Well bless my soul and whiskers. This is the first time I’ve joined the congregation at the Church of Apple for a new product launch. I’ve watched all the past ones, downloaded the Quicktime movies and marvelled as Apple’s leader has stood before an ovating faithful and announced the switch to Intel, the birth of iPod, the miniMac, the iTunes Store, OS X, iPhoto, the swan’s neck iMac, the Shuffle, Apple retail stores, the iPhone, the titanium powerbook, Garageband, the App Store and so much more. But today I finally made it. I came to San Francisco for the launch of the iPad. Oh, happy man.

Today had special resonance. In front of his family, friends and close colleagues stood the man who founded Apple, was fired from Apple and came back to lead Apple to a greatness, reach and influence that no one on earth imagined. But a year ago, it is now clear, there was a very strong possibility that Steve Jobs would not live to see 2010 and the birth of his newest baby.

With revenues of 15.6 billion Apple is now the largest mobile device company in the world, Jobs told the subdued but excited six hundred packed into the Yerba Buena Cultural Center for the Arts Theatre this morning. A few more triumphant housekeeping notes followed and then we were into the meat of it. Well, the whole event is available to be watched online, you don’t need me to describe it. He picked up an iPad and walked us through. Afterwards I was allowed to play with one myself.

I know there will be many who have already taken one look and pronounced it to be nothing but a large iPhone and something of a disappointment. I have heard these voices before. In June 2007 when the iPhone was launched I collected a long list of “not impressed”, “meh”, “big deal”, “style over substance”, “it’s all hype”, “my HTC TyTN can do more”, “what a disappointment”, “majorly underwhelmed” and similar reactions. They can hug to themselves the excuse that the first release of iPhone was 2G, closed to developers and without GPS, cut and paste and many other features that have since been incorporated. Neither they, nor I, nor anyone, predicted the “game-changing” effect the phone would so rapidly have as it evolved into a 3G, third-party app rich, compass and GPS enabled market leader. Even if it had proved a commercial and business disaster instead of an astounding success, iPhone would remain the most significant release of its generation because of its effect on the smartphone habitat. Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?

Nonetheless, even if they couldn’t see that THREE BILLION apps would be downloaded in 2 years (that’s half a million app downloads a day, give or take ) could they not see that this device was gorgeous, beautifully made, very powerful and capable of development into something extraordinary? I see those qualities in the iPad. Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company. In the future, when it has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100 millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can’t now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today’s nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.

“What can I do with it that I can’t do with a laptop or an iPhone?” they might now be objecting. “Too big for my pocket, not big enough for serious use. Don’t see the need. It’s a solution looking for a problem.”

There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: “Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it”. No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects. You know how everyone who has ever done Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? always says, “It’s not the same when you’re actually here. So different from when you’re sitting at home watching.”? You know how often you’ve heard that? Well, you’ll hear the same from anyone who’s handled an iPad. The moment you experience it in your hands you know this is class. This is a different order of experience. The speed, the responsiveness, the smooth glide of it, the richness and detail of the display, the heft in your hand, the rightness of the actions and gestures that you employ, untutored and instinctively, it’s not just a scaled up iPhone or a scaled-down multitouch enhanced laptop – it is a whole new kind of device. And it will change so much. Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic text books, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed (poor Kindle). Specific dedicated apps and enhancements will amaze us. You will see characters in movies use the iPad. Jack Bauer will want to return for another season of 24 just so he can download schematics and track vehicles on it. Bond will have one. Jason Bourne will have one. Some character, in a Tron like way, might even be trapped in one.

There’s much to like of course. The physical beauty and classy build quality, as in anything designed by Jonathan Ive. The shockingly low price — $499 for the basic model. The contract-free, unlocked nature of the 3G version. But there are two chief reasons for its guaranteed success.

1. It is SO SIMPLE. It is basically a highly responsive capacitative piece of glass with solid state memory and an IPS display. Just as a book is basically paper bound together in a portable form factor. The simplicity is what allows everyone, us, software developers, content providers and accessory manufacturers to pour themselves into it, to remake it according to the limits of their imagination. I’ll stop before I get too Disney.

2. It is made by Apple. I’m not being cute here. If it was made by Hewlett Packard, they wouldn’t have global control over the OS or the online retail outlets. If it was made by Google, they would have tendered out the hardware manufacture to HTC. Apple — and it is one of the reasons some people distrust or dislike them — control it all. They’ve designed the silicon, the A4 chip that runs it all, they’ve designed the batteries, they’ve overseen every detail of the commercial, technological, design and software elements. No other company on earth does that. And being Apple it hasn’t been released without (you can be sure) Steve Jobs being wholly convinced that it was ready. “Not good enough, start again. Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough.” How many other CEOs say until their employees want to murder them? That’s the difference.

Slightly annoying that the iPhone autocorrects iPad into upas – which is a kind of poison mulberry I believe… you can bet that omission in the iPhone’s glossary will change with the upcoming release of iPhone OS 4.0.

I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from the Simpson’s voice, “Ha ha! He’s naked.” And then a lone child pipes up, ‘No. He’s actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes.” And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what E. M. Forster called the lack of confidence trick. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say “Not impressed”. I’m not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design fixated and so on are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can’t bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire. The fact is that Apple users like me are the uncoolest people on earth: we salivate, dribble, coo, sigh, grin and bubble with delight.

No, I don’t have shares in Apple. I came so close to buying some as an act of defensive defiance in the early 90s when every industry insider and expert in the field agreed that Apple had six months to go before going bust. But I didn’t. If I had done I could now afford to buy you all an iPad. Yes, I do like and have tried to champion OpenSource software. How can I square that with my love of Apple? I’m complicated. I’m a human being. I also believe in a mixed economy and mixed nuts. I love our National Health Service and the National Theatre, but I also love Fortnum and Mason’s and Hollywood movies. “Apple,” Steve Jobs said, “stands at the intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts.” This statement confused non-Americans who are not familiar with the phrase Liberal Arts (you can look it up here) but I think shows the fundamental cultural seriousness of Jobs and Apple which in turn explains their huge success and impact. He might perhaps more accurately have said that Apple stands at the intersection of Technology, the Liberal Arts and Commerce.”

You may or may not be in the queue for an iPad in March, April, May or June. Or you may decide to stay your hand for version 2.0 or 3.0. But believe me the iPad is here to stay and nothing will be quite the same again. You should know, however that plenty of industry commentators disagree with me. They have pronounced themselves less enthralled. It is perfectly possible I will be proved wrong about its enduring, game-changing place in the landscape and that people will gleefully rub my nose in this blog in two year’s time. I’m certainly not wrong about how soul-scorchingly beautiful it is to use though. And that, for me, is enough.

GoogleBless

Dear old Google. Sounds silly to feel sorry for them. But their text transcription service has a long way to go. I was asked to do a Skype interview for the BBC’s Newsnight programme today and I gave the producers my Google Voice number. This Google service isn’t available outside the US, but is basically a phone number that you can use as one number that directs itself to all your phones. It will call your handsets, whether landline or cell, send SMS texts and voicemail to accounts and so on.

Anyway, one of the Newsnight people left this message on my phone:

Hi, Stephen, it’s Natasha from BBC Newsnight in London. Just to say I’ve sent you two texts. One is to say that we could do it at eleven am your time after the launch, or any time sooner after the launch, or we could do it at midday as we suggested earlier. I, er, if you could text me back about that, and I’ve sent you the details of Skype that you need to do too. If you could give me a call back. Enjoy the launch and I’ll speak to you after that. Thank you Bye.

I’ve transcribed it from the voicemail sound file that resides online on my inbox on the Google Voice site. All fine. I have also ticked the option for Google Voice to send me a text transcript of any voicemail. Below is their interpretation of Natasha’s message… it’s rather endearing how hopelessly wrong the largest company on earth gets it.

Hi Stephen. It’s Jeff from BBC needs in nuns. And just to say I sent 80 tax, one, if to say we could do it. I left in i a m your time off to go into any time soon, or the court and full we could grab me today as we suggested at. A. F. I. If you could text me back byebye. I’ve sent you the details of skylights that you need to 3 T if you could give me a call. Bye. Enjoy the loans. I’ll speak to you after that. Thank you. Bye.

Bless

Producer note: All comments both negative or positive are welcome but please bear in mind that if a comment is abusive, contains swearing designed to offend, is deliberately aimed at upsetting others or is troll-like, I will delete it. Stephen Fry visited the Apple event as a private individual and was not paid. Best wishes, Andrew Sampson

Comments are now closed to this blog. Best wishes, Andrew Sampson

Some people can write with ease in whatever circumstances they find themselves. Up a tree, on a bus, in a log cabin, a steamy-windowed café or a tropical beach. Some don’t mind noise, distraction or a broken up day. I, unhappily, am not made of this material. I need peace, absolute peace, an empty diary and zero distraction. I enter a kind of writing purdah, an eremitical seclusion in which there is just me, a keyboard and abundant cups of coffee, all in a room whose curtains have been drawn against the light. I would have added tobacco as a constant and necessary companion, but I stopped smoking some two and half years ago, so no longer will there be the pleasure of having a pipe clamped between the teeth as I grope for the Flaubertian mot juste.

I have a single appointment in London towards the end of January and another in Barcelona a month or so later. Otherwise I shall be as one wiped from the map of human existence. This is how it must be.

All this is a way of saying, of course, that my twitter stream will dry up for that period. No doubt this will come as a relief to some, but I am not so sunk in false modesty as to be unaware that there are loyal followers who will emit long, loud wails of “Noooooooo!” and who will feel pained and dispirited . But I hope they will understand that this is a) imperative and b) temporary. I shall return.

And what of this book? Twelve years ago I wrote a volume of autobiography called Moab Is My Washpot. It is essentially a memoir of childhood and adolescence and ends after our hero is released from prison and contrives, with a year’s probation still to run, to get himself a place at university. The book I must now write will follow on from this. Whether it will be chronological or thematic, first person or third I have no idea. That is the adventure, if I can call it such, that lies before me. The loneliness of writing, or of my kind of writing at least, is absolute. The other week, the excellent @wishdasher tweeted me a line by Paul Tilich: “Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.” Whether my reclusive isolation will be painful or glorious remains to be seen. Accept my apologies for what must be and believe me, no one yearns more keenly for the day when I will be able to be back amongst you all.

Location: London

Stephen Fry, Biz Stone, Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter; and Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn will discuss the phenomenon of social media and its future impact.

You can also join the conversation by posting a question for any of the speakers – all you need to do is add #svuk to your question on Twitter.

This event forms part of NESTA’s Silicon Valley comes to the UK event programme.

For more information: http://www.nesta.org.uk/assets/events/social_media__a_force_for_good

Watch Stephen Fry along with 1 million followers on Twitter.

Produced by SamFry for StephenFry.com
Visual Effects by Anthony Gibbs and thanks to Simon Whalley, Framestore, London.

I suspect most of you will have heard of the shitstorm that howled about the head of Jan Moir, a journalist who wrote a beastly article in the Daily Mail about the death of Stephen Gately the day before his funeral. I don’t propose to stop and pick over the carcass of that epically ill-judged piece of gutter journalism. Its malice, stupidity, incoherent illogicality and crass insensitivity have been superbly anatomised by many others and besides, too much time has passed, a whole 24 hours at the time of writing and for the online world, which is still a child, a year is a decade and a day a whole month.

If I were to express sympathy for Jan Moir here some of you might think I had gone soft in the head. And yet I do feel sorry for her. There are those, there will always be those, who believe that she knew exactly what she was doing and that she is relishing her notoriety, that the sight of her name topping the Twitter trend lists will give her nothing but frissons of pleasure. I do not believe this. Yes, I expect that she will, in time, revisit her disaster. I dare say she will write the inevitable Vulnerable Frightened Piece in which she tells the world just how tyrannised, terrorised and victimised she felt; piling on the image of the concerned mum (if she is one) who was just trying to ask questions; the honest (and perhaps naive, yes, she’ll admit to that) journalist who sowed a doubt and reaped a whirlwind. Such articles always end with Serious Questions, in this case concerning the Future of Democracy Itself if it is to be left in the hands of the firebrands, hysterics and (Dark Hints) possibly sinister forces that patrol and control the internet. It will all be silly, distressing, disingenuous and ignorant, but then she is a tabloid columnist and that is her job. The reason I feel sorry for her is not that she is a journalist, or that she writes for the Daily Mail, I am quite sure she can do without my pompous, patronising sympathy. I feel sorry for her because I know just what it is like to make a monumental ass of oneself and how hard it is to find the road back. I know all too well what it is like to be inebriated, as Disraeli put it, by the exuberance of my own verbosity.

Poland

Only a week and a half ago I was asked to appear on Channel 4 news to comment on the Conservative Party and their decision to ally themselves in the European Parliament with the Polish Law and Justice Party, a nationalist grouping whose members have made statements of the most unpleasantly homophobic and antisemitic nature. I usually decline such invitations, and how I wish I had done so on this occasion. I think I accepted for the achingly dumb reason that I happened to be in the Holborn area all that day and the ITN news studios were just round the corner, so it seemed like an easy gig. The more probable explanation is that, as my father and squadrons of school teachers correctly reminded me throughout my childhood and youth, “Stephen just doesn’t think.” Anyway. Words tumbled from my lips during that interview that were as idiotic, ignorant and offensive as you could imagine. It had all been proceeding along perfectly acceptable lines until I said something like “let’s not forget which side of the border Auschwitz was on.”

I mean, what was I thinking? Well, as I say, I wasn’t. The words just formed themselves in a line in my head, as words will, and marched out of the mouth. I offer no excuse. I seemed to imply that the Polish people had been responsible for the most infamous of all the death factories of the Third Reich. I didn’t even really at the time notice the import of what I had said, so gave myself no opportunity instantly to retract the statement. It was a rubbishy, cheap and offensive remark that I have been regretting ever since.

But it gets worse. Once the interview had been transmitted I started to receive the odd invitation to talk on Polish radio, explain myself to Polish journalists and make apologies to the Polish people in general. Perfect, you might think. An opportunity to make amends. But some mad pixie of pride in my head had got me rather riled by this time. It wasn’t helped by the fact that some of the letters I received were of such a bombastic and dictatorial nature that any spark of apology was extinguished before it was born. So I just ignored the whole incident and pretended to myself that I had been misunderstood, mischievously misunderstood, you might even say; that it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that I had never meant to suggest that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust and therefore it would make so sense for me to apologise — it would only perpetuate the culture of offence and apology that is so tedious a feature of our world. Or so I muttered. Really I was so guilty and angry with myself that I directed the anger outwards, as people will.

I take this opportunity to apologise now. I said a stupid, thoughtless and fatuous thing. It detracted from and devalued my argument, such as it was, and it outraged and offended a large group of people for no very good reason. I am sorry in all directions, and all the more sorry because it is no one’s fault but my own, which always makes it so much worse. And sorry because I didn’t have the wit, style, grace or guts to apologise at the first opportunity. I don’t know if Jan Moir feels the same, but I am pretty sure that in her heart of hearts she will have at the very least yearned for a rewind button. How many times in her mind since must she have rephrased, reworded and rejigged that sorry and squalid little article? Some of you will think I am a simpleton to imagine any such thing and that she is much more canny, crafty and conniving than that. Conspiracy theorists can be the faithful guardians of our democracy, but like many fierce dogs they can often mistrust and savage the postman, the doctor or the innocent bystander as well as the real malefactor. But this a blog and therefore about meeeee.

Political Stir Fry

There is a whole suite of reasons that disqualify me from being any kind of politician. Firstly, I don’t want to be one. I would rather suck turds for a living. Secondly I can’t make my mind up on Big Issues. On Wednesday I might believe x but come Friday I will be convinced of y. By the weekend someone will have persuaded me that the only possible answer is z. Thirdly, and most importantly, as the Polish incident demonstrated, I cannot keep my mouth shut. If a joke or a neat phrase or an apparently convincing rhetorical trope or apt simile occur to me they will emerge from my mouth without passing Think. Political opponents will have every opportunity to shake their heads and murmur about judgement, reliability and loose canons. I would spend my time writing craven letters of apology and writhing with guilt, shame and self-disgust. Which, let’s face it, is no way to run a whelk-stall.

But maybe the age of politics as we knew and loved it is over. Maybe the two twitterstorms of last week point to a new kind of democracy. L’Affaire Moir followed hard on the heels of a quite horrific attempt to muzzle the press by the lawyers Carter-Ruck. In the name of sub judice this notorious law firm slapped a ‘superinjunction’ on The Guardian newspaper forbidding them to mention the name of an MP or the question he had tabled in Parliament on the Trafigura toxic waste dumping scandal. Six hours of TwitterIndignation later, during which time every censored detail was made freely available for all to see, and the injunction was, force majeure, lifted. The internet had hobbled it fatally and it was led limping back to its stall, to the jeers and cheers of the public. Ian Hislop, editor of the Private Eye heaved a huge sigh of relief – the Eye had decided to publish and Hislop is under a personal restraining order which would have led to his facing the real likelihood of imprisonment for contempt of court, breaching the terms of a judgement and all manner of nutty malfeasances.

What both cases point to, some would argue, is a shift in the very focus of democracy. In the good old days there were Three Estates that held dominion over us. The Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons. As the Press rose and cast off the shackles of censorship it became routinely referred to, after a remark made by Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century, as the Fourth Estate. Here is how Oscar Wilde saw things a hundred and twenty years ago:-

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891

I would urge you click the link above and read the rest of that magnificent essay, especially the continuation of Wilde’s thoughts about the press.

The Fifth Estate?

Well, then. All in the same week the Fourth Estate has been rescued by Twitter and shamed by Twitter. Has the twinternet now become the Fifth Estate? And if so is it safe in the hands of people like you and me? Especially me.

Without, I hope, too much self-pity, I do seem to have made myself a target. Journalists who don’t understand what Twitter really is (the overwhelming majority) will use my name as a kind of shorthand for the service. The fact that I have been on it for a whole year (ie a decade, see second paragraph above) and have in that time accumulated a fairly large number of followers allows them lazily to go straight to my “Twitter feed” (as they insist on calling it) and either crediting me with being a kind of a Citizen Smith of the Twitting Popular Front, or blaming me for hypocritically claiming to strike blows for press freedom with one hand while trying to censor journalism with the other.

And what am I after all? What right have I to wield this kind of influence? A question people have been asking about journalists for years, but which they have every right to ask about me too. I don’t know what business I have wielding influence either. This whole thing has just grown up around me and now I cannot help wondering if, despite my preference for turd-sucking over politics, I have found myself in a new Fifth Estate political assembly, willy-nilly hailed as some sort of tribune by friendly people on one side and being yelled at by unfriendly people on the other. I am not cut out for the hurly-burly of adversarial politics. I am not qualified to represent anyone nor, I cannot repeat often enough, do I wish to. So I should shut up. That seems to be the only sensible thing to do. I should shut the fuck up.

Twitter and Me

It all seems rather unfair, he wailed piteously. A pleasant twittery microblogging service that I joined in the spirit of curiosity and fun has emerged as a real force in the land and it is of course fascinating  and pleasing to see this. I am, despite my prolix propensities and orotund enunciations, infantile. I like toys, I never plan ahead and I have little thought for consequences. I had no agenda with joining Twitter a year ago other than popping my toe in its water and seeing what the temperature was. It was not part of a clever commercial plan to “build my brand” (whatever the arse that means) nor to sell tickets, books and DVDs nor to ready myself for government, nor to disseminate a point of view nor to raise my profile in the media. I was travelling in Africa and other spots around the globe and I thought it would be an interesting way of sending little postcards to anyone who might be interested.

A tweet is a 140 word expression of what’s on one’s mind, what one is doing or dreaming of. No one, not Biz Stone and the other founders of the service, not you nor I and certainly not anyone in the mainstream or techno press, ever had the faintest idea what Twitter would become. We still do not know what it will become. Some of those who dismissed it as it rose in popularity will now be slinking embarrassedly to the sign-on page, while political ginger groups of all kinds, right left, religious secular, fanatical and mild, will be sitting around wondering how to harness its power. ‘Political consultants’ who had never heard of the service six months ago will be hiring themselves out as experts who can create a ‘powerful, influential and profitable Twitter brand’. And the moronic and gullible clients will line up for this new nostrum like prairie settlers queuing for snake oil and salvation.

“If a twazzock like Stephen Fry can wield such influence,” the mainstream parties and their think tanks will be saying, “just imagine what we can do if we get our Twitter strategy right.”

Well, I contend that I do not wield influence. I contend that Twitter users are not sheep but living, dreaming, thinking, hoping human beings with minds, opinions and aspirations of their own. Of the 860,000 or so who follow me the overwhelming majority are too self-respecting, independent-minded and free-thinking to have their opinions formed or minds made up for them in any sphere, least of all Twitter.

Is it now my turn to be disingenuous, you might be wondering? I do not think so. I don’t propose to put it to the test by urging my followers to sign a petition to bring back the death penalty or have Jan Moir sued or some other cause of which I do not approve, just in order to see whether I can bend them to my evil will, but I can guarantee that were I to do so I would get thousands of “Boo, Stephen, I thought better of you then that”, “Stephen have you run mad?”, “Stephen I think you should lie down in a darkened room for a while” types of  tweet in response.

Incidentally, in the case of both the Trafigura scandal and the Daily Mail article, I was late on the scene. I was neither an opinion former nor a trend-setter. Both Trafigura and Jan Moir were high in the top ten Twitter trending lists by the time I tweeted my first tweets on the subject. Twitter being what it is you can check this out. All tweets and their time of posting are logged and every statistic recorded. Contrary to appearances I have another life and do not spend all my time monitoring screens and detecting every twitch on the filament of the web. So you see, my influence really is wildly overstated by journalists who could take the trouble to see that I am more often behind the curve than ahead of it, more often reactive than proactive. I will concede that sheer force of numbers can cause me to break sites and to swell the ranks of a trend, but Twitter and the causes espoused on it all get on perfectly well without me.

Twitter and Governance

Perhaps the foregoing is the most fatuous and maddening aspect of the press’s (perfectly understandable) fear, fascination and dread of Twitter: the insulting notion that twitterers are wavy reeds that can be blown this way or that by the urgings of a few prominent ‘opinion formers’. It is hooey, it is insulting hooey and it is wicked hooey. The press dreads Twitter for all kinds of reasons. Celebrities (whose doings sell even broadsheet newspapers these days) can cut them out of the loop and speak direct to their fans which is of course most humiliating and undermining. But also perhaps the deadwood press loathes Twitter because it is like looking in a time mirror. Twitter is to the public arena what the press itself was two hundred and fifty years ago — a new and potent force in democracy, a thorn in side of the established order of things.

I don’t suppose there can be many in Britain who do not agree with the proposition that the Four Estates are decaying. The Estate that matters, or ought to matter, is the Commons. It is an old way of saying the common people, or as we would say now, the people. The Commons in Parliament Assembled have not now become the Commons in Twitter Assembled, any more than the presses that rolled in the eighteenth century calling for freedom and ridiculing the powerful and the corrupt of the age were the Commons in Pamphlets Assembled. But the twinternet shows that the focus is shifting. The Commons in Parliament Assembled have never been so distrusted and more importantly — for we humans rightly put more faith in our hearts than our heads — they have never been so disliked.

Twestminster: Democracy at Work

I am not a representative of the Commons in Twitter Assembled. I write this as an observer of a new and interesting trend, a trend that might conceivably play as important a role in the forging of a new polity as the development of the presses did in the eighteenth century. There is an energy abroad in the kingdom, one that yearns for a new openness in our rule making, our justice system and our administration. Do not imagine for a minute that I am saying Twitter is it. Its very name is the clue to its foundation and meaning. It is not, as I have pointed out before, called Ponder or Debate. It is called Twitter. But there again some of the most influential publications of the eighteenth century had titles like Tatler, Rambler, Idler and Spectator. Hardly suggestive of earnest political intent either. History has a habit of choosing the least prepossessing vessels to be agents of change.

Twitter may seem to some to be dominated by bien pensant, liberal spirits at the moment. Will I be so optimistic about it when these spirits are matched by forces of religiosity and nationalism that might not accord with my chattering-class, liberal elite preferences? When the political machines march in and start recruiting and acquiring millions of followers, giving them the power to close sites with DDOS slashdotting campaigns, what will I say then?

Well, all kinds of bleak scenarios are possible. But for the moment let me believe in democracy and the good sense and good intentions of the commons. We commons have long treasured our ancient liberties. They stretch back in time, marked by Magna Carta, Milton’s Areopagitica, 1688 and the Bill of Rights, Wilkes and Liberty, the Peterloo Massacre, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, the Reform Bill, the Jarrow marches and innumerable other milestones that have led us to this point. The ancient liberties of the common people have found expression in plays, poems, ballads, essays, journalism, cinema, television and now they find a voice in Twitter and the internet. One medium has never replaced the other, but complemented and enhanced it. Let there not be war between Twitter and the press. Let them both be agents for freedom of speech and a better way of governing ourselves.

Meanwhile what of me? Hundreds of requests pour in every day asking me to use my strange, new-found ability to connect to a lot of people. It is as if I own a billboard on the busiest road in Britain. Some seem to think I have a duty to relay their message. Indeed they get quite shirty if I do not, as if I am a public service to which they have every right. Publishers want books mentioned, charities or individuals want good causes pointed to, individuals want their birthdays mentioned and their political campaigns supported: through it all I continue to try to use the service like a good twitterer, balancing public service announcements with the trivial core identity of Twitter. I blather about my day, my likes and my dislikes, I sometimes try to be amusing and I allow my incoherent thoughts to tumble out. I routinely press send without thinking and I often get myself into trouble. That is what Twitter is all about.

But maybe the very fact that I have so many followers now disqualifies me from stating the sort of opinions all others are free to – as if I were a member of the royal family. Lord, what a thought.

The best I can do is hope for a quiet week ahead…

Our masters at ITV have decided that there shan’t be a fourth series of the television drama Kingdom. I am sorry because it was such a pleasure making them in my beloved Norfolk. I am sorry because the crew of mostly local East Anglians was so cheerful, professional and delightful to work with: the riggers, sparks, grips and location; the camera, caterers, dressers, make-up and props, production assistants, accountants and co-ordinators, the sound men and the drivers, assistant directors and runners, the security, police and councillors who always tried to help. The cast of local people who cheerfully subjected themselves to the indignities of a background artist’s day. They will all be missed and their memories cherished.

Above all, the people of those Norfolk towns and villages on which we descended for days on end. The citizens especially of Castle Rising, Wells-next-the-Sea and above all of Swaffham who put up with our desire to control traffic (something of a vain, Canute-like hope in Swaffham’s central buttermarket – Norfolk’s Piccadilly Circus). They were kind to us, considerate and understanding. It was a charming and cheerful experience for us all. I am lucky to live there much of the time – for the rest of the Kingdom cast and crew it will be a sad farewell that was never properly said.

All things must pass. That is why we must be so grateful to Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, and mother of the muses. Heigh ho. Onward and upward.

I remember attending a Rolling Stones concert at the Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles last year. When it was apparent that the final encore had been given and that the event was over, the audience stood to leave and the darkness was punctuated by the twinkling of ten thousand BlackBerries: the Rolling Stones generation checking their inboxes. No cigarette lighters held up in the air to honour the band (there probably wasn’t one smoker in a thousand at the venue), just handsets held up to their own faces to honour the bandwidth. The moment seemed to distill some truth about our culture that simultaneously amused, depressed and delighted me. Go, as they say, figure.

The Canadian company Research In Motion introduced its first BlackBerry, a duplex pager, ten years ago. Since then RIM has established itself and its device as one of the great success stories of the digital age. BlackBerry is a kind of cult – a verb, a metonym, a synecdoche for corporate life on the move.

Under the RIM

For those of you unconnected with business, the way Blackberryists interface with their phones may be unfamiliar. Typically he or she will have been given the handset by their employer. This is not an act of generosity. The device is a kind of leash, a digital ball and chain not far from the electronic tag that convicts on parole are forced to wear. The email and calendar accounts are controlled by the company, via BlackBerry Enterprise Server connections. Each handset can be zapped, nixed and deactivated by the corporate IT people whose hands are ever hovering over the kill switch, awaiting the command from the Fifth Floor. Or so it must seem to some employees. Like the bonds of marriage, the connection can be seen as a welcome tie that binds you with ribbons of gold to the company you love, or as a set of shackles that confine you for ever in a hateful prison from which there is no escape.

There is a civilian way to own a Blackberry, however. You or I can walk into a network provider’s retail operation and sign up for a BlackBerry enabled account.  Nowadays the configuration for this is done Over The Air: fire up the device for the first time, follow the email set-up wizard and voilà! – you’re a BlackBerryist. RIM calls this a BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service) connection, in contrast to the BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) connection for the corporate user.

In either case RIM’s own servers ensure that their unique email system works on your device and delivers the authentic BlackBerry experience that many find so addictive. Essentially your handset is in a state of constant connection to these servers, which will ‘push’ emails to you the moment they come in. You can as-good-as-replicate this on a non BB phone by setting it to connect to your email server as frequently as once a minute say, but that wouldn’t be true push and tends to be more wearing on batteries. Google, expanding into all areas of online life as it is, does now offer genuine Exchange server push email to iPhones or other platforms for those with Gmail accounts. I have to say I’ve found this service so far a lot flakier than either BlackBerry or the standard iPhone ‘fetch’ IMAP4 or POP3 connections, just as Google’s CalDAV syncing is also prone to arbitrary disconnection and failure. The Big G get away with this kind of unreliability by being a) free to use and b) in a constant and eternal state of Beta. GoogleSync also offers calendar and contact syncing with a number of platforms including RIM, but we’re wandering from the subject…

The appeal of BlackBerry has always been simple: secure push email without frills. From the corporate point of view it’s a one system solution with an admirable data security record and VPN-style command and control capabilities. For the individual who is hooked on their CrackBerry, it’s all about eliminating frills and fancy folderols and concentrating on text input and output.

For years any clamour for music, video, third-party applications or even basic colour and HTML browsing was met with raised eyebrows. “This is a business tool, not some student gaming platform,” the shamed enquirer would be told in the scandalised tones of a butler who has just been asked for ketchup. Indeed, a proud feature of first, second and third generation BlackBerries was that they had no camera. How did this give bragging rights, you may wonder? Well, it meant that when you visited a factory, a boardroom, a government department or any secure or sensitive area, you didn’t have to check in your phone:  “I’m so important, my work is so sensitive,” was the implied Blackberry boast, “that I have a camera-less phone. Kneel before Zod.”

Over the years RIM have bowed to pressure, reluctantly found that bottle of ketchup in their pantry and, with something of a disapproving sniff, served it up on a silver salver with as good a grace as they could muster. Their somewhat ancient Java operating system has been regularly updated and the product line these days includes phones with cameras, media players and an OTA store called BlackBerry App World. Why, their websites even carry banners now that cry: “Works with Mac straight out of the box!”

Convergence has many faces. A printer, a scanner and a fax machine can easily converge into an All-In-One machine; a hip, fun, flashy media-playing, super-browsing communicator and app-platform like the iPhone can converge with business devices by getting all VPN and Enterprise friendly and a grim corporate tool like the BlackBerry can fluff and frisk itself up with Facebook apps and games and video and ask to be played with. But there are ontological baselines and last year RIM made a disastrous attempt to cross a BlackBerry with an iPhone and came up with one of digital history’s all time dogs, the Storm, an example of those wretched, cursed mutants that slip from the womb, writhe and thrash for an instant as they struggle for air and then die screaming – to the eternal shame of the diabolical genetic manipulators who dared interfere with the natural order of things. The Storm was (and is – for they have been cruel enough to keep it alive) blushmakingly dreadful. It was as if the butler answered the door wearing trainers, ripped jeans and a beanie with a cry of  “Sup, bitch?” Embarrassment all round. I reviewed the benighted beast here and while I wasn’t kind, I hope the glowing encomia I heaped on the BlackBerry Bold in the same blog shows that it I am certainly no BlackBerry hater.

I think RIM have understood that messing with the core appeal of the BlackBerry in this way was a bad idea. It may be that somewhere in the future they will develop a successful hybrid, a phone with either a proprietary (web-based, like Palm’s?) or existing OS which will be capable of delivering the usual BES or BIS connections on a modern, games and app-savvy platform. For the moment they have in recent months concentrated on bringing out true BlackBerry devices that offer the limited bells and whistles that their venerable Java OS affords but which tweak, streamline and refine that system in an elegant and consistent manner. Twitter and Facebook clients, RSS aggregators, utilities and games all work on these new generation devices, but never as well as they would on an iPhone or Android phone. There again, push email won’t work as well on iPhone or Android platforms as on a BlackBerry. For the moment, true convergence between Work and Play hasn’t been effected by either side and the BlackBerry still reigns supreme as the professional business phone par excellence.

Given that: what choices are there? The Bold offers quad band, 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, a 2MP camera and 1GB of onboard memory (supplemented by micro-SD) and is still a champion device, the complete package. Version 4.6 of the OS gives a smooth, balanced look and feel, there’s power and speed enough.

Speed is an interesting issue for BlackBerry. RIM has always exhibited a schizophrenic attitude towards wireless protocols. The true BB experience doesn’t really require 3G speeds, EDGE is easily good enough for push email and conserves battery power so much better: indeed pointing at the four-fifths full battery icon at day’s end is one of the BlackBerryist’s favourite occupations. But 3G is “today” and not to offer it would seem perverse. It is really most useful for Over The Air downloads of applications and updates or web browsing — only of course the proprietary web browser, while it may have improved, still sucks big time stylie. Too many random fails and “XML is not well-formed” error messages.

So: what flavours and functions of BlackBerry handset are available? More cut-down models than the Bold offer either a configuration which is 2G only but has WiFi built-in for downloading and power-browsing or a configuration which offers 3G but no WiFi. Of course, in America (and parts of Asia) there is the option of CDMA (more later) which until now has only been available for the senescently gray 8830. Which brings us on to the two models under advisement.

Graceful Curve

The Curve 8900 is the 2G with WiFi option. Its 480 x 360 display is bright, crisp, clear and colourful. Best ever. The operating system is 4.6 for my Vodafone badged model, but it may be that you can update it to 4.7 if you search about and trust one of the fan sites like the ever irreverent but never irrelevant (say that five times fast when drunk) crackberry.com. Everything works well, you can download the iPhone apps that have now been recoded for all the major smartphone platforms: Shazam, Evernote and so forth as well as a slew of Twitter clients (TwitterBerry, TweetCaster and twibble seem to be the most popular) are all available, as are Facebook, the Google suite of mobile apps, dictionaries and language learning apps from Beiks, Oxford Duden and Collins, and games that can be chosen from eight categories ranging from Arcade to Strategy. That once frosty butler is now in a muscle vest, boogeying and writhing on the dance-floor in the most unlikely fashion.

The Curve 8900 can be regarded as a replacement for the highly successful 8300, 8310 and 8320 Curves (the later versions adding WiFi and/or GPS). Also this year, just to confuse everyone further, RIM have produced the 8520 – a low end EDGE Curve that comes with a 2.0MP camera and WiFi, no GPS and no 3G but which still manages to excite interest and curiosity in that it features an optical trackpad to replace the now venerable trackball. The trackball first appeared in 2006: a white granular navigation sphere that gave the neat little BlackBerry 8100 line its name of ‘Pearl’. While it has undoubtedly been a great success, most users report that after time the trackball loses precision: dirt + grease = grinding paste = poor performance. It is also frankly a matter of good fortune as to whether you get a good one or a laggardly imprecise little bleeder out of the box, so delicate is the mechanism. So my advice to anyone buying any BlackBerry is try it out first: check the running of the trackball.

Back to our Curve 8900: this comes in a configuration that includes a 3.2 MP camera, video camera and audio recorder, various other bundled goodies like the obligatory BlackBerry Maps and Docs To Go (pay for full functionality) and  one’s sense of it really comes down to how well you get on with the 35 key, backlit keyboard. It’s full QWERTY and once the fingers are used to it (a much shallower learning curve than that necessary to accustom them to an Android, iPhone or Palm handset), they can fly back and forth inputting at furious speeds, which is just how BlackBerryists like it. The superb fully editable glossary (Apple, I’m on my knees, please take note) can increase the input speed enormously. If you have a regular home and work WiFi network then the lack of 3G really isn’t a problem. This neat, elegant and highly desirable smartphone is slimmer, shorter, narrower and a whole ounce (27 grammes) lighter than the Bold. Available in the UK from all the major network providers and through the usual retail outlets.

The Tour (left) and the Curve (right), with inexplicable intervening turtle (centre)

Grand Tour

If you live and work and the United States of America, you may have become attached to the CDMA protocol, unavailable in Europe. Many Americans (rightly, for the most part) bemoan the backwardness of the United States when it comes to telecoms. This is obviously less to do with American technological know-how than with the problems of infrastructure presented by so vast a landmass. The US can boast however, choice in basic wireless protocols. There is the one we in Europe are familiar with: GSM (incorporating GPRS, EDGE and 3G in the form of HSPA and UMTS) and there is the alternative available in the US and parts of Asia: CDMA. Typically CDMA handsets do not contain SIM cards (unless they are sold as “global” phones which can also speak GSM) their connection to the network provider – Sprint, Verizon, AT&T etc. – is built in. Their equivalent of 3G is CDMA 2000, or EV-DO (standing for Evolution Data Optimised) and is generally considered by aficionados to be faster, stabler and more reliable. Certainly when I have used CDMA phones in large American cities I have been extremely impressed.

The all new 9630 Tour replaces the silver 8830. Like its predecessor the Tour is dual mode, allowing the American traveller to access GSM networks when abroad. My Verizon Tour worked straight out of the box and with almost alarming speed.

For most users the modality of wireless protocol is no more central to their experience than whether their car engine is diesel or petrol these days. Never mind what goes on under the hood, what are the day to day differences between the Curve and Tour in terms of use? Well, aside from the fact that the Tour comes without WiFi but with 3G, the differences are really quite small: the same familiar candybar form factor, though with darker skirting on the Tour. They both enjoy the one physical feature of the Storm worth keeping, the  shiny black sloping ‘roof’ where the lock and mute buttons live. There is the same superbly bright and clear 480 x 360 display on each and the same 3.2MP camera (although there is the dazzling option of being able to buy a Tour without a camera which will undoubtedly impress your friends) and the same suite of bundled applications (give or take a network specific doodad here or there). The Tour is a mite heavier and a snidge thicker than the Curve and being 3G is more demanding on the (identical) DX-1 battery. I prefer the slightly more scalloped keys on the Tour’s keyboard. The sharper edges offer a better tactile feedback which imparts greater confidence and ultimately therefore, greater speed.

If I lived and worked in the United States and visited Europe from time to time I would certainly choose the Tour as my BlackBerry of choice. Meanwhile, in Europe there is no reason not to be drawn to the Curve. Just don’t even think of getting a Storm. Unless you enjoy swearing and throwing things out of the window. Which some people do.

Before the year is out RIM’s OS 5.0 should be available (it already is if you are prepared to hunt about and live with a beta) and we can also expect the possibility that at any moment they will offer a Curve with trackpad but no GPS and a Tour with WiFi and 3G but no trackpad and a Pearl with EDGE but trackpad and GPS but but no WiFi and another with …. oi, you get the idea.

Coming next … a look at the Palm Pre and LG Watch Phone.

Android is the name given to an open source mobile operating system developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance and released a year ago. In December 2008 I reviewed here the HTC G1, the first android phone. I concluded:

One can bet that the G2 and G3 will better bear the luscious fruit of Open Source development before very long. Meanwhile, the G1 stands as a reasonably priced and impressive first shot from HTC and Android. The whole system can only improve and when it does it will truly give the iPhone a run for its money. Especially if Apple stays as tightly closed as they are now.

Well Apple haven’t shown much sign of opening up. Each week seems to bring a new story of some indignant developer complaining at Apple’s lordly refusal to allow their new app shelf-space in the store. Even the mighty Google have been whingeing. On the other hand Apple have not stood still in the field of iPhone development either. So have Android and HTC managed to close the gap with the Hero and the Magic?

Magic

The Magic first. Exclusive to Vodafone in the UK, this sleek little device houses the new (Cupcake) 1.5 Android firmware. Much is recognisable from the G1, and while much has also been greatly improved only a few of my earlier gripes have been addressed. There is now a videocamera and video playing built in from the get-go and that must be good. Still no standard audio jack however, which is close to a criminal offence these days. The set of ear-plugs HTC provides for attachment to the miniUSB port are tinnier than a 60s portable transistor radio playing Aha hits in a zinc-roofed hut with the treble up to 11. No PC or Mac synchronisation, no MS Exchange capability, no multitouch and still a noticeable lag when the screen is oriented from portrait to landscape and vice versa.

So how is the Magic different from the G1? Well, the most striking and obvious difference is the lack of a slidey-outy keyboard. This is a very weird development in the world of Android. Many of my friends still give the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard as their crowning reason for staying with their BlackBerries and I freely confess that I was one who at first deprecated the iPhone’s onscreen virtual keyboard, finding text input slower for my fingers than either a BlackBerry or Palm Treo. I am now dining on humble pie (if in England), or on crow (if in America) – for I must confess that, steepish as the learning curve may have been, I am these days quicker on an iPhone than on any physical phone keyboard I know. There are still moments of agonising frustration — especially when typig like this and missig the ‘n’ which for some reason happens a lot, as does, conversely, hitting the ‘n’ insteadnofnthenspacebar. Then there’s the mysterious case of the cursor inexplicably dropping down to the bottom of the screen while typing. The fact that the autocorrect glossary is not user-editable means that all kinds of words are now understood to be acceptable to the iPhone’s internal autocorrect mechanism and … well, I could go for ever. The point is, Google, OHA, HTC and their advocates could scarce forbear to gloat when the G1 was announced to be the proud bearer of a hinged slidey-outy keyboard. “That’ll put the iPhone in its place,” they cheered as one. “Steve Jobs laid on egg with his refusal to allow a proper keyboard. We’ll show him.” The keyboard was the G1 hardware’s Unique Selling Point and already, with their first makeover it’s gone, to be replaced by as close a simulacrum of Apple’s own VKB as they could contrive without being taken to court for patent infringement.

They have done the right thing, humiliating as the climb-down might be. In landscape mode especially, one can type very quickly (though still the same propensity to missthespacebarthatdogstheiPhone – maybe it’s just the way I type). A highly satisfactory strip above the keyboard presents one-touch options to the words you’ve typed. If you’re Android savvy and know your way around the bay a bit, you can replace the design of virtual keyboard that comes with the Magic with its much improved successor, as seen in the Hero (see below). You’ll need to download the Android SDK and a few other programmes to your desktop computer, but it can be done. If you’re allergic to terminal mode and entering commands like chmod bin/sh usr ${VAR} then wait for a firmware upgrade and leave well alone.

The lack of a hinged PKB contributes of course to the Magic’s light simple and shiny unibody shape and feel. The merest hint remains of the endearingly grotesque ‘chin’ that angled out from the lower section of its ancestor, the G1. My model, as you can see, is white and is branded Vodafone. Only the volume rockers and miniUSB port break up the purity of the wraparound – there is a place for microSD cards but that is safely tucked away under the easily removable lid where the (replaceable) battery and SIM card also live.

Magic

The inbuilt GPS wireless, which is demanding on the battery, seems to respond much, much quicker than it did on the G1 and the addition of a compass means that true turn-by-turn satnav is a real possibility, and I note that one or two (rather ungenerously user-reviewed) navigation apps are starting to hit the Market. HTC’s trademark haptic vibration allows a pleasurably tactile feedback which I really like and which would benefit the iPhone enormously.

The camera on the reverse side offers a 3.2 MP flashless sensor which delivers perfectly adequate pictures in a good light, but which – as does the iPhone – struggles in murkier conditions. These days we routinely hand our phones to a friend, waiter or passer-by so that we can be in the photo ourselves. On the iPhone that helpful passer-by will often press the home button instead of the picture button, causing one to have to come round and give a lesson, which is all very vexing and time-consuming. The happy-snap mood will have been dispelled and the moment gone. This isn’t a problem on the Magic, where the photo button to touch is clear and unambiguous. Once taken, there is an intuitive row of buttons which offer sharing and saving options – straight to Twitter, Picasa (not Flickr – this is a Google phone, remember), wallpaper, email, messaging or home gallery. Unless I’m being very stupid there is no way to switch between still and video modes for the camera without quitting, returning to the home screen and choosing the dedicated videocamera app, which seems a little silly. The quality of video is not going to threaten even the old Flip style devices, let alone the new generation of HD recorders, but it’s fine for rough and ready use and footage can (naturally) be uploaded straight to YouTube.

For anyone used to the iPhone 3GS (where “S” stands for Speed) the Magic seems slow. General functions, application opening and accelerometer screen orientation are all a little laggardly, the price paid for using last year’s chipset, I suppose.

Otherwise everything one might expect is present: I ought to point out that this phone is really of no use to anyone who doesn’t have a Google account. Yes the mail client can deal with non Gmail accounts, yes, some form of Outlook synchronisation is possible and yes too, you can download a variety of chat clients from the Apps Market, but the straight-out-of-the-box preference is for Google Calendars, Contacts, Mail and Talk. It may be technically a Vodafone badged HTC Magic, but to all intents and purposes it’s G2, Le Googlephone Deux.

Final judgment. Better than the G1, the very light, slim Magic is an excellent 3G device for the money (free) but still with annoying niggles. It’s packed with the GPS, compass, bluetooth, wi-fi and all you’d expect from a classy modern touchscreen smartphone. The interface is customisable but not daunting, simple yet powerful. It comes with a Vodafone contract that will keep you locked in for 18 months, by which time many better phones will have come and gone, so make sure there’s a free or very affordable hardware upgrade path available to you from Vodafone during the term of your deal.

Hero

Which brings us to the Hero, our second Android 1.5 Cupcake Google phone from those Taiwanese wonders, HTC. At first glance you might think it a reversion, for it looks a little closer to the G1 than the Magic, having almost as prominent a chin and a more matte finish. But look closer, there are changes, and they are all for the better. The screen has that oleophobic, fingerprint-repelling coating first encountered on the iPhone 3GS. The body (in the white version at least) is teflon coated. And whoopy-doo! – do my eyes deceive me? – a standard audio jack for attaching proper headphones! And wowzerooni! – a 5.0 Mp f2.8 autofocus camera. They’ve been listening. So, what about activating that grease-resistant screen and seeing what awaits within….

My Hero

Hello there! – a calendar and weather widget welcome you to the home screen and an all new virtual keyboard offers better visual (and buzzy-haptic) feedback and a neat achievement of Shift characters by a simple press and hold. A suite of themes called “scenes” allow cookie-cutter or customisable wallpapers and environments. The idea is to switch between work and leisure or home and travel, devising different environments for your week and weekend for example. HTC calls this new system “Sense” and while it will last no longer in the world than “Flow” or any of their previous graphic user interfaces, it does very well for this phone, which is (aside from the camera and audio-jack) identical under the hood to the Magic and (under) powered by the same 528 MHz processor and (under) equipped with the same 288MB of RAM.

HTC have essentially taken over the Android stage and redressed it with their own sets, props and costumes, in much the same way they did two years back with the horror that was Windows Mobile. Android needs less disguising than WinMob did, but nonetheless you have to applaud HTC, they have gone all out to rethink every detail of the user experience. The superb standard Android notifications blind that pulls down from the top of the screen has wisely been kept, but HTC offer their own Mail client for the Magic, one which finally allows Exchange and all the flavours if IMAP and POP that you need if you don’t have a Gmail account, and they have a tweaked version of the webkit browser, which is now Flash enabled, though don’t expect to be able to play YouTube or Vimeo footage, in fact I could barely find anything other than a few website splashscreens that could show this implementation off. The browser also now offers true iPhone style multitouch spreading and pinching instead of tedious + and – zoom buttons. Twitter and Facebook have been integrated into HTC’s new environment too, should you want it both services can be now always on and just a swiped screen away.

Naturally, all this threaded function and all these fancy widgets and themes come at the cost of overtaxing the engine. If the Hero were faster and smoother you could call it a real pretender to the iThrone, but the continued sluggishness and ongoing difficulties with syncing media to and from PC or Mac do hold it back. At least so I thought until this afternoon when I downloaded the new 2.73 ROM upgrade which is available from the HTC site – my thanks to readers who alerted me to this. It makes a real difference to the three crucial S’s  in this arena — smoothness, speed and stability.

It’s an impressive device, really really impressive. One is bound to ask why Vodafone UK, in seeking to offer an Android phone, chose the Magic over this clearly superior version. Perhaps the Magic is cheaper, perhaps HTC demand a premium for all the work they have put into their beautifully pimped Hero.

The Hero's keyboard (left) is closer to the iPhone's in appearance and an improvement on the Magic's (right).

Android has done well in its first year. Its staunchest advocate cannot pretend that it is a success story on a par with that of the Apple iPhone, but 10,000 apps in the Android Market (to Apple’s 85,000) shows that there is a solid and committed developer community catering for a satisfied and enthusiastic user base. The Hero will make sure both groups will continue to grow.

Around the corner lurk the launches of the Motorola Cliq and rumoured Android phones from Samsung and LG: these can only help ensure that Google’s Open Source OS is here to stay.

Coming soon

Early autumn is BlackBerry picking time…

I am as aware as anyone that on the subject of smartphone brands perfervid attachments and preferences can foment almost religious fervour in our passionate breasts. It is not enough for many BlackBerry aficionados to love their Curve or their Bold, they must also loathe the Apple iPhone; every time they see one in the hands of a passer-by in the street or a latte-lapper in the Caffè (iPhone users only frequent coffee bars that spell café with two Fs) a small part of them wants to scream out “Poser! Creep!” How much worse if the iPhone is being fondled on screen by a talkshow host, film actor or celebrity chef. It is as if those cursed airheads are conspiring to question the BlackBerryist’s very life choices – his whole meaning and value in the world.

When two businessmen drop down in neighbouring aeroplane seats and each gets out a smartphone an electricity will crackle between them like that between two sexually heated adolescents whose thighs have accidentally touched in the backseat of the school bus. If one businessman fishes from his shirt pocket a BlackBerry while the other gets out an iPhone a whole range of complex thoughts will begin to boil in the brains of each: resentment, contempt, insecurity and irritation are merely the emotions bubbling closest to the surface: deep down, dark and primal forces stir. We do not possess antlers, horns or tusks, we cannot display fans of feather or manes of fur, the best we can do is express our personality, aspirations, beliefs, outlook, sexual potency, status, right to breed and place in the hierarchy through the choices we make in our possessions: and no possession, here in the early part of the twenty-first century, speaks quite so loudly as our smartphone. Once upon a time it was our motorcar and in the future it may well be a robot, a rocket-pack or a hoverpenis that defines us, but for the moment it is, for good or ill, a smartphone.

Many women reading this will detect that the foregoing is an issue almost entirely for males, who remain the prime sufferers in this kind of tribal status war. My suspicion is that women are, if not immune, far less emotionally bound up in the business than men. I may be wrong and welcome clarification either way on this point.

I open with these observations because I am aware that some of you will take unkindly to any strictures I might make on your favourite mobile operating system or model of phone. You may well know that I have, since 1984, been an advocate of many things Apple and may feel that this disqualifies me as an independent, disinterested (in the now almost forgotten original use of that word) and unbiassed judge.

I hope you will believe me when I say that it seems to me that my whole adult life has been a long, fairytale quest for The One. I have written about this before. I went into the subject of The One at painfully unbelievable length here almost exactly two years ago, when the world was young, the iPhone was 2G (well 2.5 if you believe that is what EDGE is) and the App Store was nought but an ungerminated pip in Apple’s core.

While so much has changed in the telecommunications landscape since September 2007, the hope still lives that someone will produce a flawless masterpiece of art, technology and consumer innovation in which function, charm, ease, beauty, power, speed and versatility converge. If it must be Apple well then it must and shame on all the other corporations that ten years ago had more money, status and market power – they know who they are. But do believe that I am open to be seduced by the products of all comers: I only ask that they care for the consumer and are excited by the power and potential of technology. I will rush like an excited puppy even towards Microsoft if they come out with something that exhibits passion, flair and an open-hearted commitment to creating objects, systems and devices that are beautiful, useful, new and enthralling. You never know. It may happen. After all – look at their new Courier tablet – a bit busy, design wise, you might think – but at least it gets the salivary glands going. When did anything from Redmond last do that?

Well, below are the devices up for consideration all fanned out on the chest at the end of my hotel bed.

A fan of devices

They are, reading from left to right. BlackBerry 9630 Tour, BlackBerry 8900 Curve, HTC Android Hero, HTC Android Magic, Palm Pre, LG Watch Phone, Nokia N97, 2009 iPod Nano, 2009 iPod Shuffle, 2009 iPod Touch.

I would love to have added the Flip and Kodak HD video recorders as well as the MS Zune HD to that parade, but I shall have to save them for another day. I have also promised many followers and correspondents that I would write a broad comparison of iPhone turn-by-turn navigation apps, now that the 3GS and its inbuilt compass allow a viable implementation of this technology. This too will have to wait, I fear. Gosh how it all backs up. What with tweeting, miniblogging and pursuing my-so-called career there isn’t much time left for major projects. I have much rummaging in my old friend Donald Trefusis’s memory stick to do as well.

Your forbearance is greatly appreciated.

When Europeans come to America they are supposed to be divided into New York or Los Angeles types. When the English writers W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood crossed the Atlantic in the late 30s Auden stayed in Manhattan and Isherwood went to LA where he remained for the rest of his life. Auden was the arch New Yorker, restless, edgy, sceptical and cosmopolitan. Isherwood was more prone to mysticism and mellow introspection. When I am asked if I like LA and reply that I do, it is common for my interlocutor to say, “Really? I would have put you down as a New York type.” But you see I AM. I had an apartment in Manhattan for many years, I go there as often as I can. I adore the city. But I love Los Angeles AS WELL. And I have found I can sustain these two supposedly opposite and mutually exclusive affections without tearing myself in two or exploding in a fireball of self-contradiction. In fact I’ll go further, if there’s one thing that gets my goat, curries it and serves it up on a bed of flaming indignation, it is this habit of dividing the world in two. Which reminds me of an old geek joke. “The world is divided into 10 types of people. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.” Pause to allow you to wipe the tears of helpless laughter from your weeping eyes. But damn it bothers me when the choice of one thing is interpreted as a necessary repudiation of the other. People are always doing it. “You’re either a Beatles person or a Rolling Stones person” I’ve heard them say. Tummyrubbish. Balderpiss. Arsegarbage.

A couple of months ago someone asked me what I was up to and I mentioned I was making a documentary about Richard Wagner. “Oh, I would have thought you liked Beethoven,” they said. I was too polite to pick them up by their scruff of their necks and shake them violently back and forth, but I mean WHAT? “Why’ve you got a Norwich City shield on your Twitter avatar? I thought you liked cricket.” “You just quoted Family Guy” – I thought you liked The Simpsons”, and so on and so on. I mean, really.

Another joke. A Jewish boy on his birthday is given a pair of fine silk ties by his mother. He comes downstairs next morning proudly wearing one. His mother looks at him, hands on hips and says, “So what was wrong with the other one?” Imagine if every time you ordered chicken in a restaurant someone said, “Oh, so you hate lamb, do you?”

I like LA and I like New York. And it is the fact that they are so very, very different that makes me like each all the more. They each serve and satisfy a different part of me. As do town and country, wine and beer, swimming and walking. Seems mad to define oneself, to limit oneself, doesn’t it?

One thing that New York can never offer is the sight of a great Hollywood Sound Stage. This is the one I’ve been filming in today. Marilyn on the wall. I mean, what’s not to like… Plus there’s Clarence, the security guard on one of the gates to the Fox lot. Every time I come in he reads me one of his poems and tells me and my driver that he loves us. As does Jesus apparently, which is nice of him. Well I certainly love Clarence – incredibly hard not be cheered up by such optimistic bonhomie and unconditional friendliness. “Oh but Stephen, I thought you were an atheist. How can you like someone who isn’t? Surely that’s impossible?” Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!