Day Jar View

I’m well pleased with my new Sony Bravia KDL-26T3000 LCD television. I previously had a 17″ DMTech with built in DVD, but this failed early on (although predictably just after the guarantee had expired), so I couldn’t use the internal DVD player.

This time round, to go with the new kitchen breakfast bar, we splashed out on a 26″ LCD to go with the separate DVD player, and chased the cables into the wall. I can now work with a whacking great TV to my immediate left and watch the women’s beach volleyball. Heaven.

The launch of the new iPhone has seen a predictably hysterical reaction in the more media-friendly press. It promises much of the same as the original version launched last year, with the addition of 3G promising fast internet access, and a GPS receiver, allowing navigation software to run on the unit.

The software glitches that have blighted the launch of the new unit have been the focus this week, but I wanted to point out something that I think makes the whole thing more of a fashion accessory, rather than a useful tool.

It’s called the iPhone but, in reality, from the very beginning the phone seems to have been included almost as an afterthought, in order that it can be marketed as a genuine catch-all alternative to the already ubiquitous and ground-breaking iPod and your current handset.

I say this because the keyboard of the iPhone is still a problem in my eyes. The problem with most phones is that the keyboard does not lend itself very well to typing, simply due to its physical size. Compound that with the touchscreen technology, and you have a keyboard on the iPhone that is considerably slower and more error-prone than those with conventional keys.

In their haste to produce a thing of beauty (and in that respect, incidentally, I think they have succeeded), they have taken the iPhone down a cul-de-sac that has hamstrung its desirability as a useful communication tool.

Sure, it looks great, will play music and apparently even makes phone calls, but try and use it to email, blog or compose a document, and you will find yourself yearning for an old-school keyboard that not only collects dust and crumbs, but means you can work faster. Surely that should be the point of these things?

No doubt Apple will shift orchard-sized piles of these things, in spite of my nit-picking, and good luck to them. But I will be sticking with the decidedly and resolutely old-school keyboard of my BlackBerry Curve, in all its crumby, dusty glory.

Read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7501321.stm

Over the past few years, I have experimented periodically with trying to reduce my amount of exposure to all things electronic. I include under electronic basically anything with a chip – tv, laptop, PC, PDA etc.

The driver for this was never a fear of potential damage to my innards from stray electromagentic radiation, but a desire to try and avoid a potentially far more damaging end result – my ability to concentrate.

I find that trying to concentrate on any one thing – whether it be a book, an article, a quote or composing an email, is becoming increasingly harder the more devices and websites are running around me. The urge to check email on my tabbed browser or PDA is so strong that the only thing to do is to turn them off, and go and sit in the next room. But then when it isn’t close at hand, you spend probably every other paragraph thinking about what you might be missing. Sound familiar?

I’ve read about some people only reading emails between certain times of the day, or having one day a week off everything, so maybe I should try that. But I think unless someone physically removes the PDA, PC or tv from my immediate vicinity and then straps me down to the chair, I have a feeling I might struggle to stick to the new regime.

Check out – http://tinyurl.com/6zdzcf

One of my pet hates, especially in today’s world of instant access to spell checkers and websites devoted to grammatical correctness (is that a word?), is the seeming increase in the use of the greengrocer’s apostrophe.

It’s one thing to see a scrawled sign on my way to work every day that says “lunch’s”, but quite another when one of the world’s largest companies, Dell Computers, makes a similar faux pas on its offers home page.

I don’t know what’s worse; that Dell don’t have a single person in their organisation who has spotted it, or has and then hasn’t reported it, or that the probable thousands who have seen it since haven’t contacted them to flag it immediately?

Of course I am included in that bunch. And at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I don’t want to be the one who tells them – I can imagine it wouldn’t be warmly received and I don’t want to be “one of those”.

So, instead, I will post up their mistake for everyone here to see and everyone else to potentially stumble across in year’s to come (geddit?).