After a little delay due to the tsunami warning, Unconferenz 2010 was held at KCC on March 20th. This was the third annual Unconferenz and I was quite impressed with this year’s discussions. I think either the participants’ interests are maturing or they’ve all figured out that social media cannot be used to make a quick buck. Either way, there was no talk about monetizing audiences in the sessions I attended. But, there was interesting insights into how businesses are using social media (blogs, chat, and social networking) for internal communication within the company; and using the big social networks for recruiting and market research.

Thanks again to Burt Lum for organizing the Unconferenz.

So I couldn’t sleep the other night and I someone added a comment to one of my Flickr pics and I didn’t have any sheep to count so I figured it would be a great time to sort through all 150 or so pics on my phone and e-mail them one by one to Flickr.

All in all, the camera on the Pre is quite good for a point and shoot and has been very convenient to whip out at a moment’s notice. I ain’t giving up the D90 for this though.

My Palm Pre Set on Flickr

Well it’s been a bit more than a week and my first impression fascination should be out of my system. I still think the Pre is a keeper, but here are things that others will find useful.

Keyboard is small but workable. I have a iPod touch that I keep in a pocket at the same time as I carry my Pre in my belt holster. I have used the Apple touch screen keyboard heavily when I was trying to use the Touch for my mobile e-mail. It just didn’t work for me, because of all the reasons others have complained about already. The Pre’s keyboard is one notch better than the Touch’s keyboard. The little keys are just enough for me to focus my attention on while I type with my thumbs. However, I must concentrate to find the keys with my thumbs. I would not call this touch typing. That said, it is a workable solution and I find myself reaching for my Pre rather than my touch when I want to type a quick message. The keyboard on my old Treo 700p was not any larger but it is easier to find keys because the gap between keys are more pronounced. The Pre’s keys are too level, when you run your thumb across them, you can’t quite tell where the edges of the keys are.

The camera is a bit better than average in both image quality and ease of use. Low light situations are improved by the flash, but the effective range is 2 – 3 feet. Macro photography is out of the question, minimum focus distance is nine inches by my guess. E-mailing the photo to Flickr for uploading is a snap, as is Twitpic.

More thoughts about the apps and music player later. It’s after midnight already.

So a couple weeks ago my e-mail client on my Treo 700p died. It would send the Treo into reboot hell whenever I launched. In the four years or so prior to that, it was probably the best mobile e-mail program I could ask for. But, there no point to naming names now, since the makers of that software sold out to Palm and are no longer selling new licenses.

Anyway, I got in line just in the nick of time on Saturday. Turns out the Sprint store had 25 units in stock, I was the 24th in line and one of the guys ahead of me bought two.

After my first 36 or so hours with the Pre, I feel comfortable enough that I will keep it. The only really big concern of mine was the battery life. On Saturday, I ran the battery down from 90-ish percent down to below 50% in two hours while I was setting it up and trying out everything. This morning, I intended to buy a spare battery and another charger. However, I decided that I would try to get through one day one a single charge just to see if the battery could be coaxed into making it through the day.

I charged the Pre overnight and unplugged it from the wall around 7 a.m. As I write this it is now around 11:30 p.m. and the battery is at 57%. Admittedly, I used the Pre rather lightly today because I expected the battery life to suck. However, I am now confident that the Pre will survive my normal work day.

I configured my Pre to extend battery life without too many tradeoffs.

• I disabled wi-fi and bluetooth.
• I left location services and GPS enabled. But only because I forgot to disable them. I will likely leave these enabled in the future, it doesn’t seem to be too much of a drain.
• I set e-mail to only check for new mail once per hour

During the course of the day, I checked e-mail about a half dozen times and I left Tweed (the only WebOS twitter client so far) on in the background. Although Tweed was running in the background, I don’t think it queries Twitter’s API unless it is in the foreground.

So bottom line, battery is suitable for every day use if the above caveats are acceptable to you. I’ll probably get another battery just for those rare occasions when I use the phone a lot. Well, that’s a lot to say just about battery life. It is 11:30 so I’ll leave the rest for another day.

Zapatag is a site for reporting cars who have cut you off, parked illegally, or have Darwin award envy. Mind you, no action will be taken because of your report. Zapatag is just a outlet for you to vent your frustration.

Zapatag has the pre-requisite mashup of web services to be part of the Web 2.0 crowd including Twitter integration, avatar pics, and a Google map for every license plate. There are a couple hundred license plates listed so far, mostly from Hawaii but a few others scattered around the mainland U.S.

Unsurprisingly, I haven’t used Zapatag as it was intended. I don’t really care enough to warn the Internet of bad drivers. So, I’ve been Zapping interesting license plates or notable vehicles. I include a pic whenever I can. I’m kind of anxious to see if any license plate will become a repeat offender on this site. As of now there hasn’t been a single plate listed by more than one person. There are no names to connect plates with drivers and usually no pics of either the cars or drivers.

One interesting thing I’ve found is that none of the license plates on Zapatag will show up in a search engine unless you type the contents of a license plate in a comment or description field. CORRECTION: Sometimes a plate will picked up in search engines through the Zapatag Twitter feed. I’ve tried searching for plates I’ve zapped in Google, Yahoo, MS Live and Altavista. I’m not sure if this should be called a bug or a feature, but I’m leaning towards “feature”. I bet you’ve never tried Googling your own license plate…but you will now. I’m a bit relieved that my license plates don’t return anything of interest.

All in all, Zapatag looks like a promising toy to add to your collection of wacky websites. If anything, I’ll bet that Tweeting about cars you see on the road will become more entertaining.