Wonder Of Wonder, Miracle Of Miracles

It must be a California thing, I guess, but still there's nothing quite like coming home after a long Fourth of July weekend and finding that your house hasn't been burnt to the ground. Not that people don't try- believe me they do. In fact it's now 2 days past the Fourth and I'm still going to sleep each night with the sound of a hundred little explosions popping in my ear (along with an occaisional Whistlin' Pete, of course - geez, are they still making those things). Oh well, that's life in the combat zone, I suppose.

One nice little suprise I did come home to was left on my front doorstep courtesy of one of the neighbors kitty cats. Ah yes, what better way to greet the day than to open the front door in the morning and find 10,000 flies buzzing around your head, and then look down at your feet and find a half-eaten carcass of a dead garter snake decaying all over your welcome mat. What a pretty sight that was, I tell ya', and especially nice were the 8 billion ants that were crawling over it and carrying it off piece by tiny little piece.

But then I don't blame the cat (and I think I know which one it was). Cats are just neighborly that way, and though I'd rather not take one side over the other, if I had to choose I'd rather have a cat as a neighbor than a dog any day. I mean other than the occasional dead bird or snake they may leave in the yard, cats generally keep to themselves and don't bark all night or crap all over your lawn, do they? No, that's what dogs are for and that's why I welcome my kitty cat neighbors. In fact, after I buried what was left of the snake I have to admit I even felt a little touched that this cat would think so highly of me that it would want to share it's meal. Well ok, maybe not touched, but at least I appreciated the gesture.

But you didn't come here tonight to hear about that, did you. No, people read blogs to catch up on all the latest tech news, so that's what I'm gonna give you.

Have you heard about this new Yahoo Music service? You haven't? Well great, let me tell you about it. For around $7.00 a month (or $5.00 a month if you sign up for the full year in advance) you can legally access Yahoo's entire library of over 1 million songs and download them to your computer or supported MP3 player. Of course Napster and Real Rhapsody have been offering this same service for a couple of months now, but at over twice the price. Yahoo is clearly trying to undercut the competition and win this market, and to sweeten the deal they're also offering a free 7 day trial for the service.

Naturally I had to check this out.

And that's where my next big suprise came because I've looked at these services in the past and have always been disappointed that my MP3 player was not among the ones supported. I could listen on my computer, but the only way I could take the music with me was to download it to my laptop and then lug that around with me whenever I wanted to listen. But when I looked down Yahoo's list of supported devices what should I spy but my cellphone listed as a supported device.

That's right - my cellphone!

Ah, the good ol' SMT5600 just keeps getting more and more useful everyday. So, to make a long story short, I signed up for the trial, downloaded a few CD's to my cellphone, and bada-bing bada-boom, it works perfectly. Now instead of having to carry around a MP3 player and a cellphone with me wherever I go, I have the option of just loading everything on the phone and leaving the MP3 player at home. I say "option" because there are a couple of drawbacks to this whole scenario.

The first is that my cellphone currently has only 512 MB's of storage on it, and that's because I only have a 512 MB flash memory card (miniSD) installed. Of course I could upgrade to a 1 GB card but the 1 gig miniSD cards are currently hard to find and a little on the expensive side. Still, 512 MB gives me room for about 8 hours of the high quality 192kb music which is enough to get me through the day.

The major drawback with the SMT5600, though, is the lack of a standard headphone jack. Like many phones on the market these days, the SMT uses a 2.5mm submini jack instead of the standard 3.5mm mini jack found on all other types of portable audio devices. Given the multimedia capablilities of this phone that seems like an egregious oversight to me and you'd think that Audiovox would at least offer some type of adapter with the phone so that users could use their high quality headphones with the device, but they don't. Fortuantely Palm One offers such an adapter for their Treo line of PDA phones and it looks like I'll be ordering one of those. In the meantime I'm stuck using the regular headset that Audiovox ships with the unit and although it sounds pretty good, I know my regular headphones would sound much better.

But nothing's perfect and, like I said, the music coming over the regular headset sounds pretty good. I know when I first heard that the wireless companies were going to offer phones with MP3 capabilities I thought the whole idea was pretty lame. I mean c'mon, listening to music on your cellphone - who are they kidding. But now that I'm there and doing it I gotta admit it's pretty cool. A little device that fits in your pocket (or on your belt) that can make phone calls, surf the net (sort of), retrieve your email, take pictures (albeit very poor ones), display pictures, play music, play movies, or perform a hundred other little tasks. I tell ya', it's what the modern world is coming to. Tell me this isn't geek heaven.

And I'm not even a geek.