Haha, this one is funny: I was checking the front page of Geeks.com (great people behind this shop btw) and saw that their No1 selling item is a 19″ Acer TFT LCD monitor this week. Obviously, the buyers can’t resist the fact that this is a widescreen 1440×900 19″ monitor. It sounds so cool. And yet, they could have saved as much as $45 if they would go for a 17″ SXGA 1280×1024 monitor instead. But nooooo…. this is a 19″ monitor, it’s bigger! And it runs a higher resolution!

Does it really?

1440×900 = 1,296,000
1280×1024 = 1,310,720

Yes, these widescreen 19″ monitors have 14,720 fewer pixels than the 17″ SXGA monitors! No, the pixel count difference is not significant, but it’s there (the difference is only about a 121×121 square of pixels).

SXGA on a 17″ monitor is more than enough to work comfortably, plus you will have more pixels available than on that widescreen 19″. But this is a great example how people don’t know how to shop. They don’t research deeper. They know 1-2 buzzwords and they go for it.

Sure, there are reasons to buy that specific 19″ widescreen monitor instead of the same model at 17″ instead: if the user has eye problems and needs bigger pixels, or because he watches too many DVDs or pirated DivX movies and likes that widescreen format better. But honestly… Only a few people would have bought this monitor for these specific two reasons. The large majority bought it because they think they get “more” than the normal SXGA 1280×1024 monitors…

But it seems that they don’t know how to multiply…

I just don’t understand why people get RaZR phones. I really don’t. Granted, they are thin, although not overall very small (the classic RaZR for example, is pretty wide). More over, the Motorola phones (the ones running their proprietary mini-OS) have the worst user interface than any other cellphone in the market. The most confusing, ugly, unattractive UI is Motorola’s.

And yet, these phones account for more than 40% of the US market. Almost everyone has one! From my two favorite actors to Joe and Jane. Why? Why everyone gets this ugly thing? This is something I will never figure out.

However, what I am mostly interested in a cellphone is the web browser. And on top of the problems I mention above, the MiB Motorola browser is an even bigger disaster. It just doesn’t render properly anything. Not WAP, not cHTML, not XHTML. The developer must cut corners from all fronts to get this piece of sh*t to work properly.

Anyways, the MOTOKRZR K1 came out recently and Michael from MobileBurn was very kind to send me some shots of the browser rendering osnews (look below). I have to specifically autoredirect the MiB browser to an even simpler web page (about 3 KB of text+data instead of 28 KB) to make it go through. And even then, I get reports that the older, V3i, model doesn’t work at all with that (almost validated) page and they can’t figure out why: either a specially buggy version of the browser, or Cingular’s proxy not allowing this phone to render non-WAP pages… What a freaking mess.