Jesus Phone does not perform miracles
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Mobile Phones, Apple on
Although the iPhone 3G battery, according to many bloggers, lasts for around 5 hours absolute max before shrugging its shoulders and departing this world. So the question is, how long can you talk to your Jesus Phone before it dies on you?
The old iPhone wasn’t too bad when it came to battery life, I mean most of us can get by on 8 hours or so. The situation is starting to look very different for the iPhone 3G, with its greater demands on power it looks like 5 hours is the most you can get. Now I don’t know about you, but I rather like to make it through a working day without having to recharge a mobile device.
Otherwise it becomes rather less than mobile in my book.
The problem, of course, comes down to what you expect of your iPhone. The trouble being that if you have been romanced by those Apple adverts that promise all the Internet you can eat, and all of it right this second, then you’ll be expecting too much.
The 3G data access, the GPS location stuff, the full colour games play, it is all too much.
Whereas a typical smartphone gets plenty of use out of its additional functionality when compared to a typical dumb-mobile for want of a better description, the iPhone 3G ups the stakes once more it would seem. People are treating it like a mobile games console, a portable satnav and a mini-laptop, all the time, all at once.
And then wondering why the battery gets buggered so quickly?
Jeez, it might be known as the Jesus Phone but it cannot perform miracles.
It has been suggested that multi-core processors are the way forward for Apple, providing the power when needed and being able to save it when not doing much other than making phone calls (remember them?). However, I think the solution is much simpler: educate iPhone 3G users so that they start to appreciate that if you want everything all of the time then there has to be a cost. As far as the iPhone 3G is concerned, that cost is battery life, so get over it already.
Just out of interest though, what is the longest you have got out of your Jesus Phone under heavy usage? Can anyone beat the 5 hours max, or maybe set a new record for the shortest battery life?
Rated: 86.67% (3 votes)
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Can Twittex tempt texting cold turkey Brit Twitterers?
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Facebook, Internet on
Up until the 14th August all was calm in the land of the Brit Twitterer. Then Twitter announced it was pulling the free SMS alert for UK users. Now, a mere two weeks later, Twitterers are experiencing cold turkey withdrawal symptoms and looking for an alternative.
Which is where ISP and VoIP specialist Gradwell comes in with the newly announced Twittex service which promises to fill the void for text hungry Brit Twitterers.
Well, sort of. It ain’t free unfortunately. Instead it adopts a pre-pay service model. Gradwell MD Peter Gradwell (do you think that’s why he got the job, having the same name as the company?) explains what’s going on:
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Message to ASUS: Eeenough is Eeenough already!!!
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, hardware, miniBook on
You know something, I am huge fan of those little ASUS Eee PC mini-laptops. Anything that helps to bring affordable mobile computing to the masses has to be a good thing in my book. But like my mother always said, you can get too much of a good thing.
And that, unfortunately, is the situation ASUS has found itself in.
C’mon guys, this is just getting silly. How many Eee PC variations are there now? Good question, but difficult to answer. I’ve pretty much lost count it has to be said.
Heading over to the Eee PC Comparison List at the ASUS website I am informed that there, in fact, no less than 12 of the little buggers.
No less, but I would venture to suggest quite a lot more. That list does not include the 900XP and 901XP for example. These newly announced models appear to be pretty much the same as the 900 and 901, funnily enough, but come complete with flowers on the lid.
I kid ye not. What next, the 900SB (SpongeBob) or 901HM (Hannah Montana) editions?
You could argue that the figure for different Eee PC products is already way higher thanks to the number of colour options alone that are available already, everything from pearl white (how original) to blush pink and lush green (how awful.)
Of course, I can appreciate that ASUS must be getting a little edgy now that there are so many of these mini-laptops flooding into the market. I mean, head over to the Lilliputing Database and there are 44 different models listed in glorious detail.
But surely it would be better to focus on getting one or two models out there to satisfy the market, and getting them right rather than spreading the technology love across a whole host of slightly different products?
Apart from anything else, if it can confuse a technology journalist then where will it leave the average punter looking to buy into the budget titchy computer market?
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Olympic flash of gold for Microsoft
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Adobe, Internet, Microsoft on
Silverlight has, to be fair, not exactly set the world on fire. Microsoft was obviously hoping it would, and there’s nothing majorly wrong with the Silverlight 2 Beta to prevent it. Other than the market share enjoyed by Adobe Flash of course.
Ay, there’s the rub. And while quoting from Hamlet, I might as well drag out some of the words that follow that, as they seem to apply so well to Microsoft with regards to Silverlight: what dreams may come?
As it turns out, those dreams were in Chinese.
Could it really be that the Beijing Olympics are the Saviour of Silverlight? Well I’m pretty damn sure the Games of the XXIX Olympiad are not going to do it any harm in the getting the word out stakes.
Or more precisely the ‘getting Silverlight installed’ stakes. Whoever managed to pull off the deal with NBC to drive the online video coverage of the Olympics deserves a medal, a big shiny gold one at that. Not that I suspect it took too much negotiating considering how the two have worked so well before. MSNBC ring any bells?
The Silverlight ability to adaptively stream the video data depending upon the available bandwidth, together with certain copy protection promises, seemed to do the trick.
So just how much of a success has the NBC Olympics coverage been for Silverlight? Ah, Microsoft isn’t actually saying. It would appear to be sticking to its standard ‘up to 1.5 million downloads a day’ line that has been spun out since, well, almost forever. At least it seems that way from here.
However, some reports suggest that the real figures are a whole heap of beans higher.
How does 25 million unique visitors for NBCOlympics.com via MSN during the Games so far grab you? Or how about the fact that more than half the visitors in recent days have already got Silverlight installed?
With 22 million videos streamed so far, that’s a pretty impressive showcase for what was looking like a near-miss technology just a few weeks ago…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Digg into Twitter to find Chief Twit Barack Obama
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Hot on the heels of the news that Twitter is telling its UK users to get stuffed by pulling support for SMS Twittering in the UK, comes word that over the pond a certain big fish has been crowned Chief Twit.
Yep, it seems that Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has more followers on Twitter than anyone else.
More than the previous Chief Twit, Digg founder Kevin Rose who for some unfathomable reason found himself with some 56,482 people who were interested in the Digger Top Dog’s every thought. Rose, on the other hand, not being completely mental or a politician did not follow everyone who chose to hang on his virtual coat tails. Instead, he only follows 97 people.
One of those he follows happens to be Barack Obama.
A man who happens to understand the importance of technology in the modern presidential election process.
A man, who happens to have 56,791 people following his every move on Twitter.
What’s more, it seems that Obama follows every one of them as well. And then some. According to Twitter he auto-follows a total of 59,474 people in all. Or at least his account does, which one has to assume is manned by a small team at his election HQ or alternatively some nerd in a back bedroom carefully locked away from the campaign spotlight. I doubt that Obama spends much time actually using Twitter himself, if truth be told.
Still that is more than Grandpa McCain who seems to have let this technology thing pass him, and his campaign, by. He does not feature in the Twitter Top 100, or anywhere at all. Mainly because it seems that he does not have a Twitter account.
Even his unofficial campaign Twitter account, going by the name of JohnMcCain2008, can only muster a comparatively tiny 1485 followers.
Does this bode badly for the old man of presidential politics? Or does it just mean that when it comes to popularity amongst the younger and more media savvy types that the younger and more media savvy man gets the vote?
Not that Obama has it all his own way in the switched on Internet presidential campaign stakes. There’s always a certain Paris Hilton to consider, even though she is not entirely naked for a change. Hilton appears in a spoof presidential campaign video which she made after McCain featured her in a campaign advert decrying Obama as just a celebrity.
La Hilton has proved as popular as ever, with that video clip fast approaching 7 million views.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Big Brother Apple
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Look, I make no bones about it, I have grown to like the iPhone but Apple has left me feeling pretty poorly treated to the core. I mean, the whole version 2 software upgrade lockout thing and the MobileMe storm in the computing clouds were hardly great customer service success stories were they? Then there’s this iPhone kill switch debacle which could see users applications, bought and paid for, switched off remotely by Apple for whatever reason they choose.
Yet nothing seems to be able to stop the Apple revolution, at least as far as the iPhone is concerned. The Wall Street Journal interviewed Steve Jobs and the Apple CEO reckons that sales of iPhone software alone will hit something like
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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What chance the Microsoft-free desktop in the real world?
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Linux, Lotus, IBM, Microsoft on
The big news from the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco this week has got to be the IBM partnership deals with Canonical, Red Hat and Novell. IBM has, quite plainly, gone on the offensive and stated that in combining its Open Collaboration Client Solution software suite (with Lotus Notes, Symphony and Sametime) with Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse Linux distros it can convince its customers to make the move to a Microsoft-free desktop experience.
With Canonical already confirming that Lotus Symphony will be distributed via its Web services programme within a couple of weeks, the other players in this trio will most likely follow with similar announcements real soon.
Now, according to various online sources, the fourth largest maker of computers is looking to get involved. The Chinese-based company that acquired the IBM laptop business some years back, Lenovo, is apparently involved in ‘active discussions’ with regard to bringing out a series of systems with a Microsoft-free desktop running the Linux/Lotus combination.
Should Microsoft be worried? Well, truth be told, probably not. After all, IBM has been pushing the Microsoft-free desktop thing in Europe for some months already to no great effect as far as I can see. Why it should make any bigger an impact in the US is beyond my ken.
Throwing Lenovo into the mix could be interesting, but again I doubt that it will win too many converts. There is, to be fair, enough choice of Microsoft systems out there in the market and while the Linux market share continues to grow slowly, the emphasis is on slowly.
Just as Firefox has eaten away at the Internet Explorer userbase, so Linux will claw at the Windows market. But as with the web browsers, Microsoft will still be left with the lion’s share and then some. Convincing the business market to switch from a Microsoft desktop to a Linux one is going to be a lot harder, as their is already much more invested in both financial and cultural terms, than simply switching a web browser client.
Even allowing the for the credit crunch argument of businesses being strapped for cash so looking more favourably at the open source sector does not really hold water when push comes to shove. Buying new hardware does not save money, it costs money. Those businesses are far more likely, surely, simply not to upgrade and therefore not spend a budget they do not have.
The only possible chink in the stick with Microsoft argument comes with the number of enterprises which are not upgrading to Vista, leaving a slight possibility that they might look elsewhere when the time does come for new hardware…
Rated: 40% (4 votes)
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2000 year old computer had Olympic roots
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog on
Over 100 years ago sponge divers discovered something much more exciting, and much less spongy, than their usual catch near the island of Antikythera. The Antikythera Mechanism as it became known has fascinated and confused the scientific community ever since. Until now, that is.
It has been dated back to the 1st century BC, no doubt about that.
It has been described as the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world, no doubt about that either.
There is even no doubt that the Antikythera Mechanism is something to do with astronomy. The geared device appears to track cycles of the solar system. A device to calculate and track dates you might say.
The world’s first computer, some will argue.
But now researchers have announced that they think know just what this computer was used to calculate: the dates of the very first. Yes, it was an Olympic calculator it would appear.
The fact that it could work out the cycles and phases of sun and moon is no surprise, that has been taken as a given for the longest time. But the deciphering of inscriptions relating to the original Olympic games does make for fascinating, and really very timely indeed, reading.
Not least because, as researchers writing in Nature report, this thing is more technically complex than any device made over the next millennium.
Using high resolution X-rays and surface imaging, the boffins reconstructed the gear function via the fragmented inscriptions and discovered the Babylonian arithmetic-progression cycle calculator.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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