Nokia Lumia 800

What’s the smartphone world up to at the moment? Well, mostly we have had to witness the sorry spectacle of patent suits and counter-suits between Samsung, HTC, Apple, Google, Nokia – in fact all the big players in the game, each of them shelling out huge sums in lawyers’ fees for cases where they are fighting each other or those creepy companies who have invented and given the world nothing but stealthily bought up patents over the years and now hope to rake in many tens of millions. By way of retaliation and to prevent more of this, a consortium consisting of some of the biggest beasts in the jungle – Apple, Microsoft and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion amongst others – paid four and half billion dollars for Nortel, while Google splashed out even more impressively, paying twelve and half billion for Motorola Mobility and its 17,000 patents. Yes, 17,000. How many patent lawyers charging how much an hour will it take to work through that portfolio? The mind boggles.

Do we remember any of this happening in the auto industry? Does whoever came up with the limited slip differential get a licence from every car that uses one? Or the inventor of fuel injection, the overhead camshaft or the wishbone chassis? Did it happen in the manufacture of radio and television sets? Maybe it did but we just didn’t know about it. To the outsider the current situation resembles nothing so much the bloodiest kind of shark feeding-frenzy.

Large corporations can at least look after themselves. The problem is that smaller, ever creepier parasitic corporations, “patent trolls”, have been currently making life hell for individual third-party app developers too, bombing them with Cease and Desist letters asserting that the app they have designed has used, probably in all innocence, some algorithm, routine or in-app purchasing technique that has been sneakily hoarded by the company – an algorithm, routine or technique that would certainly have been independently invented by hundreds of different app developers anyway. Earlier this year it seems that in the case of the most notorious of these companies, Lodsys, Apple stepped in on behalf of the developers

Well it’s not an area I have any expertise in, but it does leave a nasty taste in the mouth. Of course original creations and inventions should be protected, but as with the case of musical copyright I would argue (as I did here  at the iTunes Festival in London in July 2009,  the periods of greatest creativity have been those where weak copyright has prevailed. It is, to (mis)quote, the fencing master in Scaramouche, like holding a bird. Clutch too tight and you will crush it, too loose and – pah! – she will fly away.

Anyway, while all this goes on, the multi-billion dollar business of trying to get you to buy into a smartphone continues apace. There are, I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, four big players here. RIM, who make the BlackBerry that once dominated the business world almost entirely, Apple, whose iPhone utterly transformed the idea of what a smartphone could be, the Google Android Open Handset Alliance which was (cough) inspired by Apple to produce their own not strikingly dissimilar operating system and finally, last year, Microsoft, who threw their hat in the ring with Windows Mobile 7, now called just plain Windows Phone.

They all take apps, they all can play YouTube films, but only the Android devices have Adobe Flash – and most Androiders will try and avoid using it very much. Everything Apple said about it when Steve Jobs declared the iPhone would never carry it has turned out to be true and Adobe themselves have finally come to realise this and to accept the inevitability of HTML 5 constituting the proper way forward.

There is a core of must-have productivity apps these days that is beginning to dominate: every operating system has its version of Kindle and Evernote for example, or Dropbox (in the case of Windows Mobile only a free client app at the moment) – the latter two cloud-based utilities allow users to ensure that the files they create on their laptop or desktop are also available on their tablet or smartphone. And vice versa. If you get me. Plenty of  security or photo utilities like 1Password or DropImage for example, are beginning to get a similar kind of traction, by being Dropbox savvy.

So in the end, what I suppose I am trying to say is that these phones I have been using are all converging somewhat. I find I am using email clients on all them that are intelligently plugged into Gmail and allow me to do anything in terms of archiving and drafting that I could do with a desktop app like Sparrow or by Gmailing on the web. I use Dropbox on all the devices, and I use Kindle and Evernote too. Each system has its official Twitter app and a variety of third-party options available through their App Store, Market, Marketplace, App World or whatever they might choose to call it.

Little arms races take place between the systems: Apple released the iPhone 4S complete with built in voice recognition for every app that uses a keyboard, as well as the much feted, mocked, loved, tolerated, abused, seduced and shown-off Siri, “your personal assistant”. Just yesterday an Android equivalent Cluzee was announced (who dreams up these names? Are they paid? No, I mean in actual money. Really?).

New ways of integrating GPS, mapping and intelligent shopping, parking, sight-seeing, navigating and trekking come along all the time, but to be perfectly frank things have got to the stage where each of the four systems can be said to offer broadly the same functions and capabilities. Which leaves us, as it always did, with the question of preference. Which experience is most satisfying, most fun, most reliable and most desirable? Or to put it another way, which is the least fiddly, the least flaky and the least intuitive? I can’t claim to have a definitive answer for that. It would be like telling you which breed of dog is best. Opinion, emotional attachment, aesthetics, social pressure and cost will always come into play quite as much as functionality.

We live in hard times and these gismos are not cheap. Your network operators offer upgrade paths that may seem slow to those who want the newest phone now, but it is worth either phoning up or going in to your local store and turning on the charm. One hears stories of  some lucky people getting upgraded because the assistant they spoke to seemed to be in a good mood while others whose accounts were identical have been met with nothing but blank indifference.

So to the devices themselves.

BlackBerry Bold 9900

Recent news has been bad, very bad, for RIM. I have tried to like their terribly flawed Playbook tablet, but failed to find it had any part to play in my life. I have always thought their original Bold handset was as perfect in its day as a phone could be, and was pleased that after the catastrophe of the Storm and the ho-hum of the Torch they finally produced a month or two ago their Bold 9900, a phone that seamlessly blends touchscreen and keyboard capabilities in a totally satisfying way. If you are a happy BlackBerry fan this will be the phone that you want. Battery life used to be the BB’s great selling point when compared to power-hungry rivals, but what with the way apps use 3G and Wi-Fi and mapping and GPS and Bluetooth, you can easily find yourself out of juice half way through the afternoon if you’ve been hitting the phone hard. But this is true of all the devices under consideration. Blackberry, like the HTC devices, can at least offer removable batteries. The new Bold is also one of the first to offer “Near Field Communication”, a standard yet to be widely implemented that will allow the phone to activate other devices close to it, such as smartpay machines and, of course, other phones or computers.

In the wider corporate context, the world of Enterprise which has been the bedrock of BlackBerry’s business success has been slowly slipping away from RIM. As a result they announced only yesterday that they will be allowing their Enterprise Management Suite to work with other platforms. A sign of weakness, but also a recognition of the inevitable, as most commentators have agreed. This move may allow them to stay in the game, even if they will never again be quite the force they once were.

The two HTC phones I’ve been playing with reveal the startling turn around rate that goes on in Taiwan, where HTC are based. They seem to bring out new Android and Windows phones four times a year. It is getting very hard to tell which kind of Desire or Sensation you have and what the difference between them is. The Sensation XL With Beats, is as big a phone as I’ve seen in a long while. For all its size, the 4.7” LCD screen doesn’t excite with colour richness in quite the way that the AMOLED displays of many rivals do, I’m thinking of the Samsung Galaxy for example. There’s an 8 megapixel camera, all the HTC Sense scenes and widgets and pages full of the useful free bundled software that Android users have come to expect. There’s a video store called Watch which has a reasonable selection of films for downloading and, most importantly of all, there are the Beats that give the device its strange name. You will probably be aware of Dr Dre and his Beats earphones; well, a pair of these come with the Sensation XL and baked in is his personally tweaked “Beats Audio Technology”. I have absolutely no interest in such things to be honest. The sound appeared to be excellent, but maybe it suits someone with a different kind of music collection.  I don’t suppose the hip-hop legend had Wagner and Glenn Gould in mind when tweaking the audio for HTC. With a single core 1.5GHz and 768MB or RAM such a large phone seems significantly underpowered. And when the next flavour of Android comes out (mine is running Gingerbread 2.3.5) it will be a question as to whether this behemoth will be up to the task of coping with whatever demands Honeycomb and Icecream Sandwich make of it (in case you wonder what I’m drivelling about, Android name each full new release after a cake, ice-cream or pudding. We started with Cupcake, Donut and Éclair who knows where we’ll go after Honeycomb).

HTC Sensation XE with Beats Audio™

So, not a bad phone, but not a great one. Its slightly smaller sister, the dual core Sensation SE seems a more sensible solution to me, a very similar device but with just a bit more oomph.

Compared to either the Rhyme seems absolutely tiny, although in truth it is about the size of an iPhone. I can’t quite make the Rhyme out. It has two new hardware features; one is a docking station that turns it into a beautiful alarm clock if you locate it on your bedside table. The other is most extraordinary. It is a long string with a small white cube on one end and a mini-jack on the other. The idea is that when your phone is in your bag, you attach this “glowing purse charm” into your earphone socket and leave the white cube outside the bag. When the phone rings the cube glows and you can follow the string down into your bag and find your phone. Here’s a film if you can’t make sense of the way I’ve tried to explain it.

HTC Rhyme

This accessory and the fact that the default colour of the phone is a lush kind of purple alerts us to the distressing truth. HTC is making a phone for women. Women are always fiddling about in their bags for their phones and so they need a “glowing purse charm” to help them out. At least, this is the implication: but let’s be frank, the sight of women diving into their bags trying to locate their phones is not so rare. Motorola didn’t do too badly with Razr devices aimed squarely at pink-loving, fun-loving ladies, and far be it from me to decry HTC’s attempt to attract a female following too. As a phone the Rhyme is not a stand-out. It is perfectly fine, it is, as are all Androids, especially those front-ended by HTC Sense, much more customisable and pimpable than rivals, so if you don’t like the default screen you can easily change it. Well, fairly easily – there is a shallow but undeniable learning curve and I have seen people throw their Androids across the room because they couldn’t work out how to get two clocks with two different time zones onto their home screen at once.

And so we come to the most important (in terms of corporate destinies at least) phone of all. The Nokia Lumia 800.

The story of Nokia’s rise from lumber, wellington boot and lavatory paper company to world domination of the mobile phone market is the stuff of legend (and admirably told here, should you be interested. The inexorable relaxation of their grip as Apple’s iPhone reshaped the world of mobile telephony has been a sad sight to behold. Their venerable Symbian operating system was a miracle of compactness, reliability and power economy and is still in use (and will continue to be) in fantastical numbers around the world. But their share price has slipped as their market share has fallen here in the west and grim prognostications were being made about the Finnish giant.

They bit the bullet last year and realised that they were going to have to play or leave the table. An alliance with Microsoft was announced. Here were two corporations who understood all too well the pain that comes when what seems like unassailable domination turns with such dizzying speed into a humiliating downward spiral. Neither had reached anything like rock bottom and they were cash rich enough to invest in their new partnership. The hope of each CEO, Stephen Elop of Nokia and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, is that Nokia’s brand reputation as a reliable builder of phones and Microsoft’s reach and penetration as a software provider will allow the alliance to face up to Apple and Google and carve a share in this quite unbelievably valuable market. The stakes are very very high.

I was present at the launch of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 last year. I liked what I saw and was happy to say so. There were many similarities with the release of the iPhone in 2007. No microSD slot, a GUI precisely governed by MS, at launch no cut and paste and naturally a very small choice in third party apps… but there was much to like. The smoothness and glide, the cleverly baked-in social networking elements, the (only to be expected) quality of MS Office and Xbox Live compatibility. LG, Samsung and HTC were the two major manufacturers for the OS then and they each did a good job.

And now Nokia has stepped in with two models, the Lumia 800 and 710. I haven’t had any experience of the latter, which is a more affordable version of the 800, with 8 GB of internal flash memory to the 800’s 16.

Now, Microsoft’s approach has been ever more “walled garden” than Apple’s, and Windows Phone devices are the least pimpable of all. You can change the colour of the signature tiles that make up the GUI, you can have a black background or a white background. You can certainly introduce wallpaper, but that is about it. Ringtone customisation has arrived and the app Marketplace is filling up with well designed version of old friends like Angry Birds and IMDB as well as the essentials like Evernote that I’ve already discussed.

So all I can do when I describe the Nokia is tell you that it is an elegant candybar (familiar to those who remember the N9) it has a very bright and likable AMOLED screen, a rear 8 megapixel camera (no front facing one) and the obligatory three touch screen buttons at the bottom: Back, Home Screen and Search.They have decided against the removable batteries found in HTC and Samsung Windows Phone devices.

Nokia have added their own goodies, Nokia Drive, Nokia Maps and Nokia Music. Nokia Drive is a turn-by-turn GPS navigation system (with selectable voices) which works extremely well and is certainly enticement enough to buy the phone, given the cost of some GPS apps. Nokia maps seems an oddly redundant replication of what MS’s Bing already offers, but it’s there, along with something called “Local Scout” which is yet another way to see where the nearest Flat White or pizza parlour might be. Nokia Music would seem to be in direct competition with the Zune based music store that’s also a de facto presence in all Windows Phone handsets. I dare say Stephen and Steve banged heads a bit over that one, but compromise seems to be the order of the day. No harm in more choice.

Mango, which is the codename for the latest version of the OS is slick, smooth and a pleasure to play with. If you are of an Android turn of mind you might find the inability to pimp frustrating, but for the minimalists of this world the cleanness, the slide, glide and flow are sumptuous and delightful. It’s easy to get connected via a Windows Live or Hotmail account (indeed that’s a necessity if you want to take advantage of all the social networking features) and to set up a Gmail or any other email account is straightforward too. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn can all be embedded into your identity allowing seamless transitions and postings. An ever changing display of your friends faces (if like me you add pictures to your address book) will greet you every time you fire the phone up. The feature that will grow with Windows Phone is “live tiling” which will allow tiles to alter according to need or notification. A BA app tile will turn into a boarding pass QR code when you check in for example. Multitasking has arrived too, after a fashion. It seems to apply to some apps but not others and I haven’t figured out how to quit an app that’s running in the background. That’s probably just my stupidity, and I certainly haven’t found speed in the least compromised by having four or five apps running at once.

The Lumia, like the iPad and iPhone, takes a microsim card, though in the Lumia’s case via a rather fiddly system of flaps that have to pressed and slid and prodded and poked. Each time you connect your USB cable the flap has to be popped and lifted and I fear that many phones will have lost theirs after just a few weeks. Nokia have rather overdone their attempt to be entirely sleek and finished here.

I should imagine the closest rival phone to the Lumia 800 is the HTC Titan, which offers very similar specs. I wish Nokia well. For them to fall by the wayside would be sad indeed. They have produced a phone here that should have great appeal to first time Smartphone buyers who are comfortable with the name Nokia and pleased by the elegant simplicity of Windows Phone.

Windows Phone Mango looks and feels great, it is simple and yet – the more you drill down and play – remarkably flexible and versatile.

It is an anxious time for the corporate chiefs in Finland and Redmond, WA. Much gnawing of nails. If the Nokia gains momentum and is a sales success this Christmas, if the number of Windows Phone users increases, then so will the variety of apps, and that critical mass will also increase the resolve of Microsoft to keep innovating with their tiles and their widgets and encourage Nokia to produce new and ever more interesting and desirable devices.

If, if, if …

x

Stephen

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

Of course, you might point out that he asked for me specifically because he knew that I admired him and that I would write a positive piece, that I was more or less a patsy who would deliver what he wanted. I would not deny that for a minute. I like to believe that if I had been disappointed with the iPad I would have said so and written it clearly and boldly, but fortunately that issue and the inner turmoil it would have caused never arose for the iPad and I fell in love instantly. A month or so after that meeting with Steve, the “magical tablet” launched and was received with the inevitable mixture of admiration, contemptuous dismissal and bored incomprehension that had greeted so many of Apple’s previous products.

Like the original Apple computers, the Lisa, the Macintosh, the LaserWriter, the OS X operating system, the iMac, the iPod, the MacBooks and the iPhone before it, the iPad went on to reshape the landscape into which it had been born and to exceed the most optimistic sales forecasts and once again to make the Apple haters, doubters and resenters look like sullen fools. The contrast between those awful prophets and Apple’s awesome profits was (and is) something to behold.

Using my white iPhone

It is a very dismal business when a great personality dies and the world scrabbles about for comment, appraisal and judgment. I have been asked in the last 24 hours to appear and to write and to call in to join in the chorus of voices assessing the life and career of this remarkable man. But what was Steve Jobs? He wasn’t a brilliant and innovative electronics engineer like his partner and fellow Apple founder Steve Wozniak. Nor was he an acute businessman and aggressively talented opportunist like Bill Gates. He wasn’t a designer of original genius like Jonathan Ive whose achievements were so integral to Apple’s success from 1997 onwards. He wasn’t a software engineer, a mathematician, a nerd, a financier, an artist or an inventor. Most of the recent obituaries have decided that words like “visionary” suit him best and perhaps they are right.

As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”.  The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance. If the unprecedented and phenomenal success of Steve Jobs at Apple proves anything it is that those commentators and tech-bloggers and “experts” who sneered at him for producing sleek, shiny, well-designed products or who denigrated the man because he was not an inventor or originator of technology himself missed the point in such a fantastically stupid way that any employer would surely question the purpose of having such people on their payroll, writing for their magazines or indeed making any decisions on which lives, destinies or fortunes depended.

It would be vulgar to say that the proof of the correctness of Jobs’s vision is reflected in the gigantic capitalisation value of the Apple Corporation, the almost fantastically unbelievable margins and the eye-popping cash richness which has transformed a company that was on the brink of collapse when Jobs arrived back in 1997 into the greatest of them all.  All this despite low market share and an almost fanatical attention to detail and finish which would have 99% of CFO’s weeping into their spreadsheets.

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”  Steve Jobs in an Interview with Fortune Magazine, 2000

Which is not to say that abject worship is the only allowable viewpoint when it comes to the life and career of this magnificently complicated man. I am very glad that I did not work for him. I cannot claim he was a friend but over thirty year or so years I bumped into him from time to time and he was always warm, charming, funny and easy to talk to, yet I know, and the world has already been told enough times over the past few days and weeks, that he was a fearsome boss, often a tempestuous mixture of martinet, tyrant, bully and sulky child. His perfectionism, the absolute conviction and certainty in the rightness of his opinions and – I am afraid it is true, as it is of so many leaders, Churchill and other great figures not excluded – his propensity apparently to have originated an idea that he had previously dismissed but now suddenly owned and championed, these traits must have maddened his colleagues. But the charisma, passion, delight in detail, excitement and belief in the creation of a new future – the sheer magnetic force of the man made his many faults a forgivable and almost loveable part of his mystique and greatness.

The quality I especially revered in him was his refusal to show contempt for his customers by fobbing them off with something that was “good enough”. Whether it was the packaging, the cabling, the use of screen space, the human interfaces, the colours, the flow, the feel, the graphical or textural features, everything had to be improved upon and improved upon until it was, to use the favourite phrase of the early Mac pioneers “insanely great”. It had to be so cool that you gasped. It had to feel good in the hand, look good to the eye and it had to change things. It changed things because it made users want to use the devices as they had never been used before. As I used to say of the Mac in the early days, “it makes me jump out of bed early to start work”. People may not think so but I’m as lazy as can be, and the creative, human-based implementation of technology in such a way as to encourage labour and thereby invigorate innovation and change is a remarkable achievement in so potentially dull a sector as computing.

Jobs said, when he presented the iPad to the world in 2010 that he regarded Apple as standing at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. I pointed out that it might have been more accurate to say that Apple stood at the intersection of technology, the liberal arts and commerce. There is no doubt that as Disney’s biggest shareholder, as the boss of Pixar, the company that virtually invented computer animated cinematography, Jobs was in a unique position to bang heads together when it came to getting studio and record label bosses to consent to copyright agreements for what was to become the iTunes store, just one of the massive “game-changing” contributions he made to technology and the arts.

A control freak? Well, since “freak” is always the word used in such a context, then yes. But it was that control that won the war, freakish or not. The so-called “walled-garden” approach whereby Apple make the hardware, the software and control third party access to the APIs and architecture of each device may madden many but they are precisely what allows the devices to work so well, so cleanly, so fluently out of the box. They allow longer battery-life, less heat, more stable operating and dozens of other enormous advantages. If different companies are making the firmware, software, chips, screens, operating system, radios and cases the results will always be far less coherent and usable devices. I have nothing against Android and admire the idea of an Open Handset Alliance. I don’t want to be characterised as an incurable unthinking Apple “fanboi” – but I cannot fight the instinct that makes my hand always reach for the pocket with the iPhone in it when I have a Windows 7, a Blackberry and an Android just as available in other pockets. I have in the past set myself the task of using only an Android for two weeks, or only a Windows 7 phone or only a Blackberry and while it can be done (obviously) I am less content, more frustrated and crucially as far as I am concerned, less productive as a result. And the fact remains that it is so much easier to survive on an Android, a Windows 7 phone or a Blackberry nowadays precisely because they have all fundamentally modelled themselves on Apple criteria. They want to be smooth, graphically pleasing, they want the user to love and enjoy them. The frustratingly silly patent wars that are raging around the world between Google, Samsung, Apple and dozens of other companies would be a sad obsequy to Jobs’s colossal achievements, but with such gigantic sums of money in so huge a market at stake it is little wonder that others will do all they can to “crack” Apple. Well that is fine, I have no shares in the company. So long as the way they crack Apple is to learn from Steve Jobs that style matters, that beauty matters, that joy, simplicity, elegance, harmony, charm, wit and quality matter – well, I don’t care which company has the best stock market capitalisation.

Henry Ford didn’t invent the motor car, Rockefeller didn’t discover how to crack crude oil into petrol, Disney didn’t invent animation, the Macdonald brothers didn’t invent the hamburger, Martin Luther King didn’t invent oratory, neither Jane Austen, Tolstoy nor Flaubert invented the novel and D. W. Griffith, the Warner Brothers, Irving Thalberg and Steven Spielberg didn’t invent film-making. Steve Jobs didn’t invent computers and he didn’t invent packet switching or the mouse. But he saw that there were no limits to the power that creative combinations of technology and design could accomplish.

I once heard George Melly, on a programme about Louis Armstrong, do that dangerous thing and give his own definition of a genius. “A genius,” he said, “is someone who enters a field and works in it and when they leave it, it is different. By that token, Satchmo was a genius.” I don’t think any reasonable person could deny that Steve Jobs, by that same token, was a genius too.

I will end with a story few people know. What you probably do know is that Jobs wooed Pepsi Cola boss John Sculley to Apple in 1985. He wanted him to do to IBM the unthinkable thing that he had done to Coca Cola: beaten the brand leader into second place. He won Sculley with the famous phrase, “do you want to sell fizzy sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?” Sculley came and a few months later, astoundingly, their disagreements came to such a head that Jobs found himself fired from the company he had founded.

You probably knew that. You probably knew he went on to found his own computer company NeXt – a black cube computer that ran a UNIX operating system, revealing Jobs’s already growing conviction that the professionally popular UNIX, so suited to networking, should be the future kernel (if you’ll forgive the geeky pun) of any sensible consumer oriented operating system.

It was on a NeXt machine that the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote the protocols, procedures and languages that added up to the World Wide Web, http, HTML, browsers, hyperlinks … in other words the way forward for the internet, the most significant computer program ever written was done on a NeXt computer. That is a feather in Steve Jobs’s cap that is not often celebrated and indeed one that he himself signally failed to know about for some time.

After having written www, Berners-Lee noticed that there was a NeXt developers conference in Paris at which Steve Jobs would be present. Tim packed up his black cube, complete with the optical disk which contained arguably the most influential and important code ever written and took a train to Paris.

It was a large and popular conference and Tim was pretty much at the end of the line of black NeXt boxes. Each developer showed Steve Jobs their new word-processor, graphic programme and utility and he slowly walked along the line, like the judge at a flower show nodding his approval or frowning his distaste. Just before he reached Tim and the world wide web at the end of the row, an aide nudged Jobs and told him that they should go or he’d be in danger of missing his flight back to America. So Steve turned away and never saw the programme that Tim Berners-Lee had written which would change the world as completely as Gutenberg had in 1450. It was a meeting of the two most influential men of their time that never took place. Chatting to the newly knighted Sir Tim a few years ago he told me that he had still never actually met Steve Jobs.

Their work met however and it is through it that you are reading this. I will not be so presumptuous as to mourn the loss of Steve as a personal friend, but I will mourn his loss as a man who changed my world completely. As the great writer, wit and sage John @Hodgman (who played the pasty-faced PC in the old Apple TV commercials) wrote a few hours after Steve’s death “Everything good I have done, I have done on a Mac”.

“…and the elements

So mixed in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world, “this was a man!”

x Stephen

© Stephen Fry 2011

On Bank Holiday Monday Channel 4 are screening one of those “100 top” programmes they like to make and this year I had the pleasure of being allowed to choose my 100 favourite gadgets. I don’t think you’ll guess which comes first. Besides, I didn’t really approach it as a beauty pageant. The winner might as easily be a kitchen essential as a digital doodad. The fact is I have always had a quite inexplicable love of gadgets and feel myself blessed to have been born into an age in which they seem to have come thicker, faster, newer, sleeker and more miraculous than ever before. In the programme we didn’t want to get all ontological on your arse and never made an attempt to define or limit the meaning of the word. A gadget, for our purposes, was more or less what I decided it was, and in the end it doesn’t really matter who wins the Palm D’Or. Though naturally your burning curiosity will keep you watching all the way to the finish because …. well, you’ll never guess. You’ll just never guess…

But it’s talk of palms, d’or or otherwise, which brings me to the sad story of the week. Of the year. Of the decade.

The early days…

I’ve always been a lucky sod when it comes to my love affair with all things tech. It is a passion that coincided with my having a career that allowed me to be able to indulge in the kinds of insane spending spree that the speedy inbuilt obsolescence of gadgetry has always necessitated. At some time in 1985 I astonished my friends by brandishing before them professionally printed material. I remember the late and blessed Ned Sherrin goggling in disbelief when I came into a radio studio with a piece of A4 on which my script had been perfectly printed.

“You send your scripts to a printer?” he shrieked.

I nodded gravely. “These are fine scripts,” I said. “They deserve memorialisation.”

It was only after being harangued for insanity, hubris and dementia that I finally confessed that I had invested in a new kind of printer. You must remember (or be told because you are far too young to remember) that in 1984 printers were dot matrix machines that produced only a faint simulacrum of what a printing press could manage. In 1985 Apple brought out the LaserPrinter, Aldus produced a programme called PageMaker and I had splashed out £7,000 for one and about £40 for the other. A ridiculous sum, but I was now a Desk Top Publisher. The PostScript language, kerning, leading and justification were all I could think about.

Less than ten years later I ambled into a film studio and started taking photographs of the set with a QuickTake camera, much to the astonishment of the cinematographer and his crew.

“What’s more,” I said, “I could upload the photographs to my computer and email them to a friend.”

“What’s email?” they all wanted to know.

That digital cameras, perfectly printed pages and email are now all as platitudinous, quotidian and meretricious as takeaway coffee is easy to take for granted and I certainly don’t expect credit for being an early adopter or some kind of wise prophet. I was also an early adopter of many disastrous failures. The Newton, the Microwriter AgendA, early, bulky and dreadful Sony electronic books, iRex iLiads weird tone-dialling devices – any number of freakish gadgets that were either before their time and technology or simply deluded and hopelessly hopeful were all grist to my crazy mill.

iRex

The Mac, the LaserWriter and QuickTake camera were (niche and generally unprofitable) Apple products and it’s hard now to believe that there was so long a period when friends and the entire tech press gleefully crowed that my aging Mac peripherals and spare parts would in future have be bought at specialist hobbyist shops because Apple as a company was doomed. Well in 1997 Steve Jobs returned to the company he co-founded and that had fired him 12 years earlier and everything changed, but enough of that.

A tiny sector of the gadget market…

My real passion in those days was not for things Apple but for a small and for a long time unnoticed sector of the market – one that Apple did have an early brave stab at, as had many others with equally doomed results, but which was truly ruled for what seemed an age by Psion and then Palm and Nokia. I am talking about those little objects that started out as PDAs and morphed, almost without anyone noticing, into smartphones.

If you (are masochistic enough to) go back five years or so and consult the earlier tech blogs section of this site you can find examples of me banging on about my love of those early devices. The world has moved on hugely since then, but this week has laid a final wreath on the grave of a much loved (by me) innovator.

British to the core…

It is not meant as a patriotic boast, but it is certainly remarkable that the ARM processors behind almost all modern mobile phones, the Symbian OS that reigned supreme for so long, the design of iMacs, iPods, iBooks, iPhones and iPads and indeed the world wide web itself have all been largely the work of Britons. Of course, good science and technology depends upon shared resources and Berkeley’s RISC was the foundation of ARM; Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of WWW, always maintains that his work was part of an ongoing process, Jony Ive never fails to mention his fellow designers at Apple while Symbian … well, poor old Symbian is all but forgotten these days, indeed Nokia’s stubborn clinging to it is regarded as one reason for the Finnish giant’s less than impressive performance of late – despite the billions of Nokia badged phones that are still used around the world.

Symbian began life in Britain as EPOC, an operating system created for Psion handheld devices. The Psion Organiser 2 was the first really impressive, in my opinion, Personal Digital Assistant. I was a loyal user, indeed had the honour to help with the launch of the Revo in 1999. EPOC’s transformation into Symbian was taken up and run by Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola in an attempt to create some sort of standard Operating System for reasonably low-powered, ARM processor toting mobile phones. It was never entirely standard of course, nothing ever is, all kinds of flavours soon developed, UIQ, S60, Anna and the lord knows what else, but with the Nokia Communicator in 1996 Symbian really managed to strut its stuff as a proto-smartphone OS. You could send emails, browse the web, store contact numbers and calendar entries and even add what we would now call apps – all in monochrome with navigation and control achieved by cursor buttons rather than touchscreen, but for those of us lucky enough to own one it was about as exciting as could be. Val Kilmer used one as Simon Templar in The Saint, I recall, that’s how cool it was.

Shirt pockets…

Across the Atlantic things were moving in a different direction. I became fascinated by the US challenge to the Psion and Communicator, the Palm Pilot, a device which answered a peculiar American imperative in that in could fit into an office worker’s shirt pocket. Corporate Americans wear (usually white) shirts which always have a pocket round about where the left nipple might be on a human being and woe betide any hardware manufacturer who even thinks about producing an object that exceeds this unalterably insistent form factor. The size limitations required Palm to think hard and, like a poet forced into the sonnet form, they came up with marvellous solutions.

The Palm Pilot had a touch sensitive screen, not the capacitative type we now all know and love in the modern smartphone or pad, but the resistive kind which required the use of a stylus, or when lost (as it inevitably was) a finger nail, empty biro or the tip of the arm of a pair of spectacles. Handwriting of a kind could be achieved by forming characters from a cut down, shorthand version of the alphabet known as Graffiti (sideways on but a nostalgic reminder). Graffiti could very easily be mastered and allowed immensely speedy input. I adored it and used it when it reappeared for a while on the Newton, on Sony P900s and even, bless them, early WinMob devices where they called it “block” or something similar. Now it’s available (of course) as a retro app for Android and iOS.

Handpsring…

Palm was acquired by the 3M company and its original creators and founding geniuses moved away to found Handspring which came up with first the Visor and then, joy of joys, the Treo. The Treo 180 (or 180 g for Graffiti lovers ) was a Palm Pilot into which you could slip a GSM SIM. It had a stubby little aerial, a beautiful flip screen, guess-ahead contact dialling and many of the features we now regard as standard but which were then little short of revolutionary. It could be synced with one’s computer, and (as it iterated all the way into the Treo 600) it allowed full colour web browsing. It was a real smartphone, its battery lasted all day, you could swap SIM cards at will, Matt Damon used one in the first of the Jason Bourne movies, for heaven’s sake. Matt Damon. That’s how recent and yet how far distant the PalmOne (as Handspring became) and its PalmOS were and are.

Throughout the greater part of the first decade of the twenty-first century nothing came close. Microsoft produced the hideous, cumbersome ugly and all but unusable WinMob OS in various numbers. Nokia continued with Communicators before, sadly (for me anyway) abandoning them. Sony never quite got the P900 series right. So perfect but so flawed and so-o-o liable to crash.

But…

Palm was IT. They made arses of themselves by producing a Treo that ran Windows. This alienated everyone who liked the simplicity and ease of the Palm OS and was the first indication that they might be losing the plot.

Then in 2007 two things happened that changed the landscape for ever. Palm produced the Foleo , a dumb terminal netbook and a month later Apple produced the iPhone. The Foleo lasted little more than three months. Apple had changed everything.

How to respond…

Palm scratched their heads and saw that multi-touch, app-rich full laden smartphones were now here to stay. They realised that WinMob was no way forward and that Apple was not about to licence anyone else to use its iPhone OS. Rumours abounded of an Open Handset Alliance, led by Google who would come up with something to answer Apple’s transformation of the market. Palm decided to devise their own challenge and it was to be in the form of devices powered by a Web based OS, in other words an operating system for smartphones whose apps were written in the same language/s that runs the world wide web. Many Google services default to web app version when you browse to them on a mobile. Amazon have just produced a web app version of their Kindle reader to get round Apple’s prohibitive policy of denying the iOS version direct click access to the Amazon store. Web apps, in other words, are far from a dead duck and an WebOS struck most commentators at the time of Palm’s announcement as an excellent and exciting idea. I certainly salivated at the thought.

The rest is history…

The Palm Pre arrived. Too late. Too small. Underpowered. You could fit two into an American office worker’s shirt pocket, for heaven’s sake. I owned a couple of Pre devices, an American CDMA and a European GSM version. I so wanted them to work. I liked a lot of what they did and how they did it. Blackberry has incorporated some of the original WebOS gestures into its Playbook, a frustrating but in some ways (to a contrarian like me) rather appealing tablet about which I might write another time.

In short, the Pre failed to catch on. It was a disaster for Palm. Their owndership of the American businessman’s shirt-pocket, which once seemed so assured, was over. More than that, the company itself was done for. Hewlett Packard bought them for $1.2 billion last year. HP announced they would integrate Palm’s WebOS into a series of hand held and tablet style devices and go at this huge and growing market with all guns blazing. They introduced the WebOS powered TouchPad less than three months ago.

HP Sauce…

Then, last week, HP announced it was withdrawing completely from the hardware business, whether in terms of laptops, desktops, smartphones or tablets.

So now only Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s vastly improved mobile OS, Android and Apple’s iOS remain to fight over the world’s smartphone customer base. Nokia has more or less given up on Symbian and will concentrate on producing Windows 7 devices as a hardware manufacturer. HTC will carry on producing cute and serviceable candy-bars for both Android and Windows 7 while Apple will continue to do, presumably, what Apple does. RIM meanwhile have a foot in each corner. They have retreated to their proven customer base with the introduction of a restyle up-to-date version their best BlackBerry, the Bold, while refusing quite to let go of the Playbook or the hybrid Torch, a BlackBerry that thinks it’s a multitouch but isn’t too sure.

I have that new Blackberry Bold 9900, a Playbook, an HTC HD7 Windows phone running “Mango” and an Android HTC Sensation as well as an iPad 2 and an iPhone 4 (both running iOS 5 and the iCloud with Lion OS X 7.2 beta because I’m a sad nerd who forks out for a developer’s account) – I have run, and always, will I suspect, run as many devices alongside each other as I can for the foreseeable future.

But then, as AOL and Psion and Nokia and Palm will tell you, the future is not very foreseeable at all. And I can see that it never will be. Er … I think.

I do shed a tear however for the demise of Palm and their WebOS. Any turn of events that reduces biodiversity in the smartphone sector saddens me, and I mourn and memorialise the ingenuity, imagination and innovative genius of Palm and its original founders.

x Stephen

That’s probably enough metaphor. Here is a link to the Pushnote FAQ which we hope will address the most obvious questions you might have.

Do remember that we’re in Beta, which means Pushnote is a work in progress. There’s lots to add, lots to polish and lots to improve. Being in Beta means that we’re also reliant on the comments and suggestions of users. So do plunge in and try it out. I think you’ll find that there’s real pleasure in happening upon a site that’s wearing the little pushnote icon in green or red, the sign that a fellow user has been there and has something to say about it.

Above all, please be assured that the issues we take most seriously are your privacy and security.

Enjoy…

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.

© Tony Husband 2010 for Stephenfry.com

Let us suppose for a minute that you have an iPad on your lap, perched oddly on your splayed out knee, laid flat on the table, fashioned into a lectern by the Apple suedette case, cradled in your arms above your head in bed or in any of the other peculiar contortions that you will find your body adopting in order best to read and interact with your new friend. You may, rightly, think that this FryPaper app is rather simple and unexciting. Indeed it is. There are the device, the content and you and we are not very interested in clouding the interaction between the three. We might add this bell or that whistle from time to time and as occasion and opportunity might suggest, but for the moment we are happy to offer this as no more than a little something. If the mood strikes me to blog, microblog or blessay the app can suck that content from the site and let you know that it has done so and you can read it in an iPaddy sort of way. That is all there is to it.

But there is a much stronger chance that you do not own an iPad and that you are waiting to see what the fuss is about or waiting for iPad 2.0 or even 3.0. There is a chance too that you are an Apple sceptic or even Apple hater who thinks those of us who have one are dumb lemmings, mindless style slaves, pretentious boobies, suckers, poseurs and losers. Over the last few years and with a growing intensity more or less mappable onto a graph of Apple’s seemingly relentless march into greater profitability and share value, a new kind of depth of feeling has entered the tech world and I thought that on the day the iPad comes out I might as well look at this whole problem of Apple, trolling, flaming and the nastier side of Web 2.0.

The tribalism, fanaticism, fury, joy and intensity of hatred, veneration, anger, love and contempt with which Apple and its products are regarded by some must, for those who are on neither side of the sectarian divide themselves, pass all understanding. I have rarely wavered in my excitement and delight but naturally I believe my responses to be reasoned, reasonable and this side of sane. Well, I would wouldn’t I? Nobody in any realm introduces themselves as an extremist. It is only their opponents who are extremists. Some Apple devices are better than others, but I confess I am nearly always childlike in my thrilled and squeaking pleasure when the latest object of desire chugs off the Cupertino conveyor belt. What Willie Wonka was to Charlie, Steve Jobs is to me. I am pretty excited to see the latest HTC and Blackberry devices too. You would have to be very peculiar if you claimed that there was an absolutely equality in design and finish to all the gismos that come from all the manufacturers, it is of course perfectly okay not to be nuts about Apple and to choose another path to digital felicity. I would be the first to say that biodiversity is better than monoculture in the unnatural smartphone and computer world just as it is in the natural animal and plant world.

I ought at this juncture explain what my professional relationship with Apple is. I have often been told that I am a “spokesman” for the company and it is assumed by a few that I am on a retainer of some kind. I own no Apple shares and have never accepted (or indeed been offered) a penny by the company or their representatives. I have attended the odd launch at their invitation, but they have never paid my travel expenses, nor would I want them to. On the other hand they have given me gear. My friend Jony Ive, Apple’s chief designer, likes me to have the newest products to play with and through him I am lucky enough to get early versions of all kinds of devices. On the other other hand, the nice people at HTC have also given me prototypes and hot-off-the-press versions of almost all their WindowsMobile and Android smartphones too. I have sat and chatted to their Chief Marketing Director John Wang, a man I greatly like and admire and he has made sure that I have a full range of his superbly put together devices to use and evaluate. The wonderfully kind BlackBerry chaps from RIM have also done the same for me — giving me a new Bold, a new Storm and much else besides. I am a very lucky fellow indeed to get all these devices but I don’t tell you all this in order to elicit envy, admiration or wrath. I tell you simply so that you get a picture. Being a tech blogger, a figure who is known to be excited by smartphones and digital devices of all kinds I am sent lots of toys to play with for review and personal use. A small minority of it is in fact Apple, but nonetheless those who like to believe in agendas, conspiracies, graft and corruption will continue to imagine that I have a vested interest in Apple. The anti-Apple lobby sees that kind of thing everywhere. The BBC, god bless them in their paranoia, fear and writhing self-conscious insecurity, are hard put sometimes ever even to mention the company, knowing all too well that there will be those accusing them of being unpaid PR operatives for Cupertino, disgraceful lackeys and running dogs spending MY LICENCE FEE on the furtherance of Steve Jobs’s evil plans. And on and on it goes.

The causes that lead some to hate everything Apple are complicated and various, but they are certainly not rational. Hate never is. Nor indeed is love. We are dealing with emotions here, not thoughts. Apple divides people in tribal, primal and almost frightening ways. Not all people, of course, indeed only a tiny, tiny minority of people, but they (we) are the ones who take up most of the bandwidth in the tech blogosphere and make the most noise and fill up Twitter and Facebook and other forums with our polemical deliberations and bellicose disquisitions. Although it is a minority who are so riven, it is a significant and loud one. I do not think you find such divisions and disputation in many other areas of human life, except religion, politics and sport of course. Some people prefer Ford cars to Honda say, or Parker to Waterman pens, or Sony TVs to Samsungs or Colonel Sanders to Ronald McDonald or Beethoven to Mozart but you don’t find online ideological wars or virulent tradings of insults on the subject. Apple haters cannot wait to tell you how underwhelmed, how (exaggerated yawning gesture) bored they are by the hype, what suckers, what sheep what idiots we are for even discussing the iPad. They know perfectly well how much better the HP Slate is, or the JooJoo or the Notion Ink Adam or any number of Android or Windows 7 netbooks, smartbooks and tablets. Only a susceptible ignoramus would rave about a ‘slick’ (what an insult) over-designed (d’uh?) iCon (hoho) like the Apple iPad.

I exaggerate. Of course I do. A little. Only a little. Most people, as I have already said, are on neither side of a Swiftian civil war between LittleEndian Applistas and BigEndian Anti-Applistas. There are plenty of people who are more measured and reasonable in their scepticism about Apple, it is not my mission to characterise everyone on each side as a fundamentalist. But you know there really is fury out there. Absolute fury. Otherwise funny and sane people like Charlie Brooker have taken up anti-Apple stances as a matter of style. ‘People who like Apple are pretentious and style conscious, so I will never ever have one,’ the argument goes, if I can call it an argument, and obviously I can’t, because it isn’t an argument it’s just a dumb and slightly mad assertion. After all, how style conscious do you have to be to refuse to be seen dead in anything so fashionable. Huh? I mean huh?

The fact that I will have turned off my website’s comments facility or moderated it into effective silence is even now driving some of my readers (a tiny minority I’m happy to think) insane. They are dreaming up insults about me and the iPad and dripping with cunning clever remarks to show what a fool, what a pretentious idiot, what a preening, posturing pseud of a lame waste of skin I am to champion Apple and their controlling commercial ways, their over-proprietary software, firmware and hardware and their whole corporate style. How dare I not let them flame me off the planet with their bile and spleen and choler and other medieval bodily fluids? It is their right and their need not just to disagree with me but to grab me by the scruff of the neck and push me face down in their prose until I squeal for mercy and admit that the iPad is a failure and a disgrace, that I am a fool and a nothing for falling for it and they are supreme and knowing and right, dammit, and why won’t anyone listen??? The desire to wag a finger, to take me down a peg and above all to show a superior understanding of Steve Jobs’s motives, Apple’s deficiencies and my shortcomings, hypocrisy and smug stupidity must be overwhelming, but you will have to forgive me for suggesting that you do all that on your own site, not on mine.

I don’t know about you, but my eyes are already trained only to read the top half of a web page these days. Rather as a Victorian would not look below the waist, I do not let my eyes have even a second’s contact with the revolting Have Your Say or Comments section of a BBC site, a YouTube page or any blog or tech forum. The lower half of web pages is very like the lower half of the body — full of all kinds of noxious evil smelling poison. I suppose it has to be expelled somewhere, but you will forgive me for not wanting to be close by when it happens. It is a pity, a real pity, that the furious few pollute the atmosphere and obstruct the pipelines that might otherwise allow the reciprocal possibilities of the world of User Generated Content that Web 2.0 promised all those years ago. Lord knows I don’t want the comment sections on my site to be filled with nothing but sycophantic agreement and loving worship. The truth is I would like them to be open, honest and free. There are thousands of people with valid and interesting points of disagreement with me on any number of subjects, with objections to Apple, their corporate style, their approach to hardware, firmware and software and their whole philosophy, but they are drowned out by the fundies and the freaks. One hurtful, mean-spirited, vicious or intemperate comment ruins everything. Absolutely everything. One turd spoils the whole bath. You cannot say to someone about to lower themselves in, ‘Don’t be a wimp, it’s only a small turd, the rest of the water is crystal clear.’ So I would rather have no comment at all. Call me weak, call me pusillanimous, call me craven, call me anything, only don’t do it here.

Article “Apple’s iPad: The Mothership Prepares for Launch” published on Thursday 1st April 2010 in TIME Magazine” – Time Magazine headline.

It is a gorgeous spring day when I arrive at the coolest address in the universe: 1 infinite Loop, Cupertino, Calif., where apple has been headquartered since 1993. The campus, for such they call it, is enormous yet not big enough to contain apple’s current rate of expansion. An additional site is being designed and built. after stocking up on “I visited the mother- ship” t-shirts at the company store (we fanboys are pathetic, I readily confess), i am shown around the canteen, lawns and public spaces. It is right to call this a campus, for everyone looks and dresses like a student. I should imagine the only people ever caught wearing suits here have been visiting politicians.

I am here at apple’s invitation to try out the iPad, and later in my visit I will spend an hour with the company’s boss, Steve Jobs—the first time I’ve ever spent any real time with him.

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…