What a ride home tonight! Dreadful dreadful rain, soaked through, but my bike's performance! I just can't believe it. Riding up Peckham Rye in the heavy rain I actually overtook a fit young guy on his Ridgeback. I mean, I was tailgateing him up the hill and I thought, hmm, how much can I push this, so I upped my pedaling and tried to overtake, and just about made it. I thought, I'd best keep pedaling and I did...ALL THE WAY UP THE HILL!

Clearly my new handle bar stem has made quite a difference to my riding. And it feels better for my back too. Anyway I got home and saw a little package waiting for me. New for 2006 - Cateye Strada. It's like a iPod Nano-esque cycle computer. A fair few more functions than my Sigma 500 (which was broken) and no buttons (just like a Mighty Mouse!), you just rock it to change mode (just like a Mighty Mouse!). Perfect cycle computer for a Mac user, clearly.

Oh and did I say how thin it is? It's THIN!

Thin is so...2006. Really.

Tags: Cateye, Thin

I got a call from a company offering me a phone upgrade. This is the nth time I've had one of these, but this time it was a friendly English voice so I thought I'd play along. I asked which phones could I upgrade to? Well, only one caught my interest. I went to an Orange shop to look at the phone, and I asked if these callers were scammers: apparently not, and I was due an upgrade, so I got one from the shop.

And here it is charging on my Apple Keyboard. It's a Motorola SLVR L7. It has all the features that were state of the art two years ago (MP3 player, Bluetooth, Quad-Band, high-res colour display, VGA camera). So, in this mega-pixel, 3G, WiFi, hi-fi world, it's not exactly cutting edge, and its got the old Motorola interface (although when I tried it in the shop it seemed OK, and friends with Motos thought it was OK too). It has one feature though that got me:

It's just so THIN. I know, the RAZR was thin, but I hate flips and this is even thinner. It's less than half as thick as my old phone (Nokia 6600). My Housemate thinks I should have got a Nokia, and I would have, if they made a small thin phone that's free on Orange upgrade. Maybe next time.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that it also comes with headphones and a 64MB card for music. Reading on web forums, a fair few people got this phone thinking it was the iTunes phone. It is the iTunes phone, of course, but only on Cingular in the US.

It doesn't matter anyway, because I found iTunemywalkman, which I'll be testing out tonight. The key feature of this program is re-encoding, although I think my phone does some form of AAC.

Just turned on comments, if that works, and hope you like the new theme.

Tags: SLVR, Thin