I have an AT&T Fuze with the original, stock Windows Mobile 6.1 installed. I have tried repeatedly on two different machines to get Internet Sharing working over either bluetooth or usb. No dice. Finally, I stumbled on this blog: http://stevenharman.net/blog/archive/2008/10/03/windows-mobile-internet-connection-sharing-hack.aspx. The important part wasn’t how to hack the registry. What I needed was to know that the AT&T ISP connection needed to point to wap.cingular instead of isp.cingular. I made that simple change and my connection worked flawlessly! Hopefully this helps someone else.
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I love the Kindle! I read my first full-length book over Thanksgiving, and it was a great experience. At first, you're aware of the device, which is a little distracting, but after a while, you forget about it completely.
The e-ink screen is amazing! Everyone I show the screen to, whether geek or technophobe, agrees that they could read off of it. It really does look like gray paper. Sure, v2 could have some better contrast, or maybe even color, but v1 is perfectly fine. As with a book, the more surrounding light you have, the better. You can't really understand how different it is from a laptop until you see it for yourself.
Positives
Screen - again, e-ink is awesome!
Book availability - Amazon already has tons of books available, with more coming all the time.
Wireless - it's so convenient to have wireless built in, with no fees. Downloading book sample chapters is great, and I subscribe to my local newspaper, so it's just there every morning! Every once in a while, I also look something up on the web.
Form - with it in the included book-like insert, it looks and feels just like a book.
Negatives
I'd love for wireless to be controlled with something other than a switch. It'd be nice to set it to time out, or to only be on when it's plugged in. If you forget and leave it on, your battery life goes from weeks to a couple of days.
The battery cover comes off easily when in the included book-like insert, since the insert uses an indention on the battery cover to keep the device in place. Annoying.
You're not going to write novels with the keyboard.
Newspapers and other periodicals don't include images. To be fair, this is stated on the Amazon web site in the fine print. Hopefully this will change one day.
Bibles, while usable, have limitations. You get a chapter list as links at the top of every book in the Bible, and once you navigate to the chapter, you can't see what chapter and verse you're at. The Kindle seems hardwired for page numbers, and that's it.
Expensive. Yes, this is obvious, but it still needs to be in the list.
Bottom line
The negatives are more like nitpicks of any v1.0 device. This device is great as-is! If you read a lot, you owe it to yourself to investigate this device! It is expensive, and you'd have to read a lot of books to get a decent ROI, but the convenience is worth something in and of itself.
Ok. So I ordered a Kindle. It will arrive tomorrow - I'm stoked! I think the days of ebooks have arrived. The coolest thing about it: it has built-in EVDO! It doesn't cost anything... it's built into the device price. It has the following benefits: No need to ever sync to a PC. Browse and buy books, magazines and newspapers direct from the device, and have them delivered in a minute. Email Word docs and pics directly to the device, for only $.10 a piece. Your entire library is backed up at Amazon, so you'll never lose your books, even if something goes wrong with the device. Browse Wikipedia online for free. There's so much more to this thing. I'll try to put up a review after using it over Thanksgiving. For now, take a look at the deets on Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/ref=sv_kinc_0/102-8150105-3212934 John PS. Have a great Thanksgiving! We are blessed, and have a lot to be thankful for.
Home automation software So, I'm using Homeseer (www.homeseer.com) software to do my home automation. Its interface is web-based, and it's written using .NET. Because of this, it's (theoretically) easy to add custom pages and the like. One of the things I've wanted to do is have LCD panels distributed throughout the house to use to control my devices. Here's a sample screen. Thermostat control Specifically, my first goal has been to control any of the three x10 thermostats in my house from any panel. Now, there are lots of panels on the market. However, they're all insanely expensive, and use proprietary interfaces. So, I've explored the idea of using PCs with touchscreens. This gets cumbersome, though, because you have to buy a touchscreen, and you also have to store the PC somewhere out of sight, while still having it close enough to the mounted screen. Nokia 770 Well, last week I saw that buy.com (I buy most tech stuff there) was having a deal on the Nokia 770 Tablet. It was $143. That's not much for a device with an 800x480 screen that has wifi and Bluetooth, and runs opera. I thought to myself, "Self, you could run the Homeseer interface right from that device!". So, I ordered one. Ajax on the Nokia Sure enough, the 770 handles the Homeseer interface with ease. You might be asking why it wouldn't. Well, the thermostat plug-in uses AJAX, so I was worried. Fortunately, since the 770 uses Opera 7, it does a great job with it! Here's a screenshot: Nokia 770 and internet radio (Orb to the rescue) Now, in addition to handling my home automation software, the 770 can also play internet radio, which was another need I had. Well, it sort of can. Unfortunately, it doesn't support asx feeds, so I thought I was out of luck with one of my favorite stations. Fortunately, though, I saw another site that mentioned streaming it through Orb. Since I have Orb installed on my Media Center PC, I gave it a shot. It worked great! I just had to set Orb to stream content in .pls format, which the 770 can handle, and I was set! I connected the 770 to my home theater, and the music sounded really clear. I was surprised, since I was restreaming the internet radio stream through Orb. Anyhow, now I can walk up to my touchpad and control my music selection as well as my home automation! Of course, since I was accessing Orb, I could play a photo gallery on it, since my pics are all stored on the Media Center PC as well. Here's a screenshot of Orb on the 770: Nokia 770 limitations I wish I could say that the 770 was a panacea. Alas, I cannot. While it does have Opera, it's an old version. Flash is also old (only version 6). If it had a newer version of Flash, I could have run a third-party Homeseer plug-in called Maestro, which is a really slick Flash interface. Also, the 770 doesn't have a lot of codec support, as mentioned earlier. The 770 supports a memory format that's hard to find, so, unless you do buy another card, expect to have issues if you run more than a couple of things at the same time. Conclusion The Nokia 770 solved my home automation need nicely! And, since it also did Internet radio, I was able to sell my Soundbridge Radio I had been using, which could pay for two of the 770s! Life is good!