Take a look at this

We’ll eventually after a lot of ‘oh look at this’ from my brother-in-law I opted for the iPhone.
My shiny new device arrived on Saturday morning in a tiny box. Apple don’t supply you with any form of instructions leaving you to fend for yourself. I had to do a Google search just to find out where the sim card went.  The only instructions were from O2 that simply said download iTunes and activate your phone.

Getting the contacts off my Nokia and into the iPhone was no easy feat either, no phone swap wizard here. o2 mumbled something about looking at their help pages on how to do it, but after wasting time I decided to do it my own way and backed-up and imported into Google Contacts. This works really well as the sync between Google and the iPhone is seemless. After I was setup I spent the weekend installing some apps. I love the appstore, it’s possible to spend hours searching for things to spend money on.

There are a few things I don’t like however, well one really. I have always heard people say the battery life on the iPhone sucks. I can’t really tell as at the moment it’s not out my hands for more than 20 minutes at a time, and during that time it has background process running that are connected to the web retrieving email and what not. Time will tell when I am away from home and using it for lots of calls, but for the time being the battery is lasting a day so it’s not a problem.

People complain about the call quality, I can’t judge call quality yet but I did get cut off on my last call. I’m hoping it was a one off experience. I didn’t care so much about being cut off, it was only O2 doing their welcome call and trying to sell me upgrade packages and insurance so it actually did me a favor.

My biggest gripe is iTunes. iTunes is awful, it’s up there with Lotus Notes in the bad software league. I installed a load of applications from the appstore and today when I tried to copy music to the device iTunes deleted most of the apps. iTunes actually apologised for the fact that it couldn’t delete all of them which was a nice touch in the same way a user friendly virus might apologize if it was unable in infect all of your files. iTunes is so awful, having tried to copy music over for the best part of the morning I’m considering carrying an MP3 player in future just to listen to music.  I can’t figure out how to move just a few tracks over as I seem to have to create play lists for every album I want copied. My last attempt resulted in all my wife’s music appearing on the device so now I have the added bonus of trying to remove them. In general it’s really annoying having to use 3rd party software just to copy things to a device. I prefer a device being treated as mass storage so I can do what I want.

But all that aside I love the iPhone and have a heavy dose of iPhone love (that stage were you start looking around for accessories that you don’t really need but feel you should have) but iTunes is that dark secret that iPhone owners don’t talk about, it’s the app that must not be named.

My intention after leaving was to take September off,  but now we are in to October I’m still in no real rush to go out looking for a job. I like the idea doing some contracting until the end of the year, one more xBox game to go then I’ll take a look. Other than playing games, I’m still blogging at Augmented Planet so if you miss me then you can always catch me there.
I have been busy putting together an augmented reality event in London (11th November 6pm -- 9pm, All Bar One, New Oxford Street) for augmented reality enthusiasts, if you are in London and you want to see some cool demos then feel free to register and come along. Feel free to get in touch it you want to show a demo.

There are hardly any augmented reality applications for Symbian devices, so I’m looking to spread my wings and buy (yes buy) a new phone for the first time in 10 years. I’m torn between the Google Android G2 HTC Hero and the iPhone. The Android device has been in the front running for a few weeks, but my brother-in-law recently got himself an iPhone. He has been driving me crazy with it and has turned into the ‘there is an app for that’ advert. For someone that could hardly use his last phone he has discovered Twitter and the joy of installing applications, and boy does he install them.

Feel free to help me decide my next phone choice.

Speaking of new phones, last week I went to the OverTheAir event in London and had the chance to play around with the new Samsung 360 device. For a prototype it was very nice, very responsive and very iPhone like.

The Satio is a Symbian device based on S60 5th Edition, it does everything you’d expect and has a 12.1 megapixel camera as well. The downside, non standard headphone jack. pifff.

Personally I’m not due an upgrade for a while and marketing is not like the days of old where we had the latest toys for a month before getting bored and getting something new, (sadly) so the chances of me getting my hands on one are slim to nil.

I still expect to see her every time I go home. She was always a particularly vocal cat that would meow at everything but for the last month or she had been completely mute. It turns out  as well as a tumour in throat, her kidneys and liver had failed and she had gone deaf. She was 16 years and 10 months so had a good innings as they say.

I started to go through my old books and put a few up for sale on Amazon. I was surprised to see that I sold one in about 10 minutes after listing for £1.00. Amazon added £2.75 shipping taking the total to £3.75. Less their deductions of £1.52 that left me with £2.23 for my book. But postage cost me £2.15, leaving me with a net profit of £0.08. It’s lucky I found the envelope or this book selling lark could get really expensive. Any top tips where to invest my 8p greatly apprecaited.

Aside from all that, look out for LGs new touch screen watch phone that will be hitting the Orange stores later this month.

It’s a pretty fun video, just like the sort of thing that you’d expect from Samsung.

I’m wondering how they got all those people to stare, I’m assuming they were all in on it.

The Jet website (flash version) is equally impressive. http://jet.samsungmobile.com/

In the meantime Nokia have announced a few other devices based on S60 5th Edition. (Symbian)
The E72 (click here for a review) which is an updated of the highly successful E71 and the 5530 XpressMusic (click here for a review) which is a 5800 clone.

Nokia E72

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic

In case you have forgotten

Well, there were all sorts of suggestions how they did the trick, but here is the answer.

Editoros Online (Brazil) hit upon the idea of using QR Codes to engage with the younger generation (that makes me feel officially old), by putting QR Code around a city in Brazil and inviting people to take pictures. They would then receive a message of either Love or Hate depending on the code. The messages they received were harvested from live twitter accounts.

They then produced a book based on the codes. The book contains 200 pages, 100 messages of love and 100 messages of hate and can only be read with a mobile phone. As there is no shortage of love/hate messages on twitter the book updates itself every week so it’s always changing.

Watch the video below, the book sold out completely and they are already looking at this as being the future of books. Imagine a school book that is always up to date with the latest content.