iPhone 4 Review

 

Well I have had my iPhone 4 for over 2 weeks now, so I think its about time I made some comments on the thing.

Look and Feel

The first thing you think on picking up the phone is “wow, this is well built”. It really is too, nicely machined, and it feels right in the hand. The new squarer feel to the device means it sits very nicely with your hands right over the antenna (more on that later!).

Apparently the back of the phone is glass too, so you need to be careful not to bump into things as you walk along. Apple claim that the screen is twenty times stronger than on the old iPhone, but that not the kinda thing I am going to test with my own device.

A friend of mine has told me that there are scratches on his phone already. He is relatively careful with his phone and its in a case, but there is no screen protector. My own phone remains unscathed. I have put it in my Nexus Ones neoprene sleeve though. I do tend to be a bit overprotective with my phone. My previous iPhone 3G stayed in a pocket without keys or change in, but had a habit of picking up bits of tissue in the dock and headphone connectors.

Top tip, unless you like scraping bits of tissue out of your iPhones most delicate regions with a paperclip stick it in some sort of case!

My wifes 3GS has always felt a bit flimsy to me, none of the newer models have felt quite as good as the original metal backed iPhone. the 4 however feels better than this. Its helped by the quality of the volume buttons, the slider that puts the phone into silent mode and the ‘home’ button. Which feels far more clicky that previous efforts.

Software

the iOS 4 software is a reasonable evolution of the device. There is some multitasking finally built in – accessed by double clicking the home button. Frankly its a bit rubbish. Yes you can now set last.fm playing in the background while you go to Safari to check out a page. Who really did this though? I am willing to bet that most people just used the iPod app anyway, which always ran in the background.

The fact that navigation apps run better is all very well, but again I dont need a nav app every day. What I would like to happen is for my Twitter app to run properly in the background, updating itself so when I come back to it I DONT NEED TO REFRESH IT. As you can probably guess this doesnt happen.

I am probably being slightly unfair as I am sure that this kind of behaviour will be supported in an app update rather than an operating system one.

Frankly its just fast app switching in most cases rather than true multitasking

The most visually obvious changes are wall paper and folders. The fact you can group all your ‘Travel’ apps altogether in one folder is lovely, not revolutionary but very nice indeed. And I can set my own backgrounds and nit just the lock screen? Fine – they arent animated as they were in Android but at the same time they dont suck the battery dry in about 2 hours either.

Speed

Yes the phone is faster to launch apps, play games, surf the web and carry out tasks like that. One area is definitely faster is in obtaining a GPS lock, its practically instantaneous. Nice job Apple.

I have yet to see it ‘lagging’ doing anything, which was a  real problem on my 1ghz N1. Sometimes the android phone would take up to a minute to respond to a key press in the Messaging application. Tiresome? Yup.

Suffice it to say the iPhone is plenty fast enough. I don’t think its a dramatic speed up compared to the 3GS (massive over the 3G) but its good enough for me.

Lock Screen & Notifications

I may have hinted about this before. The iPhone lock screen and notifications suck. To be completely fair, the standard Android lock screen REALLY sucks. Slide left to unlock (which you can only activate in the first place by clicking the top button, why not the click wheel Google HUH?, huh?) or slide to the right to silence. Its pants.

You can make it full of win though by installing FlyScreen ,http://www.myflyscreen.com/ which shows you all sorts of things that you might want to see without having to DO anything to your phone, like…see what calls you have missed, or emails, or texts.

The iPhone unlocks the same way as it always has, slide to the right. It also gives you useful info like 2 missed calls and 2 texts waiting. Doesn’t give you nearly enough info though. A bit pants. You need to unlock and then hunt around all your apps looking for the little red number badges against them to really figure it out.

That’s the ‘notification’ side of this, all notifications on the iPhone take the form of a blue rectangle on the screen with VERY limited info on it.

On Android you get the bar at the top that populates with all the information that you need to know, number of missed called, texts, tweets emails etc. If you want more detail you slide it down and get the detail. Awesome. Simple and very effective.

In fact I think its the only thing I really liked about Android.

Unified Inbox

A small bit of Android bashing again…sorry. Why do I need 2 email apps? 1 for gmail and one for everything else! 1 is fine thank you.

iPhone now does a unified inbox, that it all your email forms one steady stream into one place. Nice. You can still view them separately but really, why would you?

You can also have multiple exchange accounts on the device, I use google to sync all my calendars, mail and contacts which uses exchange to ‘push’ it all to my phone. My work account is Exchange based and does the same. They. Just. Work. Together.   END OF

Nice

Battery Life

Is great. With normal use I can now go 2 days between charges. By normal use I mean:

• Frequent checking of Twtter
• WiFi on all the time
• 3G on all the time
• Push email/contacts/calendar from 2 accounts
• There are currently 22 active ‘multitasked’ apps running

Now that’s pretty good I think. N1 did 12 at a push, I now feel comfortable leaving the house without a charger.

Reception

Yeah, this is the kicker I think. There has been an awful lot of press about the iPhone 4’s flawed antenna. Even non-geeks know by know that if you hold your phone a certain way its going to drop calls.

Yes I can make it do it. If I carry out the ‘grip of death’ and cover the antenna I can make the reception gradually drop bars and switch to ‘searching’. I could do this on the N1 as well by cupping the bottom of the phone. Obviously I had never bothered to even try it until the iPhone issues came up.

In real world use however. I haven’t had an issue with it, calls seem clearer, none have dropped on me so far…

Its fine, I wouldn’t take my phone back, most people use a case (I don’t) its a bit of a non issue really

However

It is fairly crap by Apple to not really acknowledge that there IS a problem and telling users that there is a software fix (we are going to display fewer bars) is a rubbish response. Give away a free case and acknowledge the problem Apple. Sheesh

Facetime

its a pointless gimmick. Get used to it

Summing Up

I hope this has been a fairly balanced review, if anything it may come over as slightly negative. Why am I using the iPhone then?

Deep Breath

Basically it just works, it doesn’t crash randomly, it will let me answer frakking calls, text messages get sent without floating around in the ether for up to 2 days. its consistent app setting are all controlled in ‘Settings’ rather than in multiple menus buried within the app themselves, the app store contains genuinely useful, well built apps

Its good. Get one!

Tomorrow

Tomorrow I will have a go at Part one of an iPhone 4  review, any questions you are dying to ask then fire away!

Just over a month with an iPad

Well I have had my iPad (32GB, 3G) for just over a month now, I have seen terms like ‘game changer’ applied to it I don’t know that I would take that far but its a pretty nice device for most people.

Right out of the gates this is NOT a laptop replacement, if you are a hardcore email warrior and novelist its not going to cut it for you. I would guess that even with a keyboard attached (however you want to do that bluetooth or via the dock) its not an editing powerhouse. Its simply too much hassle to keep reaching up and poking the screen whilst typing on the keyboard.

It is however the ultimate ‘edge case’ computer. By that I mean that its an amazing little device to keep on the edge of the sofa, or on your bedside table. For those moments when you want to pick something up to check IMDB or facebook its perfect. Its there, its on and to borrow an appleism. It just works.

The Travel Experience

To say that thats all that it is good for is perhaps being a little unfair, I have taken it away on business trips, its survived a Ryanair flight to Belfast and a First Great Western Trip to London. On those trips I didnt take anything else. No paper notes, no briefcase and not even a charger.

The Belfast trip I read checked the WiFi at the airport, read a bunch of papers for the duration of the 1 hour flight. Checked the Taxis location with the GPS as we drove through Belfast. (I wasn’t sure we HAD to go down the Falls road!) then took continuous notes whilst in 5 hours worth of meetings. In all about 10 pages of closely packed notes into Pages. On the way back I read a book on the Kindle app. I still had 60% battery left when I got home.

My laptop would have been on its knees. I would have needed to charge it at least twice, it would have been heavy, bulky and a continual worry to me. It also would have been a bit of a barrier to communication  whilst sitting in the meetings as the lid open of the lappy can be a bit rude to say the least. From this point of view it was amazing successful. As a nice aside it attracted a group of pleasant young ladies wishing to lay their hands on it! This is a side affect that is bound to wear off as people start to see more of them.

The London trip was a similar experience, excepting the fact I used the iPad to drive the presentation that I was giving. It did catch me out slightly that it doesn’t send a signal to the projector until you hit ‘play’ on the presentation. So that’s a useful thing to know! I imported the slides from PowerPoint into Keynote (£4.99) and did some light editing of them on the iPad on the way there. It perhaps wasn’t as quick to make the changes as it would have been on my MacBook but it certainly wasn’t painful, I applied transitions, bunged in some clipart and reformatted text in a number of the slides without hassle. At the end of the day I then emailed the presentation to the hosts.

Simples!

Summing Up

I know that all seems contradictory, start out by saying its a great ‘home’ computer then go on to talk about how wonderful its can be as a business tool. As a device it encourages you to take it out and actually use it though. Its size and its battery life actually make it useful for many more situations than you would expect. Hooking it up to a service like DropBox lets you take everything that you need with you. Which again you could do with a laptop, but you would be worried about the size, battery…etc. Yes you could take a netbook but I found the screen limiting and the keyboard more of a hindrance than anything.

Get one. They are very very good!

Indispensible Apps

GoodReader £0.59 (carry any PDF, Word Doc etc with you when you go – Perfect for travel, you have all your documents and papers with you)

AirVideo £1.79 ( Amazing little app that lets you stream any content of your Mac/PC onto the device. Well handy when you dont want to sync EVERY bit of media that you have)

Kindle Free (Cheap books on the go? Awesome. I find I am reading more on the iPad than I have in years. I don’t know if its the novelty of being able to do it or just that it has made reading more accessible to me again but its bloody useful)

iBooks Free (Apple has a go at the e-reader app and its good. The Bookstore in the UK is far far far too expensive though. I do have some ebooks that I converted to ePub thanks to Stanza though and it renders them beautifully)

1Password £8.99 ( Have all you secure passwords with you whereever you go. Awesome)

Plants V’s Zombies HD £5.99 (Fun little game to pass the odd 5 minutes with. Dont buy it if you plan to be productive! Additionally this is the game that has made my kids fall in love with the iPad)

Keynote £4.99 (for all the reasons outlined above, a very useful app for me)

DropBox Free (Amazing app for getting access to all your crucial stuff. Wherever you are)

New iPhone4 and my (old) Nexus One

Wschaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh…

Thats a sigh of relief in case you were wondering. Yesterday my new iPhone4 appeared from out of a UPS van to say I was slightly excited was an understatement.

This finally meant that I could retire my oft cursed Nexus One.

Some might say…

“But Rod, you are such and Apple fanboi why on earth would you pick up a N1 in the first place?”

Well thats  a hard question to answer. I have flirted with Android before (see previous post for my G1 thoughts) and pretty much liked it but it didn’t have the fit and finish of an iPhone from both a hardware and software point of view. To cut a long story short I liked the multitasking I didn’t like much else.

Fast forward one year

Google releases the Nexus One, a slexy slab of phone with an OLED display and Android 2.1 and I start salivating. All this combined with the promise of Google Voice in the UK and my concerns about Apple app store policies and my hand started to creep towards my wallet.

Then

Apple announced the iPad. Colour me underwhelmed and I bought the N1 the same day.

The N1 came in three days, all the way from America as I bought it straight from Google and I was in hog heaven. This was a nice solid piece of hardware AND I could upgrade the memory myself AND I could use Google lattitude AND my chat application stayed connected all the time. The wonder I could install what I wanted and it was fast fast fast.  Heaven! Then there was the screen, the huge gorgeous OLED screen made the device for me, so bright and clear and the resolution was AMAZING! I went to work the next day and sold my iPhone 3G on for a price that made both me and the buyer happy.

For a day or two I revelled in the glory of my open phone, surfing the xda-developers forum considering the amazing possibilities of putting alternative OS’s on my new wonderPhone…LOOK AT ITS POWER!!!!( I may have been heard to mutter whilst basking in the glow of geeky gadget awsomeness)

A few days later I walked outside and took a call in the bright sunshine, went to answer, glanced at the screen to ‘swipe to answer’ and the screen had  turned into a mirror. I couldnt see a pissing thing! A little experimentation showed that even a dull day made the screen hard to make out! Well thats great, I now had an indoor cellphone, but otherwise it was awesome right? Hell I am a geek, sunshine makes me rot anyway.

Did make it hard to use the camera, did make it hard to do foursquare and a bit of light twittering, did make it very hard to look at what songs were currently playing in the media plater.

Oh. The media player. Right.

Its (and excuse my french here) fuc*ing, *hitting awful. I mean really bad. There are 4 little ‘hard’ buttons underneath the touch screen of the N1. All the play/stop buttons on the N1 are right above this! Want to change my song, I end up tapping the ‘back’ button. EVERY TIME!!!! As an aside it does this in just about every other app too! Typing a text and hit space? IT TAKES ME BACK TO THE HOME SCREEN GRAAHHHHH!

I know Android fans at this point will say, but you can install OTHER media apps. Apple doesn’t let you do that. This is true and I do make use of DoubleTwist these days, but lets face it why should I have to? Shouldn’t the default applications be at lease adequate?

Time moved on with my Nexus one, GoogleIO came and went and I installed the Froyo update which made almost no difference to the OS but added 1 thing I had always had on my iPhone, like Exchange Syncing. Hurray! It had finally meant I could stop carrying an iPod touch as well to get my work email. It also gave me tethering! WOO HOO

EXCEPT. There is a hardware flaw with the N1, in less than ideal network conditions it will prevaricate between between 3g and GPRS networks. Therefore you get NO internet at ALL as the phone refuses to DECIDE! GRAHHH my network is O2 there are ALWAYS less than ideal network conditions!!! In fairness this is more O2′s fault it I lived in an area with better coverage this might not have annoyed me quite so much. It did annoy the crap out of me that the only fix to get my phone to work as a phone was to disable connections to 3g networks. Great SO glad I sprung for a 3G phone.

A few other thoughts, the Facebook app is utter shit. Want to do just about anything and it takes you to the WEB version. Well thats great. GLAD you have an app facebook!

Media Syncing can be challenging. I actually had to BUY Salling Media Sync to get any kind of useful syncing with my media library. Except Video podcasts. The device is far too finicky with video to let you watch whatever you want! You need to recode it to something it understands, despite ALL my video being H264. Wonderful. Once again I know about DoubleTwist, but man that app is crash happy and slow. Salling at least write a decent stable app to get my songs on there.

While I am on the audio kick. Whats up with Audible? I accepted the fact that there was no Audible books on it when I bought the device but after Audible release an App and then dont make it available in the UK!? Well that makes sense doesnt it.

…and breathe…

While all this is going on I have time to think a bit more about the iPad (more on that another day) and Apple announce the iPhone4. Did I want a phone that I could actually use as a phone again?See in the daylight?  Did I need Google latitude, as I had only convinced two people to actually use it? Did I worry about losing Flash on my handset?

Would I run and not walk back into the walled garden?

HELL YESSSSS! Sold Mr Jobs

Thoughts on the iPhone 4 to follow but after 11 hours with the thing?

Wschaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh…

Should leave with 1 thing that android does 1000x better than the iOs though. Notifications…Just saying Apple

had quite a day fighting with recalcitrant pieces of network equipment. HP procurve switches are particularly reprehensible to me now

sorry just testing my ping.FM client as Twitter posts seem to have stopped appearing in Facebook

Android Part 2

So since I wrote my last post I have been using the G1 for over a week, including a trip to Scotland where is got to spend an elongaed time away from a charger.

The signal on the device is excellent, I may be eaxgerating this slightly as I am more used to O2 (which isnt terrible, I hasten to add!) but Vofafone to seem to have more signal in more out of the ways areas. Particularly in the West of Scotland and on the beaches around Swansea. Additionally I see the 3G logo a lot more on the G1 that I have on the iPhone. There appears to Edge in more places also where I just see the GPRS logo on the iPhone.

As an aside I purchased a new T-Mobile E160 wireless modem for my trip and couldn’t get a 3g signal anywhere! The 3 modem I had before (3 works off T-Mobile) works just about everywhere…go figure, I wouldnt encourage anyone to buy a T-Mobile card based on this unit.

Back to the G1 its very nice to have proper keyboard, I am very used to the iPhones software one but a true keyboard is nice. The G1′s screen keyboard isnt a patch on the iPhones however, the sensitivity of the screen doesn’t seem quite as good as the iPhones, occasionally taking 3 or 4 pokes with your finger to get it to register an input. Leave your fingers on the keyboard and trackball though and the phone makes perfect sense. The lack of responsiveness would put me off getting a Magic which has no hard keyboard at all. I suppose that is could be processor related and the G1 is just a bit too busy to immediately respond to my inputs, but the iPhone’s processor is no ball of fire and it generally copes with these kind of situations better.

Apps on the G1 are good, there is certainly not the amount of them that there are in the App store – particularly when it comes to games. The ones that I have installed however are pretty useful.

Tunewiki -Nice it shows the lyrics in real time as you play a song. Not terribly useful but cool nonetheless

Twitdroid- A twitter app, very good one actually, they update it a lot – Updates on Android are pushed to the device automatically. This one has been updated 4 times in the last week

Locale – Automatically changes your system settings based on the area that the device thinks its in. So when you are home you can have it change you ring tone and screen brightness, and when out different settings apply. This happens automatically of course, and you can modify the profiles fro anywhere you want.

Glympse – I have mentioned Glympse before but I will say it again its an awesome and and its vvery cool to be able to send your friends and family your exact location so they can see for themselves where you are and where you are going to be. Kills the battery (unsurprisingly!)

Video Player – The G1 comes with no default video player, so far this app has coped with everything that DoubleTwist has thrown at it, very nice.

Meebo – This is an instant messenger app that runs continuously in the background it does AIM/MSN/Google Talk/Facebook and others. Proper backgrounding is still Android’s killer App. It is very nice to have this ability, in a way its a shame that twitter has replaced live messaging because this is a very nice thing to have on your phone. This combined with a real keyboard is very compelling.

The lack of a decent Facebook app is a bit of a negative on the platform, but I am sure that there will be one along real soon now, given the pace of android development.

Part 3 coming real soon now….iPhone OS3 should be out tomorrow and I can finally talk about that in comparison to cupcake.

HTC G1

Well I have been a G1 user for just over a day now and can post some initial thoughts…

The device itself is the white model and was initially locked to T-Mobile in the UK. As an iPhone 3G owner, all fully legit with contract and all there was no way I was going to buy the new Magic on contract, ot even a G1. To have to contract at £35 quid a month? That way madness lies! So I picked one up from ebay and did the unlocking thing.

I had a T-Mobile sim card thanks to my wireless broadband dongle so I popped that in and changed the APN settings to vodafones for the UK, stuck in a PAYG sim card and then visited this site.

http://www.unlock-tmobileg1.com/

Gave them the IMEI number of the phone and £15, 20 minutes later I had an unlock code, switched on the phone in, carefully entered the code and that was that. One unlocked G1

Now I could have a proper play with it.

Build Quality

The device itself doesn’t feel quite as well made as my iPhone 3G and certainly not as good as the original iPhone, it is however and awful lot better than the last Blackberry that I had not feeling quite as plasticky as that device. It does creak a bit when you pick it up, this is due to the slide out keyboard and does make me feel a little doubtful as to its long term resilience, time will tell I am sure – all the ones I looked at in the T-Mobile shop were in 2 pieces so hopefully that’s just due to rough handling! In fairness after an iPhone that has only one button there isn’t much to go wrong mechanically. The actual slide on the G1 feels reasonably progressive and doesn’t give me the immediate impression its going to jump apart. I did have a Nokia that did that to me once, the microphone shot across the car into the passenger foot well (it was legal in those days, honest!) My caller was a little confused that was for sure.

Harking back to the Blackeberry for a minute, it has the same sort of trackball that my Pearl had, and works in exactly the same way as that. The keyboard itself is quite flush, its not particularly difficult to type on, though the backlight isn’t up to much making it difficult to see some of the keys in low light.

The screen is very nice, bright capacitive touchscreen. Same as the iPhones in most respects, there is no multi touch however and I find it hard to recalibrate my brain to not pinching things to zoom. Swipes, drags and ‘long presses’ work fine though. If you were not an iPhone user you would think its very good indeed. As it is it makes me use the keyboard and the trackball more. Which isnt a bad thing! This multitouch issue isn’t a limitation of the hardware but of the software. The rumor is that Google has an agreement with Apple not to do it….

Overall then a 3/5 will wait and see on the slide but the screen is good

Operating System

This is the bit that really matters, the Android OS is the really interesting bit of this device. As I type this Android 2 has been previewed at Google I/O and it will bring a lot of new and interesting apps and features to the OS, I currently have the 1.5 ‘cupcake’ build on this device so that what I will be referring to here.

The main point of this OS though is the philosophy behind it, its an open source OS that means manufacturers are able to put the OS on any device they see fit. Windows Mobile is about $30 a handset so that’s quite compelling for many device makers. Google seem to think that there will be another 20 android devices out by the end of the year. Enterprising developers are already taking the OS and making it work on older platforms like the Dell Axim and various netbooks! The potential is huge, this combined with the ability to have apps published in the ‘free’ market that is the Android marketplace makes for a compelling device. This is of course free in the sense that Google aren’t the final say on what it allowed to be published within it.

The OS itself is nice and snappy and performs in a mostly consistent way, its a bit laggy to switch from portrait to landscape but other than that is reasonably snappy.  There is one area here that makes the iPhone look at its feet mumbling. Backgrounding most modern mobile phone OS’s will let you run applications in the background,the iPhone even ‘kinda’ does it. Well Apple main apps the phone, mail, ipod and messaging are allowed. Anything else? Not so much…. Apple are doing a halfway house with OS3 and will allow notifications that something has changed but its not true backgrounding.

Why should you care? Well if you are running something like an instant messaging application then when ever you come out of the App it is killing the connection to it..not very instant and not very always on.

Now Apple  DO have a valid reason for not wanting to allow this. It Kills the battery life stone dead. I only managed to get to 4 o clock yesterday before the G1 completely died on me. Having said that I played with it a LOT and at 3 o clock had switched on the GPS and an application called Glympse which was cheerfully broadcasting my position constantly as I drove along….This as you can imagine is a bit of a hog! I will do a more comprehensive review of the Apps as I go on but Glympse is awesome.

The other thing that the G1 wins on is related to backgrounding and that the notification area. On the iPhone when you get an alert i.e missed call, text or email you get a little blue text box (which you need to light the screen up to see) and a incrementing ‘badge’ in the bottom corner of the application that was affected. Which is pretty but not very functional.

On the G1 there is a notification tab at the top where the network strength and battery indicators live. If you have an alert of some description these appear on the left hand side of this bar. You then just need to grab this bar with your finger and roll it down to see more detail. You can then click on the alert to take you into the right application. Genius

OS 4/5

Quick Summation

I have gone on a bit longer that I thought for a quick into to the G1 but I havent finished yet! More to come for the moment though a final thought. The G1 isn’t an iPhone(its not meant to be!) it lacks the polish that the iPhone has, its hard to beat the ‘just works’ philosophy of the iPhone BUT I can’s stop using it at at the moment. I feel I will be carrying 2 phones around with me for the moment…

a quick word about Moblin

Just tried out the Moblin beta on my MSI wind. I think I can see where intel are going with this, but they need to sort a few things out PDQ.

It IS fast to boot, for sure about 8 seconds, and the same to shut down again. Actual usage however is terrible. Flipping between websites is a real treacle event. It looks like they are using a google chrome build of some description and given the speed of this in Windows this is absolutely terrible.

The Trackpad on my MSI Wind doesn’t work at all meaning I had to plug in an USB mouse, now what sort of use is that in a nettop.

I like the social aspect they are trying to bring and the simplicity that they are shooting for too. But its still a very beta beta. Best avoid for the moment. Stick to your normal Linux distro.

Hopefully my HTC is pitching up tomorrow so I will do an initial impressions post, and if I get time an unlocking experience….

HTC G1, the Google Phone

One of the guys at work has an HTC G1, I have been quietly impressed from a distance really, its not an iPhone but its pretty bloody good.

My reasons for being dismissive were something like this

• No direct 3.5″ headphone jack, you need to use an adaptor
• No direct synchronisation with iTunes (or similar)
• The battery life is terrible
• The UI is a bit all over the place

As an iPhone/mac user I am probably ‘slightly’ more sensitive to having all of these things right than most. Having said all that there there are 3 things about the Android platform that hugely appeal to me

• Its open source. That is a huge deal, some of the decisions that Apple has made recently have been questionable, particularly as regards allowing applications on the App store and its position on hacking the iPhone and iPod touch. People spend a lot of money on their device. IF they want to hack it then thats up to them. It shouldn’t be a violation of the DMCA
• Backgrounding and the notification bar. This is just awesome. End of, the notion of something other than Mail and the Telephone apps running in the background…well its almost like having a compiter or something in your hand. The first time I saw Tweets building up in the taskbar at the top I thought, ‘Oh! My phone needs that’.
• Glympse on http://www.glympse.com now thats the way this kind of location sharing should be done. Al turned it on and went for a walk around the building, it drew a little map and showed us how quickly he could walk when he really wanted a yoghurt. It even expired after 60 mins automatically, Stalkers beware its not going to work so well as google lattitude for ya’.

Suffice it to say after all this I hit ebay up yesterday and hopefully shortly after the bank holiday is over I will be the proud owner of a second hand G1. I will go into much more detailed comparisons then. Havent been this excited about a mobile since his Steveness announced the original iPhone 2 years ago…..