The result? sadly disappointing. I won’t sugar coat, the Pogo just doesn’t hack it in comparison to my nice Penable pen. Now, I won’t say that the Compaq 2710p is perfect, on the contrary, the tracking sometimes is a bit off on the corners, but overall, my 2710p and One-Note was a killer combo. PenUltimate is a nice tool, but I feel like I’m back in kindergarten finger painting large scrawling notes because my Pogo won’t track that well (maybe because of my Zagg), and at times I need to resort to my fat finger, and I’m just wasn’t happy with the results…

The Pogo, because of the soft tip, had to be mushed onto the screen almost to the metal body for it to start tracking, and because of the tackiness of my Zagg screen protector the Pogo just dragged along the surface, so it felt like painting on fly paper. The other issue was my writing/drawing style, I can’t speak for everyone, but when I learned how to write in school my hand was on the page while holding my pen. Well, I can’t do that with the iPad, as soon as my hand rested on the touch surface, a touch was registered, resulting in scribbles where my hand started to rest. So, I had to use the Pogo like a Chinese calligraphy brush, hovering over the screen. The result was an even more unreadable mess. Ditching my Pogo was a little better, at least the tracking was better, but I just can’t write with my finger. Alas, I gave up on Penultimate and went to Pages, since Penultimate doesn’t accept typing. Once in Pages, I flipped the iPad into Landscape mode, locked the rotation and sat it on the desk flat to type meeting notes; a much better experience. It did take a little getting used to the slightly different arrangement of keys on the iPad keyboard, but I was able to type pretty quickly.

So my experience with my iPad in meetings didn’t go as nicely as I wanted. Doodling in boredom in Sketchbook Pro and taking notes in PenUltimate with my Pogo just didn’t work as nicely as the same combination found in my Penable TabletPC’s. The iPad’s form factor and battery life is so incredible, but it REALLY needs a stylus, even if it’s an optional accessory… Not having one just seems like such a travesty!

From the quiz application we continued onto building an application that utilized Apple’s CoreLocation library to pull our GPS location and learn about delegates. It was quite interesting, the only thing I can equate delegation to is setting up an event listener, or an ajax call. Where, once the delegate is setup to run, it will go about doing it’s task and report back when it’s completed it’s task without the need to constantly poll or ask for a request completion. Lastly, we continued onto an introduction to CoreGraphics, where we learned about Views and made a simple application that used CoreGraphics to draw shapes on the screen, add text and establish a ScrollView, which allowed for panning and zooming of the window.

It was a large amount of content to cram into a day, but it was very exciting to see the pieces of our hard work over the past few days come together.

Our nature hike was a good one today, we went down to an old mill on the property, it was actually a much harder hike than yesterday, since the terrain was a little more rugged. But it was enjoyable, and got the blood flowing.

Mark left today, and it will be our next instructor Joe’s turn, and tomorrow we start building actual iPhone applications. All I can say is that having gone through the Objective-C course, I’m much better prepared to tackle iPhone development because now i can better understand the syntax of the language, and understand why things are written the way they are.

Tomorrow will be more hardcore Object Oriented programming in Objective-C. I know most of the concepts of OOP, but application in Objective-C is different than know about OOP.

The resort is out in the woods, and is a very pleasant country setting, probably the nicest place I’ve been to for training. Once checked into our rooms, we met for dinner with the others that had come with the 2pm shuttle. It was nice getting to know some of the people that I will be training with. They’re a pretty good bunch, all with varying backgrounds, most have not done any Objective-C programming before. But that will change tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, we begin the 2 day workshop of Objective-C! It should be a good class, and I’m looking forward to it.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Atlanta!

Almost. It’s probably the best smartphone I’ve owned to date. But with that comes some drawbacks for me (you know I had to find something). My only real peeve is having to completely surrender the way I do things with my pocket devices to the way that Apple wants me to use it, but that’s really what Apple is all about isn’t it? It’s there way or the high way.

My negatives really aren’t around the phone itself, but more the software/os. Apple really locks you down to one machine. They’re world is revolves around you owning one machine to do everything, and that’s it. As soon as you cross this boundry to say a mixed environment or mulitple machines, it all goes to hell. Handling the syncing of applications and all data on my iPhone is enough example of this. I like plugging in my device to multiple machines, my PC, my iMac at home, and my Macbook Pro. But trying to keep things sync’d properly without accidentally wiping my data off my phone can be challenging. I’ve already lost my songs, playlists and apps on more than one occasion now, because iTunes decided that hey, I’m supposed to sync, and hey this computer doesn’t have these songs, so I’ll just wipe them off the iPhone.

The problem here could just be that I’m just not well educated on the nuances of managing iPhone (iPod Touch too) data on multiple machines. But I was really annoyed that I couldn’t get my playlists of my iPod Touch to my iPhone…

The other area of annoyance is the lack of customization with the sounds on your phone. I like that I could taylor my own sounds on my WinMo Phone, but I’m sort of stuck with what Apple has given me for SMS sounds and email sounds. Luckily they let you make your own ringtones… Once again, this is minor, but I had to point it out.

If Apple can make it easier to manage with multiple machines (or if someone can show me a good way to do this and still manage to keep my sync’d data), and let me change all the system sounds, I would consider this perfect (until I find the next thing that bugs me).

We found a Sprint store in a nearby mall. We rushed in and found the Palm Pre display. We had all heard the comments on the build quality, so we had to see and feel it. Our conclusion? Yes, sadly, for as nice a device as this is, it feels like a toy. I think some of my son’s toy phones are made of better stuff. the front of it is a shiny plastic, and the back is a sort of rubberized plastic, obviously for a non-slip surface. It smaller than the Ipod Touch, and the screen is smaller, but the screen has nice resolution. The flip up keyboard was usable, but it did feel cramp. The only metal on the case was the back panel that showed when sliding the keyboard out (probably used for the antenna), and the little button nub that’s on the bottom front of the unit. Sadly, this looks to be where Palm cut costs for the phone. Being all black did make it seem rather dull in comparison to the iPhone, and my Xperia, whose build quality is exceptional.

We all liked the phone’s OS, but someone had to show us how to close applications, because it wasn’t obvious right away that you had to flick the application windows up off the screen to close them. It was obvious that the phone could run multiple things at once, since not knowing how to close apps, I had quite a number running. The web browsing experience was exactly the same as the iPod Touch (which I’m guessing is the same as the iPhone). Internet access speeds seemed adequate, but the device didn’t play YouTube videos as well as an iPhone (which I later tested at an Apple store in the mall). YouTube playback was not smooth, and paused often, this may have been the fault of Sprint’s network, and not the device. In general though, my feeling is that the iPhone is still better in regard to the overall experience, even though only one app can run a time, things just seemed snappier.

So, since I’m in the market to replace my Xperia, will the Palm win me over? No, I don’t think so, maybe in another generation or two, but right now, the iPhone is still the better device for what I’m looking for.

I shouldn’t be surprised, since it’ll be a year this November when the X1 was released. I’m not sure if I should be happy that they are continuing their line or just plain mad that they seemed to have done nothing with their X1… What bugs me about the whole thing is that nobody inside the United States seems to even know what an Xperia is? It was (and probably still is) one of the most powerful WinMo phones to ever launch, and yet, Sony didn’t even bother to get anyone interested in carrying the thing here. In the UK, it seemed they couldn’t give them away fast enough (carriers were offering them free! with a Nintendo Wii!) … But here, I had to shell out $800, and I got blank stares from anyone in any carrier office when I asked them if they were going to carry it! 

I guess I’m just fed up with the whole angle that Microsoft’s Mobile OS has taken, where it’s just the PC model made smaller, and the performance feels like living in a shack layered on top of a landfill. The specs of the new iPhone 3GS are only now as powerful as the X1, but yet, my old iPod Touch feels and works better than the X1. My final grievance is I’m just tired of following around a phone OS that has no one excited about and has no clear direction of it’s offerings… So, Apple, here I come, see you on Friday!