Is it that much effort to design a nice GUI?

Come on China, we know you can cough out some impressive PMPs, but is it that hard to make a pretty GUI? Recently I read up on the Ainol V3000 and found out it comes with a 800x480 WVGA display, which is pretty much a first for a flash player. Eventually, I found a place selling it, but after watching the video of it in action, I was pretty much disgusted.

This is what sets major players like Samsung, Sony, iRiver, Archos and Cowon apart from those players. While none of them have been able to produced an equivalent player, their interface is still better looking than Ainol's pitiful looking interface. As much as I like the specifications of the player, and how it would really be handy to carry around, the interface is something I probably can't live with.

Hopefully someday one of those companies will produce an opensource PMP so they can let others do the work for them, and produce a pretty interface like HTC's TouchFlo or something similar.

STM Medium Phantom Review (Plus some pictures of small version)

The small version, and comes only in red. Hopefully STM will introduce more colors.


Medium! Only available in black.


Both bags side by side. There is a very slight difference, about 3-4cm difference between both bags.


The interior. The laptop section is designed to completely hide your laptop.


Very spacious design. The top is a little narrow, but the bottom is extremely spacious.


The frontal compartment for all your gadgets.

Overall, I think this is a pretty nice bag. If you want something versatile and allows easy access to your stuff in the bag, this will be a good choice. I picked the medium mainly because of the small difference in size, which can be found on STM's website.

Just got a Panasonic TZ3!

Are you a photographer? If you are, a small portable camera is always a must to carry around. There are always situations where your phone can't handle the situation, or you just need something with more reach.

A DSLR is just too big to carry around daily specially if you have tons of junk in your small bag, plus it's not very convenient for any candid/impromptu shots that you might find interesting. Most compact cameras do not have much reach, being very limited at 3x zoom, which is not really my style of photography. Thankfully Panasonic's TZ range of compact ultrazooms answered my call for a compact zoom camera with good reach, so when a good price came up for one of this, I grabbed it without too much hesitation. 7.2MP, 28-280mm equivalent, and an image stabilizing component, it's a very good camera! It does have its compromises due to the range (eg. slow lens due to dimensions), but after using it, it's not as bad as I thought. It's an excellent performer during the day, and decent for night shoots or group indoor shots.

If you're ever in need of a compact ultrazoom camera, look no further than a TZ series from Panasonic.