louie tran spot – daily gadget blog

For those who missed the $30 for 13 months of XBox Live can redeem themselves, this time on Amazon. You can go there directly by clicking here. In this tough economy, gamers and geeks need to save as much as they can! Thanks SlickDeals!

I just got my Touch Pro from the Sprint store today. Even though I was 3 months away from getting the renewal price, they were able to sell it to me as if I was a new customer!

I liked the Diamond and appreciated how small and thin it was but I had a tendency to delay responding to e-mails and text messages because I didn’t like poking at the screen to write and it was difficult for me and especially when I couldn’t get used to the small letters. Plus that onscreen keyboard takes up half the screen.

For the first 5 minutes of using the Touch Pro, using the keyboard was such a relief especially when my previous phone before the Diamond was a Mogul. The difference in thickness from the Pro was not as drastic as I thought it would be and it feels pretty light. Also switching from portrait to landscape when opening the keyboard is almost instant, and there’s no lag like the Mogul had. I was a bit disappointed when I realized that there’s currently no FM Radio support like the Diamond had, but it’s not really a big deal.

I’ve already unlocked the phone and installed MightyROM 4.5. I’m going to install my usual applications and then work on eBay-ing the Touch Diamond. I’ll have a full review of the Touch Pro either by this weekend or at the beginning of next week.

 If you haven’t heard already, Circuit City will be closing all 567 of its stores and will be liquidating their merchandise starting today. Since I live about less than 10 minutes away from the Pasadena Circuit City in California, I decided to swing by and take a look. The picture on the left was taken at 9:30 this morning and as you can see, people have already started piling in up. The store opens at 10AM and when it got even close to that time, the parking lot was crowded with people eager to find a great deal. At first there was some confusion amongst the staff on controlling the crowd and they were letting in a few people at a time. About 10:15, they just opened their doors and let EVERYONE in.

A lot of people, such as myself were quite disappointed that not everything was onsale. They were just regular priced and the majority of their items were 10% off. There were some things that were 30% discounted but there really wasn’t much to write home about. I saw a lot of people Rockband 2 for the Xbox 360 which was 10% off and that was about the only decent deal I saw in the store. 20 minutes later, after realizing that today wasn’t a great day for sales, a lot of people in the crowd left and went home empty handed since the discounts weren’t as impressive.

As the weeks go by, I’m sure they will continue to lower their prices jsut like they did when the CompUSA stores were shutting down. A lot of stores have been shutting down lately and the economy is frighteningly bad. With the closing of Circuit City, about 30,000 people will lose their jobs.

I was browsing on SlickDeals and saw a post that Walmart is selling the 12 month subscription to Xbox Live for only $30! That normally retails at $50! You can take advantage of the deal by clicking on this link.

Also on SlickDeals, I got $35 back for each Sprint phone that I have due to a class action lawsuit on an Early Termination Fee (ETF) policy that they had. You can file a claim inf you’re a Sprint customer by clicking here.

I need to visit SlickDeals more often…

Yesterday afternoon, I had a phone call from my boss telling me that my Blackberry had sent her over 1000 e-mails with an “Undeliverable Message Errors” from a Blackberry I didn’t use anymore. Then I had a few phone calls from my staff telling me they are getting at least getting 200 e-mails with the same message. I started to panic a little and hoped that was the end of it. I then got a call from our corporate IT asking me WTF IS GOING ON? Apparently EVERY SINGLE person whom I sent an e-mail to from the time I had the Blackberry has recieved that message, both internally and externally!

What happened was the Black Berry that I was temporarily using had a mail rule on my Outlook forward the messages to the Black Berry account. When I switched back to my usual PDA, I did not remove the rule on my Outlook.

Regardless, Sprint DID NOT deactivate the BlackBerry service until today when they realized that my box on the BB server was full for a long time and they suspended my BB account.  Every message that was recieved when the box was full received an Undeliverable Message. I was even on the phone with Sprint for over an hour until I realize what the issue was.

The moral of the story? Stick with a PDA with REAL Exchange capabities if you don’t have access to Blackberry Enterprise Service! Also… pay attention to your Outlook forwarding rules!

I was reading through Engadget’s live keynote coverage at MacWorld and it seems to me that the only announcement that was worth taking about was the 17 inch MacBook Pro. For a hefty price of $2799 this is what you get:

• 1920 x 1200 LED-backlit display
• 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo / 6MB L2 cache
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 memory
• Nvidia GeForce 9400M
• Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT / 512MB
• 320GB hard drive
• Slot-loading SuperDrive

You will also have the option of getting a matte screen and it will come standard with a non-removeable 8 hour battery (which Apple has an exchange program for).

Engadget pretty much summed up Apple’s last MacWorld by saying: “…no Steve, no iPhone nano, no new Mini, no new iMac, no shockers, no surprises.”

I couldn’t agree more.

MightyMike has just released his latest ROM on the PPC Geeks forums right when I was about to install the 3.9 version I downloaded this morning! Mike’s ROMs are probably the best for the Touch Diamond. For the most part, the ROMs are very stable and significantly enhances the speed, battery life, and functionality of the Touch Diamond which is a great deal of differnce in using the stock ROM.  You can read more by visiting this thread.

MightyROM
Version 4.0
(Hosting Provided By CedoNulli)

Click Here To Download MightyROM 4.0

SYS OS 21109 Build 211091.6.0 MightyMike

[ + ] Added – OEM’s Converted To Modules (Speeds Up OS) *Thanks Calkulin*
[ + ] Added – Internet Explorer Mobile 6.0
[ + ] Added – Soft Reset Shortcut w/ Custom Icon
[ + ] Added – Camera – Panorama 7 Mega Pixel Shots
[ + ] Added – Wireless Lan – G Compatibility
[ + ] Added – Adobe Flash 3.1
[ + ] Added – Inbox Stored To Internal Storage
[ # ] Updated – Large Title Bar 4.46.0.0
[ # ] Updated – Long Press End Key 1.1.34309.2
[ # ] Updated – Quick GPS 1.00.18173430.1
[ # ] Updated – Random Access 4.1.1819.2922.0
[ # ] Updated – Task Manager 2.1.35349.400
[ # ] Updated – Teeter 1.4.1819.2028.0
[ # ] Updated – Opera Mobile 9.5.15202
[ # ] Updated – Album 2.2.1820.3428.M0
[ # ] Updated – Audio Booster 2.1.1816.2328.4
[ # ] Updated – Audio Manager 1.6.1820.3027.h
[ # ] Updated – FM Radio 1.6.1817.4024.1
[ # ] Updated – Voice Recorder 1.10.1819.1927.1
[ # ] Updated – YouTube 1.0.1819.4027
[ # ] Updated – EzInput 1.5.32715.0
[ # ] Updated – Full Screen Player 1.05.081015
[ # ] Updated – GSensorCalibrator 1.0.1819.2126
[ # ] Updated – HTC Gesture 1.0.32356.0
[ # ] Updated – SmartTouch 1.0.32417.1
[ # ] Updated – Startup Animation 1.1.5.999
[ # ] Updated – USB To PC 2.2.1819.1228.1
[ # ] Updated – Display Drivers
[ # ] Updated – Manila Files
[ # ] Removed – Advanced Config Utility
[ # ] Removed – Music ID

I didn’t get a chance to do any updates today because my webhost’s server Dream Host has been down all day! And the timing is as horrible as the situation too because this is the day that Mac World and CES both start! UGH! It’s extremely frustrating but at least it’s up for now.

Besides… I’m not even sure if anyone is reading this anyway…

I posted a question a few days ago on mac-forums asking how to view icon thumbnails in the mac osx like how windows xp and vista does it. it was getting annoying having to open the file to see what the photo was. The solution was very simple and I got a very prompt respond on that forum:

“Have a Finder window in icon view. Select the menu item View/Show View Options. Activate “Show icon preview”. You can set this for an individual folder window or all windows.” – ron4mac

Thanks Ron!

I just quickly added the about section and made a few tweaks to the layout. I’m going to watch one more episode of Heroes and then go to sleep. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow and I should hopefully be done with the site by then, the day after.