Wesley's Tool-Box

Cyberbank released a few boxes of their new POZ series of PDA-phone, the CP-X501, to the beta testers and related people last Friday, as my previous post has shown. Since I was in the mood to post the pics, here are some chronologically ordered photos you might want to see.

By request, here's the current state of the desktop. Picture was taken with MITs-M4300 which is now out of the official 'desk item', so now the digital camera on the lower right of the screen is now visible.

The latest PDA-phone from Cyberbank has officially debuted. Dubbed CP-X501, succeeding the best-selling CP-X301, is the smallest WM2003-based PDA-phone to hit the market. The unit I have was given by Cyberbank for a test-out. More on this coming soon, I think.

This is a long overdue story. It began exactly 7 months ago, on January 11, 2005.

At Macworld Expo San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced a small form factor Macintosh computer called 'Mac mini'. Right up to that point, I had almost no interest at all in using a Mac. Why, my AthlonXP desktop computer was working fine. I had no need to use a largely incompatible and expensive computer that wasn't even small. But the moment I saw that Mac mini, I was absolutely shocked. A supposedly decent performing computer that has a mainboard that probably measures only about 15cm on each side, and fully operational unit costing as low as $499.

Interestingly, I already owned a computer smaller than this: Sony VAIO VGN-U50, an ultraportable notebook computer the size of a normal 3.5" hard disk. Hadn't I already filled the 'own a tiny computer' need? Apparently not. I saw the potential for replacing my desktop computer in Mac mini. VGN-U50 would still be the 'second unit', a portable device I would continuously carry around with to fill my needs. I needed something small that can be kept sitting around the house. Mac mini was it, I envisioned.

I've done some encoding tests with various settings using PSP Video 9 and altShiiva. I had originally intended to use altShiiva for encoding, but then after encoding one file, I noticed that it would hog my main system's resources for an extended period of time. Therefore I decided to look at alternatives, and chose PSP Video 9. This runs on Windows platform; my backup system has Athlon 64 3000+ for the CPU and runs Windows XP 64-bit Edition and can serve as an encoding workstation.