Happy new year to all.

I got to take a few days hours off last week, which was great. I took care of some overdue projects around the house which included moving my % complete on my desk refinishing project from about 25% to about 97%. I am waiting for the 2nd clear coat to dry so that I can run some sandpaper on it and apply the last coat. It’s only taken me 8 months to get this far. 30 hours over 8 months… not bad.

I also installed my bed lights in my truck, which was fun and fairly easy to do. I love to tinker with this kind of stuff. It’s good to get the hands dirty doing something every once in a while. The project was cheap and smooth. Here are some pics and here is a write up I did on the f150online.com forum I lurk on from time to time. These lights are a long time coming and I actually used them the night I finished them on a trip to the store with the wife.

The strangest thing just happened, I opened up a new tab to grab a link to the flickr gallery of the bed lights and mistakenly typed in http://www.flckr.com/ for the URL and got a page for the Real Player. Have things gotten that bad for Real that they are now using misspellings of flickr’s URL to market their crap. WOW. Just give up already. Anyway… on to the rest of this post.

I also did some meaningless surfing while I was off and came across something fairly cool and fun. Check this out. It asks you some questions and then tells you what video game you would be based on your responses. Here is what it told me:

I am a Defender-ship.  I am fiercely protective of my friends and loved ones, and unforgiving of any who would hurt them. Speed and foresight are my strengths, at the cost of a little clumsiness. I’m most comfortable with a few friends, but sometimes particularly enjoy spending time in larger groups. What Video Game Character Are You?

I’m not sure how accurate this assessment is, but it was a fun 3 minutes. 

I decided that there would be only one resolution this new year. No resolutions. They rarely are successful endeavors and lead to some degree of guilt along the way, so I am canning them. In their place will be a set of goals and objectives for myself this year. Some are professional and some are personal. I may decide to share them at some point, but not at the moment.

2006 was a good year. It was busy. It was hectic at times. It was successful in my eyes. It’s a new year with new goals and objectives. Time to get down to business and start making 2007 a GREAT year.

I got my 8525 just over a week ago and I give the device a solid 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. I’ll keep this simple:

The Goods:

Improved Usability - They added some buttons to launch the start menu and to select the close or OK button. They also replaced the “slider” button on the 8125 with a Blackberry-style scrolling wheel. The wheel has a select function by pressing it, just like on the Blackberry. They also put an OK button there, which I have yet to use, but understand why it’s there.

Speed - This is better in two ways. The phone itself. I have a lot of contacts. Something like 1200 of them. The phone “queries” these contacts when I am looking for a phone number, typing an email or a text message. My 8125 was brutally slow at this. This baby has no problems with them. The second way is the connectivity. I am one those people that actually hit google from the phone every once in a while or lookup and address on Yahoo Yellow Pages. The speed hitting the net is as Cingular claims most of the time… “near broadband” speeds.

Size / Footprint - In a couple of words… it’s smaller. As someone that used (and liked) the 8125 quite a bit, a reduction in size is great. It makes the keyboard a but smaller, but still a great size. I consider it ideal. I had a Treo 650 and the keyboard was my complaint about it. I am not small and neither are my hands, so keyboard sice is important to me.

Camera - It’s a 2 Megapixel and the new Camera software is great. It is actually better than the third-party CoolCamera app that I was using on my 8125.

The Not-So Goods:

Battery - Here’s a retread… In a couple of words, it’s TERRIBLE. I am hoping I have a bad battery. The phone doesn’t last a day for me. Just to give you a sense for my power profile, I do not use Bluetooth, so it’s off, I do use ActiveSync with DirectPush for email. I do not use Wifi, so it is off. I think my screen goes dark after 10 seconds of being idle. I have nothing good to say about the battery life.

“The Dongle” - Instead of simply using miniUSB, like the 8125 did, the power interface into the phone is something different. No idea what it is and I am frankly not that interested in researching it. I hope there is a reason for this additional interface because it sure is a pain. This pain is only made worse by the fact that the battery life is not good. You lose this thing, you can’t charge it.

Windows Mobile 5 - This is not specifically about the device, but I simply wish that the “SmartPhone” features could exist on these devices. I especially loved the fact that my 2125 automagically changed my profile to meeting based on a meeting on my calendar. Bring it to the PPC version Microsoft!

Memory Card - I am cheap. Why change from the MiniSD to the Micro SD? I know why. To sell more memory cards. Just kidding, sort of. I went from a nice 2GB Mini to a 1GB Micro on my 8525. Admittedly, I have less than 100MB on the card, so it’s not a capacity issue for me. The digital camera was an unexpected beneficiary. Merry Christmas Canon Powershot!

I used to say that my 8125 was my favorite of all the devices I have had, and I have had a few. I have a new favorite and it’s this one. The battery issue could potentially be a show-stopper for me, but I plan to check with Cingular on this and see if they can help me.

Here are a few pictures of the 8525. You can see a slideshow with some more here.