/dev/weblog

On June 5, 2009 — the day before the Palm Pre released, I decided that I would pick one up on a whim, having read the news and hype about it in the preceding months. I got up early that Saturday and was at my local Sprint store by 6:30am, being one of the first 10 in line.

I put the Palm Pre in my hands and never looked back. I was floored by its looks, its ease of use, and its multitasking. Later, I was courted by Palm's warm feeling for their developer community. When HP announced their purchase of Palm, I was wary at first, hoping they wouldn't bury this phone platform I came to love. (I'm not a fanboy, I'm an enthusiast!)

After watching the coverage of the Think Beyond event today, I can safely say that HP gave me the warm fuzzies thanks to all we've been waiting for: new hardware!

• Pre³ – What I'm doing with my summer vacation. 1.4 GHz. 3.5″ 480×800 WVGA. 512MB RAM. 802.11a/b/g/n. Autofocus 5MP HP 720p Camera. Front-facing VGA Camera.
• Veer – This thing is adorable. 800MHz. 2.5″ 320×400. 5MP Camera. I think this is their answer to the Kin.
• TouchPad – Daddy Like. Dual Core Snapdragon 1.2GHz. 9.7″ 1024×768 XGA. 1GB RAM. 802.11b/g/n. 1.3MP Front-facing Camera.

The Touch to Share concept and SMS/call forwarding from the Pre³ to the TouchPad look absolutely sick.

The phone's availability is "this summer". I can only hope that Sprint decides to get off its ass and carry more webOS hardware.

The event ended with an enigmatic reference to HP's plans to bring webOS to the Personal Computer. How exactly will that work?

The Commodore 64 turned 25 this week!

I was 10 when my brother Ryan gave me his (this would be winter '91-'92). His C64 had a Warp Speed cartridge and a 1200 baud modem! It was hooked up to my black-and-white GoldStar 13" TV (the same one I used to play his Atari 2600).

At 10, I was using the C64 to (among other things)

• visit my first BBS
• program stupid choose-your-own-adventure games in BASIC
• play great games like California Games and Operation: Wolf
• do reports for school using Paperclip III.

You should have seen my face the first time I wrote a BASIC script that wrote to the dot-matrix printer.

I found out that a Sega Genesis controller worked great as a joystick for the C64.

The next computer I got was an IBM-compatible 486 DX2/66 that ran Windows 3.1. Quite an upgrade, but I still look back with a smile on my Commodore 64 days.

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