FirstAdopter.com

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Chat Session

Walt Mossberg's D conference had an excellent sit-down session with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. A must see. The full multi-part videos are here. Am I the only one that thinks this reminds me of the Mac commercials with the PC guy and the cool Mac dude. It's obvious Gates is a bit intimidated by Jobs' charisma, however Gates comes across as really smart too. I love the historical computer anecdotes back when both companies were startups.

Programming Lead of Heavenly Sword Whines

It's not a good sign when the lead programmer of Heavenly Sword is whining about how developing it sucks. Yikes. This game is the biggest launch for the Sony Playstation 3 this Christmas. I was hoping it would make my PS3 worth the money I just paid for it.

Big mainstream games at the moment aren’t fun to work on… We are so stuck doing the non important stuff (1000 facial mocaps and shaders on 10 processors with actors and cameramen straight out of hollywood…) that the actual process of making the important bit (the gameplay) has becomes nasty… It sucks, its no fun and given how much work everybody (code, art, design, qa and production) has to do to make a game, having it being no fun, really isn’t good.

It's especially noteworthy as he seems to be complaining about PS3 centric technical issues.

T-Mobile Blackberry 8800 Impressions

I bought a Blackberry 8800 from T-Mobile recently to replace my Treo 600. Over the years, I've gotten sick of the Treo's instability, random crashes, and inability to handle my 1300 contacts. Its gotten to the point where I have to delete contacts and calendar entries on my Treo because it couldn't handle the quantity. I heard that Blackberry can scale to thousands of contacts.

So far my impressions are mixed. It certainly is an upgrade over the Treo 600. The positive attributes are great slim form factor, clear colorful screen, good battery life, and stability. On the negative side, I'm not wild about the trackball vs. the scroll wheel on previous Blackberries and EDGE isn't exactly a speed demon 3G upgrade.

I'm satisfied though. The PIM isn't as intuitive as the Treo, but overall it works well. It hasn't crashed yet and the IM messaging programs are much better on Blackberry (Yahoo messenger and JiveTalk Beta). The push email also works better and with the battery life, it's an excellent messaging device. I'm not sure on where I stand on the keyboard yet as I'm getting used to it.