I've been predicting the death of big box retail for a while now. I first predicted (and I think we'll soon see, accurately) Circuit City would go, and then they would be followed a few years later by Best Buy. This is due to a number of reasons (mostly due to simple economics regarding the cost of ownership of physical space vs. a website and a few warehouses), but one reason was that the brick and mortar retailers just weren't doing anything creative. They have been selling mostly the same things for two decades now. However, I happened into my local Best Buy today, and I have to say, they are doing a pretty good job of proving me wrong.

Those of you keeping up with my news updates know that I swapped my trusty HTC 8525 for an even trustier HTC Fuze a few weeks ago. Whenever I get a new phone, one of the first things that I do is get a cover for it. Now, as far as phone covers go, I *HATE* the leather ones that AT&T always has at their store. They're just so tacky, huge, and generally make using the phone a process, which is not what I want in a device that I'm constantly using for many different things throughout the day. With my old 3125 "Star Trk", I discovered that the Internet presents many different options in case covers, and ended up going with a very sleek silicone cover. For the 8525, because of the sliding nature of the phone, there really wasn't a similar case, so I went with one that had a hard shell, which had a similar look to the phone itself. However...I was never very happy with that solution. I decided to look around for other options once I got my Fuze.

Today we received a dumping of snow, probably around 5-6" (which is pretty impressive for still being in the month of November). As people usually do, someone was speeding down our narrow, bumpy, dirt road, and with the addition of ice and snow, this was the result...

Over the weekend I decided to upgrade my AT&T 8525 smartphone for the new-new model, the HTC "Fuze" (the one in-between was the Tilt, so I skipped a generation). I looked around YouTube and there weren't a lot of reviews out, so I went ahead and put two of them together. The first one is just a simple overview of the device; the second one focuses on three of my favorite features: GPS, FM Radio, and Windows Remote Desktop. Check them out, they're already pretty popular on YouTube!