The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘tech-geek corner’ Category

With the mas­sive suc­cess of the iPhone app store, app devel­op­ment is on the upswing. I’m see­ing report after report about peo­ple who’ve never writ­ten a line of code in their lives, sud­denly try­ing to learn how to cre­ate apps for the iPhone.

Its sen­si­ble, as the rel­a­tive ease with which you can sell your app com­bined with the poten­tial prof­its make this a very appeal­ing propo­si­tion to many.

Per­son­ally, I haven’t writ­ten any soft­ware in nearly 30 years, when I used to have a very rudi­men­tary under­stand­ing of BASIC. Here’s a sam­ple of what I mean:

10 Print “Fuck You”
20 Goto 10

Yes, that’s about how sophis­ti­cated I got. And wow, did that lit­tle pro­gramme make peo­ple laugh. Things have changed a lot since then.

The prob­lem with devel­op­ing apps for the iPhone is the amount you need to learn to do it. It’s the steep learn­ing curve that is prob­a­bly putting some peo­ple off trying.

What if you didn’t have to learn anything?

What if you could piece an app together the same way you’d design a web­site or automa­tor action?

Enter iApp, the lat­est soft­ware to join the other pro­grams in iLife.

Well, tech­ni­cally it hasn’t yet, but I am tak­ing a wild guess that it will in the future.

iPhone apps are just chunks of code and APIs strung together, so why can’t Apple build an iLife style appli­ca­tion that would allow dum­mies like me to design appli­ca­tions for the iPhone with a sim­ple, clean and easy to use interface.

Just imag­ine assem­bling a list of sim­ple instruc­tions, the same way you would put together an automa­tor script, which are then com­piled and trans­ferred to your iPhone via iTunes.

Apple have already done this for music, video, DVD author­ing, ring-tone cre­at­ing and web­site design, so why can’t they do it for iPhone applications?

The short answer is that they can and if I was to ven­ture a guess, they are prob­a­bly work­ing on just such a prod­uct right now.

Think about it: they could com­pletely democ­ra­tise pro­gram­ming apps for the iPhone, allow­ing any­one with a good idea and some free time the chance to design their very own appli­ca­tion with a very gen­tle learn­ing curve. And if you think your app is good enough and would be of inter­est to oth­ers, you can reg­is­ter to sell it on iTunes and watch the dosh roll in.

Do I think this is com­ing soon? Who knows?

I do think some form of sim­ple iPhone app cre­ation will come. And its going to be a major game-changer when it does.

Shot with my Polaroid Zi6 video cam­era attached to a Gorilla Pod, which was hang­ing upside from the rear view mir­ror of my car as I drove around north London.

Edited on iMovie ’09 in less than an hour. I sped the footage up as much as I could, which turns out is 800% or 8 times nor­mal speed.

The music is some­thing I recorded years ago which just sort of worked.

I still have way too much time on my hands.

Hav­ing a some­what point­lessly devi­ous mind means you occa­sion­ally spot things that are meant to be used one way, but can just as eas­ily be exploited to be used another way.

Every user account on Twit­ter offers you the chance to receive the tweets it gen­er­ates via an RSS feed.

If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, click right here.

If you have either your browser or a news­reader app con­fig­ured to deal with RSS feeds, all you need to do is click on the RSS link and its mag­i­cally added to your sub­scrip­tions list.

The link on Twit­ter pro­files is easy to find, its just below the thumb­nail pho­tos of the peo­ple being followed:

Once you’ve added the link to your RSS reader, every time you refresh it, you will receive the tweets from the selected feeds, assum­ing they’ve sent any­thing since the last time you updated.

All that’s fair enough, but what if you wanted to fol­low some­one with­out them know­ing you’re fol­low­ing them. Per­haps an ex-partner, maybe even your cur­rent one or your boss or your best friend or your worst enemy, whoever?

You can use this method to accom­plish just that, stalk­ing with stealth on Twitter.

If you fol­low someone’s tweets via your RSS reader, you won’t appear in their fol­low­ers list. You won’t appear any­where and only you will know you’re receiv­ing them.

Sneaky and cool, eh?

Now, I know there are peo­ple out there who might use this rel­a­tively sim­ple tech­nique for nefar­i­ous pur­poses, but I’m sure you’re not one of them. Right?

I took deliv­ery today of my brand new Robo-Toaster — the Toaster of the Future!

Not only did I receive it today, I made this rockin’ video:

I shot it using my Kodak Zi6 HD Pocket Cam­corder in about 10 min­utes and edited it in a cou­ple of hours using iMovie ’09. I’m not expe­ri­enced at all with that ver­sion of iMovie, so it took a bit longer than it should have done. Plus I found it eas­ier to ren­der it out in Quick­time, rather than play­ing it back in the appli­ca­tion, which stut­tered and stalled a bit on my 2.8mhz dual core iMac as I added lay­ers of effects and titles.

Clearly I have too much free time on my hands. And if you just spent 2 min­utes watch­ing my video, clearly you do too.

Hey fuck­ers! I’ve signed up for Twit­ter again, this time for real!

If you want to fol­low me, please feel free to add @nthlondonhippy. Fuck knows what I’ll be post­ing; I guess we’ll all find out together!

I can rec­om­mend fol­low­ing Stephen Fry (@stephenfry), the British actor, tv pre­sen­ter and genius. He’s both pro­lific and enter­tain­ing, 2 things I aspire to be!

I tend to read tweets on my iPhone, as their bite sized nature makes them per­fect for enjoy­ing on a hand­held device.

Ok so I’m late to the Twit­ter party, but at least I’m there now. Where’s the bar? This hippy could use a stiff drink. Or even bet­ter, a big fat juicy spliff!

(Blogged from my god­damn mutha­fuckin’ iPhone, yo)

Hey fuck­ers!

Dig this shit! I now have the abil­ity to post to my blog directly from my iPhone.

At least I think I do. We will find out for sure when I attempt to post this bad boy on my site.

If you’re read­ing this shit, then it worked. And you can maybe expect more mobile blog­ging on the future.

There’s only ten days left till xmas and if you haven’t fin­ished your shop­ping yet, I’m here to help.

Its a short list of poten­tial gifts, but ones that will be cer­tain to impress and daz­zle the recip­i­ent. Also, you can order them online and have them ready to dole out on xmas with­out hav­ing to leave the com­fort of your home. That’s the best way to xmas shop!

Kodak Zi6 HD Video­cam­era
Ama­zon UK: £ 89.99

The Kodak Zi6 HD Video­cam­era is an impres­sive lit­tle piece of kit. While pocket sized, this lit­tle mar­vel shoots in glo­ri­ously rich and detailed 720p High-Def, while record­ing onto cheap and read­ily avail­able SD cards.

The Zi6 also shoots in stan­dard, YouTube friendly VGA, has a built in USB con­nec­tor and works like a dream. On my Mac, it just appears as a hard drive on the desk­top, you drag the files onto your desk­top, then into iMovie, which can han­dle them in HD quality.

On a PC, the Zi6 includes built in edit­ing soft­ware, that you can run from the cam­era. Sweet.

It also shoots stills, has a 2x opti­cal zoom and works off stan­dard or rechar­gable AA bat­ter­ies. I am so impressed with this cam­era already.

I bought mine a few weeks ago and paid £119.99, which means at £89.99, its already a major bar­gain! If you’re look­ing for a sim­ple to use pocket video­cam­era that won’t break the bank, this is the cam­era for you.

iPod Touch
Ama­zon UK: £149-£254 depend­ing upon stor­age (8gb, 16gb or 32gb)

I know I go on and on about my iPhone, but what if you are already happy with your cur­rent mobile deal, but still want to play with the coolest hand held gad­get ever? The iPod Touch is for you!

The iPod Touch is basi­cally an iPhone with­out the phone. It does nearly every­thing an iPhone can do except make and receive tele­phone calls, send and receive SMS mes­sages, take pho­tos and have proper GPS. Other than that, it does every­thing else.

You can run most apps on an iPod Touch, you can surf the net, send and receive emails, it does have some loca­tion aware­ness based on wi-fi posi­tion­ing. Oh and it plays music and videos and dis­plays pho­tos too.

I bought one for Mrs. Hippy last xmas and she absolutely loves it. She used it for music until the Apple App Store opened and that’s when she really got hooked. She now uses it for surf­ing, for gam­ing and its rarely not in her hands.

The 2nd gen­er­a­tion iPod Touch is even slim­mer than the first and its added a small speaker and the abil­ity to input audio via an exter­nal micro­phone, mak­ing it even more flex­i­ble than the orig­i­nal model.

The only neg­a­tive Mrs. H has come up with on it is it makes her wish she had an iPhone. The lack of con­nec­tiv­ity when there is no wi-fi avail­able is a real stick­ing point. Other than that, its nearly a per­fect device, guar­an­teed to be used daily by who­ever you might give it to.

Vol­cano Vapor­iser
everyonedoesit.com — £279.75 for the stan­dard model

I bought one of these a few months ago, but it is some­thing I’ve cov­eted for ages. Near as I can tell, its the only vape that really works and con­sis­tently deliv­ers good results.

The Vol­cano Vapor­iser does one thing and does it very well, it takes your favourite herb (like weed) and turns the active bits into vapour, while leav­ing the nasty bits alone.

When you smoke weed, you burn every­thing, includ­ing the carbon-based bits which con­tain the known car­cino­gens and other nas­ties. You also burn a good chunk of the THC, before it reaches your lungs.

A vapor­iser only burns the THC. leav­ing the other com­po­nents alone. The weed doesn’t actu­ally burn, but it does get a bit toasted and turns brown.

The Vol­cano works by fill­ing a small cham­ber, which holds your weed between two screens. You place this cham­ber on top of the base unit, where it is heated to the proper tem­per­a­ture. You then engage a small fan, which blows air up through the cham­ber, fill­ing an attached bal­loon with very sweet, pure vapour.

When you inhale it, you can def­i­nitely taste the weed, but your throat and lungs don’t feel any­thing at all. The vapour is at room temp, so its not hot and dry like smoke, and it is very light, though you can see it when you exhale.

The head on vapour is also dif­fer­ent from smok­ing and is hard to describe. It is decep­tively strong, clean, clear and every enjoyable.

By far the most impres­sive thing about using a Vol­cano is how lit­tle weed you actu­ally need to get high. A week’s worth of what I would smoke, would prob­a­bly last 5–6 weeks in the vol­cano. A spliff’s worth in the cham­ber is enough to get 4 peo­ple pleas­antly stoned and then some.

And when you are done vap­ing the weed, don’t throw it away, there’s still some THC left in it, which you can extract by mak­ing cannabut­ter. You could even smoke it if you were des­per­ate, though that would kind of defeat the pur­pose of vaping.

I know the Vol­cano is expen­sive (and I bought the even pricier dig­i­tal ver­sion), but it will more than pay for itself with the money you will save on weed. Add the health ben­e­fits and you’ve got a really use­ful, ben­e­fi­cial device that will change your life.

I bought mine because I am plan­ning on giv­ing up cig­a­rettes in the new year. When I do, I’m going to want to cut down on my spliffs as well and I think this will help loads.

That’s it for this year, just three hi-tech toys which will amaze any­one you might decide to give them to. And if you’re shop­ping for your­self, even bet­ter, you’d love them all too!

After my recent flurry of posts about my new iPhone 3G, I’ve noticed lots of new vis­i­tors attracted to my site by this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject. With the rumours of Apple plan­ning on shift­ing 45 mil­lion more of them next year its likely to remain a pop­u­lar topic for some time.

And with good rea­son as the iPhone is the most pow­er­ful pocket-sized device avail­able so far thanks to the abil­ity to add addi­tional appli­ca­tions that extend the func­tion­al­ity nearly to infin­ity. It truly is a Swiss Army Knife of gadgets.

As a result of my recent health prob­lems, I’ve pretty much had the last month with noth­ing but time on my hands and my iPhone in my hands. I’ve barely put it down, its the first thing I fon­dle when I wake up in the morn­ing and the last thing I stroke before drift­ing off to sleep.

As much as I adore my iPhone, and believe me I do, I’m not going to lie to you about the smooth­ness of the expe­ri­ence. I’ve been suf­fer­ing with some of the issues and prob­lems you may have read about; apps crash­ing on launch, apps and updates not installing prop­erly and the dreaded poor sig­nal on the 3G net­work, but even with these nig­gles, it is still an amaz­ing piece of kit.

I believe the prob­lems I’ve had are address­able and Apple will be able to fix them through soft­ware updates. The last update, to 2.0.2 has already stopped the crashes on the phone itself and since installing it, I haven’t had a spon­ta­neous restart.

I did have to do a full restore though, as I had lost some apps when iTunes tried to install their updated ver­sions. It took a cou­ple of hours and the most recent back-up I had done was around a week old, so I lost some SMS mes­sages and a few other bits of data, but the phone is now work­ing well.

The 3G issues per­sist for me and it could be that the cov­er­age where I live isn’t that great, but I have trou­ble believ­ing that, since I live in Lon­don. I hope it improves and soon.

I’ve installed dozens of apps already, stretch­ing across 5 home screens and I thought I would share a few inter­est­ing ones with you, that you might not have heard of yet.

Sim­plify Media
Sim­plify Media is very cool, it allows you to stream your entire iTunes col­lec­tion (unpro­tected tracks only, noth­ing with iTunes DRM), over wi-fi, Edge and 3G to your iPhone and it really works. In real terms, it means there is no stor­age limit on your iPhone, it will hold as much as your Mac or PC at home. You install a small piece of soft­ware on your net­worked com­puter, install the app on your iPhone, log into both devices with the same account and your entire musi­cal col­lec­tion mag­i­cally pops up on your iPhone and you can play any track! The app is cur­rently free, but after 100,000 down­loads, they will start charg­ing for it. Grab it while you can!

Sol Free Soli­taire
There are many ver­sions of this pop­u­lar solo card game, but I like this one, mainly because it is free. I’m not much of a gamer, but I used to play Soli­taire on Win­dows PCs and its nice to have a ver­sion to play on my iPhone. The inter­face is smooth, you tap the card you want to move, then tap the card you wish to move it to and it away it goes. There are sev­eral vari­a­tions to play, my favourite is Klondike 3,

Dual Level
This is another app that’s free, which makes it prefer­able to the paid ver­sions. Its a sim­ple idea, when you start the app, the screen turns into vir­tual hor­i­zon­tal and a ver­ti­cal spirit lev­els linked to the built in accelerom­e­ters. You can use it to level hang­ing pic­tures or any­thing else you might use a spirit level for — very cool!

iVote
This is a sim­ple app which lists poll ques­tions for you to respond to, rang­ing from pol­i­tics to per­sonal, with the results avail­able for you to break down in var­i­ous ways. It’s more geared towards Amer­i­cas (like almost every­thing online!), but it is a fun app and a real time waster. I like it!

WhosHere
Of all the social net­work­ing apps, this one shows the most promise with its sim­ple, yet focused func­tion. It’s a chat app that uses your loca­tion to show you other iPhone and iPod Touch users and their approx­i­mate prox­im­ity. In other words, its a loca­tion based chat appli­ca­tion which is very clever. You fill out a pro­file with as much, or as lit­tle (or noth­ing) and tap the near but­ton — you are then pre­sented with a list of peo­ple, their pro­files and the approx dis­tance from you. You can set the prox­im­ity of your search from as lit­tle as 5 miles up to 3000 miles. You can also blur your loca­tion, up to 2 miles from where you really are, so you do have options to main­tain some pri­vacy. The app’s user base seems to be grow­ing fast and yes, this one is free too.

Pho­to­Swap
Pho­to­Swap is very new, its only been avail­able for less than a week (at the time of my writ­ing) and I find it strangely addic­tive. The premise is sim­ple, you take a pho­to­graph on your iPhone and the app sends it to a ran­dom stranger, while you receive a photo from the same ran­dom stranger that receives yours — that’s the photo swap. Once you receive a photo, you have the option of reply­ing directly to that per­son with another photo, effec­tively hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with iPhone snaps. I’ve received all sorts of pho­tos; city sky­lines, beach views, people’s homes, pets, all sorts really. And before your sick imag­i­na­tion con­jures visions of body parts, I’ll dis­ap­point you — I have yet to receive any­thing offen­sive and there is a “report” but­ton to tap if you do. The app allows you to chose a user name, plus one line of descrip­tion for a mini-profile (accessed through the main set­tings via the home screen not directly from the app) and you can choose to show your loca­tion on a map. I would sug­gest turn­ing off the loca­tion stuff if you are at home and only use it when you are out in pub­lic. It might sound a bit strange, but try it, I think you will agree that there is some­thing very endear­ing about using it.

This is just a small selec­tion of apps that have caught my atten­tion, there are lit­er­ally over 1000 of them avail­able already, with more being added to the App Store every day. Have a look, I’m sure there are some that will appeal to you too.

And I’m still wait­ing for the two apps I’ll pay for, Tom­Tom nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware for the car and a Sling­Player client. I’d lay you odds I have both before the year is out!

After all the whing­ing and com­plain­ing over the last week about my prob­lems get­ting my new iPhone 3G from O2, I thought I would share some of my ini­tial impres­sions of it.

Yes, that’s right…I’ve got my brand new, shiny, lick­able, 16gb black iPhone 3G. I exclu­sively revealed this excit­ing bit of news on Face­Book last Thurs­day when it was deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair.

And again, yes, you read that right, I posted it on my Face­Book pro­file, as a sta­tus update.

Sta­tus updates on Face­Book are a lot like Twit­ter posts. It’s another rea­son why you should be my Face­Book friend!

Even though it was 6 days later than expected, I was still very pleased to be receiv­ing iPhone 3G and couldn’t wait to unbox it and fire it up.

I didn’t buy the orig­i­nal iPhone, as it was only released offi­cially here in the UK around 8 months ago. My rea­son­ing was sound, or so I thought. As I expected a 2nd gen­er­a­tion of iPhone to come out around now, I didn’t want to be in a posi­tion of want­ing to buy it so soon after get­ting the 1st gen.

How was I to know that O2 were going to be hand­ing out cheap (or free) upgrades to exist­ing cus­tomers? Doh!

I was bit dis­ap­pointed that Apple left out a cou­ple of good­ies that shipped with the orig­i­nal iPhone — the dock and the microfi­bre cloth to wipe the screen. The lack of the microfi­bre cloth is a real silly miss, they can’t cost that much when you’re buy­ing a mil­lion of them.

The touch­screen does pick up a lot of fin­ger­prints, though they are only really notice­able when the the screen is off. When the screen is illu­mi­nated, its very bright and you really don’t see any.

The screen is actu­ally glo­ri­ously bright, extremely crisp and pin sharp. I could eas­ily watch a full length film or tele­vi­sion pro­gramme on it and prob­a­bly will. The multi-touch con­trol of the device is noth­ing short of astound­ing. It’s extremely intu­itive and very accurate.

The iPod func­tions are also impres­sive and it blows away my old 60gb 5th gen iPod with video.

I’ve also set up sev­eral email accounts on my iPhone. If you want to reach me when I am on the go, you can con­tact northlondonhippy@gmail.com or northlondonhippy@yahoo.co.uk and I’ll receive them pretty god­damn quickly! You might even get a mobile reply…

I’ve also got the Face­Book mobile appli­ca­tion, AIM for instant mes­sag­ing and I’ve been play­ing around on Twit­ter with that cool app called Twin­kle. I’m northlon­don­hippy on all of those ser­vices too, though Twit­ter reg­is­tered my user­name as n_londonhippy because they don’t give you enough char­ac­ters for my full online name.

Surf­ing the web on the iPhone is some­thing else I’ve spent a good deal of time doing and its the first hand-held device that gives you any sort of use­ful inter­net expe­ri­ence. I’ve accessed the net from var­i­ous mobile phones and an old Palm Pilot of mine and I’ve always found it sorely lack­ing. Spend ten min­utes doing the same on the iPhone 3G and you will won­der how you lived with­out it. I’ve used both wi-fi and the 3G net­work and pages load very quickly too.

I read that the new iPhone 3G has about as much com­put­ing power as a lap­top made in 2003; sim­i­lar pro­cess­ing power and stor­age is what I took that to mean. Think about it — I’m now car­ry­ing some­thing as pow­er­ful as a five-year-old lap­top in my pocket now. It blows my mind!

There really are only 2 major dif­fer­ences between the new iPhone 3G and the orig­i­nal iPhone (and yes, I know there are plenty of minor changes, just humour me, please). The inclu­sion of 3G net­work access and GPS.

The GPS is noth­ing short of amaz­ing. Even sit­ting here , deep inside my north Lon­don lair, not near any win­dows and it still knows where I am with fright­en­ing accu­racy. The map soft­ware lets you know how cer­tain it is of your loca­tion, by using var­i­ously sized cir­cles to indi­cate your approx­i­mate loca­tion, until it is cer­tain and then places a push-pin like marker where you are. Out­side with no obstruc­tions, when the iPhone can see the sky, you get a remark­ably accu­rate read­ing of your loca­tion, so much so that if you walk a bit, the blue dot adjusts to your new position.

The loca­tion data isn’t only utilised by the map appli­ca­tion, but any app can grab it. This includes geo-tagging of your pho­tos and with some Twit­ter apps, can include your loca­tion so you can track peo­ple nearby. Spooky!

Can some­one please release some turn-by-turn, good enough to work in my car, nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware? I’ve read that Tom­Tom have already writ­ten the app, so why can’t I buy it already? My old Tom­Tom is mas­sive, com­pared to my tiny, slim lit­tle iPhone, if I didn’t have to carry the Tom­Tom with me, it would be a real bonus and my pock­ets would thank you.

And while I’m at it with a wish­list, could some­one please design, man­u­fac­ture and sell the following:

A pow­ered dock for use in my car, that has a suction-cup wind­screen mount, so I can posi­tion the iPhone like a Sat­Nav, plus a built-in, sophis­ti­cated FM trans­mit­ter that scans to find the best fre­quency and then beams audio to my in-car stereo, in high quality.

My super-dooper in-car dock/transmitter/mount is not actu­ally such a big ask and it would sell like prover­bial hot­cakes. Bun­dle it with a code to get a nav­i­ga­tion app and you would prob­a­bly sell 500,000 of them in the first year alone. I’m giv­ing you a mul­ti­mil­lion pound idea here, for free, so if one of you do this, at least cut me in for a slice of the pie. Or just send me one of these cool in-car suction-cup, FM-transmitter thin­gies for free. It’s the least you could do!

There is a third thing that sep­a­rates the new iPhone 3G from its pre­de­ces­sor, though you can upgrade the orig­i­nal to the new 2.0 soft­ware and enjoy it as well. I’m talk­ing about third party appli­ca­tions which you can access via iTunes or on the iPhone itself. Some apps are free, oth­ers cost. So far, I’ve only installed the freebies.

I’m not being cheap, its just none of the pay apps have really appealed to me and the best ones seem to be games and I’m not that both­ered. When I see one I like the look of (nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware!!!!!), I’ll hap­pily part with my readies.

There are so many appli­ca­tions avail­able already that I’m not going to actu­ally talk about any of the spe­cific ones now, but I’d rather come back at another time to give them proper attention.

What can’t be denied is that this is the real game changer with the iPhone 3G, the abil­ity to do so many cool things with it. And that’s just today, who knows what tomorrow’s killer appli­ca­tion for the iPhone might be…perhaps one of you out there in inter­net­land is already work­ing on the next HUGE thing! Just whis­per it in my ear, before your start-up has its IPO, so I can get in on the ground floor and make a lit­tle dirty lucre too…!

The one thing no-one seems to ever men­tion when they write about the iPhone is the phone itself. I think that shows you how far we come with per­sonal tech­nol­ogy and gad­gets, that the voice-communication func­tion of some­thing with the word “phone” in its name, is taken for granted and doesn’t mat­ter that much.

It does to me and one of my con­cerns about the iPhone was how it per­formed as a basic mobile telephone.

It turns out I had noth­ing to fear, the iPhone is a very robust cell­phone. Calls over my net­work on 3G are clear and the con­nec­tion seems strong. The speak­er­phone func­tion really works too, dialling a con­tact or a phone num­ber is also very sim­ple and works very well.

What’s inter­est­ing about the iPhone is the many stan­dard mobile phone func­tions it DOESN’T do. There’s no MMS mes­sag­ing, so no send­ing pho­tos as text mes­sages. There’s no way to for­ward a text mes­sage either. The iPhone has Blue­Tooth, but the only thing it uses it for is to con­nect a wire­less head­set. You can’t send a photo to your com­puter, or to another phone, you can’t exchange con­tacts with another phone, you can’t even Blue­jack strangers!

I don’t really under­stand why Apple has locked these func­tions out. At the very least, let us send pho­tos over blue­tooth. And synch­ing notes from my Mac would be use­ful too!

Some­thing else I don’t under­stand is the lack of cut & paste. It couldn’t be that hard to get a clip­board like func­tion­al­ity run­ning on it. It’s sup­posed to be the same soft­ware that runs on Macs, so what’s the prob­lem? I know some Apple big-wig men­tioned that it was on their list of things to do and they just didn’t have time to get to it, but that comes off sound­ing lame. There’s got to be some mar­ket­ing rea­son for with­hold­ing this func­tion, I just haven’t a clue what it could be!

All of these cool things do come at a cost and I don’t mean your monthly bill, though they might sting a bit too. I mean bat­tery life, or the lack of it. Surf­ing the net, check­ing emails, play­ing with apps, all drain the bat­tery far faster than you would like and its very easy to see it drop 50% in a cou­ple of hours.

I could see car­ry­ing a spare dock cable and attach­ing it to the near­est PC at every oppor­tu­nity. It’s another rea­son why I want a pow­ered dock for the car. I don’t see how I would get through a full day of seri­ous usage with­out top­ping up the bat­tery a cou­ple of times.

So am I happy with my new iPhone?

What do you think? It’s eas­ily the coolest, most pow­er­ful device I’ve ever had the plea­sure of own­ing. I’m look­ing for­ward to 18 months of deliri­ous joy as I find new and fun things to do with it.

And at the end of 18 months, I can only imag­ine what sort of iPhone I will be upgrad­ing to then! It will prob­a­bly trans­port me to a vir­tual new real­ity where I’m the king of the uni­verse and every­one wor­ships me as a liv­ing god. Now, that’s a app I’d buy!

Man, am I pissed off!

I’m still sit­ting here with­out an iPhone and I think every sin­gle one of the many peo­ple I’ve spo­ken to at 02 have lied to me about it, repeatedly.

I’m fuck­ing fuming!

Imag­ine if I had to take Fri­day off because I was told IT was com­ing, only to be told on Fri­day that IT was com­ing on Mon­day. Imag­ine if today was my sec­ond day of miss­ing out on work, to wait for a deliv­ery that’s near as I can tell, not coming.

Now imag­ine I was look­ing at tak­ing a third day off to actu­ally receive my iPhone. Wouldn’t you be feel­ing homicidal?

I have the urge to crush, kill and destroy! Thanks O2!

Luck­ily, I haven’t had to take any time off work; I was off on Fri­day any­way and while I am work­ing tonight, Mrs. H is off today, so it wouldn’t have been a prob­lem if it was com­ing today.

But its not grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

This morning’s O2 liar is “inves­ti­gat­ing” why my order hasn’t been shipped yet. She says the “stock hasn’t been released”, which is bull­shit, because I was told on Weds that it was fol­low­ing my credit check. She says it could be still sit­ting in their ware­house, await­ing clear­ance for shipment…

As fuck­ing if!

There prob­a­bly isn’t a 16gb iPhone 3G to be had right now in the entire coun­try. The chances of a stray one, just sit­ting on a shelf in a ware­house with my name on it, await­ing someone’s green light is laugh­ably absurd.

I’ve just had a call back from O2…they still don’t know if I have an iPhone wait­ing for me. Their “sys­tem” is giv­ing them mixed sig­nals and its not clear what’s going on. How impres­sive is that?

The woman who phoned me back says she will keep an eye on my order all day and will phone back if it is shipped out today for deliv­ery tomorrow.

Put it this way, I’m not going to sit by the tele­phone wait­ing for that call.

I don’t think I’ve ever put so much effort into spend­ing my own money. This is beyond a joke. I wish I could go to another net­work and get one, O2 appear to be shite!