PC component prices are incredibly low at the moment.  I'm not sure if this is due to the Aussie dollar or just because it's getting so cheap to make this stuff now.

I've been watching component prices and toying with making a HTPC for a while now - and finally decided to make the plunge.

I did a little research, and came up with the following components:

• Asus P5KPL-CM Intel G31 uATX MB ($79)
• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz E7200 CPU ($153)
• ATI HD2400PRO 512Mb Sapphire PCIE video card ($34)
• Kingston 2048Mb 2x1Gb DDR2 800 Memory ($54)
• Pioneer DVR-215 Black SATA DVD ($34)
• Antec NSK-2480B HTPC/Desktop Case ($134)

• Dvico FusionHDTV Plus PCI card
• Open Wifi 802.11b/g USB Dongle
• Seagate 320GB 7200rpm IDE hard-drive

Oh.. one problem I forgot to mention - I bought a Laser branded DVI to HDMI cable and for the life of me could not get this to work going through my Onkyo SR605TX receiver's hdmi inputs. Vista would see the monitor, could identify it (as a SR605, and resolution, etc), but I couldn't get any picture at all no matter what I did. When I plugged the hdmi cable into the tv directly it worked great - so this is what I've done for now.

Only problem I had was that the Asus P5KPL-CM doesn't have a digital output, though there was some pinouts on the board for an spdif. I ended up soldering my own pinout to female rca plug with some junk I had in my cupboard and that worked a treat first try so I was pretty happy and cost me nothing

I also picked up a Logitech diNovo Mini Bluetooth Keyboard ($134) to control it all - very impressed with this little bluetooth palmtop keyboard/mouse - comes with a bluetooth dongle and it is detected as a standard keyboard/mouse - so requires no drivers and can use it even at boot time which is great.  It also works with my Playstation3 AND I managed to get it to sync with my HTC Touch Diamond - so it's a pretty useful keyboard all round!

Using Vista MCE at the moment and it seems to work pretty well - though I would like to try MythTV/Freevo and XBMC for Linux/Windows at some point too.

After spending several weeks reading up about the HTC Touch Diamond, and watching daily videos on Coolsmartphone showing an english guy abusing his - I finally bit the bullet and bought one of the first ones on ebay.

It arrived yesterday (June 4th, 2008) via courier and I've been enamoured with it ever since.

Packaging is very nice.. solid plastic and very stylish. Phone battery had about half charge for me too. Charger came with an english style plug and an australian adaptor for it. Bit clunky but it works.

Rom I have is the 1.34.831.1 - ROM - WWE

The screen is absolutely beautiful - crisp, clear, bright and very nice to use. Unfortunately the thing is a major fingerprint magnet - as soon as you touch it you've got fingerprints all over it.

Criminals - you might want to wear gloves if you try to steal one of these!

I'm still getting used to the touchflo interface, never used it before myself either. I've found it a bit sluggish at times - not majorly, but even a half-second wait when you click or slide your fingers is enough to confuse you.

Camera is surprisingly crisp and usable - unlike the one on my old O2 atom which sucked majorly. Mind you, I haven't transferred any of the images to my pc yet to check them out in detail.

The touchscreen full querty keyboard is awesome - even with my big thumbs I've found it quite accurate and I'm able to thumb punch my way through a message quite quickly with little to no errors - major improvement over the windows mobile offerings imho.
I have yet to get it to flip to landscape when I write an sms though - I don't know why. Also the keyboard takes up 80% of the screen so don't expect to see much of what you're writing when you're sending a message or filling out a field. Would be nice if the field you were typing in is always visible too - the keyboard covers it up most of the time it seems.

When you plug it into a pc you get to select whether you want it to use ActiveSync or act like a Disk Drive - which is a nice touch - unsure if this is HTC doing this or MS.

I can't really comment on battery life just yet - mine came half-charged when I got it and it spent too much time connected to my pc charging (while syncing, copying files, mp3's, videos, etc) - I charged it fully overnight and been reading ebooks and listening to music this morning while on the train and at work and it's dropped to 8/10 bars remaining (doesn't show a percentage - so could be 80% or 89% I guess).

Coreplayer 1.2.5 seems to work nicely on it for playing back divx/avi files - was playing your standard 350MB tv episode on it last night and copied a lot to the hard drive to watch when I get a chance - the screen is beautiful for this kind of stuff and playback was crisp and smooth.

There is definitely a bit of interface lag on occasions with the touchflo stuff - which is annoying at times - but it seems mostly to do with big apps being left in memory (like coreplayer, tomtom, etc).
The touchflo interface is nice and growing on me, though it's a little annoying for some things too. All too often I've stroked on the touchpad to go to the next person and instead it's either jumped into their profile or called them - annoying imho.
Perhaps I'll try SPB Mobile Shell on it sometime and see how responsive that is compared to the touchflo interface. That's what I've used in the past on my O2 Atom and it's been awesome.

GPS seems to work pretty well.. even inside houses which is nice (though not if you have a tin roof as that seems to kill it) - this may be normal, I dunno.. not really used gps much before.

Another icky thing I found. There's a button on the neckpiece of the headset that comes with it - it almost looks like a tilt switch and was hoping it'd adjust volume. Pressed it twice and it paused the music and phoned the last person I'd called on the phone - bit annoying if you're listening to music imho.

Earlier I mentioned that it gave you the option of connecting it via ActiveSync or as a USB Disk Drive when you hooked it up to a PC - the latter is supposedly faster for file transfers. I found out that when you do that though it essentially disconnects the internal storage from the WM OS and reconnects it when you finish though - which can cause some issues with apps (It causes MS Reader to report that the book you're reading is unaccessible until you reopen it which is annoying.

The biggest thing I've noticed so far with this thing is that it's soooo slim and sexy.

It's almost half the thickness of my O2 XDA Atom - and I barely notice it's in my front pocket of my jeans and keep checking to see if it's still there.  It has an absolutely beautiful screen and it's very nice to use.
The build quality is excellent - it's very well designed and made and I'm very pleased with it.

More Photos of the device, and comparing it to my old O2 XDA Atom are available on flickr.

So I've had my O2 Atom for a two years now.. and it's served me well during that time, but I will admit that my eyes have strayed lately and I've been admiring other phones too.. younger, slimmer, sexier models that have been coming out.

Not even the Windows Mobile 6 rom upgrade for it could keep me distracted for long.  Before you knew it I was checking out the HTC Touch Cruise and the eTen x600 and and considering my options.

Well I think I've found Mobile Phone Bliss with HTC's latest announcement of the HTC Touch Diamond.  Beautiful, slim and incredibly sexy - I think this one has won my heart already.

Here are the specs of this beast:

• 2.8-inch VGA display
• WinMo 6.1 Pro
• WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0
• eGPS, FM tuner
• Quad-band HSDPA 7.2
• 256MB ROM and 192MB RAM
• 4GB internal flash, No microSD slot
• 528MHz CPU
• 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus
• 10.7mm (0.47-inches) thick
• features an orientation sensor / accelerometer
• battery life is quoted at up to 270/330 minutes talktime for WCDMA/GSM or up to 396/285hrs standby for WCDMA/GSM from the 900mAh power-pack
• The Touch Diamond makes use of GPU accelerated procedural graphics, so you will not see a backward-compatible TouchFlow 3D update for the current Touch. It's capable of doing 7-8mil polygons per second (not that many games or apps will make use of that right now).
• HTC has made hiding WinMo away something of a priority; CMO John Wang stated, "You wouldn't even know this device was Windows Mobile. You would just think it's TouchFlow 3D."
• HTC totally reworked the WinMo virtual keyboard (as you can see above). Definitely not the best laid out we've seen (okay, it looks kind of messy), but it's instantly lightyears ahead of what WinMo had before.
• Opera "reflows" web formatting, which HTC is pitching hard. Basically it just reformats and wraps text on zoom -- unlike, say, the iPhone.
• Unfortunately, the device still uses a resistive touchscreen, while the controls below are capacitive. That really ought to be flipped around.
• One-touch navigation, including single-finger dialing
• An accelerometer that rotates pictures as you rotate the phone
• One-touch music playback with an animated music browser
• A heavily-animated weather forecast app
• Full-featured desktop-like web browser (Opera) with zoom-in tech that actually reformats to fit the screen upon zoom, although Microsoft promises IE 6 coming soon for it
• Youtube app and content playback
• Available in June in Europe via Orange and the "rest of the world" sometime later
• Orange music store, games, wallpapers, and ringtone downloads
• Orange mobile TV with up to 61 channels
• No normal headphone jack - gotta use HTC's proprietary USB dongle
• "Better battery life" than their other devices (although it uses a smaller battery than the Touch - we'll keep our eye on this) -- will offer a bigger battery at a later time for those who are experiencing battery life issues

So a friend was cleaning out his house and offered up his Japanese Wii-Fit to anyone interested for $50 - so I jumped at it. He'd picked it up in Japan and barely used it.

I've been waiting for this for a while, but it doesn't come out here until next month (May 9 in Australia, May 19 in the USA) and will retail for $150, so got a bargain.  On the other hand though, the entire thing is in Japanese, and you need a copy of Datel Freeloader to get it to work - even if you do already have a mod chip.

If you put the Japanese Wii-Fit disc in by itself (even with Wiikey 1.9s firmware) then it will just produce a black screen - you do need Datel's Freeloader to get it to work.

Datel Freeloader is interesting.. just pop the disk in and wait a second and the screen seems to freeze, then wipe from side to side, then everything goes back to normal a second later.  Eject the disc (you don't need to actually start it) and put in your Wii Fit and it'll load fine.

Now if you're fluent in Japanese then you'll love this game - but if you're like the rest of us you're going to be pretty confused when it loads up, as it rambles along quite a lot in Japanese.

Luckily, I came across the wonderful Wii Fit Translation guide by NTSC-uk on the net - which offers a screen by screen translation and using this I was able to measure my weight, enter in my height, work out my BMI (Body Mass Index), set some extercise goals for me and start doing some exercises and playing the games.

And the games is where it's at!

So the training menu seems to be divided into five options:

Yoga Exercises - these are all yoga like - slow paced, more stretching kind of exercises.

Physical Exercises - these are more intense Physical extercises and stretches - stuff like pushups, etc.

High Impact - these are more your high impact - but also fun.  They have hula hoop, step class, and running here (you run with the Wii-mote in your back pocket)

Games - the best ones out of the lot imho - Soccer, Slalom, Ski Jumping, Tightrope walking.

Favourites - these are your favourite exercises and games from the above menus.

I took the Wii Fit to a friends birthday party and the Slalom and Ski Jumping were absolute hits with everyone.  Girls and guys were avidly competing to see who could get the fastest time down the slopes - with people laughing at butts wiggling and people snowballing down the slopes.

So as a party game it's pretty cool - but how's the fitness side of things.  Well I think the Japanese text has impinged on that a bit for me - but the exercises are pretty good and I could really see them as being fun.  The Wii-Fit measures you over time, so you can see your weight loss progress over time, and it encourages you to work out to unlock more games and fitness exercises(by default more than half of them are locked for me even now)

The use of Mii's is fun as it gives you a laugh to see your friends and family in step class, jogging in the hills with you or kicking a soccer ball (or shoe!) at you.

Overall I can see the Wii-Fit as an absolutely massive seller when it's released here and I hope to see more games based on it in future!  Nice work Nintendo!

My Rating: A++

So it's been a while since my desktop got an upgrade.  It's a P4 2.4Ghz at the moment with a whole gigabyte of ram and is sorely in need of replacement - I'm finding that with half a dozen browser windows open at once, TVersity, uTorrent, etc it's definitely grinding.
And photo editing on it is just way too slow.

I skipped it last time by getting a laptop instead, but I've decided I'll jump on the quad core bandwagon and get something a little more up-to-date.

And of course three friends of mine have recently built new PC's - two of them with top of the line Core 2 Quad Extremes.  So I've decided what the hell.. I'll spend a little bit of money and catch up.

After a fair bit of research I've decided on the following setup:

• Antec Nine Hundred Tower Case
• Corsair 620W HX-620 ATX Power Supply
• Gigabyte GA-X38-DS5 Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4GHz) CPU
• Geil EVO One - DDR2-800 PC-6400 - 2x 2048MB sticks, 4-4-4-12 Memory
• Gigabyte Geforce 8800GT 512MB @ 700MHz
• Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme heatsink with Scythe 120mm fan