The word “estimate” is the clue here. I only know that if I had grandchildren and they heard me tell of my meetings with him they would feel as I might if my grandfather had told me about meeting Henry Ford, Rockefeller or Irving Thalberg. It might be, after all, that Aldous Huxley overestimated Henry Ford by making the dystopian future in his Brave New World name its calendar after him.

Some people become synecdoches, symbols or metonyms. Whether you think he was overpraised by some, underappreciated by others or whether you don’t give a hoot doesn’t really mean much to me. He mattered to me enormously. The standards he set, the passionate belief he had in the way that technology, the arts, design, fun, elegance and delight could all co-exist, the eternal pushing for higher standards, the refusal to accept standard paradigms in anything, either the conventional modus operandi of corporate affairs, technological matters or market practices was an example from which the world will continue to learn.

Believe me, there will be more than 500 books published in the next year which will claim to be able to teach you how to improve your business/profits/image/career by using the “Jobs example”. How he would have loathed that. I have sat on judging panels that have wanted to give him extremely prestigious awards. He only ever accepted awards on behalf of the company, not on his own. Whatever your view of him, huckster, snake-oil salesman, evangelist or hero, the whole point is that copying someone who disdained copying anything would be the dumbest joke of all.

The wider legacy will be determined by that bastard son of a mongrel bitch, history, but there is a short-term one. I had put into my hand a new iPhone 4S just eight or so hours before Steve Jobs left the world. You can imagine, I hope, the ambivalence I felt as I tested and trialled this phone in the knowledge that it was the last fully operational Apple device he would ever see.

Apple has always come up with new iPhone models at regular intervals. The very first appeared in June 2007, the following year saw the Apple 3G which allowed, as the name suggested, 3G data transmission speeds and introduced the idea of the App Store with the resultant explosion of third-party apps, whose imagination, range, variation and ingenuity still continue to astonish.

In 2009 came the iPhone 3GS. “Oh,” said the world, in a rather hurt, disappointed voice, “that’s rather odd. Why, it looks just like the 3G. It’s hardly different at all.”

The “S” stood for speed and some felt that a souped-up 3G barely qualified as a new phone at all. Why the need for the already tiresome cliche photographs of queues outside the 5th Avenue store in New York and the unhealthy sight of chubby, bearded geeks brandishing their new boxes? Surely Apple was exploiting this whole hype launch cycle without any real innovation to back it up?

In fact the release of the 3GS coincided with a new operating system, 3.0, which gave us the much-needed cut and paste facility whose embarrassing absence had been a distressing nuisance, it added MMS, and a whole new suite of extras, Voice Control and tethering, for example, all of which were also possible on an “old” 3G or even original iPhone 1 if they upgraded their firmware, but which really proved themselves on the 3GS’s faster Cortex A8 processor.

Despite the initial disappointment, the success of the 3GS was instantaneous, Apple sold a million units in the first weekend, and the model’s continued triumph created the conditions that allowed for the Apple iOS product line that followed: the iPhone 4 and the iPad. To put it crudely, the 3GS was such an outstanding win that it made Apple cash-rich enough to be able to move forward in all kinds of ways.

The iPad, aside from its other original features, was powered by Apple’s own proprietary chip, the A4. The iPad 2 by the A5. Apple was able to take more and more control over the implementation of every detail, integrating their own chips, radios and antennae in new ways that allowed for increased reliability, fluency, speed and – crucially – battery life. Indeed, the energy efficiency of the iPad remains one of its most astonishing features.

This week history repeats itself: a “new” iPhone which has the same form-factor as its predecessor but with an “S” added, again, for speed. Many might express similar disappointment, but as was the case with the 3GS – there also arrives a new operating system, iOS 5.0, which will work on previous models (but not the 3G or iPhone 1 I believe).

iOS 5.0 allows Over The Air updating and iTunes syncing, gives (AT LAST!!) a glossary so that we can make up our own text abbreviations and correct bad auto-correct habits (if ever I type “tou” it now automatically becomes “you”), offers a vast, customisable range of notification options, including a draw-down curtain familiar to Android users. iOS 5 also integrates Twitter globally so that I can go to a website, for example, and see that “Tweet” has been added to the list of sharing options available.

You will see from my screenshot that one can create a reading list too from Safari. There’s tabbed browsing also. And iMessaging, which means you can “text” from an iPod touch or iPad.

Most noticeable is the all-new iCloud, which replaces the never wildly successful MobileMe. iCloud is free and allows users to store their data, photos, apps, music and whole iPhone identity, look, feel and functionality “up there” in that happy space we call the cloud. In fact this cloud is, I believe, a mountainside in North Carolina. MobileMe users can transfer their identities seamlessly and easily, others simply create a new account for free by following simple instructions. There is an option to enable Photostream, which keeps every picture you take for ever. Be warned. You cannot delete a picture once it is in Photostream. There may well be blushes within families who share devices and discover that a photo they would rather not be seen is permanently on view, but they’ll have to learn the hard way. iOS 5 will make your existing iPhone so like a new one that you might even forget the iPhone 4S …

4S is the first iPhone with a proprietary dual core A5 chip, Apple is claiming it can process graphics up to seven times faster. Other increases in performance will strengthen the iPhone’s position in the handheld gaming market. For users like me it is apparent that the new 8MP front-facing camera, with its five-element lens, facial recognition and image stabilisation is fabulously impressive, as are increased speeds in data browsing and general app loading in everyday use.

Apple’s new cash richness also allowed them to buy a little third-party app called Siri, which billed itself as a personal assistant. I remember writing a joshing note to Jo, my PA, in February last year when Siri came out. “Hm … Jo, Siri? Siri, Jo? … Hard to tell …” And then Siri seemed to disappear. Little did we know that Apple had bought this (originally DARPA developed) technology and was due to bake it into its new phone.

Siri is the USP of the 4S, it is essentially Voice Control that really works. You talk to it, it talks back. You can ask it questions in natural English: “what is 436 times 734?” and you get an answer neatly displayed on what looks like old-fashioned punched computer paper. Wolfram Alpha is used as the database, and its elegance suits the experience perfectly.

Here are three pictures that show my experience when I asked Siri “What is the capital of Finland?” You can scroll down the final one and see a map and other details. It’s fast and very very impressive. Even better, it senses when you bring your device to your ear so you can talk to it as if you’re on the phone to someone, rather than having to endure the embarrassment of yelling at it at arms length. So good is the voice recognition that it is now built into all apps that use a keyboard. For the first time I’ve found that I can happily and accurately dictate texts and emails. Dragon Dictate are going to be very sore about it, but I have no doubt they will collude with others to bring a similar service to Android and Windows 7 phones as soon as they can. For this really works. For the moment local searches are only available for the US, but that will soon change, one assumes.

Siri, the high quality and ultra-fast camera, 30 fps 1080p HD video, globally available voice recognition and the introduction of two antennae (the phone seamlessly switches between whichever is getting the strongest signal) are features that make the 4S irresistible; what is more, the unchanged form means that a whole new range of covers and accessories won’t be required.

If you are tired of the upgrade race or feel you can’t justify the expense, you at least have the knowledge that iOS 5 will transform your existing iPhone enthrallingly.

In a sad, sad week for Apple, come a new phone and a new operating system that between them show the company still at the top of its game, still innovating, still implementing new technologies at a level of perfection and fluency that is only possible when you make, design and control it all: device, chip architecture and operating system.

Once again Apple is taking a lead and asking a lot of its competitors. I wish those competitors luck, for the better all smartphones are, the happier I am. If Steve Jobs’s true legacy is that the devices every other company makes are so, so much better than they otherwise would have been, I don’t think he would mind one bit.

Stephen x

Also published in The Guardian on the 12th October 2011

I almost always go out with an iPhone in one pocket, a BlackBerry in another and an Android device in a third. But then I am peculiar. If I had to keep only one, yes, I confess I would choose the iPhone, but I could cope happily if I were left with just a BlackBerry Bold or an HTC Desire. At least so I would have said until last week when Apple gave me an iPhone 4 to play with. For just as the frenzy of iPad launch has subsided (3 million sold in 8 weeks) it is now time for Apple haters to have a new device waved in their angry faces and time for Apple lovers to get verbally bitch-slapped for falling once more for Steve Jobs’s huckstering blandishments. iPhone 4 is here. It is only a year since many will have taken advantage of incentives to upgrade from iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS and their deals may still be active, denying them the chance to leap to the newest phone without eye-watering financial penalties. Much as 3GS was released simultaneously with OS 3.0, so iPhone 4 arrives with iOS (as all Apple mobile device operating systems will now be designated) 4.0, which will be able to bring some, but not all of its new functions and features to older phones (but not the iPhone 2G). The phone will be available unlocked here in the United Kingdom, so your existing SIM (so long as it is cut down to the new mini-SIM shape) will work without having to jailbreak and unlock.

iPhone 4

iPhone 4 is an object of rare beauty (even when badly photographed using an iPhone 3GS). Noticeably slimmer but a trifle heavier than predecessors, its new heft only adds to the profound feeling of quality and precision that the device exudes. Sharper edged, it is girt by a stainless steel band which cleverly houses all the antennas required by a modern smartphone. Jobs himself made a comparison between iPhone 4 and a classic Leica. With this device in my hand I feel that I am holding its designer Jonathan Ive’s personal prototype, hand-machined as a proof-of-concept model. Ive is surely one of the most influential and gifted designers Britain has ever produced and iPhone 4 may well be his masterpiece.

Apple have produced, and third parties will doubtless emulate and improve, rubberised wrap-around belts called Bumpers that easily slip round the edges of the handset affording what will probably be regarded as much needed protection. They come in all kinds of colours and give the device great resilience (I saw an Apple executive gleefully hurling his bumpered iPhone 4 across the room). Bumpers may diminish the perfect lines of the profile, but it’s a compromise many will make, as the sharp edges are bound to make one a little nervous about chipping and denting.

Bumpered

On the front of the phone can be discerned the lineaments of a forward-facing camera and inset in the glorious glass obverse (which leads one to speculate that future models might allow solar charging) an extra eye reveals that LED flash has finally arrived. All kinds of BlackBerry, HTC, Nokia and Sony will be snorting contempt as they recall that their own phones have had Xenon flashes for years, but this kind of flash at least is welcome to iPhone and works with typical intuitive simplicity with a simple Off/On/Auto setting available top left. The right hand icon swaps between front and back facing cameras.

The flash and camera-swap icons

That front facing phone suggests video calling of course. Apple have integrated a range of open standards for this, including H.264, AAC, SIP, STUN, TURN and ICE (don’t ask) into a package they call FaceTime (actually they bought a company of that name). It is not true video phoning as at the moment, 3G doesn’t support these data standards so you will only be using FaceTime where a WiFi connection is possible. Under those circumstances it is very impressive, offering excellent resolution, with both cameras on the iPhone being easily swappable so you can either show the party at the other end of the phone your face or others in the room: with a reasonable stand or easel for the phone Polycom style video conferencing at a fraction of the cost becomes a distinct possibility. The main back camera has been upgraded to 5 Megapixels, but Apple (and here they are quite right) have always claimed that their 3 MP original took better pictures than many 5 MP cameras on other phones, for the issue is not the sheer numbers of pixels, but more crucially pixel size (and lens quality of course). This new camera produces simply stunning images and might, for many, be reason enough to upgrade, especially when you factor in the iPhone 4’s remarkable new “Retina” display. Retina delivers the crispest images I have ever seen on a smartphone. The difference is most instantly detected with text – in emails, chats, texts and tweets for example. I still, after a week’s use, find myself staring at onscreen text with disbelief.

A bigger battery promises longer talk time, an inbuilt 3-axis gyroscope promises amazing new gaming features (check out Steve Jobs playing Jenga to get an idea), as well as fabulous refinements in the burgeoning field of augmented reality. The iPhone 4’s new 720p HD video footage can now be edited on the phone using the new mobile version of iMovie, which comes with transitions, themes and all the extras and refinements you would expect from Apple.

With the pep of the A4 chip, the Retina display, two cameras, a flash, HD video, a larger battery and that drool-worthy form factor, Apple has come up with its best ever handset. HTC Android handsets still impress and offer a viable alternative for many, but iPhone 4’s star quality is irresistible.

Those who can’t yet upgrade without financial penalty can still enjoy the advantages of iOS 4.0 – not all the features are available for iPhone 3G, but just about everything works perfectly on the 3GS. Multitasking is smooth and efficient (double press the home button for a line of open apps that can be accessed or closed). App Folders now allow you to bundle apps together according to whatever categorisation appeals to you. The Mail app gets an overhaul with better IMAP and Google Mail functionality. An element of spell checking is now available, though I still get “me” turning to “mr” all the damned time. Dozens of other little extras lurk in this major software overhaul and I can think of no reason why iPod Touch and iPhone 3G and 3GS users wouldn’t want to upgrade immediately.

App Folders

Multitasking

Warning

On a less enthusiastic note Apple made an almighty arse of itself lately with some contemptible censorship in relation to iPhone versions of Joyce’s Ulysses and Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, two of the greatest literary masterpieces in the English language. The decision was reversed with Apple representative Trudy Miller having the grace to admit:

“We made a mistake. When the art panel edits of the Ulysses Seen app and the graphic novel adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest app were brought to our attention, we offered the developers the opportunity to resubmit their original drawings and update their apps.”

The apology seems unreserved and I hope it marks a move away from an inhouse ethos at Apple that was beginning to make me feel distinctly queasy. Since he sold them Pixar Steve Jobs has been Disney’s major stockholder. I should hate to see the horror of a besuited and sanctimonious “family values” corporation take over at Cupertino. Shaved underarm overshowered American hygiene is sexless and unappealing at the best of times, when it is injected like so much processed cheese into the veins of a company that once prided itself on its alternative and open attitudes then it is time to weep. I do not want to feel, after all this time, like those horses in Animal Farm who look through the windows of the farmhouse only to see that the pigs are now wearing trousers.

© Stephen Fry 2010

Comments for this blog entry will be moderated.

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 18th October 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk” – The Guardian headline.

It’s farewell for quite a few months, I fear, as I head off to Africa, Mauritius, Indonesia, New Zealand and the Sea of Cortez to make a documentary about disappearing species. I shall be out of reach of broadband, mobile phone and even landlines for much of the time. That will not stop me from taking a suitcase full of cables, chargers, memory cards and connectors, however, and I thought I might, by way of valediction, give you an inventory of what this particular dork packs when he travels.

Photograph: Alamy

First of all, should all else fail, I will make sure that there’s at least one of Trevor Baylis’s products in my bag. Baylis, you may remember, pioneered the wind-up radio. On the eco-gadget site biggreensmile.com you can find his company’s practical and hardy hand-crankable media players, the latest (the Eco Media Revolution) offering radio, video, music, photo, text, phone-charging, memo recording and storage in most of the useful formats and codecs, all for £129.99. One minute of winding makes for 45 minutes of play, that’s the promise: a big British bargain. The same site has a Freeloader solar charger for £24.95 that will help with juicing up all my gadgets when I’m too hot and knackered to crank.

I shall also take my iPhone 3G, without which I’m pretty much an empty vessel these days, but I will bring along a collection of sim cards, too, and my unlocked first generation iPhone, which can run on any network, in case there’s a signal that the official iPhone can’t receive. Because they’re so colourful, pretty and neat, I will also pack one of the new iPod Nanos: they combine the old Nano clickwheel and anodised metal finish with a new-style accelerometer, so you can shake it to shuffle songs and turn it sideways to watch music and flick through album covers.

As for reading, well, I have a Sony eReader, a Kindle and an Iliad, all dedicated electronic book readers, but the fact is, the iPhone has already proved itself (according to Forbes Magazine) the most popular ebook reader on the market. Nearly half a million people have downloaded the free Stanza application for iPhone (from the iTunes store). Via Stanza files, just about all the classics in prose and poetry can be easily downloaded and read clearly and easily on screen. You can transfer Kindle and pdf files from your desktop, too, so a vast quantity of books and newspapers is available. Electronic books are made (as the name suggests) of electrons, which weigh nothing; whatever one’s view of the feel and qualities of a proper book, when travelling, zero ounces of electron is better than the heavy molecular mass that makes up the real thing.

For photography I shall take the Canon 1000D I reviewed the other week, enraging loyal Pentax and Nikon users, for which I apologise: if Canon didn’t exist, I’d be a perfectly happy Nikon/Pentax/Minolta user. I shall also pack a Sony Cybershot-W170, a competent all-round compact digital camera. I would rather take the slimmer and cuter Casio Exilim, but it has a complicated recharging station that takes up too much precious packing space.

Cables, of course, are the bane of any globetrotting geek’s life, and while there seems to be no perfect solution to the misery of self-knotting spaghetti, I am taken with the ease and simplicity of the Proporta magnetic cable tidies (£2.95 for a pack of two, from proporta.com). The same outfit’s Gadget Bag (£24.95) will house my Nintendo DS Lite, dozens of game cartridges and the phones and iPod. As for laptops, I shall flip a coin to decide whether to take a MacBook Air, the lightest of the MacBook range, or the Livono ThinkPad X300. Whichever I choose will come preloaded with as many films and TV shows as I can download. Their weightlessness will save me having to lug DVDs about.

Thank you for reading this column over the past few months. I apologise for errors and inconsistencies. Yes, I believe in Open Source and Free soft-ware, but I’m too much of a fanatic to be pure about it. I like to try everything, even if it’s proprietary and closed. And I like to share what’s out there with those who are less assured in the digital world. By the time I get back, who knows what goodies and innovations will await me?

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 11th October 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk Listen to this” – The Guardian headline.

Mankind’s hunger for what Emerson called “a better mousetrap” is unquenchable. I can think of few technological solutions perfect enough to force inventors and innovators to proclaim, “Right, that’s it. Problem solved. Let’s move on.” The Screwpull came along in the 80s and was declared the last word in corkscrews, yet innovations continue to stream from the world’s drawing-boards. Coffee makers: I could hymn on coffee makers until you begged for mercy. Pencil sharpeners, umbrellas, cigarette lighters: mankind will never cease from reaching ever upwards towards the paradigmatically perfect implement. Actually, you might argue that in the last category Zippo reached the sunlit uplands decades ago: wind-proof, reliable, a design classic that works every time and comes with a lifetime guarantee. Pity no one smokes any more.

Katie Melua listening to her iPod. Photograph: Linda Nylind

There is surely no climb to perfection more impossible of completion than that of the ascent towards the ultimate high-end sound system. How can we hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture with which music originally smote us amidships and enslaved us for ever? The rainbow we chase is to make music sound new again. Hi-fi is like wine: dangerously expensive as taste refines and jolly enthusiasm turns to pernickety connoisseurship. Audio shops still exist where twins of the Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy sell valve amplifiers, record decks and styli as if the digital revolution never happened. They’re probably right: nothing matches vinyl and analogue for audio range and richness. I want, however, to consider users who are hunting high-quality portable, digital music.

When you rip from a CD or buy music online, it is usually saved as AAC, M4P or MP3: these are called “lossy” formats, a trade-off between memory compression and sound fidelity. There are alternative “lossless” formats: ALAC comes built into iTunes, while FLAC is gaining ascendancy elsewhere. But be warned: FLAC cannot run on iPods, and all lossless files take up more room than MP3 or AAC. Convert an album (from vinyl or CD, not from MP3!) to one of the lossless formats, and see if you notice the difference.

If you can’t be bothered, splash out on good earwear. A few years ago noise-isolating headphones were all the rage, with Bose and Sennheiser leading the way. I never saw, or heard, the value in them: big, clunky things that needed batteries and were inconvenient. More recently, high-end plug-in buds have become fashionable: for £360, Shure’s SE530PTH Triple TruAcoustic Micro-Speakers deliver amazing sound. For a very competitive £79, Apple has introduced a pair with built-in tweeter and woofer drivers that dramatically improve the standard music player experience. But there is an even more impressive option.

I recently tried out made-to-measure T2 In-Ear monitors from Advance Communication Systems. A month ago, its MD, Andy Shiach, came to squirt silicone in my ear and two weeks later he fitted a pair of cochlea-shaped creations in my lugholes. Ex-musician Andy, whose own hearing was harmed by overexposure to loud music, specialises in acoustic research, and I can vouch for the astounding quality of the music that fills the head when wearing his phones (hearingprotection.co.uk).

They come in a distressing medical pink suggestive of NHS hearing aids, which is fair, because once they are pushed in, you are deaf to the world. But not to the music. When that comes, wow! The dynamic range, the richness, the power: this is the best performance digital music has ever given me. Like most custom-made items, they are expensive and, once tried, impossible to give up, but what a Christmas present. The company keeps the moulds, so new gels can be cheaply made for attaching to other makes. Listening to a lossless version of Siegfried’s Death March reduced me to the happiest puddle of butterscotch Angel Delight in Britain.

Initials of the week

AAC Advanced Audio Coding – ‘lossy’ successor to MP3
ALAC Apple Lossless Audio Codec
FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec
NHS Norwich High School (amongst other things)

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 27th September 2008 in The Guardian “URC: Universal Remote Control or Useless Rotten Crud” – The Guardian headline.

I yield to few in my love of gadgets: let a new gizmo arrive in the post or be brought back from the shops and you will see me fall on it like a lion on an antelope – I will savage the hard, clear, welded plastic packaging with my teeth and let out growls of drooling hunger and mews of pleasure. Out tumbles the doodad and straight away I will plug it in, install its drivers, power it up and connect it, and to hell with the manual. No matter how gimcrack or futile the toy might be, the adrenaline will surge, the lips part and the breathing come in shallow stertorous pants of ecstasy.

Better five or six remotes that work than one universal remote that doesn’t. Photograph: Getty

Actually, there’s a rider to that – aside from apologising for using the phrase “pants of ecstasy”, I ought to make it clear that there is one genre of gadget that over the years has proved so preternaturally disappointing, so remorselessly useless, that I receive it with dread. I am talking about the so-called Universal Remote Control. I have drawers full of them. Over the years I have bought more than 50, and not one was any use. Someone gave me a cheap market stall giant URC as a joke and that – oddly enough – is the only one I use, but it is configured only for the TV, which brings me to the principles underlying these wastes of plastic.

It ought to make so much sense. We sit hunched on our sofas while a lapping tide of remote controls surges towards us, threatening to flood every spare square inch of surface. Why not unite them into one remote? It really ought to work, I do see that. And yet… The configuration processes, whether by code look-up table, online software connection or IR “learning”, never work satisfactorily, unless I have been unlucky 50 times on the bounce, which is possible, if statistically improbable. I won’t claim they have never worked, but they have proved more cumbersome and annoying than the problems they were designed to solve. Maybe it is just me, but some mixture of muscle memory and brain mapping has meant that I have been happier with the complicated routines of the six or seven devices I know than with the streamlined convenience of one URC.

It was with low expectations, then, that I unpacked the Logitech Harmony One and the Philips Prestigo SRU 8015. Each has a colour LCD screen and claims to solve your remote control problems in one fell swoop with ease and power. After half an hour with each, I wanted to hurl them out of the window. They are not as dreadful as what has gone before, they are much worse: worse because there is so much more (badly implemented) technology to come between the problem and the solution. They both come – and this should alert anyone with an eye sensitive to technology – in the shiny piano black that was fashionable some years ago. Both Logitech and Philips have always had poor design sense, and this is demonstrated by their desire to copy colours and forms precisely at the moment they become tired and dated. But that shouldn’t matter if the functions are taken care of.

The Harmony One is configured with your DVD, satellite, TV, amplifier and games machine by connecting it via USB to an online computer. You go through a tedious and ill-designed process, on PC or Mac (beware the Mac online update to the software that comes bundled with the remote – it simply does not work: I am not alone in finding this out; forums and user group sites are alive with furious users who have had to uninstall the update) and eventually five or six of your devices can be controlled by the Harmony handset. Only they can’t, because the system stinks.

The maddeningly non-intuitive Philips Prestigo uses inbuilt codes and works little better. Between them these two useless implements have sucked four hours out of my life. Usually I don’t mind when time is frittered away in digital device play, but somehow when it is lost trying to use objects whose only purpose is to simplify and harmonise, I get very cross indeed.

Initials of the week

URC Universal Remote Control or Useless Rotten Crud…

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 20th September 2008 in The Guardian “What kind of camera are you?” – The Guardian headline.

Every Coke has a Pepsi, every Visa a MasterCard. Who do you support in the Boat Race and why? Don’t you dare tell me you couldn’t give a fig either way: it’s Oxford or Cambridge, at some point one must develop a preference, for whatever reason. It’s Harvard or Yale, Harpic or Domestos, AA or RAC, PC or Mac. Binary tribalism: Gilbert and Sullivan wrote a song about it.

Canon EOS 1000D: All the convenience of a compact, but underneath lies the potential of a real grown-up SLR

In the world of serious SLR photography, the choice has always been between Nikon or Canon. The single lens reflex (SLR) camera is best defined as being the sort of camera where what you see is what you shoot. As the initials tell you, it is a single lensed entity, a lens that can be changed with a twist of its bayonet. A clever mirror ensures the viewfinder’s image is more or less congruent to that of the lens. The SLR is the choice of photojournalists, paparazzi, sports photographers – anyone who needs fast, accurate shooting. The camera goes up to the eye and will be manufactured (with apologies to Pentax, Olympus, Leica and Minolta) by Nikon or Canon. A huge range of Nikkor F-mount lenses for the Nikon and EOS EF lenses for the Canon have built up over the years; they are forwardly and backwardly compatible with new DSLR and old SLR bodies, but not across the brands. An EOS won’t fit a Nikon body nor a Nikkor a Canon. There are issues with older Canons and with some Nikon auto focus lenses, but generally speaking, this broad description is correct. A profitable war zone where two major powers continue to joust.

One of the most active battlefields within this world is that of the entry level DSLR. Many people with ordinary compact digitals decide, after a while, that they are ready for the Real Thing. Serious professional kit is wildly expensive, but there is the mid-priced range for the prosumer (yes, isn’t that a lovely word?), and finally there is the “My First SLR” category, hotly contested because once a toe is dipped into either the Nikkor or EOS pool, it is unlikely the customer will change: too much will have been invested in the lenses.

Canon has had its reliable 400D and 450D and Nikon their excellent D40 and D60 models available as entry level DSLRs for some time, but I have been spending the past week in the company of Canon’s new 1000D (aka the Rebel XS or Kiss F), which I will come straight out and say I adore. It does everything you could hope to welcome a newcomer to the field of SLR photography.

New DSLRs are exceptionally annoying: the outlay is far from insignificant and it is galling when, six months after you’ve taken the plunge, a new one comes along. I won’t claim that Canon will never improve on the 1000D, but I can recommend the plunge being taken here and now. For about £400 you get one hell of a lovely camera. It is astoundingly light (some people will dislike that; I happen to love it), manageable and friendly. With four-stop image stabilisation, a 10.2 MP sensor, a customisable menu, an integrated anti-dust self-cleaning system, a large enough LCD display (albeit slightly smaller than other models), excellent Pro software, the Digic III processor used in higher-end models, SD and SDHC (but not Compact Flash) memory card compatibility and just about all the features you would expect on a prosumer model (no spot metering though, which some users will miss), it is superb value for money. It reacts quickly in Jpeg mode and, most importantly, takes fantastically high quality, low noise photographs using a gigantic permutation of manual and automatic settings. A true pro would wish for faster responses when shooting RAW, but for the rest of us, this is The One. All the convenience and ease of a compact is there, but underneath lies the potential of a real grown-up SLR. If you do buy one, give yourself time slowly to learn about real photography. Be warned: as in music and painting, no gadget can replace talent. For what it’s worth, I have Mr Magoo’s eye for a shot.

Initials of the week

DSLR Digital single lens reflex.

SDHC Secure digital high capacity memory cards.

RAW An uncompressed, unprocessed image file. These are much larger, but allow complete control over the image.

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 13th September 2008 in The Guardian “Save yourself a packet on mobile calls” – The Guardian headline.

Every once in a while a proprietary device or process strikes it lucky and becomes The One. A combination of apt nomenclature and mass-market penetration will allow it to achieve the ultimate accolade of being used as a verb – we have been Googling for the best part of a decade. But who would have guessed that a company from Tallinn, Estonia, might join this elite group? But I Skype, you Skype, he/she/it Skypes, we will have Skyped, they would have been Skyping.

3′s Skype phone

Skype is the best known of the VOIP services, utilising the Voice Over Internet Protocol to allow anyone with a net connection to make free calls to other Skype users. You can also top up a Skype account via credit card or PayPal to get a SkypeIn number, and make and receive local and international calls, taking advantage of all that bandwidth at a fraction of the price your home telecoms company would charge. On top of this are Skype’s videoconferencing and instant messaging services, akin to iChat, AIM, Jabber and Windows Messenger.

Wi-Fi Skype phones have been around for some time, so you don’t have to be tied to your home or desktop when Skyping. They connect to a wireless network without the need for a computer. The Belkin WiFi Phone for Skype is an excellent and serviceable example.

But what if you prefer to take advantage of all the savings your Skype account allows without having to search around town for wireless hotspots? A mobile phone with Skype capability, surely that is the way forward? Well, upwards of 50 have been capable of Skyping for some time now, with workarounds for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, but there has been nothing quite like the new 3 Skypephone S2, an all-singing, all-Skyping mobile from Skype in partnership with Hutchison Telecom’s 3 Network.

The S2 is a small, neat unit, manufactured by the Chinese company Amoi. Along the bottom of its bright, clear screen parades a line of familiar icons that allow instant access to Google, Facebook, Windows Messenger and, of course, Skype. It is the work of a moment to input your Skype username and password, and have your buddy list come up and integrate itself instantly with the phone’s address book. You are Skyping in seconds.

You might think that such a phone is all about the nature of the network contract. If you have an all-you-can-eat data package, then Skyping looks like a good deal, but if you are charged for your 3G data access pro rata then large bills could be racked up that render the whole thing a waste of money. Well, startlingly, this phone can use standard GSM for its Skype functionality and all calls between Skype users are free. This is true Skyping. You can be out of reach of a 3G or GPRS mast and still Skype away to Sidcup or Sydney.

What about email? Well, the S2 isn’t a smartphone, but there is a solution: it operates with fabulous ease as a USB dongle modem. In other words, when you connect it to your PC or Mac, modem drivers mount as an install package and then it is, as they say in America, “a snap” to access the internet on your lap or desktop, at 3.6MB access speeds in a 3G area. On-the-move connectivity that doesn’t depend on wireless networks or ad hoc “tethering”: a superb feature beautifully implemented.

This phone replaces Skype’s original foray into the mobile market, the S1, and is trimmer, smarter and more feature-laden than its predecessor. The 3.2mp camera is barely more than adequate and the video frankly ropey, but aside from that there is little to carp at. The Google suite of Search, Mail and Maps is useful – though when I tried to use the latter I was given the message “Sorry, Google Maps does not work on your Amoi 8512″, which I am charitably assuming is a glitch with the pre-release model. A crisp QVGA display allied to a happy thumb-feel keypad makes for a desirable and admirable phone that could save you hundreds of pounds in calls.

Acronym of the week

QVGA Quarter Video Graphics Array, 320 x 240 resolution display common on phones and other small devices.

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 6th September 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk” – The Guardian headline.

I miss him both as friend and technology guru. For years, we played with digital toys together, swapping software and finding new ways to make our systems crash. Back in the 80s, we had acoustic coupler modems, capable of what we thought was a dazzling half-duplex 1,200 bps. In those pre-internet days (or, more accurately, pre-ISP days), we communicated with each other’s Macs via these modems: plugging telephone receivers into the rubber-grommeted holes of the coupler, we spoke into the Mac’s inbuilt microphone and waited for it to emerge from the other end as (broadly) intelligible speech. It took us a week to fine-tune the system, but in the end we could hold a conversation. We triumphantly told Douglas’s wife, Jane, who asked why we didn’t get rid of the computers, the acoustic couplers, the miles of wiring and the discs. “It’s called a telephone conversation,” she said. Doh.

Douglas never lived to see his beloved Apple rise from near-collapse in the 90s to today’s position. He died a few months before the arrival of the first generation of iPods; I missed his response to them dreadfully, as I have every new arrival in the digital sphere since. Some Christians have What Would Jesus Do? as a motto; I have What Would Douglas Think?

I’m looking now at the SanDisk Sansa e2x0 (x=memory option, from 2Gb to 8Gb), a new media player from the flash data card people. Playing with it over the week, my mind has been turning on one of Douglas’s theories. When asked if everyone should become “computer literate”, he harked back to a 30s Boy’s Wonder Book Of Science in which one article extolled the virtues of the new generation of brushed DC motors and how they were going to revolutionise the world. There were diagrams of a “house of the future”, a huge electric motor in the attic with a series of belts driving everything from the washing machine to the rotisserie. The piece concluded that, as a result, everyone would be very handy with DC motors – “electric motor literate”. What its authors failed to predict was that such motors would indeed revolutionise the home, but instead of one big master, there’d be dozens of small motors, invisible to the user. They are still with us, in our washing machines, computers, cars – even in the first six generations of iPod. We don’t have to be motor literate, however – they are just there.

Douglas argued the same with computer literacy. We used to believe that homes would have one great computer controlling music, lights and heating. In fact, we have them in our tumble-driers and thermostats, cars and coffee machines. But we don’t have to be computer literate any more than we need to know how a car engine works. All we have to learn is how to negotiate the traffic.

The Sansa is good, but it is hard to get excited about an audio video player, even a cheap one with such a good battery life (its most impressive feature). Most of us have them built into our phones, and we’ll soon have them in our cameras, fridges and cars. It will be interesting to see how Apple copes with the diminishing excitement of new iPods. Meanwhile the SanDisk is fine. Small, good value, better sound reproduction than an iPod – ideal for DRM free music. But surely it won’t be long before MP3 players go the way of the electronic calculator: from eye-popping novelty to consumer essential to gift from the estate agent to dusty, solar-powered in a drawer.

Being flash memory, of course, the Sansa doesn’t have an electric motor. Shame: Douglas and I would have enjoyed taking it apart and proving our electric motor illiteracy.

Acronyms of the week

BPS Bits per second. In 1985, 1,200 bps was fast; your internet connection is millions of times faster.

ISP Internet service provider. In the 80s, only academe and the military provided internet service. The arrival of the first commercial ISPs ushered in the internet age.

DRM Digital rights management. System that ‘locks’ music or video bought on the internet so it can be played only by the authorised buyer.

Stephen Fry is wowed by Nintendo’s magical Wii

Last week I looked at the remarkable rebirth in the fortunes of Nintendo, a renaissance engendered by two products – the DS, a pocket gaming device, and the Wii, a larger living-room machine.

The Wii arrived in Europe last year and demand has been allowed massively to outstrip supply, causing howls of anguish from those who, like Veruca Salt and me, always want it now. You can buy a basic Wii from any old Woolworths, but the Wii-Fit add-on is still made, as the saying has it, from purest unobtainium.

Photograph: Itsuo Inouye

Wii is white and dinky. It connects to your TV by ancient Scart connectors, for heaven’s sake, eschewing 21st-century HDMI. Its graphics, power and storage capabilities are nothing like as impressive as those on a PlayStation or Xbox, it can’t even play back basic DVDs – but it has a USP that makes up for all that.

The Wii Remote is the magic wand that transforms the Wii into the most exciting mass-market device for years. Filled with accelerometer, sensor and motion feedback technology, this pointing device (about the size of a late-80s mobile phone) is strapped to your wrist like an épée (sometimes with its companion piece, the fearsome-sounding nunchuk) and within minutes it is an extension of your body. You play tennis with it, you pick things up, put them down, putt, swat, bowl, swipe, climb, jump, run and fly, all with waves of the wrist. It seems like magic at first. This is a gaming system that can make you sweat with effort and have your heart pound with honest exertion, rather than dampen you with the usual hot, sick sheen of fear that attends conventional video-game experiences with their unrelenting panic and din.

Nintendo has supplemented this exercise element by launching the Wii Fit, which features a “balanceboard” on which you can do yoga, step aerobics and ski slaloms, and have your BMI calculated, achievements logged and stamina challenged. At the moment this item is rarer than hen’s teeth and I have yet to try it. But no matter, the basic version can give you a daily workout regimen. I started with a physical age of 63 (according to their calculations) and have managed in a week to bring it down to 58. I expect to be a rorty 17-year-old with accompanying acne and attitude in time for Christmas.

For me and millions of others, anything approaching walking, running or lifting for fitness has always been out of the question on account of the way time slows down so mercilessly. But if our health-giving routines can be made part of some witty, graphically impressive, compelling game, think what this could do for the health of the nation.

The Wii allows Wi-Fi connections to the internet and the inevitable proprietary Market Place whence software can be downloaded. Users can also design an avatar called a Mii for themselves and their online or flesh-and-blood playing partners. The Wii only truly comes into its own when you play with someone else. The first thing you have to do when you buy a Wii, therefore, is purchase at least one more remote. Don’t be fooled into buying the add-ons that turn the remotes into simulacra of baseball bats, steering wheels and tennis rackets – these are a pointless waste of money.

If your wife, mother or lover has a china ornament you have always hated, make sure it is within a 10-yard radius of the TV and you can be sure it will be smashed within a fortnight. Another Wii service for which we can all be truly thankful.

Nintendo’s recrudescence is yet further proof that the market (ie the population) wants machines that don’t frighten, but befriend. The snarling roars of the feral Xbox and the brutal PlayStation are impressive, but Nintendo understands that while play does involve competition, territoriality and rehearsal for war, it also involves silliness, laughter and fun.

Acronyms of the week

Scart That 21-pin connector we Europeans used for connecting videos and DVDs to TVs before HDMI (explained last week) and Component Video took over. Stands for Syndicat des Constructeurs d’Appareils Radiorécepteurs et Téléviseurs.

USP Unique Selling Point, but you knew that.

BMI Body Mass Index. Something horrid made up by doctors to make me feel ashamed.

Stephen Fry has a lot of affection for Nintendo’s DS, which he finds much more engaging than Sony’s PSP

Poor Nintendo. Those clever little handheld games in the 80s: small, orange, plastic “Game & Watch” devices that opened up like a book. A gorilla threw barrels down at you while you leapt about a beeping LCD world. Then came the NES Game Console, followed by the highly successful Game Boy. After that, things began to go wrong: the Nintendo 64 and its successor, the GameCube, failed to penetrate what was now an enormous market. The oldest video games company of them all was in trouble: Donkey Kong and the Mario Brothers seemed destined to go the way of Atari and Sega, Pong and Sonic the Hedgehog, while the big boys would be left to slug it out with their PlayStations and Xboxes. That was Sony and Microsoft’s plan, and no one doubted it would be so. Nintendo, as a games brand, was about as hot as Waddingtons.

“I Nintendo live for ever, or die trying” – Mario Marx.

And then came its “seventh generation” offerings, the DS and the Wii (pronounced “wee”). The assumption made by Sony and Microsoft was that awesome processing power, state-of-the-art graphics, smooth animation and voluminous storage would make their big beasts market leaders. Nintendo staked all on cheaper devices that stressed a personal relationship between player and machine. The DS was all about a highly portable, stylus-driven environment, while the Wii – well, the Wii changed the rules completely.

The DS and its more streamlined successor, the DS Lite, reached out to women and the middle-aged, and managed to do this without alienating the core gaming audience. Games for teenage girls, games for sudoku-playing commuters, “brain trainer” games for fortysomethings – whole new audiences were being reached, and the units sold in their millions.

My DS Lite is pink. There was so much demand earlier this year that they couldn’t be had for bribes, sexual favours or worse. Unless you accepted girly pink. The moment you open it, you are taken back to the old Game & Watch days but can see why the DS has succeeded so well with the middle class, the middle-aged and the Hello Kitty/My Little Strawberry Shortcake Pony set. You set up in a twinkle and then play on two screens, one of which accepts stylus input and touches.

As well as being backwardly compatible with the Game Boy Advance, there are hundreds of DS-specific games to choose from, some available on all platforms, such as Lego Star Wars; others proprietary and particular, such as Mario Kart. Fashion Dogz, Hannah Montana: Music Jam and Imagine Girl Band look after the all-important little girl sector, while Call of Duty, Race Driver: Grid and endless sports implementations show that your classic boy gamer isn’t left out either. He will prefer the versions on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, of course, but Nintendo’s whole strategy is to encourage crossover. Adults are turned on to the joys of shoot ‘em ups and RPGs, the young discover Space Invaders and Scrabble. That’s the theory, and more than 100m units sold make it hard to disprove. The DS is nothing like as feature rich as the PlayStation Portable, but it isn’t trying to be. The philosophy seems so counterintuitive at first blush: surely today’s digital devices demand the Swiss Army knife approach? If the DS has a touch screen, speakers and controls, then it should offer USB connections, AV and HDMI in and out sockets, memory cards, MP3 and movie playback, Wi-Fi and texting. Convergence is all, no? Well, we humans can be so ornery. A simple pocket knife can be more appealing and usable than a bristling Victorinox, and a dedicated little games machine like the DS can engage us far more than the sleek power of the PSP. You can feel admiration and even awe for the big power boxes, but for the DS you feel affection – and that, in marketing terms, is worth a whole heap more.

Next wiik, wii’ll take a wii look at Nintendo’s other phenomenally successful platform…

Acronym of the week

HDMI High Definition Multimedia Interface. Says it all, really. Neat single cable attachment for HD TVs, Blu-ray players and modern gaming consoles.