It’s all my brother’s fault. He’d just come back from a factory in Italy where he’d picked up a brand new, 85′ floating gin palace. Then driven it back to Blighty, accompanied by the retired chief constable of a shire county. Who was along for the ride, presumably to ensure the boat didn’t make off in the opposite direction. It is, after all, likely to be worth a figure with six zeros following a figure greater than one.
Apart from a gale in Biscay which kept them in harbour on the Northern Spanish coast, they had had a slow but comfortable voyage. Both paid by the day at a rate less than the vessel drank diesel per hour. Bro’, had the photos of his voyage, all taken on his Sony camera phone and that’s what did it. I want, no, NEED a new camera-phone.
No go on discount
Off to Carphone Warehouse Sunday morning, armed with my daughter’s details to get staff discount. Despite the best efforts of the amazingly helpful and knowledgeable staff in their Worthing shop, better by far than any of the many other ‘phone shops I tried, I couldn’t get the discount. My daughter would have to accompany me to do the actual purchase, even though she is on the management team at HQ. The spikey-haired salesman did everything he could to get me the discount and approved my choice in phone – he wanted one himself.
Reverse logic polish
Oh well, it did at least save me nearly two hundred quid, which is about what the phone would cost. According to my reverse logic always applied when I want/need a new toy, this saving, coupled with the pair of shoes I nearly bought, would make the phone free.
However… it sets you thinking when you see all the boys’ toys in the ‘phone shops. Like blackberry and apple pie, what other combinations work well together? The latest being sat-nav on a Nokia but do I actually need sat-nav I wonder? As well as an MP3-playing, video-making, games-consoling gadget. Usually I’d go for the smallest phone on offer or whatever hand-me-down one of my kids passes on.
Who needs a Beemer?
Being an independent worker, I only use PAYG phones and don’t need to subscribe to office one-upmanship. For example, I don’t want a BMW because all my colleagues have one. Instead I make decisions about equipment based on their specifications, independent reviews and what the toy…erm…device can do for me. A BMW then becomes an expensive, unnecessary and not particularly attractive car where a Japanese vehicle would serve me better and be more reliable and economical, Civic Type R aside.
Phones, on the other hand, are a bit different. They have moved a long way from their original purpose to such an extent that they are directly challenging kit such as digital cameras and PDAs. The Blackberry is okay but limited compared with the iPhone. With unlocking and a son in Chicago, an iPhone could be mine by the middle of the week, courtesy of DHL. But its 2 mega-pixel camera doesn’t excite.
Go on Steve
If the iPhone runs on Mac OSX why haven’t Apple made it a fully-fledged pocket computer and be done with it? At Wall Street Journal’s 2004 All Things digital conference, here, Steve Jobs told the audience he was as proud of the products Apple hadn’t shipped as much as they ones they had. He was alluding to a PDA, here, which one assumes became the iPhone. But it was clear the audience wanted an Apple pocket computer, something Apple hasn’t tried since their 1990’s Newtons.
And put a better camera in for me please.