Jakub Anderwald

I currently use HTC Touch Pro. It’s small, nice, easy to write on, functional. However, I bouyght it 1,5 years ago and since then there have been newer phones, bigger, faster, with more features.

I usually upgrade my phone every year or two, so I thought – it’s the time.

However, there is no good replacement for Touch Pro. There’s a thing called Touch Pro 2, but it’s just a minor refinement. Moreover, I had a look through HTC’s leaked plans for 2010, they don’t have anything with bigger screen and much better CPU and hardware keyboard. I would love to buy “HD2 Pro”, but it seems it’s not going to happen.

So I decided to do a software upgrade instead, to get the new features. However, it’s a pain in the back. If I don’t want to spend weeks tweaking and building my new mobile OS, I have to download one of the “custom built” ROMs, e.g. from XDA Developers. But they do have issues. They hang, they’re not as stable as the original OS, they miss some features, draw weird things on the screen etc.

How come Apple gives you the newest software, no matter if you have 3-year old iPhone or the new and shiny 3GS, and HTC / Microsoft don’t? Do they fear I won’t buy I new phone? Hell, I will buy, just make me a device with WVGA, Snapdragon CPU and hardware keyboad and I will gladly pay whatever ridiculous price you put on it.

If not, just let me upgrade my phone, don’t make me feel like I’m stuck with whatever I have because I bought it a year ago.

I have just upgraded my blog engine to Wordpress 2.5 Yep, I know it’s a bit early, but all the new features look promising, I’ve already seen some positive reviews of it, and – best of all – the new admin panel interface is very neat.

See the new admin interface yourselves:

And this is how it looked like in the old, 2.4 interface:

The new panel is more clear, colours are less intrusive, it’s much more web2.0-ish. Now we just need rounded corners and “make friend” button ;)

I found just one issue – the new multi-file picutre upload panel doesn’t work in Opera. But I’m getting used to new Javascript features not working in Opera…

Yesterday I upgraded my display for the Big One to a 24-inch Gateway FPD2485W. It’s a S-PVA, Pivotable large display that really makes sense to watch movies on.

My previous display was Sharp LL-T1811W, a regular TFT-TN 18″ LCD display. Such an upgrade always gives me the “wow”, since I upgraded from a two-class-behind equipment. This is what I intend to write about – your hardware upgrade policy.

We all have ou beloved machines. We tweak them one way or another. We play with them. We sometimes talk to them and yes, they speak back. Of course we all need to keep them in good shape and the best way to do it is to make sure they’re not running on outdated hardware, old technologies and don’t have unnecessary constraints. And that pays back – we’re not frustrated when something runs slowly, we don’t have those “too little memory” errors and we don’t hear our drives constantly scratching for the swap file. We simply use them without problems.

It comes with a cost, though. That’s why we cannot (well, maybe some of you can – I can’t) afford to replace our hardware whenever a new generation / feature comes in. We have to settle down on one of the two policies:

Early adopter. You buy new equipment quite often. Sometimes just after it’s been released, but mostly when you read some reviews of it and make sure it’s worth upgrading. You can sell your previous equipment for a reasonable amount of money.

Every couple years. You replace your equipment only when it brakes, stops working or is unbereably slow and frustrating. Usually your old equipment is not worth a penny when get rid of it.

Of course these are two examples, your behaviours will be somewhere between one and another. I compared the costs of each methodology and they’re not that different, surprisingly. When you’re replacing your hardware that’s relatively new, you can sell it and get more than 70% of price of the new hardware, so you’re just paying up for the difference. On the other hand, most of your couple-years-old hardware can only be sold for little to nothing on eBay or similar auction systems, or just given as a gift to your family, friends. So you have to pay the full price for almost every upgrade. Of course your mileage may vary.

I personally prefer to upgrade only when needed – the biggest difference is the “wow” factor here. Two or three years in IT make a dramatic difference, so when you upgrade your stuff after that time, you’ll mostly see all the pros and little of the cons. And you don’t have to spend 2 weeks choosing and reading reviews for the things you want to buy – you can simply compare their declarative parameters, read two-three trusted reviews to make sure it’s not a dead-end product line, and you simply buy itfrom your local shop. Or order it on eBay.

This way I can gloat over my new display / drive / DVD recorder with a peace of mind, not worring if I could choose the “10 bucks more expensive, with 1 extra feature” competitor – I’m usually overwhelmed by the difference between my new toy and the old one.