iandick

The iPhone I’ve Been Waiting For

Another day, another keynote. Some thoughts…

iPhone 3G. Roll on July 11th. An iPhone with 3G, GPS, better battery life, no recessed headphone socket, an App’s store full of software and all for…something less than today’s price. O2 are promising more information tomorrow. Hurry up please. Cheaper American prices come with a 2 year contract.
No upgraded camera, no video chat, 16GB max. Nice to see there’s a reason to buy a new iPhone every so often.
The updated design looks good. I like the thin edge’s and don’t mind the plastic back. Still undecided though – black or white? Black = better looking but more obvious scuff’s and scratches?
MobileMe. Nice upgrade to .Mac which is no more. Option to use me.com e-mail address. The push updates from the cloud look excellent. Not so sure on the web app’s which look slick but how do they perform?
With the GPS will locational app’s really take off? If only the camera res was upgraded as taking geo tagged photo’s is a really nice feature. Missed opportunity?
Nothing much on Snow Leopard, the next version of OS-X. Quality upgrade and not a feature upgrade. Mmmm. Ok. Surely that’s a service pack?
Can’t wait to play Super Monkey Ball. For all the people that say iPhone is meh….show me software on your phone that look, runs and plays like that. Thought so. Band looked pretty cool too. $9.99 for Monkey Ball too. Sounds like a bargain.

I think that it for now. Great announcement, a new phone for me soon. Can’t wait…unless O2 tamper too much with pricing. Surely not.

The Wait Is Almost Over?

It’s almost a year since the iPhone launched in the states and around 7 months since the UK launch. It was a great device and I’ve lusted after one since launch. However I was on an existing contract, without jailbreaking you couldn’t add software and dropping back from 3G just didn’t appeal. The wait is almost over though. The biggest shock at next weeks WWDC would be no announcement of a 3G iPhone.

3G and GPS seem a stick on if you pull together all the rumours. What else would I like? 32GB, better battery life and a well stocked App’s store. MMS and video chat would also be nice to have and it will be interesting if all the .me rumours are true and that .Mac is really changing.

To be honest a 3G iPhone and no other extra’s would suit me just fine. Only slight worry – would O2 increase their tariff’s for 3G. Surely not? 3 days from now we’ll have all the answers as well as a release date. I’d love to be able to get one in the next couple of weeks. Roll on Monday.

Tin Cup

We had another trip down to Roodlea on Friday for a round of golf and some eats afterwards. It was another really good day and despite my handicap being cut I managed to win. Again. Oops. Now the handicap will be well and truly butchered but to be honest it’s about time someone else had a chance of winning.

Managed to snap a couple of videos while I was there, one of them pretty funny too. Sorry Tom.

Golf Lessons – The Chip Shot from Ian D on Vimeo.

Other videos can be seen on Vimeo in HD or at Flickr here, here and here as well as the full photo set on Flickr.

We’re hopefully making another trip down in August. The course we visit is Roodlea Family Golf Centre and it’s perfect for us. It’s 18 par three holes which makes it manageable for those of us (me me me) who don’t play golf. Highly recomended.

I live in Ireland?

Generally my broadband connection behaves pretty well. Indeed I threw up a speed test on Friday night to Flickr showing how close to 20Meg I was getting. Quite impressive especially as it was peak time. I also had a voice in my head saying that posting the speed test will no doubt lead to trouble. Little did I know it would be so soon.

For the first time today I saw adverts on BBC News. As it happened first thing I thought maybe the BBC had decided to cash in it’s sites. I know the rest of the world get adverts so why not UK? But during the day the adverts would sometimes appear, then disappear. Hey ho. Then I tried to access some iPlayer content.

This content isn’t available in your country. What? I so want to see that Doctor Who trailer as well – you know – the one with Davros! So where in the world am I if not in the UK? Trust Google to know…

Yes. Ireland. Clicking on Google took me to what it thought was my home country page. Mmm. What was wrong – Virgin Media or OpenDNS? Disabling OpenDNS showed it was Virgin at fault. A reboot of the modem made no difference. A bit of digging about showed that I wasn’t alone with this issue and that using Virgin’s webcache proxy would solve the problem. So using a proxy of webcache.virginmedia.com and port 8080 I was back in the UK with iPlayer available again. The only snag is the drop in speed. Compare the two speed tests below, the first one with the proxy enabled – quite a difference.

Now I’m not convinced that the webcache speedtest is not reporting right as generally the browsing speeds all felt fine, except they should do, they are cached by Virgin. But site’s that aren’t cached all felt fine too. Weird. I’ll get onto Virgin after the weekend if this doesn’t resolve itself. Sigh. Should have never have done that initial speed test. Jinxed.

Glasgow Birds Eye

I love maps especially Google Maps and Live Search where I can happily spent time scrolling around and viewing the maps. Well I only realised today that Glasgow now has some Birds’ Eye photo’s on Live Search.

I’ve thrown some more up on Flickr. A glorious time waster.

Would it be that bad?

With all the Yahoo/Microsoft talk back on the agenda, I was thinking back to the first Microsoft announcement that they wanted to buy yahoo and the reaction on Flickr. Much like when Yahoo bought out Flickr but 10 times worse. People would leave, service will go to rats etc etc etc. Then I watched this video from TED on Photosynth. Jaw dropping. Would a Microsoft take over really be any different for a lot of the Yahoo services?

Loved the developers reaction to the crowd applause in the video too.

Killionaire Video Test

Playing Halo on Friday and I managed to get a Killionaire. Woo hoo. So to celebrate I’d though it was time to take a video and test not only the Panasonic TZ5’s video performance but also to try out the different online video hosts to see which works out best. The video is of me laying waste with the gravity hammer in Halo. The video was shot in 720p mode using the TZ5. Some shady rawk music was added to increase authenticity.

Ideally I’d like to upload and show the video in HD. For that I’ll be trying Vimeo and Viddler. I’ll also throw the video onto Flickr, Youtube and .Mac website. First up is Vimeo.

Killionaire from Ian D on Vimeo.

The first realisation is that upload speeds really have to pick up as uploading 120Mb HD films is very time consuming. 120Mb is probably over the top for what this video is but it’s more of a test than anything else. Vimeo has a nice easy to use interface and once the video is uploaded it converts it into flash. The quality is very good (well I thought so) and you can also view it full screen. There is also a link to the original video so you can download it if you really wanted to. Currently there is a limit of 500MB of uploads per week.

Continue reading “Killionaire Video Test”

Crumpler Pretty Boy

I’m still loving the Panasonic TZ5 and as it has a really exposed lens, getting a good camera bag was high on the to-do list. After a bit of research I bought a Crumpler Pretty Boy XXS. The TZ5 fits easily in the main compartment and is well protected. There is space for another battery and also a card holder. What I like is that it isn’t a zip that seals the compartment but a large padded flap that seals with velcro and a clip fastener. The second pocket is also velcro sealed. I’ve used it for the last couple of weeks and it’s certainly stopped the TZ5 from scratches, scuffs and any lens damage. Great bag – crap name! Highly recommended for TZ5 owners.

D-Link DIR-655

I picked up the D-Link 655 a few months ago and have been pleased with it. One thing I did notice was that the firmware for the UK router hasn’t been updated since May 07 while the US and Euro versions of the firmware have had numerous updates.

I took the plunge a few days ago and upgraded the routers firmware using the latest Euro version and I’m glad I did. i get better wireless performance and importantly faster wireless performance over a wider range. LAN performance especially to the NAS is also better. No stability issues yet either so it looks like a worthwhile for UK 655 owners. It’s a bit odd that D-Link use different versions for different countries although Euro and USA versions look very similar. Why is the UK firmware versions so old?

Second Coming

So O2, Carphone Warehouse and now Apple in the UK have ran out of 8 & 16GB iPhones. Same is happening in America. It can only mean one thing (hopefully) – iPhone ver 2 with 3G will be here sooner than a soon thing. Or within the next couple of months.

As I was in contract and money was tight I didn’t get the iPhone back in November. But I will be picking up ver 2 assuming it is a 3G version, which it surely must be?! What else would be nice? A decent battery life although reports seem to be mixed on just how much juice the current version eats up. I’d also like a camera > 2MP and video would be smart too for those occasions without my camera. Those features along with the software that will start to flow from 3rd parties in June would make me very happy. Not really fussed with GPS. Oh, I would want MMS. Don’t send/receive many but I’ve had the feature for years so wouldn’t want to be without it now. Flash support too.

The one thing that niggles. If Apple are announcing the phone at the Jobs keynote in June would they really have let their current stock levels drop to zero? That would mean at least 30 days with no phones to sell? Maybe it’s stock mis-managment, maybe it’s clearing the decks and the current phone’s have sold more than expected, maybe it’s building up the hype or maybe it’s nothing? Time will tell.