The Garmin GPS Forerunner 305 is a compact physical-activity monitor and personal trainer packed as a hand-wrist watch. This Garmin utility is an Amazon #1 Best Seller in the Sports & Fitness GPS department.

The following contain information on this product as well as handpicked reviews from online forums, blogs and stores’ customer reviews.

Videos describing and reviewing the Garmin GPS 305

What TheyThought

Many people had good things to say on this product. You can find some general enthusiasm about the 305 in these places: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and this one from the official Garmin blog.

A few improvements in this version of the Garmin product are worth stressing:

Improved Accuracy: Inspector Gadget copared the 305 to her Nike+iPod GPS sprots shoe and found the shoe to be as high as 20% off mark from the 305. See here as well.

Improved Sattelite Reception Under Trees and Buildings: See here and here.

Easy to use: See here.

Hate posts on this product are scarce and not so easy to spot.
Here are some we found and thought are worth citing:Buldgy : Here and here.

Altitude Problems : Here and here.

Bad Customer Support : Here and here.

Reset Problem : Here here and in the comments here.

Battery Issues : Here and a very crafty post by Chriss Bennet on how to supply power to the unit on the road.

No Mac OS compatibility

No use Indoor : Running on a treadmil can’t be monitored with the 305. A special add on needs to be purchased for that. This is probably the only place where the Nike+ option wins over the GPS measurement devices.

Review Hubs:

Gizmodo.com

Price

Curious about what people who use the Apple iPhone have to say ? Well, You’ve come to the right place.

The Apple iPhone is a piece of digital art. Smooth, beautiful and colorful, feels good just to hold it in your hands close to your chest. No wonder it’s become “Gadget of the year” here. People all around the web keep raving about it non-stop.

The new iPhone by Apple is a mobile phone, a multi-media player and a web browser.

The iPhone was launched on June 29th 2007 and by September 9th (74 days later) 1 million units were sold. Current price is $399. Apparently, a new iPhone model will be released by March 2008. By Feb 2008, Apple will release an iPhone SDK open to third-party applications.

What TheyThought

Here’s the official spec sheet by Apple, and this is a walk-through over the iPhone’s major functions.

Many major features are missing:

• 3G for fast browsing. Edge is too slow for our times.
• GPS
• No MMS which means there is no option for sending a picture to a non-iPhone/non-Wifi phone
• Medium quality camera for stills
• No video capture
• Web browser has does not support Flash

Additional resources: 1, 2, 3

Minor features are missing as well:

• Bluetooth restricted to headset
• no file browser
• web browser is slow and buggy
• no customized ringtones
• no voice/speed dialing

See: 1, 2

Size should also be considered. The pictures and the videos actually make the iPhone appear smaller than what it is in reality.

Smashing and crash-testing the iPhone has become somewhat of a hobby for a few:
Scratch, crash, blend, hammer, drown, and many more. Oy !

The Apple / AT&T pack deserves special attention as many out there had a lot of angry things to say about that. Many people hate the Apple / AT&T pack that forced iPhone buyers to sign up with the latter. AT&T is quite happy with that pack, and so is Apple.
See some references to these posts, below.

Recently, Apple restricted sales of the iPhone trying to fight back hackers. So now you can only get up-to 2 units and only pay by Credit Card. See here.

Further resources

iPhone affection:
I love my iPhone… 1, 2, 3, 4
I love my iPhone but hate AT&T: 1, 2, 3, 4
I love my iPhone, hate AT&T but Napster is a good add: here.
I hate my iPhone… 1, 2, 3
I say hate but I mean love ! 1

“issues”

• Vista 64 bit and Sync problems
• Heating up quickly
• Firmware updated kills non-Apple apps, and some prefer to downgrade from 1.1.1 to the older hacked image which offers much more

CNET customer reviews here.
About.com iPhone review.
PC Magazine review here and another one here.

What WeThought - Our Bottom Line

The iPhone is stunning - no argument here. But don’t let your head spin. Judging by what so many people say, this product is still not yet ripe for the buying and needs more time to get bugs fixed and essential features put in. Mid 2008 will probably the best time to grab it.

Exec Summary

When looking into buying a web hosting package, use these rules of thumb:

• Buy hosting with a hosting company, and buy a domain name from a registrar.
• Avoid Review sites that are affiliated with the top chosen companies.
• If it’s too good to be true, then it isn’t. No one can allow for hundreds of sites to have endless bandwidth/storage/CPU for a buck a month.

This is a summary of the information we found, with our own 2 cents of experience along side.

Rank	Name	TheyThought	WeThought
1		Great uptime, Great price, Reliable, Reasonable support.	Reliable, Solid shared hosting outfit.
2		Good performance, Reliable	This site is run on HostGator currently.
3		Not much - good or bad.	A bit less than reasonable uptime, No money-back guarantee option.
4		Spammers and too many billing issues here.	OK performance, Bad Support, Anti-user control panel.
5		This is the smaller, bit-cheaper alternative to BlueHost	N/A
6		Downtime seems to be an issue.	N/A
7		Hard to find Yahoo-Hosting Fans out there.	Slow, Restrictive (only allows TCP port 80 out of server), Expensive
8		Too many angry faces !	N/A

Detailed Review

The web hosting business is a rapidly growing and evolving business. There are hundreds of millions of top-level domain names and websites out there, making the domain-name registration and web hosting business a multi billion dollar market.

Web hosting companies provide a service for hosting personal or commercial website and online applications, renting their computation and networking resources as well as technical support and guidance. Every eCommerce site, small and large, is most likely run from some hosting company’s data center.

There are 3 basic types of hosting packages:

The list of companies we sought opinions about:
• Yahoo Small Business
• Bluehost
• 1and1
• HostGator
• Parcom.net
• AnHosting
• HostMonster
• LunarPages

More leading brands not covered in this item:
• StartLogic
• PowWeb
• iPowerWeb
• Web.com

1and1

BlueHost

HostGator

Yahoo Small Business

Parcom

Information on this hosting company is scarce - good or bad. Our personal experience with them has been ok aside for two things: price (relative to features) and uptime (about 97% according to our experience).

AnHosting / Midphase

Information on this hosting company is scarce.
There seems to be some talk about downtime, e.g. here, here and here. A somewhat vanilla review is here.

HostMonster

LunarPages

Epinions.com has a review list here on LunarPages. Most opinions there are outdated from 2005 and back.

Here’s a quick poll on web hosting, on the DigitalPoint forum:

Unfortunately the way this poll is run is misleading since the companies’ share is the market is not the equal, making it more likely that the larger companies will have more unsatisfied customers.

A grain of salt: How to properly read online reviews on web hosting packages.

This is our first go here and we’re very excited about it. We chose to set afoot with a special book, and it may be just a first-timers’ luck because it seems it’s very popular and highly appraised.

Deceptively Delicious is a cookbook specializing in healthy food that children will like, whether they know it or not.

It was extremely easy to find reviews on this book although it has been published only a week ago. There are literally hundreds of posts and discussion threads about this book and its author, although it’s publicly accessible only for only a couple of weeks.

A word on Jessica Seinfled

Jessica aged 36, once a public relations exec now running a non-profit organization she founded called Baby Buggy that provides essentials for infants and children in the NY city area ! Married to Jerry, has three kids.

Jessica recently started a blog here.

What TheyThought ?

Con A very few people didn’t like the book or its concept. Some resented the taste or texture and some questioned its nutritional value. Others didn’t like the deceptive strategy. Samples: 1, 2.

Pro A crushing majority had very good things to say and complements were flying all over. Many admired the the fresh attitude and how it actually works on both children and grown ups. A few nutritionists and paediatricians commended its nutritious value and benefit for the health of kids. The Sneaky Chef also comes up in some discussions but the claim is that JS’s recipes are simpler and easily done. Samples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

These opinions are coming from both people who merely saw the Oprah show and had something to say, as well as from brave explorers who actually tried the recipes on themselves.

What WeThought ?

Kudos to Mrs. Seinfeld. The book seems like a brilliant idea well executed. This makes it the 3rd commendable thing that Jessica can take credit for: her family, her charity and her book.

It’s no wonder this book has rocketed to the top of Amazon, B&N and HarperCollins bestsellers.

Here’s some deceptively delicious eye candy:

Price

Buy.com	$13.47
Amazon	$14.97
Target.com	$14.97
Barnes & Noble	$17.46
HarperCollins	$24.95

Further resources

• Jessica’s blog
• Amazon Customer Reviews
• Vids: 1, 2
• Menu Plan Monday!
• MOMMY health & nutrition tips
• Not Deceptive Enough
• Seinfeld’s “Deceptively Delicious” Cookbook
• Deceptively Delicious
• My New Best Friend
• Handy Chart of Purees for Seinfeld’s Cookbook
• Deceptive - yes. Delicious - possibly. Worth the time? Hmmm…
• Little White Cauliflower Lies…
• Moms reviews