iPhone Update 2 of 2

Lets get down to business, why should you jailbreak an iPhone. Well, you just should. It's yours and you should be able to do what you want with it!

An absolute must is the Installer application. This gets you connected to the community of developers who are writing apps that can happily sit on your iPhone and add value to it. I have installed, and uninstalled, a good number and there are a few absolutely essential items and more every day. Unless you have WiFi don't consider this though as your data charges will kill you.

One of the essential apps is a good e-booker reader. I travel almost every week on a plane to Auckland and back and this is pretty much my only down time to read. I tried out two different options, one in the cloud and one locally installed and both are good. With the former, Readdle, you upload books to your web space, either as a file upload or by e-mail (which can be multiple files and with tags) and with the later, you move TXT or HTML files to your iPhone. The only downside of Readdle if of course the relatively slow data connection through Vodafone although the free WiFi at Wellington Airport is handy. I much rather have everything on the web but until NZ gets EDGE or blanket free WiFi, I'm snookered and store my books locally. Once connectivity is sorted though, then mobile devices will really take off and become mainstream. The later, (books.app) is great but does require you to know how to get files into the right directory on the iPhone.

If you're a PC user, like me, there is a question mark over how you get files transferred to the iPhone. It is not like a flash drive that you can just plug in but there is a very simple method using SSH. I use WinSCP, an open source SFTP client and have installed OpenSSH on the iPhone and tie the whole thing together through my wireless network. There are loads of sites with really detailed instructions on how to do this, just Google it.

The benefit of the SSH connection is that I can now store any file in any place and can manage the directory structure myself. Certain apps require a bit of poking around to work but there is nothing too advanced.

There are a good number of cool games to trial out which make use of the tilt features but the old favourities are still the best and there are a number of emulators such as the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo and buckets of ROMs around (although there are some legal issues with ROMs if you don't own the original licence). Good if you're stuck in a airport lounge and want to kill something in the style of Atari.

I should mention that the iPhone is also a phone. I'm not too impressed with the Vodafone connection having been used to Telecoms rock solid coverage; there do appear to be some black spots and calls do drop more often. Nonetheless, the SMS is great and the on screen keyboard is excellent once you learn to trust it; I can now type a message significantly faster that my old phone.

So there you have it. Even when the iPhone gets here legally, you need to break it to get the most out of it, at least for the moment anyway. This device is going to set the standard of design and function for many years to come; in the same way that the Audi TT defined a generation of copy-cat sports cars, this phone will spawn a whole army of increasingly sophisticated models but will stand above them for a good few years still.

iPhone Update 1 of 2

Thought it would be useful to talk about my iPhone, now that I've had it a wee while. Whilst it is a very neat device, it does have some minor shortcomings but these are few and it is clear that a ridiculous amount of thought went into the design of the interface and usability.

There is an article in The Dom Post today which gives a reasonable commentary but misses some key points I think. I have been a user of a PDA for about 8 years, starting off with a Cassiopeia E-105 before moving on to a Dell Axim X51v, which was a quantum leap, and now the iPhone, which, again, is a massive leap forward.

Ignoring dimensions, battery life, memory and processing power, some would say not much has changed but you'd be so wrong. What has changed is quite simply the world and how we expect to interact with it; lets leap back in time to 2000.

I used my E105 at work and it was useful as a diary, some fun games and my contacts list. At the time I thought it was compact but I've just dug it out of a draw and it is a monster:



Lots of buttons and I could play music and, at the time, it was a good introduction to mobile computing. Of course, the big difference between then and now is the widespread use of WiFi and ubiquitous cellphone connectivity, but the major change is the simple fact that everything and anything can live in the cloud.

When I first started work in in 1990, I worked for one of London's major investment banks and sat in the equity dealing room with a green screen terminal that was hooked up to a whopping great mainframe computer somewhere; I vaguely recollect it was called Sperry or something and these things were indestructible. During my time, we moved away from the dumb terminal to a IBM PC set-up with a Rumba terminal emulator to connect to our host and a more classical mouse driven interface away from the hundreds of short-codes that we had to know to navigate around screens.

With this change came the requirement to run lots of applications at the same time and so faster PCs were needed and more and more memory. We've now come full circle. Here I am with a powerful Windows PC with oodles of memory and storage yet I upload my life to the cloud with Flickr and use Google Docs and it is the speed of my connection to this world that is important.

The reason this works for me is simple; I don't live my life at home yet I still want to be connected to my home life. There is no need to actually connect to my home PC as I just go to where the information is and voilà. It is this ability to connect to my personal data, from anywhere, that has revolutionised the mobile device. Whether it is my calendar, my contacts, my documents or my photos, I want, and demand, access to it from anywhere but I don't need to actually carry it with me.

Think of money. You used to have to carry it with you and then came plastic. You could leave you cash in the bank, earning interest, and still access it from a shop. Data is the same. Why carry it with you when you just need to be able to get to it when you want it. Like money, data in the cloud earns interest but the interest is the way in which disparate pieces of information clump together to be more useful; think of adding geolocation tags to photos and looking at them in a map view or pulling contact address details into a street map linked to a GPS device.

I don't want to have to remember to synchronise, I just expect everything to be connected and available to me whenever I want.

The iPhone gives me this, just. There still isn't enough good WiFi coverage in Wellington but the power of the iPhone comes from the literally thousands of sites that have popped up to support information sitting in the cloud. I'll cover off some of these shortly and why a jailbroken iPhone and home wireless network are a must.

Never thought I'd say this, but....

.....thank you to young and knowledgeable sales assistant in Dick Smith. Someone slap me. Did I dream it or did the young guy actually know what he was talking about. I'm not exactly a techie but I know bits and pieces and my general tactic is to appear ignorant and assess the quality of the sales advice. If I'm being scammed, I walk out claiming a silent moral victory.

Today I wanted a wireless router to replace my crappy old D-Link 302G freebie that I'd been using since Telecom dumped it on me a few years back and which survived the switch to iHug. I'd never got round to changing it and I know it has loads of faults, least of all it's inability to cope with any torrent and web connection at the same time; it is dated mind you and I wanted an excuse to have a wireless network for my iPhone.

Well I knew what I wanted, at least 2 wired connections and an ability to connect a couple of wireless devices. There are a few options, all very similar (and probably the same under the skin), so I asked a few questions and got intelligent answers. $129 later and a LinkSys ADSL Home Gateway (4 ports and up to 32 wireless devices) is mine. Cheap as.

Took all of 2 minutes to configure, and now I'm running a torrent at over 280Kb/s which is better than the sub 50Kb/s from before, and I have my iPhone motoring and surfing. All together. Damn, the only bandwidth restriction is only having ten fingers.....

Zoo Food

When I heard the news about the Eve Dixon cafe closing at the Zoo, due to some ridiculous decision about revenue and blah blah Spotless Catering blah blah, Mrs R and I agreed that we would not step foot in there again in silent protest. We used to enjoy a good coffee and a brunch prior to taking the kids around the zoo and would plan the trip that way.

Well, it looks like we're not alone. We were at the zoo today; went in at 10:30am and the cafe was pretty empty. Left the zoo at 12:15pm and there were empty tables everywhere. I expect at some point, a bean counter will suggest that the zoo just doesn't need a cafe as clearly people are not eating there. At some point in the future they'll work out that the old cafe was a meeting place and that most parents with young kids were looking for 45 minutes of peace prior to heading into the day and that the Zoo benefited as a result. I suspect that those people have found another spot now and they have taken their cash with them.

At least the lioness was hungry.

They Don't Like It Up 'Em

Had a bit of a party this week. First off was the appointment of two new oncologists to Wellingtons Hospital which has been a personal crusade; second up was the announcement that the Children's Hospital would be moving into better premises which will give the kids a much better environment and provide the staff with better working conditions.

And the cherry on the cake?

A bitter sweet victory as a lot of people will lose money but the failure of these utter shits (in my personal opinion) after playing with other peoples money for far too long. May the earth swallow them whole. Sadly, I'm sure they'll have money spirited in cross-company loans to keep them fat and in good wine for a while but hopefully any future enterprises can be shunned when they are exposed as the backers or shareholders. It took a few years, but I knew they'd get it in the end and revenge is a dish best served cold.

Workin' too hard

Friday night. Arrived home and it was still light and the girls were still up. Kinda rare over the last few weeks with travel and work and other commitments.

Little Miss R "I know who YOU are!". Such a small statement and very innocent, yet I'm saddened to hear it. Time to reassess what I'm doing I think.

Truly Mobile Blogging

In March 2006 I conducted an experiment with the help of Alan. I had recently bought a Dell Axim X51v, a very neat little device which had both Bluetooth and WiFi and ran Windows Mobile 5.0, and I wanted to test the mobile abilities. I spent a week blogging from different cafes around Wellington to test the WiFi coverage and conduct some coffee reviews.

What I found was that MoJo was the best coffee (which validated what Alan and I already knew) and that the CafeNet connection at Rise on the Terrace was the fastest by far. So that was exactly 2 years ago.

Now I have an iPhone; bought from "man on street" in Auckland with a handover of folding stuff in exchange for a tiny black box with a shiny new iPhone inside, all ready for a Vodafone Sim. I plugged it in and bam, everything works. No set-up, no mucking around, it just works; "Man on Street" did the breaking and this baby is truly revolutionary.

I have spent a week now and I cannot put it down; I'm on a massive data plan, thanks to my employer who (quite recently and finally) recognises the value of keeping on top of this stuff, and have been installing (and uninstalling), oodles of apps across the Vodafone network and any convenient WiFi spots.

What I find most incredible is the amount of apps available. It strikes me that we have entered a new era of collaboration where individuals with a desire to develop cool stuff and share it with the world have found a common place to do this.

On my Dell I bought a lot of extra stuff to make it more useful; one of these was a HP 12C emulator which is something I used to use pretty much every minute of every day, less so in my life in NZ, but old habits die hard. I just downloaded a HP12C for the iPhone and, as you can see below, both the Dell and the iPhone are exact replicas. The only difference is that one cost me dosh and had to be installed and one is obtained by magic with no fuss.



My Dell had my calendar. My iPhone has my calendar. Syncing Outlook through iTunes is easy; using ActiveSync was fine and gave a bit more control between my work laptop and home PC but I don't miss it. I do miss the Bluetooth sync as I'll have to buy another docking station but whatever.

The other big use of my Dell was the eReader for a vast library of eBooks that I had been ploughing through. I travel a lot and it was very convenient to sit on a plane and read in down time. With the iPhone I found Readdle where I can upload my books and retrieve them online from anywhere; I can even just e-mail the files to my Readdle account and store my library in the cloud; how cool is that.

The best advantage of course is that I now have live e-mail from GMail and my Pop mail server with iHug and can respond to anything. I'm working on how to tie this into my work exchange server and I have heard that there is a man over the ditch who is doing just that. I have abandoned Telecom (who are the major provider of services to my employer), ported my 027 to Vodafone and will be roaming in Australia on Tuesday; Telecom offer a loan phone for those travelling overseas and that sucks when you want everything in one device.

All in all, the iPhone is a quantum leap in integration of technology. The changes in two years are simply staggering and a good comparison is my two daughters who are about 2 years apart; a lot changes in two years, don't you think?

Bookhabit Launches

Saw a post on Rod Drurys blog last week about Bookhabit, a neat new way to get published if you are an author wanting to get your book out there. Through a new relationship at work, I managed to get an invite to the launch party from Stafan of WebFund and got to see what it is all about first hand.

The idea is brilliant and just to get you interested, the lovely Clare, who is the smarts behind the concept, is running a competition with a prize of US$5,000 (yep, real dollars). Go see. Go write and good luck.

The Queen Leaves

A short stop for her and what a day. The town was packed, the weather was great and Wellington sure showed off. She was glorious up close and simply towered above the wharf.

She made her way out, just after 6pm tonight.

Out of the harbour.

Past the airport.

On her way to the Cook Straight.

The Queen Arrives

The Queen Victoria is here. With a loud blast on the horn, at 7:30am this morning, she made her way through the early morning mist towards the berth by the Westpac Stadium. She is simply huge, like a skyscraper on its side and dwarfs the stadium. We're going to head in to town later to get a close up tour.



Just discovered there is a live web cam on-board, link here.