On the January 3rd the opportunity to acquire one of those ad sponsored $79 Kindles that Amazon is pushing hard in America suddenly appeared. Thinking of getting the nice and not at all expensive New Year’s present for myself I have paid $125 (yeah, international shipping is nasty) and got one on the next day.

Before that I was usually reading the paper books or ebooks on my iPhone in either Kindle app or in Apple’s native iBooks. The latter wasn’t particularly good experience. The 3.5” screen of the iPhone is just a way too small for the comfortable reading anything beyond the news, emails and twits.

I wouldn’t say that the getting the Kindle has changed my whole life or turned me into an avid reader (mostly because I actually was one before that and remained one after), but the Kindle has undoubtedly made my reading experiences much more pleasant. Also, I found myself reading if not more than more often. What I mean is that now I can squeeze more time for it. If I’m getting stuck somewhere waiting for someone or something to happen I am getting my Kindle out of the bag and putting that unexpected free time to work.

Reading myself to sleep is also possible now. The Kindle’s eInk screen is white and contrast enough to be easily visible being lit by the diffused light from the solitary nightstand lamp, and the iPhone could rest where it always have been—on the charger—to be sure that its battery won’t die before the alarm clock will go off.

I saw this splendid idea on the Reddit someday and I was so fascinated and excited by it that I decided to save the toilet paper carton rolls’ bases right away. Half year later (or more like four months later, I don’t remember it well, and, after all, this is a kind of a TMI) I had enough carton rolls to do the trick.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find the spare box with the inner height equal or slightly greater than the roll’s height, so I went on simply taping them together. It doesn’t look that great and accurate like in the original author’s pictures, but it works exactly as it was intended.

Of course, MX1000 is one awesome mouse. It was undoubtedly the best one in the 2005 — 2007. But the MX620 (and its left-handed twin-brother MX610) was the most ergonomically perfect product of that times. Its simple yet carefully designed streamlined body fit the palm of hand (at least average sized one) like a glove.

There are a number of high-end mice manufacturers on the market nowadays. Only one of them—Razer—is focusing on the gaming mice, the rest are much less specific and make a lot of nice general purpose mice including such pretty interesting ergonomic solutions like Microsoft Natural Mouse. But none of them, in my strong and strictly personal opinion, can compete with the Logitech MX620 and its successors.

Obviously, the Logitech model MX620 is no longer in production, but it has enough time to become one of the Logitech’s most popular model and brought life to a number of different models like MX400—a wired and priced down variation. MX400 was lacking MX620′s steel wheel and some additional buttons but inherited its perfectly ergonomic form.

In 2010 MX series mice lost X is their names and, in the same time with a dozen of different new models Logitech M500 laser mouse was introduced.

And just like five years ago this launch was dimmed down by another one. This time it was perfect lower high-end Marathon M705 mouse. Its little more “shapier” muscular body looks like it’s a crossbreed of MX620 and MX1000.

The middle range mouse Logitech M500 won’t promise you three years of battery life like Marathon M705 but only because it’s wired and doesn’t need any batteries at all. On the other hand, it’s two times cheaper than the Marathon.

Ergonomically, M500 is a well known MX620, just more shiny, even more well-built, and significantly lighter since the lack of heavy batteries. All the great MX620′s features are here: the steel wheel with the hyper-fast scrolling (switchable) and the full (in mid range terms) set of buttons, as well as precision laser sensor.

Logitech M500 is a perfect replacement for the old wired MX400. However, if you’re looking for a MX620 replacement and think that a hundred bucks for the Marathon is too damn much, try M500. If you aren’t moving around with your laptop a lot or even if your main computer setup is a desktop, you will get used to the cordedness of M500 pretty quick.

There is no other mouse on the market you can buy for less than $40 that is partially as good as Logitech M500. All other options (and most of them are from Logitech again) are at least twice more expensive.

I have had a bad impression about mobile phones photography capabilities since the 2005 when the first so-called camera phones have started to emerge. The low-res, blurry, with a shifted and terrible wrong colors images that was coming out of the tiny greasy holes on the back of the mobile phones were the mockery of the sole idea of the digital photography.

Now, with the mobile camera modules like the one in the Apple iPhone 3GS, I must admit that the mobile photography at least as much acceptable as a lomography. Though, it’s still a pain to look at such photos without a postprocessing on a bigger computer. May be the future smartphones with high-res displays and the gigahertz of CPU and GPU power like in modern iPhone 4 will allow to postprocess photos on the go. It’s a software problem, after all.

Speaking of connectivity, it has EDGE and it’s tolerable when you are browsing mobile optimized pages. I like the idea that I can use this phone as a modem in some situations but I really don’t want to.

Built-in browser has a very nice interface and works pretty good for small pages, but when you point it somewhere where the pages are a very little bit more complicated it returns “insufficient memory” error.

Fortunately, the Java apps are running pretty fast and Opera Mini works just well.

Buit-in e-mail client is ok, and works good with gmail account. The only drawback is it’s morbid obsession to encode anything in base64.

Twitter and other similar web apps are running good in either Opera Mini or built-in browser. 2.4″ LCD is ok to read some RSS feeds in Google Reader on the go. The fonts are smooth, good looking and easy to read.

What about the main feature on LG GW300 – its QWERTY keyboard – it is great, comfortable and very helpful. No matter what do you want to use it for: txting, managing a phonebook, writing down a shopping list or random thoughts – everything is much more emm… natural with it.

The battery of LG GW300 could be better, but everything comes with a price – bigger battery would make LG GW300 significantly heavier. Anyway, you can buy a bunch of USB-MicroUSB cables and put one in the every computer u use during a day, at home, at the office, etc. so you can charge the battery anytime and anywhere.

What I like more in LG GW300:

• Wonderful QWERTY keyboard.
• Pretty nice display and overall quite ok interface.
• 3.5mm headphones jack.
• A lot of useful fields in phonebook records.
• Useful memo and secure memo apps.
• Size and weight. It’s comfortable.
• Descent built quality.

What I do not like about LG GW300:

• Built-in camera is a joke (but it’s understandable).
• You barely can customize anything.
• Base64 encoding in e-mail.
• You cannot view ToDo from a calendar. Neither can’t you setup reminders for ToDo items.
• The mediaplayer database rebuilds after any changes and it takes a lot of time. It’s easier to access your music through file system.
• Battery life is the same as of more feature rich smartphones.

A couple of days ago I forgot to check the pockets of my jeans before laundry. The weather was slushy all Autumn so I set up my washing machine for super wash at 90 Celsius with an extra rinsing. Two and a half hours later I took out perfectly clean jeans and discovered my keys and my flash drive in the machine’s drum.

A cheap 2Gb flash drive was working fine for me for more than two years. It was branded like A-data MyFlash, but I have never seen another A-data products anywhere. So I left it on a table to dry up and on a next day tried to stick it into USB port. And it worked! I have made a full backup with no errors.

Fortunately, we have the other brands in this segment: Motorola, LG and Samsung. The first two are too bulky, in my taste. And Samsung have rolled out three new low-end models a month before: E1070, E1100 and E1125. Last two models haven’t hit the shelves yet, but the first one is already available for about US$39.

I have bought Samsung E1070 and played with it for a week for now. What’s good:

• The size. It’s quite fatty with its 15mm but short and narrow comparing to the other modern mobiles. Fits well in my Wolverine jeans lighter pocket.
• 100 memory slots for text messages.
• Nice and handy phone book (200 memory slots).
• Five alarm clocks you can program to go off on a given days of week.
• Nice battery life. Haven’t tested it “scientifically” but I think E1070 could work for a week between charges easily.
• Pretty compact supplied charger.

What’s wrong? Well, Samsung E1070 is cheap, budget, low-end. Nothing wrong, actually.

Logitech MX400 (left one, wired) and MX620 (right one, wireless) are undoubtedly the best computer mice in the modern history. The best design for the average sized hands. Unfortunately, MX400 lacks MX620′s excellent scroll wheel and a quite usefull auxiliary button, but the ergonomics and pointing accuracy are still here.

Nice mouse but doesn’t fit my average hand. Should be bigger to be comfortable enough.

Pro

• Great idea.

Contra

• Comfortability is highly depends on one’s palm size. A little less than average size fits well.
• Wired and bulky transmitter. Not the USB-stick type.
• Ridiculously short working range.
• Auxiliary buttons not so easily accessible.
• A bit cheap mats for a $100 mouse.
• Price (see above).