enjoyed some good conversations over there, especially since it's a lot better at handling those than the media darling Twitter. But good conversations can't take place there.

Because the thing that started Facebook's transformation into something that wasn't very desirable is, in my opinion, apps.

They're silly, useless time wasters. And I don't think anyone actually enjoys them. Or at least I hope so. These start lowering the value of the overall experience, they might even soft-spam (I invented that right now!) your notifications area... it's all downhill from there.

It's a pity. I think Facebook would have been an interesting place to connect to less geeky friends. IF it had no apps.

But this is just my take. Read Stefan's, linked above, because it focuses on an entirely different perspective. Which is very interesting and worthy of a read.

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Jul 13 / 3:13pm

Why is Acer Still Launching a Netbook with XP and Android?

Last week’s Google Chrome OS announcement doesn’t seem to be impacting prior plans for Android netbooks. DigiTimes indicates that Acer is still planning to launch a dual-boot netbook that offers both Microsoft Windows XP and Google Android. I don’t envision any cost difference between an XP / Android netbook and an XP-only device- the cost of a Windows XP license has to be paid in both cases. So there’s no benefit in terms of cost, but there is a value-add in having another operating system for those that want it. Or is there?

I’m not sure I understand why Acer is continuing to pursue the Android angle. It will offer them some hands on time to integrate a Google operating system with their hardware. But Android is ideally suited for ARM-based devices, and Google has made it clear that Chrome OS is their future for netbooks. Heck, Acer is even one of the hardware vendors that have already signed on for Chrome OS.

Because, you know, Chrome OS will only be available in the second half of next year.

So why shouldn't Acer stick to its (admittedly, rather weird) plan for the dual-boot netbook? To wait at least a year before it can use Chrome OS?

Hell, then perhaps Acer should consider not releasing any new netbooks until Chrome OS comes out.

Come on.

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Jul 13 / 2:54pm

@TopicOfTheDay brings Plinky-like questions to Twitter

TopicOfTheDay is simply a Twitter account and hashtag that runs and gives you a new question to think about each day.  It is your way out when you have nothing to say and have tweeters block.  Each day a new question is asked for you to respond, blog or do nothing.

Strange coincidence, Plinky is a Twitter-like service built exactly around that.

I wonder if they should have seen this coming.

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