In order to quell my rampant hatred of the iPhone and save the readers of this blog from too much anti-iPhone propoganda I’ve decided to setup a new blog. iPhones Suck - every day I’ll publish at least one or two reasons why the iPhone is indeed the worst smart phone on the planet. I’ll especially talk about why iPhone users are morons. Not necessarily always being this way with but after using a device as dumb as the iPhone their brains possibly melted.
Anyway head on over to iPhones suck and please remember to give us a few reasons why. Even if you are a drooling, zombified fanboy.
It has long been a dream of mine and many others that one day the web experience on your mobile is exactly the same as on your desktop. Albeit on a smaller screen.
Imagine going to youtube and watching videos with the same experience as the full website or yahoo mail with all its ajaxy bling and instant messenger built right in.
In many ways we’re almost there and I have to say Apple and the iphone deserve some credit. The experience is good but its not all there yet. Try going to youtube and playing a video … Oops you can’t. But why is it that with my nokia, windows mobile etc smartphone and the built in browser or Skyfire I can? Because my browser has an important plugin - called flash. Ubiquitous on the desktop but strangely missing on the iphone.
Right about now I hear the unified screams of the iphone fanboys yelling ‘but we have an app to do that!’ this is true but I am talking about convergence here. Parity. I as a developer doesn’t want to have to write a separate codebase for every mobile phone out there but because of the iphone’s popularity and lack of a key feature. I have to.
Adobe just announced flash 10 will be coming to pretty much every smartphone out there bar one the iphone. Why? Not because Adobe doesn’t want to provide it. They have gone so far as to actually having written Flash for the iphone already, it’s Apple and their typical closed door approach.
Apple, please open up your platform. You’re slowing down the future. Remember when you used to accuse Microsoft of doing the same. Stop the hypocrisy.
It’s been a while since I’ve had anything to really say and what I saw this morning has to be one the craziest “inventions” I have ever seen. It compelled me to write and it made me think a bit and realise something. People really do care for the technology of the past.
Johan Van den Brande has written a twitter client for the Commodore C64. Which begs me to think - “Why?”. Why would you want to write a Twitter client for a 25 year old computer system.
I can understand why people write emulators and play games on them. That is driven by and generates a feeling of nostalgia. Nothing feels better than remembering your misspent youth. The C64, Amiga and finally the PC (once it caught up) all bring back warm and fuzzy feelings when I think about them but I’d rather play James Pond, International Soccer or Pitstop on an emulator than waiting 20 minutes for it load off a tape or worse. Having it fail half way through.
With the above being said I must say that I’m in love with Super 8 film. I love the grainy texture and blown out colours but I definitely don’t want to work on making it capable of the picture clarity of modern HD cameras. I like it because of its warts not because I want to clear it of them. That being said there is a lot of very capable people out there like Pro8mm who like Johan like to keep their favourite outdated technology up to date. It’s certainly stunning to see what the C64 and Super 8 are capable of.
This little project got me wondering about who else out there is actively keeping our favourite technology from the past up to date. So I spent a little time on the interwebs and tracked down some interesting projects - past and present. Feel free to add some of your finds to the comments.
Grinnal Cars
These guys do some amazing work. Their car was based on the body of a Triumph TR7 a car first produced over 32 years ago. The TR7 was often ridiculed in its day, mainly because it was released minus the soft top (convertible) model and v8 engine it should have had.
Grinnal took the original concept and updated it for the nineties. By adding a body kit and a high powered engine they reinvented Triumph’s original idea. They made a car that even today has a modern look. That being said the TR7’s original design was edgy and even today people still think it’s only maybe 10 years old.
(Full disclosure: I actually used to own a TR7 and I loved it. They handle better than a gokart and when it was properly tuned I could keep up with most sports
cars from the 90s and 2000s)
DOS
Good old Disk Operating System (DOS). Forerunner of Windows and still essentially at the very heart of even Windows 7.0. A complete ripoff of CP/M which in itself is a shrunk down version of Unix it’s heritage goes right back to the 1960s. Not to be outdown by Unix and Linux which have no qualms about admitting that their family tree goes back for almost 50 years. Truly the most retrofitted operating system ever. There is a beautiful chart which demonstrates truly how inbred these systems are
Record Players and Records
For those of you too young to remember them the Long Play record known fondly as the LP all but died with the introduction of the Compact Disk (CD). While a few hard coreproponents of the LP held on with their adamanant fanaticism about the far greater fidelity of the LP - The rest of us moved in droves over to this new format that sounded far better than a tape and quite frankly was a hell of a lot smaller than a CD. Most people couldn’t tell the difference in sound quality. A few year’s after the first portable MP3 player hit the market in 1998 the audio cassette’s fate was sealed and it along with the already long dead LP fell in to distant memory. Long live digital music.
That was until 2007 when the RIAA, the fellows responsible for tracking sales and prosecuting music downloaders, noticed something strange. Record sales had previously hovered around one million units a year for the last few years, bottoming out in 2006 at 900,000 but the 2007 numbers were a real surpise - they had climbed to 1.3 million and by 2008 had
over tripled to 2.9 million units a year. Granted this is a blip in the scale of total music sales but the old, supposedly dead LP had done something amazing. It achieved a sales growth year on year of 120%. The same year CD sales dipped 25%.
This didn’t go unnoticed and audio equipment manufacturers for the first time in years have started releasing new turn tables. We’ll have to see where it leads but I think a format from the past might just have survived. All due to nostalgia. Oh and all the wanna be DJs out there.
Is there any technology from the past that you know of which is being kept up to date for the modern age?
With the storm of controversy over Nokia’s Ovi Store slowly starting to settle the nitty gritty of the store’s features are starting to become clear. In this article I will present what I found to be the best content on offer and also some of the worst. All prices have been listed in Australian Dollars. As we usually pay a high price for most products in this country you’ll probably find most things are half the price in Euros or US Dollars.
Just a note: One of the most glaringly obvious problems with the Ovi Store is that most of the apps available on your phone are not available on the website. So don’t be surprised if you can’t find some of these programs on the website.
The Good
There really are too many great apps and games to list but here’s some of the ones I find to be invaluable.
All of the City Guides ( $8 - $26.99 ) The Ovi Store is chocked full of mobile travel guides from DK and Lonely Planet. I have used these before and believe me, when you’re on holidays and traveling around 10+ European cities in a month you don’t want to drag around 10 different guide books. For the same price as a paper city guide I’d buy 10 of the mobile versions instead.
Fring (FREE)
Fring is quite simply the best instant messaging client out there. It supports all the major IM networks (AOL,ICQ,GTalk,MSN,Yahoo etc) and on top of that you can do some basic management of your social networks like Twitter, Facebook and so on. I still can’t believe this application is free. I would pay top dollar for the time it saves me and the mobility it affords.
Joikuspot Mobile Wifi Hotspot ($19.99)
This application turns your mobile phone into a mobile hotspot. What this means is that without any special software on your laptop use your phone for internet access. With all you can eat and high gigabyte allowances these days its a great way to be able to jump on the Internet anywhere you want. The best bit is, you
can share it with your friends.
PDF+ Basic ($6.60)
The E series of Nokia phones already come with a PDF reader which I find invaluable. If you find something interesting on the web or need to catchup on an important document before that meeting tomorrow you can print the doc to PDF on your computer and save it for later reading on your mobile. So if your phone doesn’t have a PDF reader already then I recommend picking up this one.
Powerboot (FREE)
Powerboot allows you to specify which apps you’d like to load when your phone is turned on or reset. If you want your phone to automatically check your email or load up your most used applications then you can’t go past this one. Best of all, it’s FREE!
Psiloc Wireless Presenter (FREE)
This app allows you to control your powerpoint presentations from your mobile phone. It works over bluetooth and even shows notes from the presentation on the phone’s screen in case you need some help along the way. I’ve found this one invaluable when giving presentations to large audiences. Note: If you own an E-series phone it’s probably already installed.
Bubble Bash ($6.60) Frozen Bubble was one of my favourite games on my Nokia E65 but sadly on my E71 the game doesn’t make use of the screen space
available. So with that in mind I’m recommending Bubble Bash as it’s a fine Puzzle Bubble clone.
The Bad
It looks as if the Ovi Store is trying to one up Apple’s iPhone App store in terms of 99 cent junk applications. While there’s nothing for 99 cents (the cheapest is $2) the quality and usefulness of some of the cheapest apps is questionable.
The Noise Machine ( $2 )
Not quite as useless as the iPhone fart applications but its pretty close. For your $2 you get an app that makes a variety of noises from crowds cheering to a drum roll.
Mysterious Fortune Ball ( $2 )
“Ask a question and the Mysterious Fortune Ball will give you an answer from beyond!” - Enough said really, a waste of 99kb of solid state storage space.
Every single paid wallpaper and ringtone ($2 - $8)
Why anyone would think I would pay $8 for a an MP3 ringtone of some Rihanna song is beyond me. For about $2 I could download the full song from the Nokia store, iTunes or for a few bucks more I could buy the whole album at a record store.
The Ugly
Here’s a list of applications that just can’t justify their asking price.
Happy Wakeup ( $68.99 )
This has to be the most expensive alarm clock I have ever come across. For almost seventy dollars I could go out and buy about 5 real alarm clocks. Is this
really a joke like the $999 I’m Rich iPhone app or is it someone trying to milk as much as they can out of the Ovi Store.
Security Shield Pro Edition ( $68.99 )
“Our patented scanning technologies are not ‘reworks’ of PC methodologies.” - I guess that’s what makes it worth seventy dollars. The app claims to be some sort of all in one security, privacy and anti spam software. Why you’d really need all this on a phone is beyond me.
MOT Finnish-English ($54.99)
A Finnish/English dictionary translator application. Why would I pay that much when I can buy a book for about $15 that will do the same thing. Even more ridiculous is
the fact that the rest of the MOT series of apps are all $16. Right about what I’d be prepared to pay. Is Finnish that hard to translate?
Summary
In summary there’s a lot of good applications and games on the store. Many of the most useful apps are available for free. However, like the iPhone store the Ovi Store is at risk from being plagued by an onslaught of “junk” applications. Nokia may have circumvented this somewhat by charging higher setup fees than apple does. Some see this increased barrier to entry as a bad thing but the way I see it is that unless you write an app or game that people will seriously want then the Ovi Store is not for you.
Nokia has finally started rolling out the Nokia store to selected countries. At this point I believe just Ireland and Australia but within a few days most countries should be online. For those who are not in the know it is basically Nokia’s answer to the iPhone app store and will be accessible from both your mobile phone (as an application itself) and the Ovi Store website.
Before I start talking about the application I’m sure you’ll want to know how to install it yourself or at least check to see if it’s available for you. So without delay, here’s the instructions:
Locate the download functionality on your phone. For recent E and N series there should be a download icon in the main menu. You may have to look under extras
Download should tell you it needs to update the catalogue. If it doesn’t choose options and refresh list.
Select Ovi Store and wait while it downloads and installs the app
The installer will ask you to reboot the phone
Once you’ve rebooted go to the home menu and navigate to where apps are normally installed for you (installations/extras). You will find a brand new icon for the Ovi Store. Fire it up and enjoy.
The first thing you have to do before you can enjoy any of the Ovi Store content is to login. Yes, even free content requires a login. If you haven’t got an account don’t worry. You can create one on the spot without a computer.
After you’ve gone through the sign in/sign up process you are presented with the following screen. Notice how all the apps recommended to you initially are free. They want to hook you in. They’ve done a great job here as there’s almost 20 apps and videos you can download without charge to get a feel for the service.
Scrolling left and right takes you across the major tabs in the Ovi Store where content is broken down into Apps, Recommended, Games, Audio & Video (media not apps), Personalisation (wallpapers and ring tones) and My Stuff. At first navigation seems daunting - pages and pages of apps, music and other stuff. Go through to the options menu and you’ll find that most content is categorised and all content can be filtered by cost, popularity and by recency.
The application prices are surprisingly reasonable. I was expecting developers to be holding out for $20 + as they did in the old Nokia store. Games seem to start at AUD $6.60 and do go up to AUD $12.00 where you do have to think twice before buying. Videos on the other hand are either free or come at a nominal price. There’s a wide range available as well with everything from movie trailers, to travel guides to stand up comedy routines. Pricing is definitely not the same as the iPhone app store where programs start at USD 0.99 but the quality on Ovi Store seems vastly superior. I haven’t seen any fart apps so far. I know I’m prepared to pay more for quality software that does more than play funny sounds or allow you to shake a baby to death.
Installing apps is, surprisingly, even more pleasant than the already quite agreeable standard way of installing apps. It’s completely seamless - once you’ve selected an App to install (and possibly paid for it) you’ll see a progress bar indicating the download progress and then another giving you the install progress. When the application is ready to be run you’ll be prompted to start it. If like me you’re so keen on installing as much free software and media as you can it will go into your installed applications folder on the phone for later use.
Once you’ve installed an app you can write a full review, right there on the phone.
So far the experience is good and I enjoyed the new found freedom I have. The old application download service was horrible. However, I will reserve my full judgement of the service for when they launch the full PC website and to see how that integrates using Nokia Suite with the phone itself. As you can see from the screen shots there’s not much chance I’ll be doing all my app purchasing on the E71s 320×240 screen.
The ultimate question is - “Will this bring Nokia enough hype and backing to take on some of Apple’s slice of new smart phone uptake?”
Every time I hear about more middle class, educated parents not vaccinating their children or another outbreak of easily preventable diseases in our schools it makes me angry. Vaccines are fundamental to our way of life.
We in the western world have it lucky. Our health care, hygiene and preventative measures against disease and epidemics has never been better. Smallpox was the first disease to be eradicated completely thanks to Edward Jenner’s vaccine and a world wide program of systematic vaccination. This disease (I use the past tense) used to kill an estimated 400,000 Europeans a year in the 1800s. Considering the population of Europe during this century was under a quarter of what it is today that would mean in today’s figures over 1.5 million deaths a year. Just in Europe. Polio is a disease that is incurable, debilitating and up until the 1970s was still affecting Western populations. Today it is all but eradicated. Without the help of vaccines our lives would be a lot shorter.
There is no denying that vaccines have been the biggest single contributor to our good health and long lives. Having all but eradicated any disease that vaccines exist for. Why then are there parents out there who are refusing to vaccinate their babies? Awareness and myopia are to blame somewhat. Vaccines are voluntary and most parents have grown up free from the horrors of these diseases. They simply don’t know why it is so important to immunise their children. The government needs to spend more on awareness, it’s a simple fix for these people. However, there is another group who cannot be reasoned with it seems. These people are convinced that vaccines are causing autism.
I wrote an entry a while back about my attempt to get 5000 visitors to my blog in a week (it usually averages about 100). Suffice to say I failed. The reason I failed is that I lost interest. The pattern of write, promote, get a few hundred visitors then rinse and repeat got boring 2 days in. There was nothing in it for me. I didn’t spark any huge debates. I ran out of interesting things to write about so starting on the mundane. I was so over the idea of another storm of digg or reddit users coming past and pooing all over my opinons I just gave up.
So back to what Social Media can do for you. The short answer is not much. The longer answer is that while it provides very good short term traffic and a fair bit of buzz about your site the longer term effects are pretty much zero. After the initial spike there’s usually a couple of days where visitor numbers are still up but that all drops off eventually. The average user doesn’t provide much value either. They don’t stay around and read more stories, they don’t click ads because they’re not after something to buy. In fact you could pretty much say they’re just a waste of bandwidth.
For example in the period of April to May this year visitors to this site from Stumbleupon consumed an average of 1.2 pages. Their average time on site was just 12 seconds. Not even enough time for them to read the first paragraph of most of my articles. In comparison, the average time all visitors to the site spent was 35 seconds. Almost 3 times as long. Compare both these types of visitors those from search engines. They know what they’re after. They consume 1.53 pages a visit and spend a whopping 1:36 on the site.
Major sources of traffic to Greener Desktop
Since writing about my first dabblings in social media my site on paper looks like a success. Traffic is up almost 120% for the month and something like 400% for the year (I don’t have exact figures for this one). But alas because as soon as I stop posting to digg, reddit, stumbleupon, buzz and all the rest my traffic flops. It goes down to exactly the same number of visitors a day as it was getting months before I started. Why? Because Social Media does nothing for SEO and without people finding you on search engines you’re lost in a sea of websites.
Let me just wrap things up by saying this is just my experience. I believe social media is effective at driving short term traffic and that can be very useful for things like promoting one off events or selling a product. For building long term traffic though, I believe it’s useless.
Time lapse video of the clouds and sun going down. Taken over about 10 - 20 minutes and backed by a nice concerto from Berlioz. Filmed, or rather photographed using a Nikon D40x. Fixed focus but automatic aperture. Mounted on a tripod with a finger pressing the shutter. All while BBQing a nice pork chop.
You were waiting for something profound weren’t you. Well before that comes, here’s one of the runners up for the supidest iPhone app ever. The iSnort.
Rather than buying an iPhone and paying $5 for a virtual cocaine app. I’d rather spend the $500 or so and buy a good quantity of cocaine. It has the same sort of user experience - big, loud, noisy, stupid and clunky but the fun lasts a lot longer. I found the iPhone’s entertainment factor lasted about five minutes. $500 of cocaine would probably get you at least a week’s worth.
Anyway on to the epiphany. I just realised something. Whereas the out of the box the iPhone experience is rather limited. A good smart phone will give you things like a decent email experience, office apps, voice recorders etc. Apple in their brilliant mindedness have encouraged developers to add the features that other smart phone users have come to expect as standard in dribs and drabs. For example on the Nokia you have a fully featured Twitter client called Gravity, whereas on the iPhone you have about two hundred different apps. One will read your friends tweets, one for composing your tweets another for sending them and so on. Just to get the same type of experience you do on other phones you need to buy at least ten applications!
Apple are ingenious. They give you what is basically the poorer cousin of a 1990s analogue mobile (or cell) phone but with a pretty screen and you as the sucker who bought one go out and waste thousands of dollars on trying to compete with those people who own a smart phone like the Blackberry, Symbian or Windows Mobile line. Those people who bought an iPhone are basically coke heads. They need to buy more and more to make themselves feel adequate.
Apple please send me an iPhone. I hate them and everything they stand for. That is why you need to send me one.
I’ve written many articles about what pisses me off about iPhones, iPhone users and all the features the iPhone is missing. I’d say I’m pretty much in the minority as far as bloggers who talk about the iphone so negatively.
With that being said I can see the positives behind the platform and especially the huge following it has generated in just a couple of years. I’ve even written about how Nokia, the mobile phone giant might find itself outsmarted by Apple and all the great marketing.
Apple - Imagine if you could convert me. I write so much about how I hate the iPhone and what it’s missing. If you could turn me around and bring me into the fold, that passion could be directed towards talking about how much I love the iPhone and even into positive debate about how it could be improved. If I could then, in turn convert just a few of my readers to your platform then that phone would have paid itself off in full, many times. Who knows, I might even end up buying a Mac.
During my trial I would give the iPhone exactly one week which is a long time to decide whether you like something or not. If in that time I miss all the wonderful features of my Nokia E71 too much then you will have failed to convert me. I will send it back. If I am converted and absolutely must have an iPhone with me at all times then I get to keep the phone. For free! Either way, I will write about my experience. If Apple fail to answer my call to give me an iPhone then I will continue to write about it in a objective way having not used one for long enough to forgive its shortcomings in favour of its advantages over other smart phones.
So Apple, please send me an iPhone so I can fall in love with it. It would be a great marketing move. I’ll blog and twitter about my conversion experience daily.
With the storm of controversy over Nokia’s Ovi Store slowly starting to settle the nitty gritty of the store’s features are starting to become clear. In this article I will present what I found to be the best content on offer and also some of the worst. All prices have been listed in Australian Dollars. As we usually pay a high price for most products in this country you’ll probably find most things are half the price in Euros or US Dollars.
The Ovi Store is chocked full of mobile travel guides from DK and Lonely Planet. I have used these before and believe me, when you’re on holidays and traveling around 10+ European cities in a month you don’t want to drag around 10 different guide books. For the same price as a paper city guide I’d buy 10 of the mobile versions instead.
Every time I hear about more middle class, educated parents not vaccinating their children or another 
I wrote an entry a while back about my attempt to get 5000 visitors to my blog in a week (it usually averages about 100). Suffice to say I failed. The reason I failed is that I lost interest. The pattern of write, promote, get a few hundred visitors then rinse and repeat got boring 2 days in. There was nothing in it for me. I didn’t spark any huge debates. I ran out of interesting things to write about so starting on the mundane. I was so over the idea of another storm of digg or reddit users coming past and pooing all over my opinons I just gave up.
