Category: Mobile

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.

Critics of the iPhone have been screaming about the lack of MAPI support (as if that really mattered) whereas the biggest noise I’ve heard from developers regarding the iPhone is the lack of an official SDK.

Of course, the most obvious reason for no SDK is simply that It ain’t ready yet. iPhone obviously runs a subset of the Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” operating system due to it’s use of CoreAnimation and there’s currently no iteration of that operating system which could be considered “release-worthy”. so it’ll be a while before we get a release SDK and therefore a longer while before we can develop proper applications. Another minor thing to consider is that Apple wants to make sure there’s enough of a user base to support application development. That’s something not to be sniffed at and I’m 100% sure they’re working on some of the bugs that people have raised.
But then it’s not just the software ecosystem which is important, there’s also an important hardware ecosystem to consider.

Walk into any electronics store and you’ll be inundated with products for your iPod. Chargers for the car. Transmitters for FM radio. Microphones.

Back in the late 90s I used a Newton. I had the keyboard, I had modems and memory expansion cards for it. I had an ethernet card and much later a wireless card. Web browsing was possible but hardly a pleasure (heck, the machine has 4 MB of DRAM). Terminal usage was only enjoyable with the keyboard plugged in. The handwriting recognition wasn’t a heap of fun to be honest. I would place the Newt before me, in landscape mode and the keyboard behind it, using the display edges of the Newt as wrist rests. It meant for some very comfortable working while on planes and the Newton as it was developing quickly made my DELL Latitude completely redundant (and even my Powerbook began to get lonely).
The hardware ecosystem I can see for the iPhone will include hardware keyboards. It will include both a portable version and a docking version. Sure – you can’t hook up a phone like a flash drive and edit files on it (damn shame!) but that might change in the future.

There’s a few months before it’s released here in the UK and let it be said, I’ll be ditching my current carrier, Orange, in preference for whomever carries the iPhone – no qualms or romance about it. I’ve been with Orange for more than 7 years….and BOOM, like a rat out of an aquaduct.

Every see those courtroom dramas where there’s a beautiful woman’s life on the line and her lawyer (who’s secretly in love with her) is fighting to keep her out of the electric chair? And there’s usually a state prosecutor who has slick back hair and a weasel’s countenance? You know to look at the guy that he’s not going to play fair and, true to his typecasting, he makes a statement which demeans the beautiful defendant and raises “Objection” from the lawyer and horrified mutters from the jury and audience. The facts may be true, but the way they’re presented is sleazy and underhand. We know not to trust him. It’s not fair play. He’s playing dirty. He’s a bad man. He just wants the pretty girl in jail, he’s not interested in justice or fair play. It’s all about the numbers.

Last Thursday, some technology powerhouses were on a panel at a media pow-wow and Sony Head Sir Howard Stringer claimed that Steve Jobs wants a world where only he makes money and further Jobs is a hypocrite for claiming record companies are the greedy ones.

These facts are probably true.

But consider the source.

Stringer’s issue comes not from Jobs’ hypocrisy or for his desires for wealth and power but from his own thwarted dreams. Sony, now famous for deliberately installing a rootkit in their customers computers (though they’re now suing the company they hired to create it) has all but decided that competing in the MP3 player marketspace is simpyly too hard and have come out with an iPod-compatible speaker dock. They’ll still continue to push their proprietary formats through their own fugly designs but it must represent a certain amount of crow-eating to now start to compete with Logitech and  Altec -Lansing in this space.

When challenged on his statement, the Sony head made a beep-beep noise as he quickly backed away from his statement.

Sony calling Apple ‘greedy’ is the absolute definition of hypocrisy, simply put the pot calling the kettle black.

Now it’s possible that Sony’s Stringer was involved in some sort of internal struggle where he was identifying Sony’s own avarice as conditional on the market, on competition, on software and music pirates and the price of pork-bellies while decrying Apple’s Jobs because the latter obviously has a “greedy” quality which makes him a bad person, mmmkay?

So, in essence, if Sony were selling the #1 music player of all time, they’d be less greedy.

Does anyone remember the Walkman?

TUAW has a rant about web sites made specifically for iPhones and how it’s wrong!

Nothing irks me more than browsing to a site only to be greeted with a page that, based on the user agent my browser supplies, keeps me out. Try going to some of these new iPhone webapps in Safari 3 on a Mac or PC and that’s just what you’ll encounter. Why? These apps will run just fine on my desktop, and yet I am left out of the fun.

It’s a fair point. Just to choose a very very nice-looking example, FlickIM, which provides AIM/iChat services in a slick AJAX interface. It uses browser detection to lock those of us not on iPhones out.  That kinda sucks.

This is precisely what subdomains were invented for. And directories.

I don’t want to be snippy here but I’d rather be directed to http://iphone.somedomain.com or http://www.somedomain.com/iphone if I’m going to see iPhone-optimised content. Don’t direct me – the version of Safari in the iPhone is meant to be the real Web after all.

So how good is the iPhone at being a phone?

 I guess I’m going to have to wait and see because I’ve seen reports claiming that battery life is both excellent and yet cripplingly shorter than advertised. I think a lot of people might expect the battery life to be shorter due to the amount of use you’ll put into this device with watching videos and listening to music in addition to making telephone calls. I know my K800i managed to last about 16 hours before needing recharged and battery life drops off dramatically should I spend 10 minutes playing the Golf game or, ye gods, making a phone call. That battery life is shorter than advertised? I think it’s one of those things – every manufacturer advertises battery life far in excess of what is actually achieveable with a functioning device. Apple in my experience tends to be a little more honest than most.

 I’ve also seen reports that the audio quality is both better than and worse than another brand name phone or three. My take on this is that I’ve never really blamed the phone for poor audio quality. I can blame trees, geography, tunnels, the crap placement of cell towers, the position of mountains, the weather and the general piss-poor network that Orange seems to be vending these days, but I’ve never noticed much difference between handsets.

And how many taps to make a call?

MacNN’s second impressions post describes it like this:

From standby mode, you first need to hit the home button to turn the screen on. Once the screen is lit up, you need to scroll your finger across a slider to get to the menu. From there, choose the phone icon and click Contacts. Next, scroll your way through the Contacts listing and choose the person you want to call. Once you are in their menu, choose their number and the iPhone will call.

My K800i compares:

Two button presses on the chiclet keyboard to unlock. Tap the joystick down to open Contacts. Then either scroll (patiently) or just to skip through to the first letter of a name by tapping again. Could be up to six or seven taps just to get the name. Then if the number selected is the right one, you can click to call. If not, then there’s a joystick tap sideways to select the right one first. To call my kids requires 9 key presses or different keys and some with different timing. To call my Dad’s mobile, 12 key presses.

The iPhone seems like a lot less work. And probably looks better too.