If you’re tired of run-of-the-mill “standard” smartphones, it looks like this may be something that’s of interest.

Synapse Phones will take your order for a customised smartphone (running Android 2.2) and ship it in Q1 of 2011

Think about for what you use your smartphone and what you will do with it. For example if you are someone who loves to take thousands of pictures, you can choose the 12MP camera and a xenon flash for taking pictures at night or under bad lighting conditions or if you want to store your whole music collection on your smartphone just choose a high amount of memory.

Seems like a good idea – and the prices aren’t epically unreasonable either. I hope it works out as a good business.

As well as cutting the number of links in the Blogroll yesterday, I’m also in the process of cutting out a number of the domain names I own. In all cases I’ve had plans or ideas for them, but they’ve not been done, so I’m going to cut down on the outstanding list.

It may be that in time to come I regret this, but for the most part I’ve had those domains long enough that I really should’ve done something with them if I planned to. I’m keeping some – the ones where I’ve really got ideas – but a goodly number are going to fall by the wayside.

In some ways it annoys me that I’m giving up on these. In others, well, it seems like common sense to do so. I think that reducing the number of things on my “want to do/try” list might actually help me get the ones done that remain on the list once this purging process is over and done with.

Of course it might not, too.  We’ll see.

In having lots of other stuff on my mind last week and over the weekend, I missed out on some date fun.

I missed yesterday’s 10:10:10 on 10/10/10 .

I meant to do a post, but other stuff came up instead.

Bum.

Over the last three years, I’ve been using the xMarks service (formerly FoxMarks) to synchronise all my bookmarks between Home PC, Laptop, Work PC, and iPhone. It’s always been a free service – allbeit one I’d have happily paid for – that made life *so* easy when it comes to keeping bookmarks in sync.

So it’s really sad news today that xMarks has 90 days to live. I don’t know of a better service for synchronising bookmarks (and passwords) in the way that xMarks does, and it’s been awesomely useful for a very long time.

For me- and it’s a point they raise in that blog post – I would’ve happily paid for the service. Not loads – but £10 – £25 a year, certainly.

A very sad day.

Work today was a swine.

For a range of reasons we had to change a number of passwords today – never the most fun – and I’ve also got some stuff to run tonight as well.

Except of course I forgot what I’d changed the site passwords to. Arse.

Fortunately I figured a way of getting them back – all I will say on that score is that Snadboy’s “Revelation” is an awesome bit of kit yet again – so everything went according to plan, but all the same, what a day.

When I got the iPhone (and on previous phones before that) one of the best things I used was a service called Zyb.com, which allowed you to synchronise contacts to their online database from your old phone, and then pull them down to the new phone. It made life *so* much easier, allowing you to do in ten minutes what otherwise turned into a dragged out and nightmarish process of copying contacts across one by one.

When Herself’s mother got an iPhone recently, I planned to do the same thing using Zyb, but I couldn’t. Because Zyb.com is no more.

A couple of years back now, Vodafone bought out Zyb, because it was such a good service. At the time they said it would carry on being available, and they’d got no plans to shut it down. Now though, they’ve closed down Zyb, and relaunched it (kind of) as part of Vodafone 360°. It’s nowhere near as good, fast or useful as it was as Zyb.

I’m really annoyed by this – despite having been a subscribed/signed-up user to Zyb, I didn’t get any notifications about the service closing down. It’s only having done other research about it that I find Zyb closed on 31st July.

As yet I haven’t found a decent replacement for Zyb that was as smooth and painless (and fast) as Zyb. Vodafone 360 took nearly three hours to sync things, and even then it’s not as good. Any suggestions?