Wristwatch Cellphone

Have you ever thought it would be possible to make phone calls to some "thing" attached to your wrist?

Perhaps you had already thought about this sort of strange devices but trust me when I tell that nothing prepares you for "wow effect" when see this "thing" making phone calls.











But before I forget - why have I bought such thing?

Well, don't really ask me because I think it was one of those impulses just like the ones we get like kids on a candy store and simply get something new to try out.


I was initially looking for a cool (and cheap) pda-like cellphone from CECT and ended up stumbling on these little wonders of technology.

The first thing I noticed were the incredibly low prices that were displayed on some asian sites that grouped small sellers. To my disappointment, after some googling for references found several evidences that clearly indicated that the probability for buying from a scam artist were too high and no guarantees to ever get a refund back.

Ended up using Ebay because even thought it had higher sell prices we would at the very least get a better guarantee of service of we buy from a seller with high feedback and respectable reputation history - which is sometimes the only thing on our side to guarantee a good trade for both parts.


Wasn't very easy to find a good auction because I wanted to find the less expensive as possible seller and after ebaying around the most popular international versions of this portal (US, Italian, Spanish, UK, German and French) I found what I had been looking for (took a full weekend of clicks btw).

The price was settled for little less than 100 USD and transportation along with european taxes increased another ~80USD to this cost.

-------


Let me tell that I had seen images and movies of this watch on the web but seeing it in real life conditions is simply outstanding.

The model I've chosen was the CECT W800 - this watch comes with several other brand names and sometimes sellers will even try to sell other models using the same model designation to cause confusion.

This watch comes with a touchscreen sensitive screen and uses an input similar to PDA style.

You can send and receive SMS, call phone numbers or receive calls from other people. Simply needs to remove the battery and add your SIM card inside.

One other cool feature is the videoclip support - this "thing" can actually play your music videoclips with quite ease after some media conversion. I was truly amazed to see how loud (reminded me of nokia phones) it would play the video and the video quality.

It will also play mp3 - too bad about the storage space - comes with an internal space of 128Mb and no external mini SD option to storage your music collection. In either case - it still fitted ~30 of my favourite music tracks.

There is also a bluetooth handset, haven't used it yet but it might be a good feature to try out some of these days.


In overall - good quality, discrete and doesn't look like an onion on your wrist so it was certainly worth the price for such a small and power featured device.

To conclude this blog post I leave you with some images and youtube clips, hope you like it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=RmXg04ICEfQ
http://images.google.pt/images?um=1&hl=pt-PT&safe=off&rlz=1G1GGLQ_PT-BRXX255&q=m800+GSM&btnG=Procurar+imagens


-- Nuno Brito

End of a cycle..

Every couple of years, the commander of the place where I work passes his position to another person.

I've been fortunate to stay in the same place to witness this end of cycle occur twice in a row, which kind of left me wondering about the things that changed over these two years of work when compared with the previous two year cycle.

A lot changed and mostly for the better.

We got more equipment and improved work conditions - but to be honest - I think the most important of it all was the chance of working along with someone that had such a dynamic perspective of life that inspired so many including myself.

He arrived to our workplace as a boss and left our house as a friend.

A cycle has ended.

Last semester exam - time to

Just finished today my last semester exam - it was called "Multimedia Systems" and was a very discipline very hard to describe exactly in which knowledge we'd be tested.

Why?

Simply because the teachings were based in a mix of computer history along with multimedia (sound, image, data) techniques that evolved over the years.

Kind of an easy exam for those who work their way around computer since 1998 but I imagine it should bring a strange set of knowledge for those who were never familiar with the nuances and improvements as technology evolved into our current state.

Take graphics for an example.

Under MSDOS we'd be happy to see any images at all - little would mind the quality as CGA with their 4 colors and mind addictive games which rock the world.

Later evolved to EGA with a 16 color scheme, which was a bit expensive where I live and only remember seeing it once or twice in action because very few people could afford this luxury.

VGA was amazing and somehow pulled 256 colors that (finally) allowed to view images - not that it wasn't possible to view images on lower color resolutions but to be honest, I always considered the results a bit ugly to enjoy and harware pieces were getting cheaper and cheaper since 1999.

This was a time of changes because digital images had 256 colors, the internet was getting affordable and there were a bunch of new file formats such as .GIF and .JPG which made possible to fit several huge images inside a single floppy.

It was also around the same time that MP3 allowed to copy several audio CD's onto a single CD-ROM media. It took the whole afternoon to encode an Audio-CD to mp3's on disk and around 40 minutes to burn this full 640Mb worth of data onto the CD media (that was still a bit expensive and therefore couldn't be wasted by leaving any space without being burnt)


-------------

Well.. sorry for this return onto the "Jurassic World" but the stuff needed to study for this exam really brought back to surface a lot of good memories of the first time when everything seemed so fascinating to me.

The exam went well - 20 questions with multiple choices which were replied very quickly.

------

Now there should be enough time to go back onto my favourite hobby and test new boot disks.

Guess some things never change and even with all our progress over these years, this is still were I'm happy in playing and learning something new each day.


-- Nuno Brito

How to make one cent worth a honest day work

Well, one cent is something certainly not surprising to anyone.

I mean, it's common for most people who walk around the street and notice a 1 cent coin on the floor to simply keep straigth ahead on their path without even considering picking this rather smallish coin from the ground - what can you do with a single cent?


So how do you make a single cent be worth a honest day of work?


Crazy as it may be, a solution to make a significant amount of money from a cent seems to be stock exchange.

Early this month I've invested some money on a portuguese company called "Pararede" - they build the most popular portable machines for ATM transactions and each of their stocks is worth around 16 cents.

In the economy world - January was a very, very tough month for stocks as crisis arised with more sub-prime concerns and most of the market fell with fear and panic - and pararede also got cheaper, being sold at 11 cents.

Imagine you buy some stocks at 15 cents and use around 1000 euros of your money for this operation.

If you're lucky - (and I use this term because I don't think we common mortals can predict the future) - then you might sell your wallet with a profit of a single cent per stock.

How profitable is the trade on this example if I sold at 16 cents per stock?

~6,6%..

You get back your money with a profit of 65 euros on this case after a few days worth of waiting and win a full day of work without even need to get out of home.

So I guess that 1 cent can be very important.


btw: It's good when things work as you expect but don't expect to always get lucky - these are not good days to risk your hard earned savings on stocks unless you really know what the risks are and prepare yourself to assume the losses when things go bad.

-----

I mention early on this blog post that few people would ever pick a 1 cent coin from the floor but this article was written because my wife found one of these coins in the shopping mall after a dinner outside and the smile on her face really teached me how a single coin made her day so happy regardless of it's actual value to buy things.


And now I'm really in doubt on how people react to this situation - would you ignore a 1 cent coin on the floor?


-- Nuno Brito

The Air Car

Those who know me in real life would surely know that having a car is not a priority in my life.

For some strange reason I never had much desire to buy a big bulky car and always made an effort to find alternatives - either by walking a lot, often use of public transport, asking a ride to friends or simply staying indoors became options to avoid the tough decision of having a car.

These machines get quite expensive in Portugal - you have to pay a lot of legal taxes for buying a new car or importing from another country that adds +20% to the price, the maintenance prices for small repair averages +50 euros every couple of weeks, insurance woes >500 euros per year.

Which leads me to the title of this blog post: A car that runs on air..

I was shopping in the marked with my wife when we noticed the big headlines which announced this revolution on a local Azorean newspaper.

This amazing invention was called "Air car" and runs completely on compressed air according to it's inventor.


The article seemed genuine until the point I decided to take a look on the mentioned website and look for independent opinions afterwards.

Sad to see another scam scheme since it will elude people telling them their project is very close to be finished and they are interested in forming partnerships with other people to resell their "revolutionary tecnhology".

They are announcing this "revolution" to happen next year (since 2005..)

The whole thing is simply an illusion - and I was seriously interested in buying one of these cars.

Here in my city there is a local stand for electrical cars made by townlife (a firm from the lamborghini familly) and I even drove one for a test drive but the price was far too expensive (>14000€) for the conditions provided by this small vehicle.

You find this scam project here:
http://www.theaircar.com/acf/
http://motormdi.com/

Don't be fooled..

:)

-- Nuno Brito