Advantages:

• The 9 cell battery lasts almost 6 hours between charges
• Backlit keyboard is really good
• Integrated webcamera is much better than expected.
• Quite light at 2.45kg
• Fast

Disadvantages:

• Temperamental fingerprint reader
• HDD drive could be a little bit quieter.
• Aero features are a bit let down by the NVidia NVS 160M graphics card. Minimising/maximising could be more "fluid"
  

[Show as slideshow]

Earth: As seen from 6.4m KM away

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

- Carl Sagan 11/05/1996

Nothing like putting it all into perspective. A youtube version after the break.

I had previously been the owner of an Apple iPod, third generation, bought back in the summer of 2004 which was a good PMP although the battery life had started decaying to worthlessness within a couple of years and the device itself was all scratched to hell within a year(a mirror like metal back was never going to stay that way for very long unprotected).

Having considered buying the current iPod classic I was tempted over by the then newly released Zune due to its larger screen (the resolution is the same as the iPod though), ability to play FM radio and its wireless synching. There was a small obstacle in my path and that was Microsoft's disregard for anyone living outside the great United States; I suppose this was a safe way for them to test out their new product and its associated online marketplace before branching out too far. Ebay, naturally, solved that problem and it was in my hands all the way from Florida in 10 days or so.

Specifications:

• 11x6.1x1.3 (LxWxB) (cm)
• 90.7g
• 3.2" LCD display
• Wi-fi (b/g)
• 80GB storage
• FM Tuner
• 20 hr/5 hr battery (music/video)

The Good:

FM Tuner:

The tuner works great and has great reception using the earphones as an antennae. The device has selectable RDS (UK/US/Japan) so the station name associated with the FM frequncy is also displayed along with any other messages transmitted.

Large Display:

Small in the grand scheme of displays but better than many other PMPs of the same class. Great for watching video podcasts on and associated track's album art looks impressive.

Casing:

No scratches really visible yet unlike on my previous 3G iPod.

The Bad:

The Zune Pad (sometimes):

You control the menu with sweeping motions of the zune pad which usually work well but when it comes to selection a menu option by pushing in the centre of the pad sometimes it registers that as a side push and goes to some other menu. Worse still is when you hit the opposite button to go back to the previous menu it doesn't remember how far down you were and you have to scroll all the way back down. Bloody annoying.

Zune Software:

It's not great, doesn't work with last.fm and doesn't even work with Windows Live Messenger's now playing thing. You'd think they'd be able to use Windows Media Player or something instead of yet another program. Oh well.

The Indifferent:

Wireless Functionality:

I thought I'd actually use this but I haven't bothered. I just synch up the Zune when I'm needing to charge it up, or plugging it in to the USB. It's more hassle setting up the wifi than just doing it normally (I assume)...

Conclusion:

85%

Well, the initial impressions of Rome were poor; from the dark and dingy airport to the overcrowded, sweltering, sweaty, unairconditioned train from the airport to the main train stration and the €35 taxi charge for the 1 Kilometre between the train station and the hotel.

After that it's been generally better. The days have mostly been spent walking the streets of rome getting ridiculously hot and burned, visiting sites and getting scammed for small amounts of money by all and sundry.

A few photos from the adventures so far:

[Show as slideshow]

12►

VOTE!

It's also one of the easiest recipes to make too. It actually turned out like what it was supposed to unlike some of the moderate disasters we've had so far and only took an hour and a half unlike the dulce de leche recipe that took 3+ hours and looked like a whole pile of crap...

Informal flat ratings:

Ben: 9/10

Julie: 8/10

Twe: 8.5/10

So, when is it acceptable to have the first drink of the day?

>>> You'll need to use the poll in the sidebar. Apparently you can't have the same poll in two places...

• High noise at high ISO
• Low maximum ISO (800)
• Minimum shutter speed of 15 seconds
• Can't shoot RAW

So to that end I was thinking about getting the new dSLR from Canon, their 450D. But then again to make full use of it you need a whole range of lenses which would total up to around £2.5k (wide angle, low light, standard zoom, telephoto zoom, flash, teleconverter...) Anyone have a few grand to spare? No? I'll put it to the back of my mind for a while then...

The above song with the combination of greats that are Madonna, Timbaland and Justin Timerlake is probably the most irritating and infuriating song I've heard in quite some time. Not helped by the fact it gets significant airtime on the local radio station and is guaranteed to be playing that song at some point during my car journey. Thought I'd turn to BBC Radio 2 just now and guess what song was playing... yup that's right, 4 minutes to save the world...

*sigh*