Category: Commentary

It’s not to our advantage that NBC wants to change the way the iTunes Store works with regard to their content. And while it’s true that this NBC/iTunes spat may hurt Apple more than it hurts NBC, it would behoove us as consumers to make our thoughts known here.

Both companies have shareholders, are profit-minded and would likely skin you if they needed something to write on. But of the two who do you think would be worse?

If you’re anything like me, you’re wary of NBC more.

[However. Paul Thurott is coming out on the side of Apple which makes me wonder if that really means Apple is in the wrong here. I mean, Thurott is never right about things.]

Tomorrow brings us a new release from Apple of “something”. And yes, we’re all waiting with bated breath. A WiFi iPod would be nice, for sure, though some might think I love my Nokia N800 more. Hm. It does Skype and stuff but it’s really so poor at everything that I find myself more than frustrated with it’s limitations. And I’m not talking about the areas I assume it would be poor – I’m talking about the areas you would assume it excels.

I find myself using the N800 at home while my partner monopolises my laptop. And as a result I find myself reading less RSS feeds, because the RSS reader is pants. And I find myself reading fewer threads on rpg.net because, well, the browser is too slow to resize and sometimes causes a slow reload. And I dislike using the email client because sometimes if it fails to connect it just exits ungracefully and for some other reason it doesn’t seem to do proper IMAP. It calls it IMAP but it’s not really. The only time it actually syncs the mailbox is on first reading. After that it really just acts like POP and the active sync between clients that I see with Mac OS X’s Mail and Webmail clients etc just doesn’t occur. It just doesn’t do IMAP right.

Skype is okay, considering I have about 10 people on my Skype buddy list and about two of them are ever online. Gizmo handles my AIM, Yahoo and MSN accounts but it’s so badly designed that it leaves me muttering. It’s so fricken slow for a start – and the text chat window when it eventually opens looks great until you start to type – and the virtual keyboard eats up 40% of the screen. Which is fine if you didn’t have a icon bar at the top of the screen eating another 30%. So the area to type in and view the history of a conversation amounts to 30% of the screen – about enough for 3 lines of text. To say the experience is wholly dissatisfying is about right – and explains to my friends who read this why I’m not online as much as I used to be (ie, it’s just too painful!)

I guess I’m going to be stuck for the “perfect device” for a long time.

Lastly I guess I have to spend some time on the reports from record company execs that devices like the iPod will soon be obsolete due to everyone thriving on a subscription model. It’s true, they’ve worked so well in the past, why the heck not.

Whatever you might say about the lack of an official iPhone SDK, there is something to be said for a controlled, tested environment.

Earlier today, my Nokia N800 died. Not in hardware, just refused to boot. what had I done? I’d installed Pidgin, MaemoMapper, XMaeme and a few other apps that weren’t endorsed by Nokia. Despite it being a Debian Linux machine, it refused to boot and there was no way to coax it back to life.

The only way was to re-flash it which meant I lost a few days work everything since my last backup. I didn’t lose anything I stored on external cards and I didn’t lose any mail, thanks to IMAP.

But yeah, pain in the butt.

I’m sure the N800 and the N770 before it have sold tens of thousands of units but I’m not sure they would ever outsell the iPhone – the hype monster of the modern era. And I’m sure there are folk out there hacking their iPhones now who really shouldn’t….

Hadley Stern of AppleMatters disagrees and maintains Apple is being arrogant. Maybe so, but it doesn’t make them wrong.

My N800 is working again and I did miss it. At least until I get an iPhone.

It’s been a while since I was a true gadgeteer. I shelved my trusty Newton MessagePad 2000 (upgraded) about 18 months after Newton Inc closed it’s doors and was re-absorbed into the Mothership. For a while I used a very functional Palm Vx which gave me a lot of joy and I spent the next few years being mostly resistant to gadget-lust with the various smartphones and whatnot that were making the rounds.

Back on July 21st, Damien gave a quick review of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet which Expansys were flogging for a reasonable 70 quid.

Gordon Murray from eWrite brought along his Nokia 770 Internet Tablet to Open Coffee Cork. A quick showing around and with a pricetag of €100 ex VAT and Walter decided to buy two, Rory bought one and Diarmuid bought four apparently. Walter’s Twitter evangelising of it then got Conor, myself, Niall and Elly to buy one. So 24 hours later and 11 have been purchased, all as a result of one person at an event yesterday.

By the time I got wind of this deal, there was a 15 day wait on the devices and I’m nothing if not incredibly impatient so I went ahead and read up on the more expensive but more capable successor, the n800. And just before I went on holidays (the first real holiday in 5 years), I snagged one and downloaded some movies and media for it.

As a geek toy it’s pretty good. Opera seems compatible with just about every web site out there which is better than I can say for Safari and Internet Explorer. And while Firefox renders most sites fine, it doesn’t do my router config page at home, which Opera on the n800 manages with aplomb.

Suffice to say this little device has all but replaced my laptop with the aid of a 4 GB SD card from Maplin (for £29). When I run out of space I’ll plonk down another £29 and get another 4 GB card for the second slot (yes, it has two).

My next purchases are probably going to be the Nokia SU-8W bluetooth keyboard and I’m seriously considering the Navigator GPS gear too.

Wifi range on this doohickey is excellent but shows that freely available wifi in Belfast (and, for that matter Stranraer and Skegness) is woefully inadequate for the worker on the move. I’ve spent a fortune on Orange GSM Data over the last 10 days (which also goes to show how Orange’s GPRS service is utterly pants).

Did I mention the n800 runs Debian? This thing is like the anti-iPhone. Sure, it doesn’t actually have a phone in there but it’s as open as can be. And it’ll do til Apple get their finger out and release iPhone in the UK…

All you have to do now is walk into any phone dealership and ask for a blank stare. Cos that’s what you’ll get if you mention the n800 and accessories for same anywhere…

Asshat of the month award for July goes to Stan Beer of ITWire in Australia for being nothing more than a Dvorak channel.

Reading the essay titled Exploiting the iPhone on the website of security firm Independent Security Evaluators, two things are crystal clear. First, the iPhone is actually a computer. Second, Apple is about to get a taste of the security nightmares that have plagued Microsoft for the past 13 years since the Internet went mainstream.

Okay Stan, let’s see what you’re saying. By this logic, the Mac, which is also a computer, but one which is open source AND has for the last 7 years shipped with Terminal and Developer tools should have given Apple a taste of the security nightmares Microsoft has brought upon themselves. Apple have been shipping around 600 000 of these Mac computers a quarter until recently when that figure went up to a million which means there’s probably 10 million+ Mac OS X machines out there which are ripe for these exploits you fear so much?
But that hasn’t really happened. Has it. Come on, be honest.

Why is this such a big deal for Apple?

Did you make a big scary woo-woo when Palm bought the Treo? What about when the Psion devices moved their Symbian OS onto phones? Ah, the iPhone is going to be a game changer? It’s going to revolutionise the phone market? It’s also going to revolutionise the Spam and Malware market?

No, Stan, there’s always going to be asshats running underprotected versions of Windows and that low hanging fruit is far too tempting.