Palm Sold 300,000 Pres in June | PDA-247

Palm Sold 300,000 Pres in June | PDA-247.

This comes as a surprise, I didn’t think it would be as many as 300 000. Compared to other high profile launches though, is it as good as it sounds? Apple, apparantly, sold over a million 3GS models in the first week or so….3 times as many in one quarter of the time. I’m also sure I read previously that Nokia shifted nearly a million 5800’s in the first month or so.

Funny that, isn’t it? Apple and Nokia launch a phone across the world, make it available through different carriers in different countries and it sells a whole heap more than the Pre. Hmmmmm, I wonder if there is a lesson in there somewhere for Palm?

RIM, Apple, Nokia, and others agree on micro-USB

RIM, Apple, Nokia, and others agree on micro-USB | BlackBerry Cool.

These companies think they are doing us all a favour by agreeing, in theory, to a new standard for chargers across he board. I’m not so sure. I see it this way. You may have other chargers lying around, from previous smartphone useage, but they will more likely be mini as opposed to micro. Why not make mini the standard, at least some people will already have one or two of those lying around as opposed to virtually nobody having a spare micro or two charger.

Most Windows Mobile phones, for example, already use mini usb chargers so people could keep using those.

For those, say Apple or BlackBerry users, who may have no intention of switching platforms and already have a car charger, spare charger and main charger to cover all charging eventualities, they will be penalised by having to move to micro when they buy a new iPhone or iPod or BlackBerry post 2010 and spend another £40 getting the same charger set up.

I’ve got loads of chargers lying around, Nokia, Apple, Win Mob, BlackBerry and even a couple of Samsung ones….funny how none of them are micro usb, isn’t it?

Things I Hate About The Nokia N97 | Symbian-Guru.com

Things I Hate About The Nokia N97 | Symbian-Guru.com.

This is Nokia's flagship product which they hope will not just compete with the iPhone and HTC Touch Pro2, and the like, but obliterate them. The guy from Symbian-Guru has written a 6 part review of the N97, warts and alll, and it makes an interesting read. This bit focusses on the negative points and in the conclusion, Part 6, he goes on to chastise Nokia for bringing out a half-baked O/S which is buggy and slow….hardly an inconsequential factor.

I must admit that Nokia phones irritate the heck out of me. There are some really great things about them, mainly however of a hardware  nature, whilst the software and O/S is second rate, in my view, compared to other platforms. It is like they bring out these really great specced, up to the date phones and lumber them with an O/S that must be at least 3 years past its sell by date. Having said that, I wish that the likes of Apple could produce hardware as good as the E71 but with the underlying iPhone software.

Numerous software glitches. For starters, I (and at
least one other person that I know of) had to manually edit every one
of my contacts, as for some reason, the N97 decided to tinker with
their names by copying the first name into the last name field, so I
ended up with John John Smith. Communication Center wouldn’t edit it,
had to manually do each one ON THE PHONE. Also, many users are
reporting time-out glitches with the backlight

Podtrapper developer on BlackBerry development, pricing and marketing

Podtrapper developer on BlackBerry development, pricing and marketing | BlackBerry Cool.

This is a very interesting post on the subject of launching an application, marketing it and choosing features and pricing. It is rather long but it explains a lot about why a developer does certain things with an application, includes or excludes certain features and picks a price point. It is easy for us to sit here and say "oh that app should have this or that" without really knowing or appreciating, more to the point, any of the problems faced.

There's lots of interesting stuff in here, especially about the UI and the limitations and difficulties heaped on a developer by an o/s, the guy behind Podtrapper (one of the best BlackBerry apps I have ever used) compares writing for the platform and Apple's SDK.

Great, now I just needed the RIM SDK. Turns out there are about 5
different versions, and the more features you get the fewer devices you
can support. RIM has been around for a long time, and unfortunately
(and unlike the iPhone) not all operating system revisions are
available for all devices. The basic choices when I started PodTrapper
were 4.2, 4.2.1, 4.3, 4.5, and the newly released 4.7. While you get
more features with the later OS versions, I decided to shoot for 4.2.1
since it was the oldest version that allowed me to access WiFi
networks, a major feature I needed. There were revisions prior to 4.2,
but they lack even more required features like access to a media card.

HTC Hero

Looks like quite a few folk fancy a pop at this one. I'm sort of semi tempted myself but wouldn't want to be in the position where there is a lack of software again. I'll need to check out things on the Android application front first. Interesting that they have dumped the keyboard, I haven't seen much evidence of how good or bad the onscreen keyboard is. I do like the Curve keyboard, it is easy to use and has some useful shortcuts, holding down a letter for example capitalises it and there is a good auto correct system which measn you generally don't have to bother adding apostrophes and the like. You can even add your own text shortcuts.

This is going to be an important device for HTC, their first non Windows Mob device for years to the point where they are now synonymous with the platform…think Win Mob think HTC. I'm not sure this is the position they particularly want to be in, especially if the falling market share for Win Mob continues in that downward direction unless they think their products are good enough to arrest the slide.
Possibly, this is them now seriously looking around and being desperate to get onto something else sooner rather than later. You'll have your hardcore smartphone user, a minority, who will really care about which platform they use whereas the general public, a much bigger target market, generally won't care two hoots about what o/s is running behind the slick HTC Hero interface. If it has a nice camera and looks cool you are more than halfway there….especially if it is affordable out of the box or with contract.

It looks like a nicer iPhone plus has the added benefit of having some buttons and it is coming to market far sooner than the Palm Pre. I've said this before a hundred times and will say it again, when it comes to marketing and making your products available, Palm are chumps. Do you see HTC restricting sales of their latest and greatest device to a tiny sector of the market? Nope, but for some reason Palm thinks that is the way to go. Lord knows when the Pre will be available outside the US.

Tiger Woods 09

I've been playing this on the PS3 for a while and I do really enjoy it. Several things though tend to irritate, for a game that claims to be very very realistic when it comes to actually playing in Championships, things can go a tad askew. For example, I was playing in this "Major" the other night at Wentworth and shot a 69 in the first round, 3 under par which was not bad I thought. Second round, I shot a blistering 59 which was promptly acknowledged as a new course record. 69-59, enough you would think, to carry a few strokes lead into round 3?

Think again. In actuality, it was not enough to even get me in the top 20 after 2 rounds as when I had finished my round, everybody under the sun seemed to mysteriously start shooting 57 and 58's. Yeah right, that happens all the time….about 30 golfers all shooting sub 60 scores in the same round.

I've also been in situations where I've shot four rounds, all in the low 60's, ending up about 30 under for a tournament and not even finished in the top 10. Seems like, the better you do in  one round then the next round, everyone will shoot 60 before you have started and make it even harder to get close to the lead.

So, a Bold, an iPhone 3GS and a Pre all walked into a bar.

So, a Bold, an iPhone 3GS and a Pre all walked into a bar… | CrackBerry.com.

Good grief…read this preposterous drivel and cry. These BlackBerry people are so far up their own bottoms they must be able to tickle their armpits. They must have some latent inferiority complex that they need constantly to remind themselves how great they are for using a BlackBerry.

Check out the comments too for new levels of unfounded smugness.

Michael Jackson

Poor soul, I got a bit of a shock this morning when I hear the sad news. A tragic end to what had been turning into a pretty tragic life. Sadly, Mr Jackson might have been "King of Pop' once but that was probably only true about 20 years ago. Can't say I've ever been a huge fan although I did like the odd single or two, I certainly couldn't have countenanced the prospect of listening to a whole LP. Being an Indie type of guy and having fought through the Punk Wars, that sort of disco stuff was not exactly up my street yet I could certainly appreciate why people would like it.

Nonetheless, his unfortunate and untimely demise, has given rise to another wave of people phoning into Radio stations and trying to express (usually pitifully poorly) their unrelenting and unbridled grief for somebody they didn't actually ever know…it's a competition to see who can show the most grief on air and who is the most upset by the death of their best friend Michael.

Still, a lot of people from my generation have happy, but rapidly fading, memories of early romantic (well they seemed it at the time) encounters played out with his music as the soundtrack at school discos and the like many years ago and for that we will always be reasonably grateful.

myBlogEdit for mac

Apple – Downloads – Internet Utilities – myBlogEdit.

A new entrant in the mac blogging software stakes and is currently at version 1. It claims to offer "smooth" image inserting, a feature, or lack of which, has been the downfall of other blogging software I have tried on the mac to date. It also supports most of the web blogging sites.

About myBlogEdit
Supports multiple accounts, has an integrated fast media/file manger
with file preview and one of the best features is the smooth resizing,
formatting and uploading of images with just one single click – so in
most cases there is no need for Photoshop or Pixelmator – just choose
the image, select size, style – upload it and you’re done…

myBlogEdit also supports advanced features like the
automatically generation of excerpts or ‘custom fields’ in WordPress,
has an integrated full featured HTML editor with gorgeous
syntax-coloring and spellcheck, search/replace, HTML tag templates and
keyboard shortcuts and a lot more nifty features…

– WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Expression Engine etc.

– intuitive interface

– manage and publish entries

– timed publication

– custom image styles

– automatically create ‘the_excerpt’

– great preview and customizable CSS

– great import/export features

Car stereos and iPod’s and iVolume

My new car has an AUX in feed and I was keen to take advantage of this by hooking up my iPod 80gb classic model to it, as I mentioned last week. I bought a cable to connect both, it goes in the iPod headphone socket and plugs straight in to the stereo via a front mounted "hole". I don't want the iPod just sort of dangling there so I also bought one of those Belkin Tune Scan things, solely because it has a built in charging system and plugs into your cigarette lighter without any further dangling cables getting in the way. The iPod then sits in that and charges whilst playing.

All this sounds great in theory but in actuality has been less than wholesome, not through any fault of my car stereo or the Belkin hardware but rather through the low volume output of the iPod itself. The iPod has to be on maximum volume and then you have to crank up the stereo volume too before the volume is listenable. Every time you change a playlist the iPod reverts back to lower volume…I need to work out how to "lock" the volume on it to get round this but even then it will not be loud enough. My next step will be to use the iVolume software I have at home to increase the volume of all music and podcast tracks and set them at a unform level. This is a useful piece of software.

I then decided to try out my iPhone with it. The Belkin kit comes with a variety of interchangeable "cradles" to hold the device and although, oddly, there was not an iPhone specific holder with it the one for the iPod Touch works just fine. I must say the iPhone is a much better device for this purpose as the volume can be cranked up on the phone itself and is much louder through the car stereo without having to similarly "pump up the jam" ( a wee nod there to all you late 80's Technotronic lovers). As I don't want the Belkin cradle kit visible for security reasons it is hidden inside the centre arm rest storage cubby (where there is another power socket) and the cable will only be connected when in use. The main advantage for me of doing this whole thing is that I will now be able to fill up the iPhone with podcasts and listen to them when out and about driving, something I could not manage to do before.                         

iTunes annoyances

I was doing a sync on my iPhone tonight, first one on iTunes for ages and it was a pain in the derriere. It kept hanging and I had to force quit several times, it was hanging when trying to copy Myst so I ended up having to delete it off my iPhone. Once that was done things started to move again.

Another annoyance, and one I just cannot fathom is its insistence on copying every single app downloaded from the AppStore back on to whatever device is attached. My son's iPod Touch also syncs with iTunes on my MacBook Pro and I have downloaded some games for him onto his Touch. This device uses my Apple account but has a different name yet iTunes insists on transferring every one of those apps onto my iPhone which is annoying. Why does it do that, perhaps there is a seperate setting to stop this happening. It doesn't do it with music playlists so why with software?

I ended up spending about 40 minutes trying to sort everything out and by the time I was finished I was so cheesed off I couldn't be bothered to do the v3 iPhone software update. In fairness to iTunes, this is the first bit of hassle I can recall in using it.

UK Tax Calculator – iPhone

I've been searching out some UK-centric iPhone applications over the weekend and found this one which is cheap and cheerful, as they say, and may come in handy a couple of times a year.

UK Tax Calculator is the best and most up-to-date UK Income Tax & National Insurance Contributions calculator in the App Store. Simply enter few details about your situation and the application will estimate:

– Income Tax
– National Insurance contributions
– Student Loan repayments
– Pension contributions
– Full payment breakdown

It's the only tax calculator app that includes 2009/2010 tax data as well as legacy tax data going back to 2004/2005. Annual updates to tax data will be made available for FREE via App Store updates

o2 increasing costs of iPhone alternatives? – CoolSmartPhone.com

o2 increasing costs of iPhone alternatives? – CoolSmartPhone.com.

God bless em', the wacky win mob guys at Coolsmartphone are blaming the iPhone, their nemesis, for the price rise of other "premium" handsets at not only o2 but also Orange who, of course, do not even offer the iPhone. I think it is more likely just to be a case of prices on phones have been stable for a few years now and with current economic times a bit tough, carriers are having to increase prices all round. How often have tarrifs increased over the past few years? Not many times, in fact data bundles have got progressivley cheaper so something has had to give and I suppose it is about time either the cost of handsets rose or the monthly tarrifs did.

Well, now they have and I suspect it has very little to do with the iPhone. I would say that the fact that o2 won't currently let existing iPhone 3G users upgrade cheaply to the 3GS is further proof of their tougher approach to profits. They are a business after all, not a registered charity.

Ovi Store Fails After The Sale | Symbian-Guru.com

Ovi Store Fails After The Sale | Symbian-Guru.com.

My favourite Symbian based website is Symbian-Guru, it just edges All About Symbian mainly because it provides a full feed in my RSS application whereas the latter provides about 2 lines and nowt else. It offers an unbiased, almost non-fanboy like view of matters Symbian such as this posty about the failures of the Ovi App store to date. It is funny how all the competing platforms were so keen to get an App Store type errr…..application out and how they were all going to show Apple a thing or two about how to do it, about how to operate a completely open and unrestricted set up and how ultimately, to date, none has come close to being as successful as the original. The reasons for this are simple and have been well documented elsewhere and were well know to the platform bosses prior to launch.

Anyway, here is a good post about why the Ovi Store is yet to cut it.

iPhone 3G S Arrives: First Impressions, Video, Speed – Mac Rumors

iPhone 3G S Arrives: First Impressions, Video, Speed – Mac Rumors.

The video is quite interesting as it shows how much quicker the 3GS is over the 3G model via wifi.

O2 Digital News Centre: iPhone 3G S Outsells iPhone 3G on Launch Day

O2 Digital News Centre: iPhone 3G S Outsells iPhone 3G on Launch Day.

See? Exactly what I was saying a couple of weeks ago after the WWDC thingy and iPhone 3GS announcement….not. I really should just keep my gob shut with my predictions.

This has come as a surprise to me though as I genuinely didn’t think it would do better than sales of the 3G version although this is just the first day and there is a long way to go…or so I keep telling myself.

Palm Pre Description – eXpansys UK

Palm Pre Description – eXpansys UK.

Now showing on eXpansys as ‘pre-order’ which could mean a lot or very little but at the very least, is encouraging.

List of Hidden iPhone 3.0 Features and MobileTech Podcast

List of Hidden iPhone 3.0 Features, Launch Unlimited Apps with Spotlight – Mac Rumors.

There are more than 96 of these hidden features listed here which should keep you going for a while. I still haven't updated my iPhone 3G but will get around to it over the weekend when I have some spare time. Oddly, I find myself starting to want a 3GS, quelle surprise…not.

On a side note, I had my most famous web personality comment this week, none other than the cool guy Kevin C Tofel himself part of the jkontherun team who also put of the wonderful MobileTech podcast. That was probably the first podcast I listened to a couple of years back and it has been a constant favourite ever since. It started my podcast craving. It's a real friendly podcast with no airs or graces, you never feel that they are talking down to you as some other podcasts do and they always make you feel very welcome and part of it, not quite sure how they manage that but it just happens.

On a seperate matter entirely, I am getting a new car tomorrow, well it's not new as it is one year old but it is new to me if you know what I mean, and it has mp3 "compatability" listed under the specs. There is a hole below the CD player into which presumably you insert some sort of lead/cable (not one that looks like it attaches to my iPod) and then attach that to your iPod. Problem is, I haven't a clue how to get my iPod working with it…what extra leads do I need or have I got to buy one of those Griffin type FM transmitter things and if so, I assume it has the necessary connection options included?

Cast Of The Capital

Cast Of The Capital on MySpace Music – Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music Videos.

My sisters two boys, Matthew and Steve, formed a band a few years ago and recently played the Rockness festival in Scotland where they attracted the attention of Radio 1’s Steve Lamacq and subsequently recorded an acoustic set for Radio 1. In addition, Matthew will be interviewed live on his Radio 1 show shortly.

Well done chaps and good reward for all the hard work they have put in over the past few years.

Summary of Early iPhone 3G S Reviews – Mac Rumors

Summary of Early iPhone 3G S Reviews – Mac Rumors.

Battery life seems much better, video is quite smooth, camera is just about better and the device is a lot quicker all round, especially impressive when gaming apparantly. These are the general views regarding initial reviews from respected mac and gadget sources which is quite encouraging.

I’m still really happy with my Curve though….if only I could get an RSS app as good as NewsStand.