It’s the time of the year for superlative lists, and I don’t want to feel left out. So here is my personal list of the Top Things of 2005:

Best Movie

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It had everything that you could ever want in a movie. I laughed, I cried, I cowered, and I laughed and cried again. And I’m not alone in loving this movie. Just check out it’s box office take of over $200 million and you can see how this easily beats all the other movies in this lackluster movie season.

Honorable Mention: Serenity (which could also have qualified in the DVD category). I loved this movie and spent most of the year waiting for it to come out. I talked about this movie so much at work, that people actually went out to see it to see what the hell I was talking about. I really enjoyed it and wanted to give it the number one slot, but it just didn’t have the box office success that all us Firefly fans had hoped.

Best DVD

The Complete Thin Man. Margaret hooked me on Nick and Nora by watching some of the movies on TCM. I was overjoyed when I heard this box set of ALL of their movies came out. There is just something great about watching this married couple who are so totally in love with each other solve murders and the like. All while balancing a drink in one hand…

Best Book

HP on the list again with Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. J.K has become and expert at crafting an entrancing story that works for all ages. And talk about keeping cliff-hanger to drag you in to the next book. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There is not way she can leave this world alone when she is done with the Harry Potter series.

Best Blog

Without a doubt, Boing Boing is the best blog I’ve read all year. Always interesting, always unusual, and never the same old crap. In the past week, I had at least 10 posts that I had to send on to other people because of how interesting they were. And it always out scoops other blogs, so the things you read are very timely.

Best CD

Elephunk by the Black Eyed Peas. Yeah, they aren’t very deep. But sometimes you have to listen to some music where the words aren’t all that important and the only thing that matters is that kickin beat. And BEP doesn’t disappoint in that category. But beware: it can be hard to get some of their hooks out of your head.

Best Magazine

Make: Technology on your own Time. It’s a little expensive for a magazine, but it the only magazine that I get that I read cover to cover, without fail. In depth coverage on how to “make” things. How to add a computer to your car. Brew your own biodiesel. Attach a camera to your kite and take photos. All kinds of not-so-useful-but-fun-anyway kinds of things.

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All the indications have been there. Snow. Cold Weather. Late Openings. Crowded Malls. Decorations. A Tree in the House. Lights up outside. Even the stoplights blinking a bright red and green. I should have known that Christmas was right around the corner. And yet I am still unprepared.

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I lament the fact that cell phone manufacturers can’t put together the perfect cell phone. It’s not that the technology isn’t there; All the features I am looking for exist. The problem is that they exist on about 3 different phones! Not very practical if you ask me.

Required Features

“Required Features” are features that seem to come as “options” on most Smartphones today. This would be things beyond data service, text messages and PIM features (since those features are the defining features to make a phone a “Smartphone”). But they are features that I think should become standard on future Smartphones.

1. Bluetooth

Any non-entry level handsets produces today should support Bluetooth. I want to be able to use my bluetooth headset with it wirelessly so I can leave it in my pocket and just mess with the earpiece. I want to be able to sync my address book from my computer without having to purchase an additional cable. I want to be able to use the data service on my phone with my computer when I am stuck in a hotel without WiFi and need that e-mail fix. I want to play around with the control that Blue Phone Elite gives me. In short, I want bluetooth (You hear me Danger? I’m talking about the Sidekick…)

2. Not Motorola

I currently have a Motorola V600 phone. It actually comes close to having all the features I would want in the perfect phone. Except that its user interface appears to have been thrown together last minute and is unintelligible. It is so bad, that I won’t consider any future Motorola phones (This includes the hot RAZOR and PEBL). It really makes me miss my Nokia 3650, even with its difficult old-fashioned rotary keypad.

My 3650 had all the great integrations that the V600 lacks. Have a picture you have taken and need to send it someone nearby over bluetooth? Nokia had that option right at your fingertips. The V600? I’m not even sure where to start looking, because it is definitely not right by the photo album…

3. QWERTY Keyboard

I don’t care how good your predictive text features are. It makes me think too hard when trying to compose a message. And trust me, it is taking most of my braincells to put the words together. Trying to figure out the right key press combo to get the message out overloads my little brain.

4. Advanced data access

I’ve got to be able to read my e-mail without firing up a crappy WAP browser. And while I’m at it, a full featured web browser. This is the first feature I’ve required that doesn’t really exist today. Palm and RIM both have improved ones, but they still aren’t great. There is still a lot of work in this area to make all web pages available on a smaller screen.

5. SDK

You’ve got to let me write apps for your platform. This worked to great success with the original Palm, to the point that there are now a couple hundred thousand Palm apps out there (including 3 by me). If you needed an app that does X, chances are somebody else had that same itch and hopefully scratched it before you got there. Closed platforms can only hurt you.

2. World Phone

If I’m going to be paying top dollar for a new phone, I want to be able to make calls wherever I go without any hassle. This means a GSM phone and either Cingular or T-Mobile.

Preferred Features

These are the features that wouldn’t be a show-stopper if the phone didn’t have them. But the perfect one would…

1. Flip Phone

This is actually the best part of the V600. It flips up nice and small and I can easily wear it on my belt (and mine shows the full year of wearing it that way from the numerous dings on the outside). Now of course this is a large thing to ask with a QWERTY keyboard, but come on people. Be creative!

2. Camera

It is nice to always have some sort of camera with you. But I don’t use it nearly enough to make it a requirement. I could get by without it.

Conclusion

So I’ve looked for some phones that meet my criteria. The Sidekick II lacks bluetooth. The BlackBerrys have a terrible form factor and also lack cameras. The IPAQ’s cost nearly as much as a new laptop. So far, only the Treo 650 even comes close, and it still a bit pricey (since I can’t get it from T-mobile).

So please, Mr. Cell Phone Manufacturer. Take a break from being innovative in the form factor arena (you hear me Nokia?) and get the feature set right first. Once somebody gets all the right features in there, then we can worry about making the form factor something innovate.

Footnotes

The title of this article is from a joke that I don’t remember the punchline to. It starts out:

The Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and a Smart Blonde walk into a bar…

I also want to add that while I wrote this in Decemeber of 2005, I could have easily written this exact same article in November of 2004 when I was previously looking at cell phones.

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I made a bunch of Christmas Cookies this weekend. Nowhere near as many as Margaret and I made when we first started dating. But more than we made last year (which I remember as being a pretty light year). And I don’t think we are done yet. We’ve done:

• Snikerdoodles
• Press Cookies
• Peanut Butter cookies with Kisses

Press Cookies always make me think of Christmas, since that is the only time of year my family ever brought out the cookie press to press the cookies. And then we would get together as a family and put jimmies and sprinkles on them to decorate them before placing in the oven. Even my father got into the decorating act. His favorite: Chocolate jimmies. If you put enough of them on, it gives the cookie a chocolate flavor as well.

I remember back in High School my friend Bruce decided to make Snickerdoodles for our German class. Whatever recipe he found, it took like 8 sticks of butter and they turned out as the heaviest cookies I’ve ever had. The recipe I follow uses shortening and the cookies usually come out quite light.

We still have a few more kinds of cookies we plan on making this year. Shortbread cookies, Sugar Cookies, maybe Gingerbread men, possibly Chocolate Chip. There is no way we are doing Oatmeal Scotchies this year. I’ve been trying for at least 3 years, and have never gotten a batch to turn out correctly. My mother has quite making them as well, for much the same reason. Oh, and we’ll probably do a batch of School Cookies for my Father-in-law when he comes for New Years. There are quite a few cookies that we won’t be making this year because they are just too hard and we don’t have the time. Things like snowballs, klotchkies (which I am sure I didn’t even come close to spelling right), nut cups, etc.

Our full list of Christmas cookies is a delightful mix of the cookies from my childhood and from my wife’s. The best part is that we both have favorites that the other brought to the relationship (I love the shortbread cookies). A few years back my mother gave me a floppy disk with all her Christmas cookie recipes on it. We have used that disk every year. And every year it gets harder and harder to find a computer with a floppy drive to read it. We have an unbelievable 8 computers in our house, and only 2 of them have floppy drives. But now the recipe list is on my laptop where it will stay until next year.

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Don’t get me wrong: I like what Peter Jackson did with the Lord of the Rings movies. He translated an epic series of books into an epic series of movies. He also happened to make a ton of money for everyone involved in the movies.

Mr. Jackson’s newest work is due out on the big screen later on this week (Wednesday 12/14/05 to be exact). I’m not sure I’m actually going to go see it. I’ve never seen to original; Nor the remake. I have seen the new trailers, but I didn’t get the “I have to see this” feeling from them. I have always figured that I would see it some day, just maybe not in the theaters.

But that may be changing. I was listening to the radio this morning and they were discussing it. And it sounded really good. Action. Romance. Suspense. Computer Graphics. And a compelling storyline. All things that make good movies. But the whole reason they were talking about it on the show this morning is because two reviews came out today giving it 4 stars. So it is starting to be hyped for a big box office this weekend. The question remains, should I believe the hype?

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