People often come up to me in the street and say, “Stephen, why don’t you pop some clothes on, there’s a good fellow.” Another thing they will ask is, “How many phones have you got with you today?” And it’s that second common question we’re going to concentrate on in this blessay.

I have blogged many, many times about smartphones: you can follow the trail here by scrolling down and clicking on “Older Entries” at the bottom – “older entries at the bottom”? There must be a more appetising way to phrase it than that. Oh well.

The trail leads all the way back to a posting called Devices and Desires in which I wrongly claimed that the virtual keyboard on the new Apple iPhone was a bad idea, but rightly asked for 3G and downloadable third party apps. I also mourned (more than mourned: I stamped my foot and frothed with rage) at the asininity and maddening, moronic, stubborn, suicidal stupidity of Nokia and Palm and Sony in their inability to come up with anything close to the ‘iPhone killer’ that the industry (and I) were demanding. Not because we wanted Apple to fall (at that time they were a far smaller company that Sony or Nokia, let alone Google, HP or Microsoft) but because we wanted the whole sector to rise and meet the challenge. To pick up the gauntlet that Apple had flung down.

Things move so desperately fast in the digital world. That blog was written just four years and a half ago, before there was Android or App Stores, before the iPhone was even available in the UK. Now we live in a world where Apple, as a company, has the highest market capitalisation in the world and is worth more than its rivals combined. It’s worth more than … well there’s a whole site dedicated to telling you what it’s worth more than.

2007

If you read that blog of mine now you can see me trying hard not to gloat about the fact that I had managed to get hold of an iPhone. Today my Facebook timeline (no I shan’t tell you my FB ID, but it isn’t Stephen Fry, and I fear I very, very rarely use it). If you’re befriending or have been befriended by a Facebook Stephen Fry, it isn’t me.

myPhone, fryPhone - iPhone!

For one anxious day it was just an expensive brick as I parlayed and finagled and finessed my way through to someone at AT&T in America who would grant me roaming rights on this alien new device. This finally came through on July 7th

It's alive!!!

It’s interesting to reread that blog (interesting for me at any rate) because it reveals just how ahead of its time the iPhone was. Let’s have a look at their rivals and see how they’re doing. In fact let’s take a look at the whole idea of the future of this field as it might be understandable from a look at the past. I’ve just read Dan Gardner’s Future Babble so I’m well aware of the futility of prophecy. Nonetheless…

Microsoft

In mid to late 2007 the Redmond Behemoth had just come up with Windows Mobile 6 for Pocket PCs, as they charmingly called their absolutely fucking dog of an operating system. Pardon the language, but nothing else will do. CEO Steve Ballmer and others at MS were the first to admit it when they launched Windows Phone 7 a year and a half ago (with my help as it happens).

This slick, smooth, slidey-tile operating system is now established and flourishing enough (weedy in its proliferation compared to iOS and Android, but flourishing nonetheless) to be called simply Windows Phone.

Microsoft are bringing out a new Windows 8 system soon that, much like Apple’s Lion and upcoming Mountain Lion, will move towards converging the smartphone and PC ‘experience’ as people like to call it. The tail of the mobile is wagging the dog of the desktop: plenty have predicted this for some time as more and more power becomes available in your pocket, according the ineluctable certainties of Moore’s Law. It’s worth taking a look at this fascinating proposition.

Moore is more

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s famous axiom states that the number of transistors you can fit on a chip will double every two years. Now, I expect you are familiar with the grains of rice on a chessboard image which is often used to explain the staggering rise that occurs when a number is doubled in series – a geometric progression leading to exponential growth. In case you aren’t I’ll just run over it again so that you get some idea of the monumental meaning of Moore’s Law.

Rice n Easy

The story goes that an Emperor (or a Rajah) many, many years ago declared that if someone could invent a game which ruled out the element of luck he would grant them any wish. A brilliant sage devised the game of chess which (so long as each player gets an equal number of goes at playing white) is indeed wholly a game of skill. The delighted ruler demanded of the sage that he name his reward.

“Simply this,” said the sage, “I should be pleased if, on the board that I have designed for this game, one of your servants could place a grain of rice on the first square, two on the second square, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on until the last square is reached.”

The emperor clapped his hands delightedly and called for a sack of rice – what a let off!

Ah, but do the maths, or ‘math’ as Americans like to call it. A chess board is eight squares by eight, and 8 x 8 = 64. By the time you have reached the 21^st square, doubling as you go, you will have to put down over a million grains on it, by the 32^nd, which is only half way, you’re planking down 2 billion grains, just on that square.

By the end the number has rocketed to more grains of rice than any kingdom could grow. On the 64^th square alone there would be 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains. When the Emperor’s CFO and senior number crunchers had told him how much he owed, the story goes that he had the sage’s head cut off as a warning to smartarses everywhere. Other versions of the tale say he made him his new vizier. Viziers are like Prime Ministers, only less stupid.

Moore’s Law was first propounded in 1970, which has allowed for 21 iterations of the principle since then, which tells us that more than a million transistors can be fitted into the space that held one in 1970. That number will double in 2014. And double again in 2016.

Enter a fine man

Is there an end in sight? One of my great heroes was Richard Feynman. He was everybody’s great hero if they love science and especially perhaps if like me they are too stupid to understand it without the help of a great communicator, a passionate and brilliant advocate. But of course Feynman was a hero to scientists too, a Nobel Prize winner, a teacher of astonishing brilliance and possessed of an exuberant and acute mind that ranged freely over all the great questions.

Physical limits

In 1985 he gave a startling lecture in Japan on the size limitation of future computers. Later he gave a series of talks at Caltech, the university at which he had done most of his work, also on the subject of the physical limitations of computing, but raising too the possibility of what is now called “quantum computing.”

This was not the first time he had caused a paradigm shift in the way people thought about science and engineering. As early as 1960 he had astonished an audience by predicting and describing what we now call nanotechnology. On that occasion he offered a prize for anyone who could make a working electric motor no bigger than one sixty-fourth of a cubic inch (roughly .4 mm³). He offered another prize for anyone who could take the information from the page of a book and reduce it down to an area 1/25000 smaller “in such a manner that it can be read by an electronic scanning microscope”. The scale he was demanding was equivalent to being able to read the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin.

He paid out on the first bet less than a year later, but the second challenge took longer. Feynman paid out on this in 1986, just two years before he was struck down with cancer, an untimely death that left the American scientific community in a deep mourning from which it has barely recovered.

For the story of those lectures, download or read online this excellent article by Tony Hey, published in Contemporary Physics in 1999. The Japanese lecture has been printed up, I have it somewhere, but not here in New Zealand where I am writing this. It’s the third one in this list of his publications and is well worth reading.

For more on Feynman, simply look up his interviews on YouTube. You might as well start with this one on waves, it’ll give you an idea of his charisma, his passion, his restless curiosity and the pleasure he takes in the complexities and anomalies of … everything.

Parallel and Quantum computing

Anyway, what Feynman first suggested was that computers could move away from the “Turing model” of registering and addressing sequentially and look to what is known as “parallel computing”. This has never really taken off, perhaps as a result of computing getting stuck in its own way of doing things and there being three decades worth of bloated ‘legacy’ from which there is no chance of escape.

But Feynman went further and proposed the possibilities of quantum computing. At a subatomic level. Please don’t ask me to explain something I don’t understand. I’ll ride in the jet, but don’t ask me to build it. I don’t mind telling you that I’m wa-a-a-ay out of my depth in all of this. I just repeat what someone I trust tells me. And then I check with my father and get the real truth as he is pretty close to being a Feynman himself.

Boil in the bag rice with chips

I suppose what it all boils down to is this. Moore’s Law has plenty of years left in it and its ever more steeply growing rice-on-the-chessboard curve will give rise to chips, integrated circuits, that will drive computational devices of such speed and power that they will in turn help engineers construct new kinds of machines that mimic what Schrödinger called the “entanglement” of activity at the quantum level.

Down to business

All that is fascinating and probably no more or less believable than any other prediction. If it achieves nothing more than introducing the world of Feynman to anyone who had been previously unfamiliar with it, then this blessay will have done an absolute good.

Meanwhile let’s descend to the rather more banal level of the consumer devices that I have spent the best part of my adult life slavishly following, loving, hating, dreaming of and desiring.

The latest intel…

Talking of Gordon Moore (my mother occasionally used something called Gordon Moore’s Cosmetic Toothpaste, I don’t think he can have been responsible for that as well?) the great man will be pleased to see, no doubt, that the company he helped found has just entered the smartphone market. A deal with Orange should see Intel phones in Europe in a month or so. Intel will make the silicon, Android will provide the operating system. At the moment it looks like they’ll be launching with the 2.4 Gingerbread version of Android, rather than the exciting new 4.0 release, which is called Ice Cream Sandwich. As you probably know Google and the Android people like to name their distributions after desserts and cakes. Well, why not?

Microsoft, of course, are not much in the hardware business, save for their highly successful Xbox and its super-duper-hooper-whooper successful Kinect accessory. Whether Windows 8 will help revive the somewhat flagging fortune of Dell and other PC manufacturers remains to be seen. But doubtless Intel, who provide the CPUs for Macs and PCs alike will do well in either case. Perhaps it is the success of Apple’s design and construction of their own A class chip (now at A5+ in the new iPad) that has caused Intel to realise that being an OEM, an original equipment manufacturer, isn’t such a bad game to be in after all. So welcome, Intel.

Forehead palm smack

Goodbye my beloved Palm. In May 2007, a month before the launch of iPhone 1, they made the disastrous error of announcing the launch of a lightweight wireless laptop, essentially a dumb terminal to service their Treo line of smartphones, which they called the Foleo. They might now claim it was a forerunner of the MacBook Air and other subnotebooks, but even if it we kindly agree that it was ahead of its time, there’s no doubt it was a huge disaster for Palm.

The Big Blue lesson

There was an old saying back in the 70s: “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. What this meant was that if you ran the IT (or Data Analysis as it was called back then) department for a medium to large company you bought from IBM, or Big Blue as they were known (this was the colour of suit their salesmen and executives were obliged to wear. Oh yes, and there were schools where IBM told you to send your children too) – anyway, the point was that no matter how shite the machine you bought, you could say to your complaining Chairman, CFO and MD, “Don’t blame me, I bought IBM,” and everyone would murmur, “Oh well, that’s alright then… IBM. Mm. Fine company. Must just be bad luck.”

IBM of course, famously didn’t see Bill Gates coming and in what seemed like the blink of an eye they had slipped down behind the speccy upstart and were selling off their consumer business to a Chinese company, Lenovo. I told you the digital world moves fast.

Sinking without trace

Well now, Palm made the same mistake. Their wonderful proprietary Palm OS was aging and rather than spend R&D dollars reinventing it for the modern, post iPhone world, they assumed that everything would be alright if they chugged along with it (they produced the Centro in late 2007) and continued to concentrate their energies on producing Windows Mobile compatible devices. How could they lose? MS was the biggest company in the world. Their operating system accounted for over 96% of all computers sold. Everyone was always going to need a smartphone that synched to a PC , weren’t they? It was a cinch.

It took them almost two years to repair this mistake and decide that they should tackle Apple head on and produce a new operating system for touchscreen devices that might compete with the ever more frightening success of the iPhone.

Pre come…

Had they decided on this a year or so earlier when they still had the wind in their sails, they might not have been too late. As it was in 2009 the woefully underpowered and maddeningly undersized and plasticky Pre devices were launched, running their new Web OS, to the sound of rolling sagebrush and tumbleweed and the tolling of a great bell.

Such disastrous strategic, commercial and software engineering miscalculation and lack of vision brought the company down. Palm collapsed, the pieces were picked up by Hewlett Packard for $1.2 billion. HP promised to develop the OS and release tablets and smartphones running it. In fact, two years later they effectively dropped all such plans and announced that they were licensing the technology for others to play with and bring to market if they wished or dared.

Sony make believe

Farewell Palm and farewell too, Sony Ericsson. As of February 16^th this year, Sony reacquired the whole joint venture from their Swedish partners and renamed it Sony Mobile Communications.

In my view Sony is the company that has most to blush about in terms of its performance in this sector of the consumer hardware market over the last two or three decades. Their brand image just couldn’t have been higher or better in the early eighties when their Walkman was cock of the walk. The company and its brand image seemed unassailable. The Apple of their day, they were known for fine design and innovation and for wit, elegance, desirability and finesse in their product range. Their Trinitron displays stood out in an area of cathode ray tube TV sets and monitors and their whole range of consumer equipment from My First Sony to camcorders more or less rocked in exactly the way that today almost everything they make in this arena sucks or remains incapable of standing out from the crowd. And don’t get me started on Vaio notebook: contemptible and contemptuous to the customer, there rarely was a more repellent and deceitful object put before an unbelieving public.

Missing the bus

A legendary moment in modern geekery was the day in 2001 when Apple’s chief engineer Jon Rubinstein went to Toshiba’s HQ in Japan on a routine courtesy visit. Earlier in the year Steve Jobs had demanded a small music player of him and Rubinstein had replied that the components for such a thing didn’t exist. At the Tokyo HQ Rubinstein was shown a 1.8 inch hard drive that Toshiba engineers had developed but which they couldn’t see a use for. They had no idea that it was exactly what Rubinstein had been missing. As it happened, Steve Jobs was in Tokyo for a different reason the same day. At dinner that evening Rubinstein said to him, ““I know how to do it now. All I need is a cheque for ten million dollars.” Jobs coughed up and the rest is history. And the rest of the Apple’s competitors were history, so far as music players were concerned.

The question I would ask if I worked, especially for Sony, is why the hell didn’t we make the iPod? Sony were not only in the same country as Toshiba but they were, unlike Apple, in the music business. Sony Music and Sony Pictures, Sony Walkman, Sony industry standard video cameras and recording equipment. Sony computers. Talk about a perfect fit. Talk about missing the bus. Talk about being outmanoeuvred. Just as he was to do in the world of tele-communications six years later, Steve Jobs took Apple from a standing start into the position of the most important music company in the world. From right under the noses of Sony.

Their phone business JV with the Scandiwegians was going south too. In the year 2009-2010 alone Sony Ericsson fell from being the world’s fourth biggest seller of mobile phones to the sixth biggest. The writing had been on the wall for two years, ever since the iPhone arrived and SE produced that shocking disgrace of a Symbian UIQ monster, the P1i that I railed against in my first techblog. That monstrosity was more or less a tomb stone.

They gave up on Symbian UIQ (which I actually really liked but which just couldn’t perform the tasks asked of it without crashing or overheating) and produced and are still producing a line of overpriced and wildly underwhelming Xperia smartphones which at first ran Windows Mobile long after the rest of the world knew it was a dead duck. When they finally saw which way the wind blew, the Scandanese combine panicked into rushing out the X10, which no one bought because it ran an out-dated version of Android and couldn’t do anything as well as a cheaper and better HTC phone.

It is hard to believe this, yet sad and true: Sony can hardly be called a trusted name or big hitter these days. Always skating to the puck, never to where the puck is going to be, to borrow Wayne Gretzky’s winning image.

All that can change of course, and let’s hope it does. No one would want to see a mighty and once loved colossus like Sony come crashing down.

Nokia, Nokia – Who’s There-ia?

Nokia, then undisputed number one in mobile phones were, back in 2007, producing low and medium end phones of great usability and huge global popularity. Using power efficient flavours of Symbian and a reliable and simple menu driven interface, hundreds and hundreds of millions were sold and That Ringtone was heard in every corner of the land. Restaurants kept Nokia chargers by the front desk on the off-chance that a diner might need a top up in the evening.

At the higher end, they chugged out silvery plastic oblongs so ugly that it gave one diverticulitis and the squits just to look at them. No one seemed to mind as high end phones weren’t their ‘core business’. But what they didn’t seem to be able to see was that smart phones would soon be the only business to be in. Which is strange because they can be regarded as the pioneers of the smartphone every bit as much as Palm or Handspring.

As I say in that damned blog, I owned just about every model of Nokia Communicator through the Nineties and Noughties. I was sending emails from my phone in 1996 using the first Communicator model, the 9000. To put things in perspective, this was five years before the iPod came into being, a longer period of time than exists between now and the first iPhone. Since Nokia knew what smartphones could do, it can only have been a misreading of the road ahead not to see how quickly the future would slam into their windscreen.

The lumbering, slumbering giant awakes…

The redoubtable Finnish giant, which started life in lumber and loo-rolls has rebooted itself as a manufacturer now of Windows Phone devices, while still producing the cheap and affordable handsets that, through M-PESA, more or less power the Kenyan and other African economies. I own a Lumia 800 and am very pleased with it, although for my taste it’s a little too small and I can’t wait for their up-coming larger 900. It’s pleasing and, I am sure a huge relief for Nokia and Microsoft, to see such enthusiastic pre-ordering and buzz for this device, running an operating system on which the futures of CEOs Ballmer and Ollila may well depend.

Blame the Berry…

I think it highly probable that the wrong turn Nokia took was due to the phenomenal success of the BlackBerry, a triumph whose shadow looms large over this past ten or so years. Like Palm, Sony and Nokia in their heydays, this giant seemed unassailable and impregnable, setting the standard that everyone else must follow. It defined the second age of Yuppyism. The ubiquitous Crackberry entered dictionaries and became a metonym and synecdoche for the corporate beast of the first decade of this century: eyes forever locked on the screen, urgently rolling up and down the thumb-wheel or tapping the keyboard. So much so indeed that newspapers, which have never exhibited the strongest understanding of the real meaning of evolution, postulated the wildly impossible Lamarckian future of children being born with stronger and more flexible thumbs …

Storm Clouds Loom

And then, again as a result of misjudging the meaning of the iPhone, the unthinkable happened. Research in Motion, the Canadian makers of the BlackBerry began to lose the plot. RIM had produced the wondrous Pearl, the magnificent Bold … how would they respond to Apple? Oh God help us with the Storm? This haptically clicking touchscreen monster was a disaster of almost unparalleled dimensions. The sound of them being thrown from office windows competed with the screaming down the landlines to their network providers of the outraged middle-management honchos who had “upgraded” to this cataclysmic failure. No one could be found who had anything but contempt for it.

The Bold and the Desperate…

Another attempt at Storming the citadel was made before, in desperation, RIM tried again, dropping the name Storm forever and attempting a kind of halfway house called the Torch which, while better, was still nothing to email home about, and nothing like what the market wanted in either direction. It annoyed the core BB faithful and had little to offer the young and the restless. So last year they had a shot at reviving the happier Bold brand, with a model that combined the by now de rigueur touchscreen and accelerometer with the original virtues of their finest, mid-season form candy-bar physical keyboard devices. That Bold, (I am fondling a 9790 as we speak) marks the last hurrah for RIM in the consumer market.

RIM’s leakage of millions in losses, the drop in share price from $140 to $14 in under three years, their desperately unhappy foray into the tablet market with the shame-makingly wrong and mismanaged BlackBerry Playbook (launched without an email app, god help us) has proved too much for founders Mike Lazarides and Jim Balsillie (yes that really is his name, what a childhood he must have endured) They have ‘stepped down’ as joint CEOs, and replacement Thorsten Heins has announced “A plan to refocus on the enterprise business and leverage on its leading position in the enterprise space” – and if you can understand what that means, then you’re just the kind of suck… just the kind of customer they’re after.

Even under the rim?

Whether Research In Motion’s name has been forever blackened and whether their once omnipotent push emailing services can survive the damage done their name and reputation by the failure of their consumer devices and the cripplingly embarrassing outage of their core services last year only time can tell, and time – as I keep repeating – rushes by so fast in this digital world. The mills of God may grind exceeding slow, but not the mills of Silicon Valley. IBM, Compuserve, AOL, MySpace, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Palm … these were names that our grandchildren and grandchildren’s grandchildren would whisper in awe until the crack of doom, surely? And as for Nokia, Sony, RIM and Microsoft – only a moron would ever connect their name with disappointment or accuse them of sipping at the last chance saloon. Who could doubt their eternal mastery of the universe?And the winners are…

Apple of course. I say that (and I always have to repeat this) with no especial pleasure. I am not wedded to the company and have no shares in it. I admire them so long as they are admirable and admirable they have been for a long, long time. They have made mistakes, but no fatal or even wounding ones. Each error is blown up hugely because no company on earth attracts such headlines. They are accused of hype and simultaneously of an obsession with secrecy, but the fact is that those who hate them are the obsessed. Ha! Their antenna doesn’t work if you hold your hand in a certain way. That’ll destroy them. Oh, alright. Look! This iPad sounds like sanitary-wear and is only a big iPhone, they’ve really goofed this time. No? OK, Ha! They’ve deceived Australia about 4G! And Feel! They’re overheating! I’m not as good at this as the supreme leader in the field, the Macalope, a genius at teasing the Applephobes of the world. Tip of the antlers to you, Macalope, old thing.

The Big G

Google of course can also count themselves as winners. They had the foresight and muscle to come up with a much better answer to Apple. In cahoots with 83 other companies they formed the Open Handset Alliance at round about the time I was writing that first blog. The first Google phone, the G1 came out in October the following year. I reviewed it, along with the fateful BlackBerry Storm and loveable BlackBerry Bold here.

As it happens Google makes more money from the advertising revenue creamed off Apple iPhone and iPad use than it does from the ever increasing market share that Android is achieving. Four times more money! Nonetheless Android has shown that Apple’s iOS and its walled garden and tightly fenced APIs aren’t the only way. The always open everywhere APIs that Android allows can of course result in some malware, flaky and downright deceitful apps as well as being a headache for developers. Try being an x-platform website author, for example: arbitrarily different handsets and tablets that use physical buttons for forward and back would make you tear your hair out. Surely manufacturers must stick to what should be an obvious industry standard: onscreen touch arrows for navigation. Random physical buttons make it all but impossible for developers to produce sites that work on all platforms. They have to buy every device to test their site on and build extra routines for each one that has a different dumb physical button. Enough already.

Nonetheless, there’s an exhilarating quality to the Android ecosystem. Much of this has been due to the third winner in the recent phone and tablet wars. If you’ve got a ribbon…

Taiwan on…

HTC, the OMG of OEMs. They were swimming about in the shallows making WinMob phones like the HTC Touch and the 3600 that I much preferred back then in 2007. But they reacted so swiftly, imaginatively and positively to the Apple threat that they could be renamed RRF – Rapid Response Force. Cheerfully and smartly produced, they sometimes sail close enough to the wind to rouse the ire of Apple’s patent lawyers, but I’m afraid I just can’t be doing with all this patent nonsense. It should stop now and everyone will benefit. Except the lawyers. Boo hoo.

Aaaannnyway… HTC made the first Android phone, that G1 that arrived at the arse-end of 2008, and have come up with some of the best Android phones over the intervening three and half years, the Desire, the Sensation, the XL (available with Dr Dre Beats) and now the quad core 1.5 GHz 1080p HTC One X (there’s a dual core S version too) which I hope to review soon… not available in New Zealand yet. It obviously won’t be the One as despite its high specs, it’s still 3G. What will they call the 4G model? The This Really, Really, Really Is The One, Promise?

Sometimes HTC (which rather endearingly stands for High Tech Computer) can be maddening. How the hell do you get the back off this one without tearing your nails? How come the Rhyme has run out of storage memory when all I’ve downloaded are Evernote and Dropbox? And must they offer a silly proprietary Twitter client? But all in all, their rapid response, their neat and zippy designs, their “skinning” of Android with HTC Sense, their server-side Hub and their competitive pricing and constant new launches have kept them very much in the game. And sometimes they come up with something so original and silly you have to clap your hands (while giggling) – The Charm – you can watch the whole gloopy film or start at about 1’ 13″ – daft but sweet.

But no one is safe in this sector — no one. HTC’s Q1 profits are down 70% this year. Analysts are less pessimistic about their future than they might be, but there is no doubt a huge amount is riding on the One and their other new launches. If anyone is going to be squeezed out of the OEM game, Nokia and a certain other company are determined it won’t be them…

Which leads us to our next winner.

Samsung Agonistes

(That’s a really neat reference to a Milton poem by the way, so laugh, damn you) – Samsung, the South Korean powerhouse seem to have emerged from the last four years in better shape than any of Apple’s major hardware rivals. They’ve experimented with and advanced the cause of OLED and AMOLED displays, they’ve pushed the hardware in all kinds of directions, they’ve aggressively stalked the iPad since its release, to the point of plagiarism some would argue, and they have survived. They’ve done more than survive, they’ve thrived. Thriven. Throve. Threft. Thrivvled. Thropwindled. Wa’evz, girlfriend.

Galaxy Quest

The Galaxy tablet is generally agreed to be the best response to the iPad that anyone has yet managed to come up with. It has hardly had the same kind of seismic impact on the worlds of publishing, journalism, design, medicine and education, and can only be regarded as a follower not a leader, but if your heart is hardened against Apple you could do a lot worse.

A review! At last, an actual review!

I have spent the past week trying to use and trying to love the Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000. This device, you might remember, caused quite a lot of hoopla in October 2011 when it was announced and released. Is it a pad, is it a phone? No, it’s a Note.

Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 © Samsung

Size sighs

The 5.3 inch screen, which is exactly yay big by yay big, notably (notably!) falls between the size of an iPad and iPhone, though it’s closer to a phone than a tablet. You can exactly fit two Notes next to each other on an iPad screen and another will lie on top lengthways. I would say the display is a third bigger than an iPhone and three times smaller than an iPad. I’m sure if I was better at geometry I could work out the difference exactly, but that will have to do. Interestingly enough, everyone is predicting the new iPhone 5 will have a bigger screen, but not this big, you can be certain.

Unwrapping the Galaxy Bar

Personally, I find the size annoying. I can’t type as quickly on it as I can on either an iPad or an iPhone (despite Swiftkey, of which more later) or the HTC XL, Lumia 800 or BlackBerry (bless) Bold that are my current PIUs, Phones In Use.

It certainly comes with a top spec. 1.4 GHz Dual Core processor, 1080p video (full HD in other words, like the iPad version 3), two cameras (8 MBP on the back, 2MBP on the front for face-to-face calls) video and photo editing apps, any number of the dreary, useless and annoying “hubs” that everyone except us, the users, thinks we need – apps that ‘unify’ contacts, events, reading habits and notes between Facebook, Twitter and Google accounts for example. They all lead to confusion and annoyance and duplicated or maddeningly overstocked address books and they must stop it at once.

The Super AMOLED display is gorgeous. At 1280 x 800 it’s not up to Apple Retina’s 2048 x 1536 resolution standards, but still marvellous with 285 pixels per inch, which gives a smooth warm highly engaging (or ‘immersive’ as we are forced by law to say these days) experience. The Note boasts the loveliest opening lock screen in history. And…

Woah there!!!

It has a stylus!!!! What? Have they run mad? Don’t they know what Steve Jobs did when asked why the iPhone didn’t offer a stylus? He raised up his two hands and said, “Nature took millions and millions of years to provide us with ten perfect styluses. Why insult her by adding another, less efficient one?” He may have said ‘styli’, but I doubt it…

The stylus is styleless…

Well Samsung is having none of this. The Galaxy Note offers a stylus with a tiny (and almost completely inaccessible and scream-inducing) button on it that uses Wacom pressure-sensitive touch-pad technology in order to add … what exactly? Complicated and elaborate ways of screen-capturing (something Android is really, really bad at) and performing other mundane tasks that would be better done by fingers and little menus or gestures. I quite see that an artistically aware stylus would be useful on the odd occasion one is moved to write beautifully or to sketch and draw, but otherwise – forget it. Perhaps Samsung are just desperately trying to add their patented ways of doing things to avoid all this hideous, upsetting patent lawyering that is making us all so cross and unhappy.

Another of their unique ideas is “tip to zoom” – fortunately this hopeless and deranged idea is not the only way, good old pinching is still available, otherwise the whole apparatus would be hurled into the sea.

It got better

At first I was going to write an absolutely blistering attack on this piece of kit because within two days of using it, it was telling me that I had run seriously low on storage memory and that I must move everything onto an SD card. There was a 4GB SD fitted and all the apps I’d downloaded from the Android Market (now called Google Play) were already there. This was baffling and maddening. Eventually I bit the bullet and did a factory restart. Since then I must confess things haven’t been so bad.

Hmmm….

Not so bad, but not so great either. The screen goes black and unresponsive every five or six attempts I make to access an app. It refuses to sync Twitter or Facebook through its hub, so I have downloaded the official apps at the risk of incurring another “memory low” warning. The Mail app, as it always is with Android, is inferior to Google’s Gmail web app.

The device cost a shedload of money – £700 to be precise, though of course it’ll cost nothing like that if you lock yourself into a deal with a network provider.

But…

The screen is gorgeous.

The notebook app is so cute. You can do nice drawing and everything, so long as your thumb can find the tit on the bloody stylus.

It looks lovely when it works. Ravishing.

Bundled up…

It comes loaded. Polaris office suite, photo and video editing software – the works. The excellent Kies Air allows you impressive and intuitive wireless file management through your web browser. Although infuriatingly it doesn’t seem to recognise the Java on any Apple browser. I tried with Safari, Chrome and Firefox and in each case Kiese Air told me that I couldn’t batch upload to the device unless I installed Java. Java is already installed and waiting to be commanded, so that is something Samsung and Kies should look at. To move any amount of music or pictures singly is not an enterprise lightly to be undertaken and I don’t see why one should shell out on a specialised Mac to Android syncing programme. Lord knows I’ve spent enough money on Mark Space and the Missing Sync over the years… usually at the cost of hair, nails and sanity.

Also, as usual with Android, all the navigation, mapping, ebook and news reading, note recording and voice control (which won’t give Siri sleepless nights) apps that you could want have been thrown in, together with FM radio and more toys and gismos that I could list here.

Judgement?

Despite all that Samsung’s offering is – as my old history teacher used to say – a long way far short of being good enough. The Note runs the Gingerbread distribution of Android although Ice Cream Sandwich is expected soon. To be fair, down here in NZ my reliable HTC XL hasn’t got round to ICS yet either, but the XL remains much less prone to hanging apps with apologetic notes or just going black and vacant than the distinctly neurotic Galaxy, which has all the glossy good looks of a racehorse, but unfortunately behaves as if it has some of the more highly strung and uncontrollable characteristics that go with thoroughbreds too.

I, I – it’s Swiftkey

I really hope Apple and others don’t think this form factor is the future, because it has taken me back to frustrated one finger prodding. This despite using the excellent Swiftkey, an absolutely essential add-on for any Android device. It is noticeable that Swiftkey’s installation routine decides that the Note is a tablet, not a smartphone and bids you install its (one dollar pricier) tablet version. I wouldn’t call the Note a tablet at all, it is quite clearly a large phone.

Swiftkey, incidentally, which speeds up the typing process by very impressive heuristic techniques and neat semantic guessing and disambiguation, teaches one the lamentable lesson that most English speakers start most sentences, phrases and sub-clauses with “I”. One does not use the word often oneself and it therefore strikes one as a little unfair that one’s texts and emails so often end up littered with implications of egocentricity. One types away not noticing that the app is opening almost every clause with that rude word, ‘I’.

That aside, Swiftkey is a great British success story. 6 million downloads and counting. Of course its interference with the keyboard API isn’t something Apple would allow, nor MS with Window Phone at the moment. So one of them will probably end up buying the company.

To go back to the beginning…

Each morning then, to return to the second question that opens this inexcusably long blessay, I rub my chin and ask myself this question. The Note or the HTC XL?

As a matter of course, the iPhone goes in one pocket; the Lumio or HTC HD7 Windows Phone into another (I can interchange happily there, whichever is charged and simmed up will do); the BlackBerry (bless) Bold into one more and then I have to choose an Android handset.

Samsung or HTC?

Lately I’ve been using the Note more and more and, as so often happens when you give a worthy device time, you start to like elements that before were an annoyance.

Alternating between both can be a bit like alternating between two cars which have indicator stalks on different sides of the steering wheel, causing you to switch on the windscreen wipers when you want to turn left. The HTC and Samsung have the volume rockers on opposite sides, so I’m always messing up there. But these are minor things. Android is a perfectly viable alternative to iOS as is Windows Phone and these two devices have plenty to recommend them.

Post 2007 trauma

The aftershocks that rippled out when the iPhone was launched are still being felt. Palm and Sony Ericsson have ceased to be. BlackBerry has effectively bowed and left the stage, billions of dollars poorer. Nokia and Microsoft are making a recovery after a very, very rocky few years in this sector. Google thrives off everything, off the Apple ecosystem and its lion’s share of the Android world. HTC and Samsung continue to lead the field as original equipment manufacturers, with Sony Mobile Communications, LG and Motorola as blips on the OEM screen that may be fading or growing. It is hard to tell. As mentioned, Intel has now staked a claim in the territory too.

Ding Dong Dell

It’s worth risking a nasty taste in our mouth as we stop for a sidebar on the unsavoury topic of Dell. The Emperor of Ugly and King of Customer Disservice, Dell has now entered the market as a manufacturer of both Windows Phone and Android devices. That’ll be the company founded by the same Michael Dell who in 1997 thought Apple should be shut down and and then five years later in 2001, when Steve Jobs opened the first Apple Store, stated that he “saw no future” in such a move: “Physical stores have been tried by a number of our competitors, and generally, actually I would say universally, that strategy hasn’t panned out.”  Over 360 Apple Store openings later, with sales exceeding $4,000 per square foot (as against US tech supermarket giant Best Buy’s $930 psf) this characteristically useless statement from the Beigemesiter seems more than a little embarrassing.

Control • Alt • Dell

He has since back-pedalled on that infamous 1997 comment, saying that he what he meant was that if he, Michael Dell, were in charge of Apple he’d have closed it down, because he, Michael Dell, only wanted to be in charge of Dell Inc. Yes, we’re convinced that’s what you meant at the time, Michael baby, of course we are, and it could just as easily have been Microsoft or McDonald’s as Apple you made the remark about, couldn’t it? Hmm? Naturally it therefore follows that your other proclamation was prescient too. Because if you had been in charge of retail for Apple, it absolutely wouldn’t have “panned out”. It would have belly-flopped like the Dell shopping centre “kiosks” that were installed in US malls in 2002. Every one of these has since been closed down.

Dell boy

Profit is all this hopeless prophet seems to care about, it certainly isn’t innovation, and the reward for his obsession with the bottom line? He produces the bottom line of devices. But then, I dare say he’s happy with his $15 billion and his place in the history books only as a dreary cut-price re-badger and knocker-off of boxes and a master of tax breaks, campaign palm-greasing and not noticeably patriotic offshoring. For more information on this almost uniquely unappetising ornament of the digital world, ask Mother Jones.

Here’s a sample:

The Future

So what, at the risk of making a Dell-like arse of myself in the prognosticator stakes, does the future hold?

In another four and half years, the power, memory, capacity and functionality of the computers in our pockets will have transformed these fascinating devices yet again. Near Field Communication and other forms of interactivity will doubtless cause a revolution in the way we work, play and shop in the real world. For I think the next step, as we continue to reap the rewards of Moore’s Law, will involve integrating small devices, quite as powerful as today’s most top-spec smartphone, into elements of cars, fridges, shop counters, airports, railways stations, art galleries, sports arenas and restaurants, whether through NFC or biometrics, which will mean that we will be able to take our Cloud with us and our bank account too, wherever we go.

But what do I know? I thought I’d never type as fast on a virtual keyboard as on a physical one. I thought that green shirt would look good on QI. I thought so many things…

Toodle-pip,

Every now and again, what with me being what I am (a human), I find myself hurled into the teeth of some sort of twitterstorm. Either I get a bit cross with someone ( or “throw my toys out of the pram” and “have a hissy fit” as some would prefer to put it) or I tweet an opinion or experience that for some reason turns into a “story” with all the distortions, Chinese whispers, misunderstandings and embarrassments that “stories” generate.

For instance…

QANTAS and Dubai

I was returning from Australia a month or two back and on the Singapore to London leg of the journey an engine failed and our QANTAS flight had to circle Dubai for a while to empty its fuel tanks before depositing itself at the airport and disgorging us to await our destinies.

This is not so abnormal an occurrence as to merit much attention, but it didn’t help that this occurred just a few days after QANTAS had undergone a full-scale strike, its boss’s probity and competence had been ripped to shreds in the Australian press, its destiny cast into doubt and its management and future compared unfavourably with the hugely profitable Asian airlines with whom it competes. It was also, by an unpleasant coincidence, exactly a year ago to the day that a QANTAS A380 engine, also on a flight between Singapore and London, had exploded – causing much grief and heartache for Airbus, Rolls Royce and QANTAS.

Anyway, on this occasion I tweeted from the tarmac, as doubtless did many other passengers and then filed out onto the jet-way and into the airport along with everyone else.

I should add that it so happened that this incident all took place during Eid, the festival that signals an end to the fasting days of Ramadan, so Dubai Airport was busier and brasher and brassier than ever.

Let’s turn back the twitter pages to find what I tweeted. I have left the entire stream of drivel exactly as it was, without correcting some of the typical typos and weird autocorrects that flow from me when I tweet in a hurry and press send without checking. My premature entweetulation problem will be the death of me, but most of us are like that so I don’t feel too bad about it. I am fully aware of the delicious pleasure it must give people when I offer them a chance to present a perceived smart-arse like myself a damned good verbal spanking for every accidental “it’s” instead of “its”, “your” instead of “you’re” and so on. I believe, for example, that the inexplicable “Liverpool” below was supposed to have been “love to”. One tweet even starts but then goes nowhere, cut off in its prime. But you will get the general idea as you read.

The first leg from Sydney to Singapore has gone smoothly. All passengers disembark, the cabin and flight crew change, the bins are emptied and hot-boxes replaced as the plane undergoes its rapid turnaround re-service.

I check my diary and see that I have promised a tweet on behalf of the Criterion Theatre and manage to get it in before we take off for the long flight to London.

Tweet in haste, repent at leisure…

3 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

Reply Retweet Favorite · Open

Just before phones off, don’t miss the sublimely talented @TheShowstoppers‘s Improv Musical this Fri night @CriTheatre. criterion-theatre.co.uk/Showstopper

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Bugger. Forced to land in Dubai. An engine has decided not to play.

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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My flight. Still on board. Not sure of we’ll be bussed to the airport lounges or kept aboard while they work on it bbc.co.uk/news/business-…

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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@oh_rhomson It sure is!

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In reply to Rodney Thomson

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Hm – I’m sure we’ll

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Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Still stuck on Dubai tarmac. No one seems to know how long we’ll be here. Should’ve landed in London at 6:20. That won’t happen! #qantas

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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@abcnews24 We’re just stuck on the Tarmac: have been for an hour or so. Give my Liverpool Tony Jones – enjoyed the Lateline chat.

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In reply to ABC News 24

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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@abcnews24 I think plan is to bus us to the transit lounge and await International Rescue. This plane, the crew tell me, is going nowhere

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In reply to ABC News 24

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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@abcnews24 So either Sydney send another one out or they come to an accommodation with Emirates. Either way not a great week for #qantas !

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In reply to ABC News 24

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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@abcnews24 I should in all conscience add that staff are being wonderful & that morale is high and the passengers understanding & cheerful

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In reply to ABC News 24

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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@StevieCummings Exceptionally true x

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In reply to Steve Cummings

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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On a bus from the plane to the terminal now. Who knows what treats lie in store? #qantas

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Oh Jesus arsemothering fuck. I’ve left my wallet on the sodding plane. Hell’s teeth this really isn’t my day. Will not leave without it.

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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@abcnews and I’ve left my wallet on the plane – all my ID cards, money passes etc. I’m going to be siting here for ever and ever and ever

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In reply to ABC News

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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That’s it. I’m fucked. Seriously fucked.

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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It’s at times like this a man considers taking up smoking again. Possibly with heroin, crack and MDMA mixed in & all washed down with vodka

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Well, SMH, not so much “upset” as bloody furious. But with myself for leaving so hurriedly I forgot my wallet: me=twat m.smh.com.au/travel/travel-…

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Reunited with wallet & cards so v relieved ! Hurrah. Qantas have gone to the trouble & expense of this: which is nice pic.twitter.com/3sStwLfV

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View photo

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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I seem to have made Gulf News gulfnews.com/arts-entertain…

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Three something rather sweet about a country as advanced as Dubai still clinging to removable ring pulls – frypi.cc/rsqNvH

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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There is be a faint chance that in 4.5 hours time I might get to Munich and then have a scramble to connect for home. Luggage? Ha! #QANTAS

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Well it looks as tho someone’s wonderfully finagled a seat on an Emirates flight direct to London this afternoon. Should only 16 hours late

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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@vinyllounge it is indeed most calming with its fountains and amazing floral displays …

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In reply to The Vinyl Lounge

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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A fair response from Siri I suppose … frypi.cc/uHqBLE

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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@jamesblundell haha! You’ve got to hand it to Siri s/he is a class act!

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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@WestgarthEnt Not true. There’s UK Eng, Oz Eng and US Eng plus French & German. Tried the Oz version with Oz friends. Scottish Eng the prob

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In reply to Michael Wilde

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Just had a terrible thought. Flying Emirates doesn’t make me an Arsenal supporter does it?

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Wow, look at how the digital industry are helping youngsters in Norfolk to decide on their future! tinyurl.com/687e7rq #YFiD_2011

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Finally taking off now. Thank you Emirates.

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4 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Touchdown! 14 and a half hours later than expected, but touchdown! An exciting day. All was calm in the end and no need for crack or heroin.

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5 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Check out @_BROWNBOOK a magazine dedicated to profiling the creative community of the Middle East. on.fb.me/nm0Wrh

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5 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Shop online at 500+ sites via bit.ly/4XNfg2 – All4charities pick up a commission and pass on every penny to a charity you choose.

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5 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Film your life next Sat Nov12 for @britaininaday and help create a historic, moving & honest portrait of the UK goo.gl/O3lLK

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5 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Comedian Simon Amstell hosts a concert in aid of London’s homeless. Great cause! Thur 10 Nov @southbankcentre Tickets: bit.ly/hrpjgB

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5 Nov

Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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To sleep, then up again and now to sleep. Body clocks – you’ve got to love them.

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Stephen Fry @stephenfry

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Close to 20 hours sleep. I think I’m awake now. Is there any way of knowing this isn’t a zomboid dream?

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One in 4 milllion

Well, what does that all that tell us or teach us? Not so very much really. You can readily understand that because I have a public face and have been on Twitter a long time and drawn a large number of followers, an event that might otherwise pass as an unnoticed and routine flight inconvenience becomes news when I tweet about it.

You will also be aware that twitter is a duplex communication service: it is not just me pronouncing and firing off tweets, there are thousands of “mentions” and hundreds of Direct Messages coming at me all the time, only the tiniest fraction of which I will get a chance to see, let alone directly answer.

You have to picture me as being in a forest on a windy autumn day. Thousands of leaves swirl around me and every now and again I clutch at one and look at it. Newcomers to Twitter get most annoyed if they “@stephenfry” me and get no reply, but with a little thought, imagination and empathy they usually get to realize that there are literally not enough hours in the day for me to read, let alone respond to, every call to my attention.

The numbers and what they mean are both humbling and (if one is honest) quite proud-making too. Of course my 4 million is but a fifth of the staggering number who follow @LadyGaga. Nonetheless with four million followers comes responsibility, and I have been trying to hold steady to what I believe my twitter identity is and should be. Each storm when it comes can batter the outer edifice a little, but so far it is holding up and I haven’t had to run away (as I have in the past and as other “celebrity-tweeters” have decided to do permanently) for some while yet.

The stream  above shows me responding, as I try to do, to special appeals to good causes here and there. It is a very distressing thing to know that even as I am typing this, someone, somewhere is tweeting me about a fun run, a  sponsored pancake race, a terminally ill person’s blog, a YouTube musical demo, a new opportunity for digital start-ups or some either highly worthy charitable endeavour.  So, while I hung around Dubai (noticing trivial things like ring pulls on soda water cans) I chose a few calls that seemed close to home, to resonate with me in some special way or – in the case of Simon Amstell – responded to a direct request from a friend who had texted me hoping for a tweet. And now owes me big time, Simon, got it? No, no. Any time….

NOOOOO!!! Not any time. That’s the problem. Oh Stephen, you see this is the point. You say things like “any time” and people take you at your word. Not Simon, who’s very hesitant and decent. But you would not believe the number of books people expect me to read and then tweet enthusiastically about. I now refuse to plug any book unless I have picked it up of my own volition and am enjoying it. If someone asks me to tweet about it as a favour I always refuse, even if I then go on to love the book. It just isn’t fair on the hundreds of others whose works I won’t get time to read.

It is obvious to anyone that were my twitter stream to become nothing but a bulletin board of worthy causes it would soon lose all interest, spontaneity and appeal. Enough people as it is, if I RT or tweet about three or four good causes in a row, accuse me of becoming a bore. Enough people tweet at me sniffily if I ignore/don’t notice or pass on their request or demand to have an event or charity passed on to my flock. I’m not complaining, such is the consequence of having a large following.

Should that matter?

Maybe it is my duty to retweet everyone who asks for an RT.

Well, experience has taught me that this won’t do. This won’t do at all.

All in a good cause…

Firstly, intergrity has to be checked. There are vile creeps out there pretending to be terminally ill and in need of just a fiver here and a fiver there to be able to fly to America to have that necessary life-saving operation. It isn’t nice to be reminded that there exist fellow-citizens who would stoop so low, but I fear we all know that it is the case. So it follows that I can’t automatically retweet every cry for help. Each has to be checked for authenticity and honesty.

In addition to this, it must be understood that my twitter space is not for sale. If people send me things (gadgets, music tracks, poems, cupcakes, robotic vacuum cleaners) I have to make it clear that I cannot accept them on condition that I tweet about them. It has to be agreed that I MUST BE FREE to see or buy or experience something that I really love and then rave about it without everyone thinking I am doing so because in some way I have been bribed or arm-twisted or in any other fashion coerced into doing so. There are those who will never believe such a thing, but that’s their problem frankly. To be live life as a cynic is to condemn yourself to eternal misery and distrust, especially of yourself: the clearest route to failure there is. Yes, I do TV ads and voice overs, but (even if no one else does) I see a clear difference between that, which is a form of (albeit whorish) acting and personal product endorsement. The one is a gig, the other is me.

Accidental DDoS

Secondly, if I do recommend a site, well those who want that site to be visited had better be damned sure that their servers can take the strain. We are talking about thousands of hits a second at peak times. The host had better have a good cluster of servers ready or there’ll be nothing but tears and distress as what appears to have been a Dedicated Denial of Service has been perpetrated on their proud and noble site.

I think I have put it this way before: it is a sad sight to see a shop-keeper react to four thousand people simultaneously bursting into his tiny little antique business. He sweeps up the broken china, splintered wood and glass, eyes his ruined business and then casts me a baleful glare. ‘But you asked me to tell people about your shop!’ I want to cry out, but he shakes his head and turns his back on me and I tip-toe guiltily away feeling as if I have been the most awful bully.

Google, YouTube, facebook, Amazon – I can of course be sure of the biggies bearing up under any kind of strain but otherwise I and my two little Twitter helpers have established a system whereby everyone who wants a charitable or useful cause tweeted has to go through my website and see what you might call the terms and conditions. It involves emailing tweet@stephenfry.com and being told how to set about “applying” for a mention or RT. That in itself isn’t a guarantee of course. I may decide that a sponsored backpack up the Inca Trail just isn’t enough, or that I’ve tweeted about libraries six times that week and I should give them a rest for a while.

I honestly don’t otherwise know how I could run that side of twitter without constant mishap. As it is I carelessly break my own rules from time to time and will unthinkingly hit the RT button and crash someone’s site. I did it the other day to a kind New Zealand girl who had written a blog that had, it seemed to me, precisely got the point behind my most recent debacle. More of that in a moment.

Be yourself…

Above all — and I have been dispensing this advice to people who have asked me about joining twitter since it began, politicians, entertainers, friends, journalists, whoever — I have to be myself on twitter. It is utterly useless and painfully transparent and wholly counterproductive to construct a false personality, or always to be in exactly the same mood. If I tweeted regularly, always in the same restrained, friendly, perfectly pitched and framed register, it would (in my opinion) be creepy and unreal. Twitter is a social network, and man as a social animal is a victim of moods, appetites, weariness, phases, energy loss and any number of other imponderables. I am not a machine, my tweeting is not regular, consistent, predictable or flawless. And sometimes, I tweet like an arse, without thought or sense.

Grrrrr…..

There are days too when the very prospect of opening Twitter fills me with dread. I cannot face the number of DMs, the potentially upsetting insults, the sorrowful appeals for help. I keep the lid on the box closed and get on with whatever else I’m doing. There are other days (and I am going through such a time now) when I might be on a film set, in a country thousands of miles and over a dozen time zones away from home. My tweeting device of choice will have to be switched off while I’m working and when finally we wrap, it’ll be six in the morning in Britain and I’ll be ready for nothing much more than a Martini and bed.

And then sometimes, without one ever seeming to spot it, another Incident rears its ugly – or sometimes fascinatingly beautiful – head.

How did it happen?

Here I am in New Zealand, a country that I love, working on a film, The Hobbit. I have rented a little house in Wellington and it has a broadband connection provided by just about the only player in the game here, TelecomNZ. If you are British think of them of the rump of a denationalized Post Office, much as our GPO became British Telecom which in turn became  BT and  Cellnet and O2.

Well, I won’t take you into the full details, but one morning I found, much to my surprise, that my (already rather slow)  connection had been strangulated to a crawl. A data download limit had been reached and, all unknowing, I had fallen victim to the dreaded throttle. Pioneered by the unpopular Comcast, who own so much of the infrastructure in the US, the throttle is applied here in New Zealand and over the Tasman Sea in Australia as well, to those who exceed a contractually agreed download limit. It might be 50GB, it might be 200. Now, if such a system is mutually agreed, this might be regarded as perfectly fair and reasonable, and doubtless it is in many people’s eyes. I confess that in my lazy way of being accustomed to Britain’s service (which is by no means universally perfect) it just never crossed my mind that a civilised country would do this. Maybe it’s the future and will happen with electricity, gas and water. But as a “power user” who regularly downloads new beta versions of whole operating systems (but doesn’t file share or bit torrent) and the partner in a production company I do get to down and upload large files.

Well, at five or six in the morning, sipping my first cup of coffee before being picked up and taken to the set, I tweeted my annoyance at how bad the broadband was. I suspected a throttle, but wasn’t sure, but anyway wanted to say that it was a pity New Zealand didn’t seem to have a better service. I had been here last year in August, in a hotel. I had been in cafés and museums and other public places that offered WiFi and always I had found the uplink and downlink slower than I am used to.

So what? Fast broadband is not a right (although many propose that it should be and internet access has specifically legislated into the condition of a statutory right in France, Spain and a few other countries).  Fifteen years ago broadband didn’t exist outside Ethernet connections in universities and governmental institutions. I remember having ISDN installed before ADSL or cable became an option in London. Before that it was good old-fashioned dial-up. So why visit a country and be so rude about their service provision? A) it’s impertinent and B) it’s trivial.

Absolutely. There are more important things. My tweeting about an issue is not meant to suggest that I think that issue to be crucial, critical or of vital importance. Otherwise I would be doing nothing but twittering about Syria, global warming, the Greek financial bail-out, racism in British football, poverty, HIV/AIDS, species extinction, sex-trafficking and the Occupy movement. There’s the darling Avaaz movement for all that – you couldn’t visit anywhere better. I am allowed to tweet about vagina-shaped pimentos or having just met someone called Henrietta Cock.

It’s not a parliament, for fuck’s sake…

Twitter is called, in case you hadn’t noticed Twitter. Not Earnest Debate, not Focus, not Forum or World Crisis. Just Twitter. And that’s what I do, I twitter away. Sometimes sensibly, sometimes not. I am not the Op Ed page of the New Yorker or a Times of London Leader. I am not a Papal Bull or an Imperial Edict. I am not an elected official or a princeling. I am, in Douglas Adams’s immortal words,’ just this guy, you know?’ And Twitter is for twittering on: so I do.

Yes, I know that I should by now have realised that my smallest utterance might have a disproportionate outcome – but I return to the earlier point. I’m me. Self-conscious tweeting isn’t social: what kind of anal no-hoper would come to a dinner party with a typed list of topics of conversation in their pocket? On Twitter, as around a dinner table, one gets caught up in the real cut and thrust of social interaction. I don’t do these things to attract attention or get special service, I just tweet away.

Kiwipedia

As it happens, I love New Zealand very much, and I genuinely do think they deserve a better digital infrastructure than the one they have. That my (rapidly typed, highly confusing and incoherent) stream of tweets on the subject so swiftly sparked the national debate it did, on NZ TV news, in the papers and, of course, throughout the twittersphere, genuinely surprised me.

I certainly didn’t expect that Telstra, one of TelecomNZ’s few rivals, would take up the opportunity to being out a full page ad.

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Fry's Trail of Twitter Slime

Mostly I think it fair to say a majority of New Zealanders have agreed with me. Some were put out by my criticizing their country, but most have travelled abroad and know that the standard of broadband you get back here is not exactly up to snuff. It isn’t perfect in Britain of course, but with a regulator ensuring that the old monopoly (BT in our case) doesn’t hog all the copper wire but must allow it as a pipeline to any of the half dozen or so major rivals, there is competition driving down pricing and driving up service. In theory. Hell, it isn’t perfect in that sector any more than it is in electricity or water provision, or any other form of mixed economy capitalism. It’s better than unregulated capitalism (hello, Enron) and better than monopolistic nationalised industry (hello, Britain in the 60s and 70s). No question, the average Brit, mutatis mutandis, gets a better megabyte for his/her money than the average kiwi.

It’s only Broadband – get a life…

Human right or not, if the board game Monopoly were invented now, Broadband would be one of the Utilities. When I was a child the cliché remark Britons and Americans would make about countries like Tunisia, Turkey, Greece and even Spain as holiday destinations would be, “Don’t drink the water”.

Americans are horrified at the lack of air-conditioning and dribbly shower pressure in Britain, we are alarmed by sanitation in India and Kenya. Delhi Belly, Montezuma’s Revenge, Gyppy Tummy, all that. Wider issues of social justice, equity, western snobbery aside, it’s human nature when you travel to think of how your stay might be in a far country.

In New Zealand the roads are as good as any country I’ve ever visited. The coffee is better. The food generally is exquisite. The water supply fresh and easily drinkable. The wine-making is outstanding. The public transport system (certainly within Wellington) as is good as it gets. The infrastructure fabric on both islands is as first world as you could find. I don’t remember seeing so much as one pothole in the surface of the roads from the top of North Island to the bottom of the South. I do wish there was a better signage system telling you whether, as you approach Mount Victoria from Seatoun and Miramar and have to make up the choice to drive round the headland or not, whether the bloody tunnel is going to be opened or closed, but that’s another matter. There is a sign, it’s just that it’s a useless one. Stop, it Stephen. You’ll only get into trouble again.

NZ rocks…

My 23 year old godson sent me this, just today, direct quote. Unaltered by one syllable.

“I imagine you might be in New Zealand right now, is that right? Hobbiting? I hope that that’s all going well and that it’s nice being out there. From the three weeks I spent in New Zealand on my gap year I do remember thinking that I had never, and would never be again, be in a more stunning place in my life. So I hope that’s the case for you too. “

Those are the words of a privileged, intelligent, talented, charming and well-travelled Englishman. There is so much to love here, so much for Kiwis to be proud of.

This is the country that produced Ernest Rutherford, the man who split the atom and Edmund Hillary the man who first stood on the peak of Mount Everest. This is the first democracy to give women the vote.  Despite the sheep jokes this is as sophisticated, progressive and forward looking a nation-state as exists in the world, its population of a mere four million or so punching hugely above their weight in almost every field of endeavour.

A flat white. Invented by Australians and adopted by New Zealanders. (Actual flat white from @SensoryLondon)

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The harnessing of the remarkable talents of Sirs Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor created the Wellywood phenomenon. James Cameron had to come to Wellington to make Avatar because, quite simply, there weren’t the technical facilities or expertise anywhere else in the world.  New Zealand is a most astonishingly beautiful country, the people are friendly and charming, though I wouldn’t want to be in a ruck or a maul with them on a rugby field. They’re outdoorsy but lack the brashness that can be found (attractively in its own way) in Australia. Modest, welcoming, zoologically and botanically unique, there are few places in the world where I feel more at home than kiwiland and if I offended by being rude about its digital performance, then I am sorry. But I promise you it came from love. Well, love with mixed with early morning grumpiness.

My good friend, the ever reliable @elvis717 alerted me to this excellent document which outlines Sweden’s digital roadmap.

http://www.regeringen.se/content/1/c6/18/18/01/509f1b0c.pdf

Like New Zealand, Sweden has a relatively small and scattered population.  Sweden too punches above its weight, not just with Ikea, Volvo, Girls with dragon tattoos who kick over hornets’ nests and get up to all kinds of shenanigans, and Abba of course, but as a digital force. The home of Spotify and dozens of other influential start ups and major players in the IT world, Sweden decided some time ago that it wasn’t good enough to be good enough, it was important to be ahead of the game throughout the country and in terms of global comparison. As the document says in its opening statement:

We have probably seen only the start of all the benefits that the use of ICT can bring. If we use the technology correctly:

• those schoolchildren who find it most difficult to learn can instead, using their own computers, become the best in the class at searching, editing and presenting information

• severely ill patients admitted to hospital in an emergency will avoid having to give their case histories as the doctor will have received all the relevant information from the electronic patient records

• it will be possible for more service jobs to be done from home, raising quality of life, saving travel, time and money and reducing environmental impact

• ICT can make democracy more accessible, even from someone’s kitchen table.

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None of that is news to any one you I am sure, but the permanency and importance of IT (or ICT as the Swedes like to call it – for Information and Communication Technologies) to the economies and destinies of nation states and their citizens cannot be overstated. Sweden, it seems, wants to emulate Steve Jobs’s quote from the great Wayne Gretzky who, on being asked why he was the greatest hockey player who ever lived, shrugged and replied that he guessed it was because while others skated towards the puck, he skated towards where the puck was going to be.

Reaction

The New Zealand newspapers covered the government’s reaction to my “outburst” as such tweets are inevitably called by journalists. It is pretty clear that the New Zealand administration is aware that many Kiwis are highly dissatisfied with the performance of TelecomNZ, who had very swiftly moved to cancel the data cap on my service and replace an ancient dusty modem.  I appreciated their attention and rapid service, but of course I had to point out – as many New Zealanders did – that I shouldn’t be getting any preferential treatment (and I certainly didn’t tweet in the expectation of it). It is not Stephen Fry who deserves a better broadband service, it is every New Zealand citizen.

Now I am aware that the heart-breaking catastrophe of Christchurch held back both government finances and also technology that was based out there and was preparing to improve the digital infrastructure. No one can blame TCNZ for that: what they and almost all New Zealand corporations have done to help rebuild the lives, destinies and future of Christchurch is inspiring and wholly to be commended. I am also aware, because the Hon Amy Adams, Minister of Communications and IT, wrote to the Hobbit production office to tell me about it, of the government’s $1.5 billion ultrafast broadband rollout. But are they still just looking at where the puck now is, I cannot but wonder?

I may have been grossly unfair. I certainly put a bit of oomph into the response of TCNZ’s competitors and perhaps that venerable old corporation itself, but it may be that it was not my place as a happy visitor to say or do any such thing.

The whole point of this blog is to try and explain that I will always make an arse of myself from time to time, whether it’s because I’m drunk, or lazy, or thoughtless or in a bad mood or just because I’m not thinking straight. I hope I don’t ever bully anyone or use my numbers to humiliate or harass, that would be very wrong, but I am a human being, not a public service. The whole Twitter experiment for me is about seeing whether I can, as a public person, be myself in public, unfiltered by a journalist, a PR company, an agenda or a ghost writer.

Why tweet, if you’re in the public eye? Just to sell tickets?

Why, you may ask, would I want to do such a thing? Lead a public life through Twitter? What possible bizarre form of exhibitionism would lead me to this? Or is it just crass commercialism?

Well, I shall level with you. It never started out as my intention, but the result of my life in Twitter is that I need never ever contribute to print media in any form again. Ever. If you have more followers than subscribe to the Independent, Guardian, Times, Financial Times and Daily Telegraph combined, then you can finally dispense once and for all with the whole horror of having to submit yourself for interview and profile. Sadly this includes saying no to all minority and student magazines or newspapers too, because of course mainstream papers ruthlessly steal from them, or the poverty-stricken minority magazines are persuaded to sell their content on.

Rupert Murdoch expressed the hope yesterday that his all new, all shiny, all ethical Sun on Sunday would print two million copies. Two million? Why would anyone in the public eye need a newspaper interview any more in order to discharge their publicity duties?

When it comes to being in a film, or having a book or TV show out one is contractually obliged to do a certain amount of publicity. I will happily consent to radio or TV interviews. People can see me and decide I am an entirely intolerable piece of offal they never want to have anything to do with again on the basis of watching and hearing me. That’s absolutely fine. But at least it won’t be because of a misquote, a vicious aside or some skewed distortion from the bitter mind of a print “profile writer”, filtered through envy, dislike and that special brand of dyspeptic, growling misanthropy and “I see through you” cynicism in which British journalists specialise. And yes, I do reserve the right, from time to time, to announce that I’m doing a public signing in a shop, a show at the Albert Hall or that I have a film out. It would greatly annoy the most loyal of my followers if they heard from anyone else first, which incredible in their detective work as they are, they so often do. They seemed to know I was playing Malvolio in London’s Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre this coming summer before I did.

What price freedom from gossip?

Maybe celebrity interviews and trashy gossip are the price we pay for funding foreign desks and “proper journalism”.  That has always been the excuse. Video never did kill the radio star, and I don’t suppose Twitter will kill the columnist and professional trafficker in opinion and comment and gossip, but what of Maria Colvin and brave reporters like her, or genuine investigative journalists who spend years chasing down corruption and wicknedness in the world? I don’t have an answer to that.

Is the internet getting all a bit … oh I don’t know, shopping mall-like and over-organised?

On a wholly different note, is it just me, or are the big internet players all getting rather nasty and styleless at the moment? Google is irritating the crap out of everyone with its new rules and protocols. It has also, quite literally, been caught with its hand in the cookie-jar.  Spotify has lost all the world’s affection and respect by locking itself into Facebook. Facebook continues to startle everyone with new depths of asinine redesign and security madnesses. And Twitter, Twitter has taken Loren Brichter’s (@lorenb) quite brilliant original Tweetie client, turned it into the “official” Twitter app for desktop and mobile devices of all stripes and is slowly stripping it of all useful functionality and the almost lickable glide, ease and sweetness of use that first brought it to everyone’s attention. Maybe Dick Costolo (@dickc) and Biz Stone (@Biz) of Twitter and other players in these huge entities all feel that it is payday – time to cash in. Maybe they know something we don’t about the future of banking and need liquidity now.

More hopefully, fresh bands of guerilla app developers and social network designers are already working on The Next Big Thing in the background and in a few year’s time having an FB or Twitter identity might well be as embarrassing as having a MySpace or AOL account is now. I do hope so.

Bye bye.

Oh dear me, I do go on don’t I? Embarrassing or not, I’m having a fine time here in New Zealand. The weather is … fascinating. The work is long and hard and hugely satisfying: if I tell you any more I will be imprisoned for improper disclosure, the contractual equivalent of flashing in public. I apologise for not being able to Skype or DM friends at sensible times of the day, but New Zealand is, after all,  13 time zones away from the meridian line.

Days may go by in the next week in which I will barely tweet at all. Or there again, my next tweet may embroil me up to my neck in the soup once more. That’s the beauty. One never knows.

My next blog might address two Windows Mobile phones and a Samsung Note that I’ve been using lately. Or maybe they will  be on another subject entirely for those of you whose hearts sink when I get all techie. We shall see.

Thanks for your time.

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I have a modest proposal that might simultaneously celebrate the life of Christopher Hitchens, strengthen Britain’s low stock in Europe and allow us to help a dear friend in terrible trouble.

Perhaps the most beautiful and famous monument in the world is the Doric masterpiece atop the citadel, or Acropolis, of Athens. It is called the Parthenon, the Virgin Temple dedicated to Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom who gave the Greek capital its name.

Parthenon - west side © A Sampson 2009

The Acropolis contains other temples and represents in the minds of scholars, historians and all who care about our past and the source of our civilisation, the pinnacle of Athens’s Golden Age under the leadership of Pericles; that period of peace between the wars against Persia which they won, and the wars against their neighbours Sparta, which they lost.

For students and lovers of architecture the Acropolis (over which I made a spectacular fool of myself some years ago) will always remain one of the most perfect examples of the Doric order ever constructed. The Romans and Arabians later added arches, ogees, domes, pendentives, barrelled vaults and squinches to the basic elements of architecture, but the Parthenon’s grace has never been surpassed. Its influence is all around us. Pillars, pilasters, porticos, pediments, architraves, entablatures, triglyphs and metopes may sound strange but we see them every day in high street buildings, town halls, 18^th century churches, squares and crescents. Some people who spot trains or birds are called sad. I am a sad corbel, buttress and apse spotter – one who loves that there is a name for everything in architecture, a full and rich anatomy.

© A Sampson 2009

Doric elements were not the only thing that came from Greece. 5^th century BC Athens was a city state that gave us Aristotle and his devising of logic, categories, ethics and poetics; Plato and Socrates led ceaseless quests for the discovery of the truth behind people, phenomena and politics. Their refusal to take as true any baseless, unprovable assertions made by priests, tyrants and hierarchs but instead to examine honestly from first principles took nearly two millennia to be rediscovered by the renaissance and then enlightenment philosophers who shaped our modern world very much with Periclean Athens in mind. Euclid and Archimedes are to this day heroes to all mathematicians and engineers. Their blend of rationalism and empiricism is at the heart of all science and sense. The sheer magnificent beauty of Euclidian geometric theorems and their proofs, has never, most mathematicians would agree, been surpassed.

The duty of Athenian citizens to play a part in justice through the tribunals on the Areopagus Hill was taken seriously, as was democracy in the form of regular voting: there was even an agreed assumption that theatre as a total art form that combined mask, dance, poetry, drama, history, music and religious ceremony was an essential element of public life and formed part of an open analysis of Athenian identity. As Nietzsche pointed out in his supreme The Birth of Tragedy, the Greek people had gone from tribal blood feuds, war and savagery to a peak of civilisation in a very short time indeed. Nietzsche chose the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as representatives of the two sides of the Greek (and of course all human) character. One part harmonious, reasonable, artistic, musical, mathematical and idealistic, the other consumed by appetite, lusts and loss of reason through desire, greed and ambition. Whether we call these Freud’s ego and id or Forster’s prose and the passion, which we must “only connect”, no civilisation I can think of seems so clearly to display through its art, rhetoric, philosophy and politics just what it is to be a human, a social and collective being, what Aristotle himself called in a phrase almost worn away by universal use, “a political animal”.

Of course we are not talking about an ideal society. Slavery, the subjugated role of women, open paederasty and xenophobia, helotry and harlotry – these are not things wholly in tune with the temper of our own times. Read E. R. Dodds’s masterly The Greeks and the Irrational and you will see they weren’t all algebraic geniuses with a bent for brilliant oratory and logical exposition. But Athenian education, open enquiry, democracy, justice and a harmony of form in sculpture and architecture were quite new to our world and indeed their ability to question themselves is one of the things for which we are most indebted to them.

We have them to thank for the Olympic Games too, and the next Olympiad of the modern age will of course be held in London in 2012, and very excited and pleased about that I am. Excited and pleased because I love sport and always and automatically want to line up on the opposite side of cynics, curmudgeons, wet-blankets, pessimists, and (literally in this case) spoilsports.

I am also excited and pleased because the occasion — the largest regular gathering human beings on the face of the planet — offers…

A) a remarkable opportunity to appease the dead spirit of the great Hitchens

B) to make up to some small degree for our recent devastating and pathetic humiliation in Europe

C) to redress a great wrong and

D) to express our solidarity with, affection for and belief in Greece and the ideals it gave us.

The Hellenic Republic today is in heart-rending turmoil, a humiliating sovereign debt crisis has brought Greece to the brink of absolute ruin. This proud, beautiful nation for which Byron laid down his life is in a condition much like the one for which he mourned when they were under the Ottoman yoke in the early nineteenth century, taking time off from the comic ironic tones of his ottava rima masterpiece Don Juan to insert this mournful threnody….

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace,

Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!

Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all, except their sun, is set…

And where are they? And where art thou?

My country? On thy voiceless shore

The heroic lay is tuneless now—

The heroic bosom beats no more!

And must thy lyre, so long divine,

Degenerate into hands like mine?

‘Tis something, in the dearth of fame,

Though linked among a fettered race,

To feel at least a patriot’s shame,

Even as I sing, suffuse my face;

For what is left the poet here?

For Greeks a blush–for Greece a tear….

Two years ago a new and beautiful Acropolis museum was completed, allowing visitors a much more intelligent enlightening, captivating and informative journey through the history and meaning of the Acropolis than the rather rocky hillside rambles of the past.

View of the Acropolis (south) taken from the balcony of the museum. © A Sampson 2009

A year earlier, in 2008, the Italian and Greek Presidents had taken part in a ceremony in which a fragment of marble sculpture taken from Greece and left in Italy 200 years earlier was returned to Athens. This small fragment had been taken by the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin.

The greater part of the haul was taken to England where they have been housed in the British Museum in London since 1816 under the now highly charged name of the Elgin Marbles. Even at the time plenty of Britons thought the Ottoman Empire’s granting permission to take so many elements of the Parthenon (and the stunning Erectheum, the temple with its famous caryatids further down the hill) away from their home and into London was little short of looting.

MARBLES

What has all this to do with Christopher Hitchens, polemicist, shamer of Clinton, Kissinger and Mother Teresa, champion of Orwell and Payne, scourge of tele-evangelists and mountebanks everywhere? Well, in 1997 Hitchens wrote a book called The Parthenon Marbles, the Case for Reunification. In it he lays out how, inspired by reading Colin MacInnes (of Absolute Beginners fame) on the subject, he threw himself into finding out more about the marbles and came to what he saw a frankly irrefutable case for their return.

Parthenon Marbles - west pediment. © A Sampson 2009

It was, as the author Simon Raven pointed out, the Greeks who maintained that anyone who tells you what happens to a person after they die is either a fool or a liar. The speculation over Hitchens’s soul’s fate has been as disgusting and degrading as the age of indulgences, sold pardons and chantry chapels, but comes as no surprise to anyone. His legacy however, his doctrine of decency, his war on bullies, tyrants, liars and frauds, now that can be honoured and it can be called, if you wanted to do so, his imperishable soul.

Arguments for keeping the Elgin Marbles in the BM usually boil down to:

A) If Elgin hadn’t appropriated them they would probably have rotted or crumbled away so we saved them and deserve to keep them

B) Once you go down the path of museums returning ransacked treasures to their countries of origin then all the great museums and galleries of the world will have their collections dispersed to the great detriment of scholarship, visitor access and common sense

C) Every year, more people see them in the British Museum than visit Athens, so to move them would be to reduce their availability to be seen.

Argument A is most peculiar. As Hitchens put it, if you rescue furniture from a neighbour’s fire and keep it for them while they rebuild their house you then give it back, you don’t claim rights over it. Hitchens points out in his book how gracious Greece has been about the whole affair. It was Melina Mercouri (at whose funeral he was a pall-bearer), the actress, singer and politician, who really got the campaign going and always conducted it, on her part, with great good grace.

The British Museum has been utterly intransigent over point B. “Over my dead body” appears to be the view of each successive Director. The current chief, Neil MacGregor has had a brilliant tenure but is quite as foursquare against the return of the marbles as his predecessors. It is axiomatic that no museum or gallery ever likes to de-acquire. “What next?” they cry. “Every mummy, every Babylonian pot, the Rosetta Stone? The Royal Game of Ur? The Madonna of the Rocks and Rembrandt’s self-portraits at the National? Cleopatra’s Needle?”

Well, the answer to that is NO. We are discussing a specific part of an existing building, which we now know can be properly and professionally curated and displayed. The argument “Oh, once you go down that path…” has never held water. The weirder kind of libertarians said it about seat belts. “Oh, once you make people wear seat belts it’ll be helmets and roll bars next…” that kind of drivel. “Once you ban hunting, they’ll ban fishing.” If you ban citizens from owning Uzi machine guns it doesn’t mean you’re “going down the path that will lead to the banning of shot-guns and peashooters. Get a grip everyone.

Humans have will. We can go down a path and then turn left or right, or turn right round. Legislature is, perforce, nuanced and (we trust) skilfully drafted precisely so as to introduce regulation with the minimum loss of wider rights and liberties. “Going down the path” of the return of the Elgin Marbles need not be fatefully precedential. We could decide to let it not be. Of course plenty of countries will seize their chance to have a go at demanding returns of this artefact or that, but this is happening anyway. The Parthenon affair is a special case. Italy returned their fragment two years ago and haven’t been badgered, bullied and ballyragged since.

Parthenon Marbles - east pediment. © A Sampson 2009

Greece made us. We owe them. They are ready for its return and have never needed such morale boosting achievement more. And it would be so graceful, so apt, so right.

As for Point C, visitor numbers, well that is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, not to mention a counsel of despair. As Kevin Costner almost said, ‘If you move it, they will come.”

Not everyone likes the new Acropolis museum it must be admitted: apparently its construction flattened the musician Vangelis’s charming house and the reinstalled friezes would, say some scholars, be hardly more ‘authentic’ in their new home than they are in Bloomsbury. But the stone quarried from Mount Pentelikon, the dazzling white pentelic marble from which the Parthenon is made, is for Greece what the marble of Carrara was for Michelangelo and it belongs in its homeland, it expresses it. There really is such a characteristic as terroir. Which is why something as disgusting as retsina tastes so delicious on a beach in Patmos and so horrific in a warm kitchen in Wincanton.

As it happens the British Prime Minister’s office and the Department of Culture , Media and Sport are, even as we speak, planning a ‘Great’ campaign in which they wish to show the world what is Great about Britain (in fact the Great is really of course is a geopolitical term, as in Greater Manchester, not a profession of superiority, but never mind). I am patriotic I think. I fact I know I am. And like most people who truly love their country, I don’t think it perfect but want it always to strive to be better, nobler, kinder, smarter. I want to be proud of it. Some will see the ‘Great’ campaign as a Ladybird Book version of Blair’s embarrassing Cool Britannia ‘initiative’ back in the 90s. A step back to a heritage museum Britain where we’re all the best of (Julian) Fellowes and grandeur parallels diversity, tolerance and innovation. I wish them well and offer this thought:

What greater gesture could be made to Greece in its time of appalling financial distress? An act of friendship, atonement and an expression of faith in the future of the cradle of democracy would be so, well just so damned classy. The City of London whose “interests” Cameron wishes to protect, but which independent observers say is now if anything less secure in its hegemony than ever before, has buildings in which people sit all day betting “against” Greece, or “taking positions” as they would rather put it. In other words they get home from the office happy in the thought that their transactions have hurled another thunderbolt into the land of Homer and Plato, Themistocles and Pindar. May they rot.

There is much talk of “repatriating powers” from Europe amongst Eurosceptic and even middle-of-the-road politicians. To repatriate a power takes treaties, rows, enmities, alliances and betrayals. To repatriate a collection of stolen marbles take good will, moral courage and a decisive belief that right can be done. Oh, and I suppose a Hercules transport aircraft or large ship. Rope, voiding, bungees, castors. That kind of thing. Bean-shaped foam too I shouldn’t wonder.

How can we British be proud until we sit down with Greek politicians and arrange for the return of their treasure? It would be a dignified, but a thrilling celebration. No need for head-hanging apology or anything silly, just a recognition that the time is now right. Remember that dipping of the head, that bow, made by the Queen to the fallen of Ireland on her last visit there? Symbols mean a great deal. If the Hulture Secretary, Jeremy … oh, you know who I mean … or the Prime Minister or his Desperate Deputy did have the grace and guts to make this gesture, perhaps at the opening of London 2012 and then following it up in Athens with a full reinstallation it will achieve many things: it might remind us of what we all owe Greece, it might encourage us to visit the country and spend a little tourist money on its ferries, islands, temples, attractions and dazzling beauty: those blue seas, the warmly hospitable people, the theatres, temples, statue, beaches and bottles of resinated Domestika.

Such a fine gesture might also help make the rest of Europe decide we are not always the perfidious Albion they have traditionally believed us to be. I believe we would gain far more than we lost. A simulacrum in plaster or resin could hang in the BM where the real ones now do and an series of photographs could display the process of the return and the history behind it.

I certainly wouldn’t rename them the Hitchens Marbles, Christopher would bridle and writhe at such a thought, but those who wanted to, might discover the part he played in this long struggle and know that he wasn’t all about trashing icons, vilifying statesmen or taunting faith-healers. He once defined an educated person as one who knows the limits of their knowledge. His own self-professed philhellenism stemmed as much from the great gift Greek civilisation had given him and has given all of us– the confidence to doubt, to reason and openly to question. To know how little we know. To be curious about ourselves.

It’s time we lost our marbles.

x Stephen Fry

This is a Britain where metro-hatred and provincial arse-licking has led to such fatuous absurdities as the farcical moving of the entire BBC sports department to Salford months before the Olympic Games come to London. Read that back twice and forbear to weep, groan, roar or wet yourself laughing.

Where does one begin with the BBC’s “regionalism”? They destroy local radio but move to Salford to “appease” the North. As if “the North” is one place! Do they think the citizens of Sunderland and Leeds are cheering because there’s a new BBC media centre in Salford? I should think even Mancunians are pissed off by it, let alone Geordies or Lakelanders. In-fucking-sane. But don’t get me started. Oh – you did.

Takes deep breath. Calms down.

Right…

Central London, like all great capitals, has its grand cathedrals, palaces, memorials, parks, public spaces, fashionable shopping districts and wild Bohemian quarters.

But also, like most great cities, it has its hidden secrets. Tiny little gardens, yards, alleyways, statues, institutions and passageways that maybe just metres away from the thronging concourses of Leicester Square or Cheapside, and yet are as quiet and undisturbed as a village churchyard.

One of my favourite areas of London is St James’s, that area bounded to the north by Piccadilly, to the south by the Mall and St James’s park, to the east by Haymarket and to the west by the Ritz and Green Park. Of course the very name summons up the worst images of elitism, aristocracy and old-fashioned, self-serving grandiosity. This is London’s clubland. Whites, Brooks’s, the Carlton Club, Boodles, Bucks, the Reform, the Athenaeum, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Travellers and even Pratt’s (it’s true). For all but a tiny percentage of you reading this, such places are at best amiably preposterous hangovers from a bygone age and at worst a symbol that Britain is still the same hide-bound, class-bound society it ever was.

I’m not going to go into all that. I’m just speaking of one who loves to wander around. I love to glance up at Blue Plaques and try to recreate in my mind the days of horse: when phaetons, landaulets, berlins, curricles, stage coaches and grand equipages dominated the streets that are now owned by vans, Boris bicycles, motorbikes, taxis and cars.

Let us just look at St. James’s Square in particular. Whenever I pass the north east corner I marvel that the memorial to WPC Yvonne Fletcher is never unattended. There are always fresh flowers and hand-written notes. In 1984 a member of the Libyan mission shot and killed her from a window of the embassy during at anti-Gaddafi demonstration which she was helping to police. The murderer got away, such are the laws that govern diplomatic immunity. It is hard not to whisper now, as I pass, “Don’t worry. He’s gone now.” If I thought that way, I would fancy that she is now sleeping more soundly.

Just next door to the ex-embassy is the house where Nancy Astor lived and entertained. It now has an “IN” painted on the left hand column of its portico and an “OUT” on the right hand. This is typical English eccentricity. I’ll tell you how it came about.

Lord Palmerston, the 19^th century prime minister, used to live in a fine mansion on the north side of Piccadilly called Cambridge House. It was so grand it that it had a carriage sweep, with one gatepost marked IN and another marked OUT to prevent collisions and assist the flow of arrivals and departures. After Palmerston’s death the house was sold and turned into a club, called the Naval and Military (not to be confused with the Army and Navy or United Services or Cavalry Club, oh no siree. This is clubland, nothing’s that simple). The Naval and Military club’s nickname, on account of the gateposts, was “The In and Out”.

Fast forward many decades and the Navy and Military moves to Number 4, the old Astor homestead in the North east corner of St James’s Square (by the way, note that it is always St James’s ­– never just St James). These new premises have no carriage drive or gateposts, but the Naval and Military painted up a completely meaningless “IN” and “OUT” either side of the front door just so that it can keep its affectionate nickname. Batty but  somehow adorable.

Even battier is the name of just one of the other clubs in St James’s Square. The East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools. I mean, what? You couldn’t make it up.

Elsewhere it’s all a bit corporate. BP have their HQ there as do Rio Tinto Zinc and other so-called “blue chip” companies. The address still has great cachet around the world.

On the north west side is Chatham House, Britain’s leading foreign office think tank. William Pitt the Elder (later Earl of Chatham) lived there. You may be familiar with the “Chatham House Rule”, a protocol agreed at meetings between politicians (or indeed businessmen or any other group of people). The rule is understood to mean: “whatever is said here can be repeated outside this room, but you can not say who said it or who was present at the meeting.” They use this phrase around the world now I believe.

But I want to concentrate your attention to the building in the north west corner, between Chatham House and the afore-giggled-at East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools Club.

The London Library.

The London Library is, I believe I am right in saying, the world’s largest independent lending library. Which is to say it is not affiliated to a university, it is not owned or subsidised by any local council, by government or any public body. It was founded by, amongst others, that monumental man of letters Thomas Carlyle. The list of current and past members is astonishing. Darwin, Dickens, Gladstone, Thackeray, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Agatha Christie, Rudyard Kipling, J. B. Priestley, T. S. Eliot … and these days members include its president Tom Stoppard, and writers like Sebastian Faulks, A. S. Byatt, Claire Tomalin, Simon Shama and, even, er, me.

You wouldn’t believe that its modest entrance (well I agree it’s a grand address, but there is a more discreet back door in Mason’s Yard behind) could reveal so remarkable and beautiful a building.

There are fifteen miles of shelves containing over a million books dating back to the very beginning of printing: you can clamber across the marvellously mysterious original 1890s catwalks and gantries or luxuriate in the light and modern Art Room. They never throw a book away and there are NO FINES! You can keep a book as long as you like or until another member asks for it, in which case a polite letter will ask if you could return it at your earliest convenience.

Art Room of the London Library © Paul Raftery

You don’t have to live in London, in fact a third of the over 7,000 members live outside the city. There’s a postal loans team who’ll send you the book you want, and there are unique internet archives (including every past edition of the Times newspaper as well as dozens of scholarly journals and databases).

One of the miracles of this unique institution is the quality of the staff. They seem to know where everything is and will hunt down what you’re after with zeal and good humour. Some of the cataloguing is inspired. The Science and Miscellaneous collection is especially highly prized. Books about Coffee, Explosives and Dreams jostle happily alongside works on Home, Duels, Yachts and Cheese.

You can bring in your laptop and find just the cranny, desk, table or sofa where it best suits you to work, study, chase ideas or dream.

The London Library is one of Britain’s best kept secrets. Because it’s private there is an annual fee, which is reduced for young people, but which I won’t pretend is a small consideration. Nonetheless the advantages are enormous and just think what a present it would make for someone you love. Subscription to a place that can become a mixture of college, West End Club, snug, den, writing room and welcoming island – and all just a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus.

London Library Lightwell © London Library 2011

I know that municipal libraries are feeling the pinch horribly. Feeling the punch might be more accurate, right in the solar plexus, and of course many of us are anxious to believe that public libraries have a real future in the internet age. The London Library may seem like an elitist enclave, but actually it is just another example of what great cities can achieve over time and can keep alive with care and continuity. Its existence isn’t a threat and never has been, to public libraries, or to the great British Library in St. Pancras. It costs no more than many gyms, and what gyms can do for your body, this magical place can do for your mind.

If the subscription is beyond your reach I’m sorry to have tempted you, but maybe it won’t always be thus, and maybe you can save up or hint to an aunt or uncle… there are student prizes offered too.

Anyway. I have no vested interest in getting you to join other than the enthusiasm that anyone who enjoys something is anxious to communicate.

x

Stephen Fry

Their website is London Library and, bless them, they’re on Twitter and their Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-London-Library/198017356050 You can also Email: visits@londonlibrary.co.uk for news of free guided tours.

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