Category: Mobile

I’m interested in seeing what Amazon has come up with, as scooped by Newsweek. We’ll see a lot more information tomorrow as the NDAs clear.

It’s a paperback-sized eBook reader with a 167dpi screen (just slightly sharper than the iPhone and iPod touch), with a always-on internet connection and 30 hours of battery life.

It might be good. It might not.

[UPDATE: It looks like ass. Screen seems sharp enough but they’ve wrapped it in the skin of an old Apple II. Someone get Jeff Bezos over to Cupertino. Stat!]

The other mobile networks in the UK are shitting themselves.

Fraser Speirs gives us an anecdote of the lies and FUD told by T-Mobile when he decided to ditch his contract and switch to an iPhone on O2.

Firstly, there was a warning that “there are lots of problems with the iPhone”. What these “problems” were was left mostly unspecified, but I eventually extracted the claim that you “can’t send an email from the phone”. Then there was the claim that several features are “not compatible with O2’s network”.

and then there’s the rumour that Vodafone fought defections by switching off their customer services line:

Vodafone’s customer service line for customer cancellations is dead – it’s been dead since the iPhone’s launch last Friday. The helpful recorded message blames a “system fault” and kindly suggests that the customer call back later.

Whether you cre or not you could do worse than tuning into Stephen Fry’s blog where he tears strips off Philips for their technology missteps and then fawns over the iPhone a little bit more.

I’m still not sure, of course, whether her indoors’ boss actually bought one. I guess I’ll find out later.

Of course, Vodafone and T-Mobile could have tried something REALLY innovative like offering service plans that kicked O2’s butt? Or maybe cutting prices? But if the only think they can think of is just lying to their customers or avoiding their calls, then they deserve what they’re getting.

The iPhone is my favourite toy this week for sure. Tonight I’ll have owned it for one week and I’ve actually been surprised at how little data I’ve been using. O2 must be laughing all the way to the bank with this one. My Marware Sport-Grip case arrived today as well so I’ll have a look at that tonight. Her indoors bought a Carphone Warehouse-branded similar silicone suit for hers and seems happy with it. She’s got mine at home and claims to prefer it so….I may never get it….

The BBC has a balanced review of the iPhone by Darren Waters. He highlights many of the shortcomings of the device (EDGE, 2 Mpixel camera, lack of wireless sync) while also taking into account some of the benefits.

My own opinions are well documented here and elsewhere. When her-indoors got her iPhone and took it into work there was a lot of ooh’ing and aah’ing and the most poignant response was from one of the seniors who would be described as a gadget guy who claimed to feel a little sick that she had a better phone than him (and better still, it worked with his iPod and Bluetooth car kit) which apparently was a rarity. Bets are on whether he’s already bought one.

People spot the iPhone in queues and crowds and it was a talking point in the pubs and clubs as well as in the queue outside the new H&M store in Belfast. One woman had obviously played with it a lot and was simultaneously dissatisfied with her own Blackberry, expressing remorse that she wasn’t getting an iPhone soon.

I’ve been very pleased with the iPhone in terms of network speed. 300kbps is fast enough for most web pages to load quickly and over on the new NiMUG site there’s a comments feed for people to post the speeds they are getting over WiFi and EDGE with the device.

I’m loving it.

When Leopard was delayed early this year, a lot of my friends who use Windows took the opportunity to guffaw that the four month delay was equivalent to Vista’s five year delay.

Pricks. The lot of them.

Playing with an iPhone this weekend has made me realise where we’re going with operating system. The earlier realisation that Apple had “stuck NeXTStep on a phone” was one thing.

I’m pretty sure that Apple will charge iPhone users for a 2.0 software release is a second thing altogether. I bought Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. Would I buy iPhone OS X 2.0?

My iPhone and my Mac are both running flavours of Leopard. In the next two years we’re going to see probably 12 dot updates to Leopard (10.5.1 is about to hit the streets) and we’re likely to see some updates to the iPhone software too, most notably in February when they’re about to release the SDK. These can be seen as maintenance updates much like the dot releases in Mac OS X. They tend to add minor functionality as well, but the major advances are left to pay upgrades.

I don’t remember ever paying for an upgrade for my Palm, Newton or mobile phone. But then the Newt didn’t even last a year before it was canned. The Palm Vx ended up in a drawer when I got my Sony Ericsson T39m and since then I’ve had a new mobile every year and never bothered upgrading any software. The ability to upgrade has never been advertised…

I did upgrade my Nokia N800 and I will again when OS2008 is released later this year. Nokia have stated they’re not expecting everyone to buy these devices as this is part of a strategy to build a platform rather than make a killing just yet.

From that point of view I think Nokia and Apple are the platforms to watch.

Obviously I’d rather not be charged for an OS upgrade for a phone, even a phone as sexy and capable as an iPhone, and I’d hope it was included in the monthly fees that Apple is gouging out of O2 (which in turn it gouges out of me).

Some idiot gets quoted in the Irish Times:

Third in the line was Matt Johnston, a 35-year-old self-confessed “computer geek” from Belfast. “A nice bit of kit,” he said, after buying the iPhone.

Whatever about the quiet level of interest last night, this is the future, according to Johnston.

“Look, in 10 years’ time having an iPhone will be the same as having a watch. You’ll look strange if you don’t have one.”

That’s a bit of paraphrasing. What I said was that if you don’t have a phone like an iPhone then you’ll look strange. That includes all sorts of smartphone obviously. As people in the UK are now considering SMS texts as part of their normal communication, in ten years we’ll all be connected…

The turnout was lukewarm in Belfast but it wasn’t bad chatting to the people there. You have to remember there’s 280 million people in the US and less than a quarter of that in the UK. And there’s only 1.5 million people in Northern Ireland. iPhone will sell in the hundreds or thousands in Northern Ireland, not the millions.