I guess I’ve got the new phone about as figured out as I’m likely to, liking parts of it and hating others.

The good news is that, technically, I can write a book on it. Which is to say that, while the keys are smallish, I’m okay with them; then again, I became okay with them a long time ago when I got a Casio CA90 in 1980. So, to answer the unending stupid question: yes, I can type on this thing, a watch, a palmtop, a DSLite, a PSP, and approximately anything anywhere ever. Not that I can literally type, which might actually help; but I can huntpeck like the wind, regardless where or how small the keys are.

On that subject: another bit of good news is that people, while monumentally stupid, are conditioned. So the sorts [read: majority] who see a palmtop and ask whether it's really a computer, see a laptop and ask whether I'm WiFied and able to let them hit their GMail, see a DSLite and ask whether I'm too busy to pretend that they matter in the universe, or see a watch and ask whether I'm Dick Tracy, have been conditioned in recent years to see a phone and, instead of asking, automatically assume I'm texting someone and really can't be bothered; so they're half right.

Though, philosophically, I suppose I'm kinda texting someone. It's a massmail thing, BCCed to the sum total of people who ultimately grab a copy of the book. You know: those three. Which almost brings me to something else; but I'll get to that in a minute....

Apart from being a phone and a wordprocessor, the thing's naturally an iPod. Almost literally. Which of course sucks a bit. Maybe it's me, but watching films on the PSP kinda wrecked my ability to watch them on an iPod, letterboxed in 4:3 and all tiny. On the other hand, it's a phone I can cram films into; so it's not all bad. Even if the battery hates it when I do that. Of course, I didn't really get a phone so I could watch films on something other than a PSP, or I'd have gone for something more like, say, an iTouch with a phone built into it...like, if that weren't locked into AT&T, who kinda bug me.

I'm trying to be fair here, so what else doesn't suck....

The whole thing's based on whatever WindozeCE evolved into, which isn't a bad thing. It came with a standard powercord I never use, since it'll recharge through USB while laplinking itself to the real computer. And, apart from Word, it's got Acrobat and stuff; so I can throw .pdfs at it and read them later instead of printing them out and reading them later. Which is another thing I need to mention, in another minute. Someone remind me....

Oh, and the speakerphone doesn't suck. The last couple phones I had, it was useless. So that's the good news, I guess.

The bad news.

For some incomprehensible reason, while Word to Go can display every character available on a real computer, it can't produce them. I'm not talking about Cyrillic stuff [though that's a factor]; I'm talking about some commonish functions, like at least turning -- into — for me. Of course, Word's the only thing that does that, so I've learned to hit Alt0151 to produce a longdash everywhere else. Except for on the phone, which has no AltKey. Also it has no ControlKey, and no TabKey. Meaning that I'm starting to get kinda good at needing to indent the next paragraph, highlighting the last one, hitting the Menu Button, hitting E, hitting C, hitting Enter, hitting Menu, hitting E, hitting P, and getting an indentation I should be able to get by hitting Enter alone. But it doesn't do that, and I haven't found a way to talk it into doing it. Yet.

On a related note, as seen in the jpeg to the right, it also lacks SmartQuotes. So I get those meaningless vertical apostrophes I'm not happy with. Of course, the phone's got a Find/Replace function hidden under File>Edit; but you can't copypaste in there, so it's not helpful.

So, I can either do a hell of a lot of copypasting through Menu>Select, Menu>Edit>Copy, Menu>Edit>Paste per character, or I can try to remember what wasn't available on the phone and fix it later, on a real computer. Neither's much fun.

As a phone, it's not bad. Technically, these days, it's a bit massive. But, since I remember downsizing to the Motorola Meteor FlipPhone in the early nineties [I've still got that thing around here somewhere, in fact], it's not a big deal. Based on what I have on my desk, it's a little larger than an Altoids tin, but maybe twelve millimetres thick. So using it as a phone, without a speakerphone or a headset, might look a little awkward; but it works.

The video is small and 4:3 and batterydraining; .mp3s are pretty much what they are, and also drain the battery. Not that it matters much, since it's only slightly louder without headphones than the PSP is. The trouble is that, with headphones, bad things happen.

Quick backstory. A couple years ago, I had a Samsung...something. Its camera really sucked, and it wasn't a damned walkman. So, while it had the 2.5mm headphone jack, I had no reason to get stereo headphones for the thing. Then I arguably upgraded to an LG VX8500 [gay people call it a Chocolate] which did music and eventually had a speakerphone; but its headphones were proprietary [like, worse than 2.5mm], connecting though a port not seen on pretty much any other phone. Now I'm back to 2.5mm and could listen to music or films or whatever; so I tracked down a converter to let me plug headphones I like into a 2.5mm port. And the suck begins.

First, pushing them in all the way shorts everything out. For some stupid reason, they've got to be only loosely connected. Which doesn't help. Because, then, the phone, being smarter than its inventors, presumes that I'm using a wired headset to make calls, and bugs me every five seconds with Beep, goofy startup noise, Say a Command [I've commanded a few things technically outlawed by the Patriot Act], beep. Over and over and over. Apparently, to use the thing as anything but a phone or a wordprocessor, I'd need to bother with bluetoothed headphones, which I didn't really wanna bother with. Or I could go all retro and wander around listening to the thing by mashing it against my ear, which I wasn't gonna. Partly because, at best, I'd look like Gene Wilder in SilverStreak.

One last thing about media: the thing isn't designed to stop. Ever. I had to cheat a key into the thing to let me stop a song or film instead of pausing it. I'd probably be upset if it were set up the other way, cancelling a song if I switched to the desktop or Word or whatever; but assuming that I'm stopping something to get back to later, when I'm stopping it to stop having to hear it, is annoying.

I think that's it for the bad. So far. Depending what else I discover. Though I'm still kinda hoping that I'll eventually discover ways to make it less ungood, like teaching it new characters and stuff. That would help.

The typical.

Actually, it's not typical; for once, that's annoying. Since the phone is functionally something of a downsized Kindle, and since the reality is that the Kindle or whatever replaces it will almost certainly be the future of books, I've been looking into all that. So far, I haven't bothered to buy a Kindle [there again: I'm not sure what will replace it, or when]; but a big strike against it, seen in the phone too, is that it resizes things. Kinda like the 'net does, which itself irks me; but worse, because it's not just data: it's a novel.

Maybe I'm the only one; but, when I write a book, it's not just words. It's not poetry, since I hate poetry; but there's a certain aesthetic to it. I put additional effort, for example, into spacing things correctly to get the dash in a truncated hyphenated word onto the next line, to prevent confusion against truncated words hyphenated by space issues. Meaning this:

A common word, which is hypen-
ated by need, looks like this.

A hyphenated word, however author
-arbitrated, looks like this.

Until you're online, or on a Kindle, or whatever. Then there's no set columnwidth, undoing all that effort. And it annoys me.

Something I'm not sure about yet , since I haven't got a Kindle and no one else cares enough to have thought to wonder, [I sent the .pdf on how to publish for a Kindle to the phone, hinted at earlier, but it doesn't cover this] is whether the thing hyphenates words on its own. The phone for example doesn't; so, if there's a hyphen, it's actually a dash, even if it's at the end of the upper line; if the Kindle does things that way too, then it doesn't matter quite as much, I guess; though, if paragraphs are justified, there     could     be     those     long     bits     of     whitespace I also hate.

The problem essentially is that the Kindle doesn't use .pdf, so I can't control things without using images, where images aren't searchable.

So. Since I'm pretty much gonna hafta deal with Kindles and other handhelds at some point [in a lot of ways, I'm all for it: it's really very cool, makes a lot of sense, and costs far less per copy to produce, on my end, the $359 for the machine on your end notwithstanding], the real trick now is rethinking how I write stuff. Which, granted, various people have been hoping I'd eventually do. I use big words and stuff. But, more relative to this, I of all people have to start thinking more in hypertext [which I initially assumed EBooks would be, before Acrobat got all big] than in print. For the most part, I do that already; except that, when it's a novel, I think in .pdf, with control over hyphens and stuff.

In a way, it won't be a big deal from here on out. In another way, a lot of the stuff I've written to date is incapable of porting over to a Kindle without major surgery. And I tend to oppose that. Though, in a third way, I haven't heard of KindleBooks having a maximum pagecount [or, really, a pagecount at all], so I could technically release the unexpurgated version of Paroxysm if I were interested.

It's all something to think about. At the least, knowing what I'm up against, I'm trying to write Lurkers in this new way. And, somewhat appropriately, mostly on a mobilephone. Even though I can't have two documnets open at once, forcing me to save the thing, close it, open lurkers.notes.doc, see what I'd been meaning to put in the book, close that, open lurkers.doc, and get back to typing with half the keys I'd need to write a book. Bothersome.

Anyway: more later....

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