Michael Henley

Well iPhone day has come and gone in the UK and Germany. Here it launched at 6:02 (why, oh why, did they make that joke?!) on Friday 9th, and seems to have been quite well accepted. I have had a fair bit of personal experience with the whole process thanks to both of my parents getting one this weekend. Activation is relatively painless, although having to wait a few hours for O2 to get their act together on this before you can really use the device and learn its intricacies was rather annoying.

As with most Apple products I have experienced, the experience as a user is lovely. The interface is revolutionary, and I don’t foresee a resurgence of buttons after this. Even the doubters are coming around to some extent once they use it. It is such a natural way to interface with your device, and comes into its own when something like a mouse or other cursor-based input device is not available. Of course this is not the first touch device on the market, and it won’t be the last, but combined with the hype that Apple products seem to generate purely by existing, and the fact that everyone who seems to use it can get to grips with it very quickly, means that I expect this will be one of the most famous, for a while at least. Indeed, my own mother, who by her own admission does not like technology, has come to, at the very least, not loathe this device. The big numbers of keypad dialling seem to be a big hit, and the simplicity of the SMS features have gone down well too. A QWERTY keyboard makes a world of difference it seems, as does auto-correcting typos.

Settings is relatively intuitive, although I am not sure why Bluetooth is in ‘General’. Took me a few minutes to find to pair the respective headsets to the devices. Speaking of which, I really like how the iPhone deals with headsets. When a call is made, it gives access to an ‘audio source’ list, from which the desired device can be chosen. This is especially useful when it is used to connect via bluetooth to a car hands-free, where some conversations need to become private quickly, and can be transferred seamlessly to the phones speaker and back again as need be. Again this is not a new feature, but like so many things, it is made easy to achieve, and so might as well be!

I am not going to do a feature by feature review, because these already exist all over the net in a much more polished form than I could accomplish. Suffice it to say that for most users this seems to be a very good choice of phone provided you don’t mind O2, and don’t mind being seen with this device. That said, for someone like myself, I still think my reasons for not wanting one are valid – 8GB is too little storage, and EDGE is old tech and is in fact a step backward for Europe. Like the loss of Concorde, and so the effective cessation of commercial supersonic flight, this kind of backtracking is pretty unacceptable. If and when there is a 3G/HSDPA iPhone with more storage, then I might consider getting one. Until then it is a toss-up between a Blackberry and a Nokia N-series. Suggestions?

WOW. This week I was in Wales for a Field Trip for the first part, and then have been ‘blobbing’ since then – doing and achieving very little, but enjoying it. Just thought back on the events in Tech of the past week. We have seen TV Links being shut down, with the 26 year old owner arrested for the technological equivalent of ‘aiding and abetting’ piracy and copyright infringement. A sad day I think all will agree, and the implications of this decision may be more far reaching than we would like to think. It was said that would, for example, I also be guilty of this if I linked to TV Links, just as they linked to the sites which hosted the content? We will see but I hope this is overturned.

On a lighter note, we saw The Pirate Bay getting hold of IFPI.com, the domain similar to that of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI.org), and establishing the International Federation of Pirates Interests. According to El Reg, they claim that they were given the domain and so are using it as they see fit. Never ones to miss an opportunity to ’stick it’ to the lobbyists for the record industry et al. TPB are enjoying themselves.

We also saw Steve Jobs announce the SDK of iPhone and iPod touch (did somebody say U-turn?). Suddenly Apple realises that 3rd party apps won’t destabilise the platform after all, provided they sign off on every little bit of code that is (and take a cut from it?). Russell Beattie has put together a fantastic dissection of this official note from Steve on his blog, and it really cuts out the rubbish and spells out what we cynics see when we read the typical marketing bullshitese!

Ubuntu ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ 7.10 was released for download, and looks good. I am yet to download this release, but used Tribe 5 in VMWare Fusion on the MBP, and it seems good. I traditionally have used Ubuntu to breathe life into old hardware, such as my old Toshiba Satellite 2450-101 Laptop, which (provided you prop the screen open) works well enough. The Windows installer even seems to tax it now, but Ubuntu usually flies along. I look forward to playing with ‘Gutsy’, and eagerly await the name of the next Ubuntu incarnation (Crappy Cow?…)