Barry Dahl dot com

I enjoy watching the United States of Tara, a Showtime series about a family where the wife/mother has multiple personality disorder. Apparently I enjoy it enough to be accepting of my own multiples. On Tuesday I purchased a Motorola Droid to replace the not-so-smart phone (Samsung Omnia – highly NOT recommended) that I had suffered with for a little more than the past year.

I’m loving the Droid so far. The Android operating system seems to be all that and a bag of chips. Lots of good apps and really fast. The voice recognition and speech-to-text functions are really outstanding. Sure I’d like longer battery life, but even that is better than the pathetic Omnia.

It occurred to me yesterday that I now have the following multiples, all of which require me to think a little differently about how to get things done, and all of which do some things well, but maybe not everything. Four devices, four different operating systems.

• My main laptop is a convertible tablet/notebook (HP EliteBook) running Windows 7.
• My phone is now the Motorola Droid (Verizon network) running the Android OS.
• My new toy is a 32G iPad without 3G (hate AT&T, no soup for them!) running the Apple iPhone OS.
• My old toy (2 years old) is a Nokia N800 Internet tablet running a version of Linux for an OS.

Although it’s only three days old, the Droid is clearly my favorite device of the bunch. The EliteBook is my second favorite while easily outscoring the iPad. I actually liked the EliteBook with Win7 enough to abandon an attempt to switch to a MacBook several months ago. Windows 7 is by far the best Windows operating system I’ve ever used, and the Mac just never really grew on me. I think the iPad is a joke, and that I’m an idiot for plunking down $660 to buy the stupid thing. The only good things I can say about the iPad is that it is much better than the Nokia tablet and that there are few free games that are fun to play on it. (Okay, I admit it, there are a few other good things about the iPad – but seriously, it’s way overpriced.) The Nokia tablet is totally worthless, except they have a good version of Bubble Breaker on there.

Apparently I’m easily amused and totally confused.

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