Listen Microsoft, I want to give you money for your products so that I may enjoy them, and then turn around and tell others, “hey, you might want to check this out, it’s pretty cool.” Then you get more money, which you can then use to improve those products and/or build newer and better ones. I will then buy those new and better ones - makes sense, right?

I’ve got to say, you are making it really hard for me to do that.

My new Zune is almost useless when compared to my Creative Vision:M. For the past week I’ve been carrying both devices, trying to figure out which of the two are better. While I prefer the Zune’s “Twist” interface, larger screen, and overall styling, the lack of podcast support is almost a deal breaker for me. By “podcast support,” I mean that I need a way for the Zune software to download, sync, and manage my subscriptions. I don’t want to use some third party solution, as they universally suck, with the exception of iTunes (hey, that gives me an idea… maybe I can find a way to use iTunes and the Zune together… I’ll report what I find).

My three-month-old 8525 frequently locks up on me, or refuses to turn on after going to sleep. That pretty much makes it worthless as a phone, since the thing needs to be running in order to receive calls and emails and the like. I have owned multiple Windows Mobile devices over the years, and all suffered from poor performance and slow reaction times (when I hit “Answer” to pick up a phone call, it would be nice if it actually worked).

My nineteen-month-old Xbox 360 took a dump on me for the second time. Gone are the days that a console would actually make it through an entire generation w/o need of repair (like the SNES and Genesis). Wouldn’t you know it, I am two months out of warranty. I paid MS $105 (after discount) to send me a coffin and get this console fixed. I think they are giving me a free month or year of LIVE Gold.

Luckily, my one-month-old Vista PC is still working just fine. I’m sure that won’t last long.

I’m not ready to proclaim that MS sucks or anything like that, but I think my diehard loyalty to this company is the only reason why. I just need to vent my frustration a little bit. Thanks for listening.

Oh, and Creative, you are not off the hook. Your Zencast software and Zen player are sucking pretty hard right now, but I’ll leave that for another post.

After being out of contract for a month, Nadia finally broke down and settled on a new phone. Cingular (or rather AT&T, formerly Cingular Wireless) did not have a single phone that she was interested in. She was hoping for a non-Sony, non-Motorola, camera-less candy bar phone that was not also an MP3 player. Sadly, that phone doesn’t exist; actually, there is the Nokia 2610, which completely fits that bill, but she didn’t seem impressed by that phone at all. For some reason, she likes the truly hideous Pantech C3. If it did not have an antenna, that would have been the phone she got.

Instead, she ended up with the Blackberry Pearl, pictured at left (alongside my AT&T 8525). I’ve played with the phone a little bit, and I really like RIM’s interface. The screen is bright and colorful, and the phone itself is attractive. Call quality is pretty good, and its EDGE-based internet access is speedy. I was happy to see that our site displays well on the phone, as does Google Reader. Google has Pearl-friendly versions of Google Maps, Gmail and Google Talk, which Nad currently has no intention of installing.

The one feature that I really wanted to try out is Push To Talk. Sprint Nextel and Boost users have had this for some time now. Since I’ve always been a Cingular/AT&T customer, I’ve never had the opportunity to use it. I had that feature added to our account, and that evening I upgraded my 8525’s ROM; the new software added a number of apps and features, one of which being PTT. We tried to get it working a number of times and had problems with it. The PTT connection was pretty flakey, and when it did work we experienced extreme delays in the audio. I was ready to cancel the service.

This morning on the bus I heard a beep from my phone, indicating that Nad was initiating a PTT conversation. I answered, and we spoke for about two minutes. All those issues we had last night just disappeared. It is highly likely that we were doing it wrong, or maybe having the phones so close together was causing problems. Either way, it works, and I will probably keep the feature. The one question that is nagging me though is this: is it really worth $20 a month?

This Twitter thing is catching on fast around the office. I made my account some time in March, and quickly forgot about it. Upon learning that some of my work friends had accounts, I decided to go back to it and try it out. Setting up the IM update feature was tougher than it should be, mainly because their AIM and Google Talk bots are so unresponsive. I also am using a Firefox extension to send my updates. My final step was to find a way to easily send updates from my phone without having to pay SMS charges. For a short while, I just loaded up the full Twitter site in Pocket IE. Not too bad, but it was a little slow. Just when I was getting ready to complain about this, they rolled out a mobile version of the site!In the right sidebar you’ll find a box that contains my latest update. I intend on changing the look of that, I just haven’t found the time to do so yet.