The iPhone accounts for 40% of Apple’s revenues.. if we all refuse to buy them, we can then eagerly await the fall of Apple once again! I do remember when all the schools were preaching Mac’s like they were the next big thing, and then they faded into oblivion. It will happen again..

Actually, I think the iPhone is a pretty cool little gadget and toy, but that’s all it is. I use a Berry for business – it gets the job done.

Cartoon by Tobias Lunchbreath

The Kontrapunkt A is a low-output, moving coil cartridge with a nude fine line stylus with aluminum cantilever. The nude fine line cartridge makes a huge difference especially tracking on the inner grooves, producing none of the strange acoustics that sometimes are evident in lesser stylii.

I upgraded from a Grado Sonata Moving iron cartridge that has a elliptical stylus, which while still being very good, did not track quite as well.

The Kontrapunkt A has the most amazing bass of any cartridge I have owned, but also keep in mind that it is the highest end cartridge that I have owned, and the only Moving Coil I’ve owned. I have heard many moving coils in my time, however, with many of them sounding a bit brittle and hyper detailed. These were cheaper MC carts, however. The Bass with this cartridge is phenomenal to me, very articulated and low, with none of that muddiness that is common with the cheaper cartridges I have heard. Nor is the cartridge thin-sounding like the OM series of Ortofons that turned me off the brand early in my listening career.

The midrange on the Kontrapunkt A is also very impressive, with a good musicality to it, without any hard edge to it. This is not too surprising however given that it is vinyl. The midrange is true, and female and male vocals are both very impressive in reproduction.

Treble is airy, and liquid, just like it should be. No rounded off treble like I have noted with previous catridges that I have owned. The treble is one of the things I have noticed about MC cartridges in the past… it is more detailed. This Ortofon is no exception.

Bottom line, I really love this cart, and I still have my Grado Sonata as a backup, but the Kontrpunkt A remains on the tonearm.

I have heard a lot of CD Players in my time on my system, but this is the first one to literally open it up to an entirely new level of performance. Granted this is probably the most expensive CD Player I have ever had in my system, next to perhaps a Krell that belongs to a friend of mine. His Krell sounded fantastic, but I didn’t listen to it long enough to realize the amount of impact it really had, while the Bel Canto CD-1 really did blow me away right from the get-go.

Its a front-loading player, with a retail price of $5000. It uses a Phillips Transport, with a Custom Low-Jitter clock. Several separate multi-stage power supplies, and the DAC is performed by a PCM1792 chip from Burr Brown. Not a lot of info was to be found, and I don’t feel like cracking open the case to see. Outputs and inputs are both Balanced and Unbalanced… I’ve been using the Balanced and I enjoy the performance of it. This is an extremely transparent player and presents and extremeley holographic soundstage.

The CD-1 has been replaced by the new CD-2, which is a smaller half-size unit that uses the Phillips top-loading transport, and is something of a digital turntable in it’s design. As for the sonic improvement (if any), I have not heard it yet so I cannot comment.

I works quite well actually, the instructions are well explained and I have been able to take some great shots of stuff in and outdoors. Learning about using the whitebalance setting on the camera has been quite interesting as well.

The display screen is 320×240 pixels and if that isn’t god enough for you then use the optional cable to view movies and pictures on your tv. Another great feature is that you can use a secondary camera located above the display screen that can be used for video calls. The phone can be purchased in black, orange and silver.

So now that you have all these wonderful details I should mention that this phone is currently unavailable in North America and is in fact only compatible with a Japanese cellular provider called NTT DoCoMo, and as far as I have found out there is no way to unlock them on our networks so don’t go buying one off eBay just yet. However there is a rumor that panasonic might be releasing a North American version of the phone sometime this year. I hope it makes it over here cause I know some celeb will make the mistake of making some home sex tape on it and have it leaked to the web. Heres hoping Amanda Bynes feels the need to purchase one of these sexy little beasts when they come out, but now I need to go have a cold shower while I think about the combined sex appeal of the Panasonic p900iv and Amanda Bynes in the same room.

The machine I got is the 14″ model with a beautiful screen and these specs:
Intel Dual Core T2310
1 GB Ram
80Gig HD
14.1″ Hi-Res Glossy 1440×900 Screen
CD/DVD
Green Color

I love the green color.. it makes the laptop more personal and something more interesting than your typical black and silver offerings. The screen is also beautiful, and I am really enjoying the way vista looks and feels. The new interface is pleasant to use and all the graphical elements are much improved. I have however had some problems with certain programs working properly with it, mostly just with MagicISO.

Anyway, I highly recommend these new Dell Laptops, they are nice to use. They even have a SD/MMC card reader in them, really cool.

Compared to my old phone, the very first generation, with no bugs figured and taken out, this phone deserves all thumbs and toes up.

Here’s a brief overview of what my old phone was like. It was a V3 RAZR, not the ones you see now, but the one that first came out, fully loaded with too little memory and bugs, the screen always had dust underneath it, no matter how much tape I put on around the phone or how many times I cleaned it, it would always get dirty a few days later. At the end I was so annoyed I just peeled the screen protector off JUST so I can see the screen during daylight. This worked great unti I started talking on the phone for too too long at a time…3-5 hours each time. This allowed sweat, steam, dirt and other grimes that a human face produces to go inside the screen and then eventually $#@^ed up the screen. Now when I see the phone, all I see is !!!static!!! and nothing else. So I had to let people know not to text me because I wouldn’t be able to return the gesture.

So on to the new phone. I had to pick out a phone that no one else around where I live has and has super good functions, looks and what not, you know how it is. So T650i it is, the T means that the phone is metal bodied and the i simply means that it is for for Europe, Middle East, Africa, while the other version, which is the T650c is for China Mainland. Yes, this phone doesn’t actually have a version for America. Awesome, a phone not a lot of people will have, if any.

Most of the buttons, layouts button sequences are relatively similar to that of the V3 so there wasn’t that much problem to learn and get around the phone. Feature wise, this phone has 3.2 megapixel camera with a lot of different modes/settings (panorama, burst mode, frames, sepia and others), a MP3 player with expandable memory, 3G, etc. Not to mention the design of it is sleek and very intelligent looking. Haven’t had much time to play with it but what I have so far have made the money spent very worthwhile.

This is the phone to get if you are looking for a new phone…err wait, don’t get it because you shouldn’t have the same phone as me.

Peace