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Usually stuff I’ve written personally, stuff I think is pretty good.

Wherefore art thou, iPhone? (Part I)

Alternate title: iPhone 4 review. ‘Cos this is what this is.

It’s just a phone, guys.

Aha, but you see, dear reader, that is where the distinction ends. It’s a phone, but it’s also a gateway to the Internet. An incredible communication device. An excellent media player. A brilliant email client. And even a capable games console.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the iPhone 4.

As I stood outside T-Life Northgate, eagerly lining up for the midnight launch of the most anticipated smartphone yet, some Optus-reseller employee comes up to us. After a short chat about mobile telco’s (there is no comparison between Telstra and Optus, especially in Tasmania), he decided to give us a sneak-peek at his stores’s demo unit. A couple of hurriedly-tweeted TwitPics later, some Angry Birds launch-time speed tests between the 4, a 3GS and a 3G, and not a few “oohs” and “aahs” at that gorgeous retina display, and our iPhone 4 lust hit fever pitch.

That last hour was the longest hour of my life. But it was cool, because I got to spend it chilling with some very cool Apple camaraderie – who provided an ample supply of entertainment, gummy bears, and decent conversation. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

After what seemed like an age (but in reality was only five hours) I was second into the store, behind the very nice man who had provided my night’s transport – I felt I owed him that much, at least. Out again not 20 minutes later, one 32GB iPhone 4 in hand, I was the first out – beating the first guy in by mere seconds. The front half of the line (which by now spanned more than 100 people, easily) applauded me as the first to emerge from the T-Life gauntlet, and I was the first person in Tassie with the Apple’s most highly-coveted offering so far.

Bringing it home later that night (or early that morning, as the case was) and setting it up from the comfort of my own bed was an absolute joy. Downloading my most frequently used apps, setting my email, Twitter, Facebook, IM accounts – the first thing I noticed was how much faster the thing was. Downloads, installs, any operation at all, just flew along. Sheer unadulterated speed oozing from every animation, every transition, every app launch, every fast app switch. And no keyboard lag!

Early the next morning I took out my cut up SIM (that I had converted from a mini-SIM to a micro-SIM the night before with my handy-dandy SIM cutter), and put in the official micro-SIM that had been provided as it had been activated and was ready to go. No dramas there.

Spent the whole of Friday babying the thing – the whole experience wasn’t as “wow” as it was when I originally got an iPhone almost two years ago now, but it was still a worthy upgrade (thanks in part to iOS 4 suffering serious performance issues on an iPhone 3G). Again, speed was the most noticeable thing here – the phone was markedly more responsive. It kept me entertained through dull Games Physics lectures, and was an excellent public-transport companion thanks to the small music selection I had synced on earlier that morning.

The camera is nothing short of amazing. The colours of any photo just “pop”, and it’s nice to finally have a camera that has an autofocus that actually works – which means macro photos are now able to be taken without any of that blurriness the 3G camera exhibited. While I haven’t yet used the video camera for any serious purpose, I’m sure the opportunity will eventually arise.

While the screen is the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever laid eyes on (if I had a girlfriend this sentence would read differently), to be honest you have to be looking pretty hard to notice the difference in everyday things (typing out messages, – maybe it’s because I’m using it with an anti-glare screen protector (which sacrifices screen clarity for a more matte look [as opposed to the glossy]), or maybe it’s because my eyesight is absolutely terrible. Either way, the difference is figuratively night and day when placed to a previous-generation device like the iPhone 3G or 3GS (as they have the same screen). Text is one of the things that benefits the most from the much higher pixel density and improved screen tech (IPS vs traditional TN) – increased contrast and no more jagged edges means text is now clear as, well, crystal. The new font is a welcome change as well!

Technologically, it’s very impressive – the best mobile display on the market paired with an impressive (but not exhaustive, Apple aren’t known to have features for the sake of it) feature list, and one of the best smartphone platforms on the market today? A winning combination, indeed.

Your testimony, please.

Alternate title: testify, oldbag! (If you don’t get that, you clearly haven’t played enough Pheonix Wright. [link opens iTunes])

Okay, I’ll admit it: there are times when I think there would be nothing worse than going to church on a Sunday. There, I said it. Sometimes it’s because I played too much Bad Company 2 the night before and didn’t get to sleep until 1am and sometimes it’s because I’ve had a terribad week (in terms of sleep, anyway, averaging 5-6 hours per night).

My own laziness aside, it’s not until I actually drag myself out of bed, get ready, and sit down at church that I realise I’m glad to be there.

As I type this on my very-soon-to-be-replaced iPhone 3G, my mind flicks back to last Sunday…

If you’re a regular church-goer you’ll know that a testimony (sometimes also called a witness) is where some member of the congregation tells the other members how they came to be a Christian.

This one particular guy from the congregation stands up, somehow manages to mumble into the microphone “I really don’t want to be up here”, and then gets on with his testimony.

Well, if you could call it a testimony.

Now, I’ve said a friendly “hello” to this guy once or twice, but for all I know he’s just another churchgoer like me. I never see him come with a partner/wife though, but that’s not uncommon.

Anyway, he gets on with his testimony, and because he’s usually a pretty quiet guy he reads it out from a piece of paper. Which is fine, it’s normal to have notes or something. But I digress. Maybe it’s the fact he’s reading his testimony, maybe it’s just his actual testimony is amazing, but what he describes is actually pretty out there – not outside the bounds of reality by any means, but enough to make you stop and wonder.

Maybe it’s the fact that most testimonies I’ve heard are relatively the same (having Christian parents, going to a Christian school, etc, etc), but his story just makes me think. I won’t attempt to recall all of it here, but you hear stories of people coming from fractured families, having abusive parents, entering destructive cycles and so on, but it’s not until you actually hear it from a person that you know that it really hits home.

Not that he did come from a fractured family or had abusive parents, mind you – nay, his problem mainly stemmed from a lack of self-confidence and the discovery of alcohol – but it made me stop and think that yeah, that shit is real.

Maybe I’ve lived a fairly sheltered life. Maybe it’s because I’m lucky to have the parents that I do, and the lifestyle that I have.

I’m not really trying to say anything here, apart from the fact that I’m glad I went to church that day. 🙂

Enjoy the tunes, indeed.

@bdyling You are excellent, thanks. We did try to get the balance right. Enjoy the tunes 🙂Fri May 14 01:12:05 via TweetDeckKristen Boschma
Kristen_Boschma

Enjoy the tunes, indeed.

I guess this particular story begins with Telstra. They ran a competition a little while ago for “social reviewers” of the HTC Desire, currently the flagship Android handset available in Australia. The HTC Desire boasts pretty impressive specs, and judging by the amount of tweets, Telstra seem to be pushing this one pretty hard, far harder than they ever promoted the iPhone (both models). Maybe they prefer Android to Apple’s “walled garden”, maybe it’s because they can load the device with as much BigPond-branded content as they desire (hurr, hurr, get it? Desire?), but whatever the reason, it’s certainly getting some attention.

As this is a pretty big deal for Telstra, having “social reviewers” means that it gets exposure, and all that yummy PR stuff which I won’t go into here. As a bonus, all the “social reviewers” get a free HTC Desire handset to hang onto, but they have to, as their namesake suggests, review the Desire.

Being fairly active on Twitter, and having a randomly-regularly updated blog, I thought I was in with a shot. Add to the fact that I resided in a semi-rural area (Tasmanians made up some 3% [or maybe 6%, I can’t remember] of the 2000+ entries they received Australia-wide), and I thought I had a real shot at this whole “reviewing a product via social media” thing.

Evidently, I was wrong.

Anyway, it turns out I didn’t get in. Boo. More on this in a second.

As a consolation prize for giving up 15 minutes of my time filling out the online application, I did, however, receive a $15 BigPond Music voucher for my personal info.

Tonight’s mission, should you choose to accept is, it to find $15 worth of music to download via BigPond Music. Wish me luck! =}Fri May 14 09:11:25 via TweetieBenny Ling
bdyling

Wanting to get my money’s worth, I set forth to purchase $15 worth of songs from BigPond Music. The songs that I chose meant I actually ended up having to pay about a dollar more, but I guess that was the idea all along.
Anyway, I ended up grabbing the following songs:

  • My First Kiss [feat Ke$ha] – 3OH!3
  • Airplanes [feat Hayley Williams] – B.o.B
  • Pyromania – Cascada
  • Not Myself Tonight – Christina Aguilera
  • Caught In The Crowd – Kate Miller-Heidke
  • Your Love Is My Drug – Ke$ha
  • Blah Blah Blah – Ke$ha
  • Burn It To The Ground – Nickelback
  • If We Ever Meet Again – Timbland
  • Drops Of Jupiter – Train
  • Mr Mysterious – Vanessa Amorosi

Say what you want about my music tastes (I wish I could say I set out to purchase the worst of the worst music currently available, but sadly not), but I chose this music based on the top 200 list on iTunes. I’d listen to the preview in iTunes, and then if I vaguely recognised the song (and didn’t already have it in my iTunes library) I’d add it to my BigPond Cart.

At this point, I have a couple thoughts to share. One, the BigPond music website isn’t the most user-friendly or accessible. It certainly has an alright search feature, but it places the songs where you have to scroll a considerable amount to find the song you’re after and add it to your cart. I didn’t even try using the previews as I knew it would have been in some horrible Flash implementation, but in the end too many clicks, too much scrolling, and a whole lot of wasted space made for a convoluted experience. Oh, and the shopping cart was in Flash too.

That being said, I wasn’t sure what quality or flavour of DRM the music downloaded from BigPond would come in – I had a hunch it was DRM free and of reasonable quality, but I didn’t know for sure. Upon completing my download I was pleasantly surprised that the files were completely DRM-free and of 256kbps or greater – the majority of my files are actually in 320kbps MP3. Nothing like iTunes’ own 256kbps “purchased AAC” that laces the file with your user ID so that they can track if you share a file simply by using some strings command, if my memory serves me correctly. I did have to re-download the artwork (which came pre-embedded in the files, but 128×128 is sooo 1998) and raise the volume of the tracks a bit, but apart from that I was pleasantly surprised.

Two more thoughts about the music itself and I’ll move on to talking about some social media things.

One, the price. Most of the tracks that I downloaded were $1.65, and others still were just 99c. Compare that to iTunes’ current extortionist price of $2.19 for the more popular songs and $1.69 for pretty much everything else, and you’ve got a real situation. I’m not saying i’ll give up the iTunes store anytime soon, just that I was previously unaware that decent alternatives exist. Ignorance on my part, but it is what it is.

Two, people these days listen to utter shit. Seriously. Going through each and every song in the top 200 list in iTunes, listening to the previews along the way made me lose all faith in humanity on more than one occasion. I mean, that beaver fellow? And some other so-called “rap artists” who couldn’t produce a decent track if their lives depended on it? Gimme a break. The kind of music on that list downright horrified me, pure and simple.

Finally, the social media part.

While I won’t deny being a little miffed at not winning (being able to experience a Desire* for a month or so would be an awesome introduction for the next-generation iPhone due to launch in about a month), I do have a couple of gripes about how the whole thing went down.

Now I can understand why Telstra wanted the most influential, the most socially “out there” people for their “social reviewers” program. It makes sense because they’d want as much coverage as possible if they’re going to be outlaying some amount of money north of $20,000 for this Desire social review program. I’m no expert on what the marketing industry is like, but I’d infer that a substantial sum like that is a pretty big deal, especially for a single handset in Australia’s largest telecommunications company’s arsenal. Someone up in Telstra’s upper echelons must really like that phone.

Maybe it’s because I’m a little too bitter than I really ought to be about the whole thing, but if Telstra wanted the best of the best social media people to review the thing, why couldn’t they have just hand-picked the people to begin with? Hey, look at so-and-so, they follow over 1000 people on twitter, they’re followed by quadruple that amount, and their recent tweets express a desire to check out the Desire (previous puns notwithstanding), let’s pick them! From there, those actually interested in the program could ave gone on to be shortlisted, and so on and so forth.

Instead, they invited everyone in Australia who was over the age of 18 and interested in FREE STUFF that had a decent social profile on the internet to enter their competition, setting up a whole lot of people to be disappointed. To be honest they probably weren’t expecting as many people to apply as they did, but the lesson here is to never underestimate the intensity of human greed. Or to follow more people and have a Daring Fireball level of activity on your blog before you apply to be a social media reviewer for Telstra.

But it doesn’t end there.

You see, the numbers of this social media review program went a little like this: 25 HTC Desires for the social reviewers valued at $779 each, with $100 of Telstra pre-paid credit tacked onto that for a total of just over $21,000. But that’s only what the official terms and conditions mention. What isn’t mentioned is the $15 BigPond Music credit (presumably) given to all the people that weren’t accepted into the program – all 1975+ of them (Telstra only states that they received over 2000 entries). It doesn’t take a genius to work out that they gave out over $30,000 in vouchers. Like Beau, I too think that they should have had more Desires available and less vouchers. Why Telstra, why?

Doing some serious stalking of the people actually involved with this whole shebang reveal two interesting things – I know a couple of people on the list by name (and reputation) only, and there’s even one person from Franklin, Tasmania – not too much further south than where I live.. FFS. No one from WA that immediately stood out, but I’m sure Telstra chose someone.

Also, looking over their social profiles reveals that most of them are now “Telstra-branded”, and by that I mean they all have a little disclaimer saying: “I have been given a HTC Desire handset by Telstra free of charge to review. Comments expressed by me reflect my user experience and personal opinion”. Read into that what you will.

Final thoughts, and I’ll wrap it up – just before I posted this I came across an eye-opening article on Why I went back to the iPhone from the HTC Desire. It’s a brilliant read, and affirms my decision; I’ll take Apple’s walled garden any day, thanks! Maybe if they gave those same reviewers the next-generation iPhone to review… ? Would certainly make for some eye-opening comparisons – how much do ordinary consumers care about what resolution the screen is? Or what format it captures it’s video in? Or even how it handles different audio codecs? Or how the memory management on Android is anything but automatic? I mean, closing the Sense UI over an app? Seriously?

Signs I’m feel way, way too bitter about this: 1500 words, man. One thousand, five hundred. How’s that for in-depth, Telstra?

Oh, and by the way – comments, criticisms, and any inferences expressed by me reflect my user experience and personal opinion.

Isn’t that the norm on a blog anyway? 🙂

* not to mention the puns. Oh, the puns.

Why I dont write more often

Short answer: I’m lazy.

Long answer: I’m laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy.
(Whoa, just noticed that WordPress doesn’t seem to wrap long text?) Lame Zero Punctuation puns not withstanding, it’s not just because I’m lazy, it’s that most of the time, the time spent writing could be doing something equally as rewarding, time-wise.

I just counted up last week’s articles that weren’t automatically generated, (i.e. I had to actually do something to blog them, even if it was just hitting a couple buttons), and I counted eight. Just eight. Not ten, not even nine, but eight. At an average of just over one a day, that’s abysmal (more on this later).

Okay, so that’s maybe not the full truth. Maybe it’s because the content I usually want to write about deserves so much more than the paltry couple paragraphs I can produce in any short amount of time. As you may have seen from the Severus quasi-build log, it’s hard to actually put everything I want down if I just say to myself “yep, gotta get this done within the next hour or so”. Not saying that it can’t be done, but it’s certainly a little harder than it needs to be.

Maybe it’s something to do with my writing style (I can usually just bash out any paragraph without going on too much of a tangent), and maybe some forward planning would do me good, but I’m not sure. To truly cover some of the topics I want and do them the justice they deserve, I’d start to be creating articles as long as Anandtech’s Gargantuan SSD Articles of Death – and you, dear reader, without any knowledge of iPhone app Instapaper or the attention span longer than a minute (I’ve seen the Analytics logs; you can’t fool me!), would utterly hate me for it.

It’s not that theres any huge lack of content, either. I might have told you about this before, but I have a note on an app on my iPhone which I write notes in about good things I might want to blog about – once upon a time I would have told you that I kept it as a secret backup store for my weekly blog postings (back in the day when Freshbytes wasn’t, you know, defunct), but now, it’s merely a place to draw inspiration from, a place to put long-term thoughts that don’t necessarily go in a tweet, status update, or elsewhere. Sometimes I get lonely at night and bring out that list again, but for all other times, it’s just the keyboard and I.

When I talk about eight being a pathetically small number for a blog in a week, think of the times where you’ve visited the site and found all (12?) of the posts on the front-page to be different from the last time you visited. Hopefully this isn’t a huge number, and with any luck, it’ll be zero. While I believe in having awesome new content as often as possible, sometimes there are too many things on these big, bad internets, and some things don’t make the cut. That being said, if I ever put some ridiculous number of things up in a day, I officially allow you to come over to my house and trash my room. Or whatever makes you feel good.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I LOVE writing. I’m no Shakespeare, but there’s something intrinsically satisfying about being able to string together words which convey a simple thought, concept, or rambling. That’s just awesome, and being able to do so in a coherent manner ever more so.

So, dear reader, I apologise for what may as well be the umpteenth time for not writing as often as I’d like, and to those who maintain their own (completely user-created) blogs, I salute you. I know full well that you’re a better blogger than I am.

The moral high ground?

Had an interesting situation work the other day. When you work in retail, it always seems to start with customers, so that’s where I’ll start…

Customer comes in store, wants to connect his phone to his laptop to use it as a modem – and there’s only one catch – it’s some Samsung piece of technology. It’s certainly no iPhone – clunky, menus are horrible, but it seems to work just fine.

Now, bear in mind this isn’t the first time he’s come in asking for the same thing. The last time he came in store, I’m pretty sure he was running 10.4 Tiger, and there was a little more hackery required to get it going. Of course, being the genius that I am, I did manage to get it working that time – but not without some serious Google-fu on my part…

Anyway, he comes in, and wants the exact same thing done again. Evidently, he must have had a hard drive failure somewhere between the last time he left the store and right now, else he wouldn’t be asking for my help (nor would he be running 10.5 Leopard).

For those of you who don’t keep up-to-date with the intricasies of the OSX operating system, 10.5 introduced generic modem connection scripts for many different types of dialup/3G/UMTS/HSDPA modems, including mobile-as-modem ones. This affected me in two ways: one, it made it (theoretically) easier to connect to networks using bluetooth dial-up networking, and two, it negated the use of third party generic modem scripts to connect. You’d think that these two facts would make for an easier connection, but you would be oh-so-wrong… So wrong indeed…

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The Enthusiasm Experiment

As the holidays are nearly over, I’d thought I’d do a quick wrap-up of a couple little things I found interesting.

As for the enthusiasm experiment, well, I’ll get to that later. Bear with me for a moment.

Over these past holidays I’ve done a couple of things – from buying domain names, helping friends get up-and-running with my CMS of choice, WordPress, finishing games I’ve wanted to play for a while (more on that in another blog post later on), even the ocassional blog post, and pretty much everything in-between, and now, as a last-minute project, I’m currently in the process of doing an almost complete re-build of my PC (as well as a not-too-cheap upgrade to i7 – yes, pics soon). It’s been good fun, but the one thing I spent the majority of my time on (during January, at least) was work.

Ah, work. People tell me I’ll have plenty of time to work later in my life, but my counter to that is that I like being a consumer whore and buying new and shiny things. I’ve been known to make fairly bad decisions on gear before (which is one of the reasons of my curent upgrade, actually), but add the fact that I pay about $90 of bills every month, and being unemployed is not a situation I’d like to find myself in anytime soon.

Anyway, work. I’ve heard that I’ve been described as “not an extrovert”, and for the most part, that rings true. The thing is, my job isn’t just to be some sales-droid – what I sell can sometimes be pretty specialised, and sometimes that involves – shock, horror – actually talking to people – and not only that (but doing so face-to-face. Oh, the humanity!), but sometimes it involves being a cheerful sonofabitch. Normally, that’s okay – however, for reasons I still can’t fathom, mornings aren’t the best time for me, and it generally can take a while for me to “perk up” – and when you have to be ready from the get-go at 9am, sometimes this can be a little daunting, which can lead to general grumpiness, and so on.

The enthusiasm experiment came to me in one of my brighter moments one morning, just as I was about to board the bus. The thing that struck me was that I was just “making do”, and just taking on whatever came, reacting to things that happened. I wasn’t proactive enough. I wasn’t taking control of my own emotions as well as I should have been, and that lead to general sulkiness (yes, that is an industry-approved term). So, to kick start my new take on life I tweeted about it(twice, actually – once that day, and then once again the next), and from there, it was all sunny days, roses, and all those other happy-feeling emotives I can’t think of right now.

The result? I feel much happier now. I’d hate to turn this into one of those feel-good, happy-go-lucky posts, but that’s kinda what it’s like. Stuff like failing my re-test for my Ls doesn’t affect me as much as it did anymore – sure, I’ll still hate on things, just like everyone does (hey, maybe I’ll even tweet about stuff that gets me down), but for the most part, it’s smooth sailing from here, chaps!