This is the first of two web sites for bird watchers that I’m reviewing. I’ve been a keen birder since the mid ’80s and part of the appeal is  not only the birds and the excitement of finding something unusual; but also my love of lists and statistics. So I went looking online for tools for birders to record and share their sightings.

First up is www.birdpost.com. This is a great site for recording your sightings, it’s attractive to look at and has some really great features wrapped up in a modern and functional interface. When you log in you’re presented with a page showing your life list in the main part of the page with your recent sightings and a picture of the currently selected bird in the left column.

At the top of the main section are three tabs to show you the:

• List View that shows the species in a list (obvious)
• Image View that shows thumnails of each of your species seen
• Map View, a Google map that can be used to locate where you saw each sighting.

You can add an observation and record basic information:

• The species
• When you saw it (date and time)
• Tags
• Whether it was in flight
• Proximity (10 feet, 100 feet, 0.25  miles or 0.5 miles)
• Notes

Here the site starts to let itself down, note that the only way to include a location is to put it free hand into the tags. More on this later.

Once you’ve added your observations they’re available to add to the map. You do this by pulling down your list of unmapped sightings and clicking a balloon next to each sighting. You can then position the balloon on the map and save its position. You can zoom in and drag the balloon to exactly the position you saw the bird. It’s pretty cool and when you roll your mouse over a balloon on the map up pops the details of the sighting and a thumbnail picture of the bird. Nice!

 Overall the site is a very good piece of work; but it has some short-comings that prevented the site receiving a full five stars. The first of these, and for me the biggest issue, is the lack of location details. When I record a sighting where I saw the bird is important becuase I want to see all the birds recorded at that site, and then roll these sightings up to a wider geographical area. Let me give you an example:

• Birds seen at the site list
• In that town list
• In that county list
• In that country list
• In that continent list
• Global list

So a bird seen, say, at home will automatically appear in my home list, Ballinascarthy list, County, Cork list, Ireland list etc. Birdpost.com has a flat tags structure that doesn’t lend itself well to this sort of hierachy. You have to remember to put every location into the tags for each sighting, it really doesn’t work well.

The next issue I have is with the map facility. This is great functionally; but has one drawback. When you add a sighting it’s flagged as unmapped until you map it. Now if you’re a birder like me you record just about every sighting. So at home I record each species seen each day. However if I enter them all into birdpost.com they’re all flagged as unmapped. Before long the list of unmapped sightings becomes huge and unmanagable. The antidote to this is to map all the sightings; but then the map becomes saturated with every bird you’ve ever seen. There really needs to be an option to discard a sighting from the unmapped list and not map it.

Final gripes. Performance is very, very slow. There’s a lot of AJAX and other Javascript going on and the site really suffers from some pretty awful performance. There’s also a few bugs in the site that will pop-up lists of Javascript errors and debug, though overall the site is stable. I’ve also not found any way to export the sightings so there’s no way to back-up the data.

In summary, a great looking site with some great features; but also some functional drawbacks, some bugs and some very poor performance.

In the past I’ve reviewed Mind Manager – an excellent piece of software for producing mind maps – a tool I that forms part of my daily work flow for information gathering and organizing. However I’ve recently discovered something called "Personal Brain" from TheBrain.com that really takes mind mapping to a whole new level.

The problem I’ve always had with a mind map is that it’s essentially only two dimensional. You start at the ‘root’ node and work outwards in a hierarchy. You can create any number of hierarchy from the centre; but problems start to occur when you want to link from one hierarchy to another. Things start to get complicated and a complex map can be difficult to navigate and locate the information you need.

The Personal Brain takes a more 3 dimensional approach to organizing data. You can link nodes to multiple parents and to multiple children allowing for a network of cross links between information nodes. In addition to linking parents and children you can ‘jump’ create links to other topics. These are links to topics that are related but don’t form part of the current parent / child hierarchy. I guess an example might help:

Here we see my TulligWeather server is a child of Servers; but because it is weather related there’s a jump link to Met Eireann. In practice this makes it simple to create complex relationships between topics and yet make them easy to navigate.

As well as creating the topics you can add notes and attachments to them as well as giving them a type and adding tags. The latter allows you to view the tags as a virtual topic showing you all the topics with that tag. Here’s a shot showing a PHP tag and it’s associated topics.

Full search capabilities and and trail of recently accessed items make locating items in unrelated parts of a map easy. Additionally you can pin major topics to the top of the work area to help facilitate moving around different parts of your ‘brain’.

Personal Brain is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. That last one is a big bonus for me as I’m using Linux most of the time at present. The Linux version does have some features that don’t work like dragging files onto a topic to create an attachment; but for most things there’s a valid work around and I haven’t found anything that I really couldn’t do. There’s 3 versions available; free, Core and Pro. The free version has quite a few restrictions; but should still be usable. The Pro version includes integration with Microsoft Office, integrated calendar and a number of other useful features; but is very expensive at $249. I’ve been trialing the Pro version which is die to expire in a few days. Due to current financial constraints I’ll be switching to the free version at that time and I’ll let you know how that works out.

I did a lot of research on-line before I bought this product, read lots of reviews, though most of these reviewed what was in the box. Unfortunately I failed to connect with the ETEN European Users forum. Had I done so I would have thought again about buying this device.

What really swayed me towards the X800 was the VGA screen. There’s no doubt that this is much higher resolution than similar products from HTC, Palm, Toshiba & the like available at the time. The reports that the CPU was ’slightly under powered’ didn’t deter me. The lure of the screen pulled me in.

I also wanted a device with Windows Mobile 6 so that I could fully sync my Outlook calendar and use Microsoft Office and other productivity tools. The X800 also came with Spb Mobile Shell which is a great enhancement to the basic Today screen.

So what went wrong? Given that the phone was bought to support my business the reliability problems I experienced rendered it worse than useless.

• The phone would frequently lock up and need rebooting at least once a day. This would often happen when a call was incoming and so this was more than just an inconvenience.
• It would often drop incoming calls when I pressed the answer button. On one occasion someone (Unknown number) tried five times to call in quick succession, every time I pressed answer the line was dead. Another reboot required and probably lost business.
• Call quality was poor with a lot of echo on the line and a lot of static too.
• The camera quality is very poor for a 2 megapixel camera. OK, not essential for business; but it’s something I like to use.
• Often the phone would go completely crazy and start playing an Arctic Monkeys MP3 track at high volume. Most embarrassing when talking to a client and also requiring a reboot to fix.
• The voice command will switch on at random. Turning it off would only temporarily alleviate the problem as it would come back on again a short time later. Another reboot.
• Overall the device is badly underpowered and most operations are sluggish.
• Battery life is dreadful. The phone needs about 2 hours charging a day to last 24 hours. It’s a lot better with all the radios switched off.
• Support from ETEN is very, very poor and really only limited to the occasional release of new firmware. My device had the latest firmware when it was delivered.

Some time after buying the X800 I was surfing the net and came across what has to be the best kept secret ETEN users have, the European users group forum. There’s some real experts on this site providing updated firmware and fixes for the problems the X800 has. I’ve installed a fix for poor screen performance that greatly enhanced the response of the touch screen. However I’ve not tried a firmware upgrade yet as this can completely wreck the phone if it goes wrong.

The Glofiish X800 does have some good features:

• There’s no doubt that the screen is good with a nice VGA resolution.
• Wifi performance is reasonable though Internet Explorer often hangs. This is probably a problem with IE rather than the phone.

So not many redeeming features. I’m now using a fairly basic mobile phone (review to follow) which also syncs with Outlook and gives me a lot more confidence that I’m going to be able to answer all calls and won’t need rebooting. Now I’ve an alternative I might try replacing the firmware with a version from the user group. If this fixes the issues I’ll update this review, otherwise I’ll just continue to use it for wifi access.