Well I have managed my first review in a very long time here on Kainzy.org. It’s obviously been long overdue but with real life work commitments, it is so hard to spare the free time. Anyway, I have written a short ‘review’ if you will on Apple’s latest iPhone. The device is already a heavily controversial one, but at the same time it is a device  feature packed with great hardware. As always, you can find it in the reviews section.

It’s been so long since I last wrote a post on this blog that I had actually forgotten my blog login details!

Enough of my long abscence from this blog anyway. I will be posting a lot more frequently here as the mobile wars I predicted earlier hots up this week.

Apple’s WWDC (World Wide Developers  Conference) begins tommorow in San Francisco,  Moscone West for three days. Of course the one highlight of WWDC every year is the most talked about mobile device since it’s first launch in 2007 – the iPhone. Love it, or hate it you just cannot ignore the massive impact the device had on the mobile world. Anyone denying this is pretty much fooling themselves to be honest.

I have previously stated that 2010 will be all about the mobile operating systems such as Mobile OSX found on the iPhone,  Google’s Android as well as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 arriving towards the end of the year. My predictions of Apple falling behind couldn’t have been more accurate. The Android OS is gaining ground at a colossal pace, but at the same time OS fragmentation is occuring as certain Android apps work with the latest version of Android and not earlier versions.

Apple’s recent Mobile OSX 4.0 preview was less than impressive, infact it was very poor when you look at the improvements Android received a few weeks later at the Google I/O conference. Apple introduced nothing new, well nothing new that the Jailbreak world already had. Apple’s multitasking features looked ‘tacked on’, and don’t get me started with the ‘folders’ in which you can organise apps into – Jailbreakers have seen it all before, a long time ago. Also shown was the inclusion of iAds – in-app advert banners that are meant to be non-intrusive…I can’t see any users liking that imposed upon them. What was shown by Apple was ultimately rather poor, but there was a lot more that we never got to see.

Since then there have been numerous ‘leaks’ of the next iPhone. Gizmodo recently got into trouble for obtaining the lost device, which was left in a bar and more recently another phone somehow turned up in Vietnam of all places, sporting a slightly different build around the camera lens area. These devices, to me look like engineering prototypes or samples that contain the latest iPhone 4 hardware but not the final ‘look’. The general build of these ‘lost’ devices stray from Apple’s general designs in the past, but it also lines up with various case patents they have taken out over the past years. So who knows?

Credits: Gizmodo

Tomorrow will be very interesting indeed. Hardware wise I cannot see Apple really bringing anything impressive to the table, especially given that the HTC Evo 4G has some of the most insane hardware known to man at present. Since I bought my iPhone 3G it has spent most of it’s life jailbroken to give me custom features I just cannot live without and that Apple don’t want to allow. I shouldn’t have to go to such lengths just to unlock a device’s true potential. Suffice to say I am tempted by Android’s potential but Mobile OSX has a solid set of quality apps now…at last, whilst Android apps are just taking off.

I for one look forward to the show, just to learn about what will be coming for the year ahead in the mobile world and also for the newly announced iPad.

Two Tablet models:

Tablet 1:

• 10″ LED Backlit TN Panel Widescreen feat a touch display and a resolution of 1024 x 768
• 3GS style Oleophobic coating to be present on the screen
• Wifi N ONLY wireless connectivity
• Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR Tech
• Assisted GPS (same as iPhone 3G/3Gs)
• 16, 32GB storage ability
• Dual Cortex A9 Tegra 2 SoC
• 2x USB ports
• Twin speakers and a Microphone
• 3.5″ Headphone connector
• Accelerometer
• Runs Mobile OSX (the same OS that is present on the iPhone’s and iPod Touch)

Tablet 2: All of the above with the following additions.

• 10″ OLED Widescreen display featuring the same details as Tablet 1.
• Built in iSight web camera
• Wifi N & 3G wireless connectivity
• 64, and 128GB storage capacities

Compare my guesstimate specs with Apple’s iPad specs and you’ll see I wasn’t too far off! Ideally I was expecting a 10″ touchscreen housed in a smooth aluminium body that presently encases present day Macbook Pro’s and Macbook Air’s. I had expected Mobile OSX to power the device, why not? The appstore despite being criticised heavily in every area has been a monumental success for Apple. It may be flawed in many ways having a system where you cannot effectively trial apps before purchase but at the same time it has been hugely successful thanks to a superb SDK that developers have access to.

Mobile OSX in my eyes was the perfect foundation for a tablet. I have to admit that I am not a fan of previous tablets, I have hated their swivel screens, which screams ‘BREAK ME’, and I have disliked the fact that these things ran a fully blown OS, Windows for the most part. In my eyes a portable hand held device shouldn’t have the complexity of a full OS, instead it should be instantly accessible and easy to use without too much underlying complexity. Mobile OSX as seen on the iPhone and iPod Touch was just perfect, so perfect that even my technophobe parents can use my phone with ease, whilst previous phones have just baffled them.

I wanted a flat panel that my parents could pick up, tap on icons and bring up films, and photos without indulging in complex, puzzling OS features that they don’t need e.g window min/max/close icons that adorn our application titlebars. Given that they can pick up my iPhone 3G and browse my camera roll easily scares the hell out of me – but they can do it, and they’re confident when using the OS…if only Apple could stick that onto a 10″ screen I thought…

It was obvious that Apple were going to demonstrate gaming on the slate pad, and whilst I am not a fan of iPhone gaming (due to poor battery life) I do appreciate what the gaming developers have done. For this reason I was under the impression that the device would be powered by the Tegra 2 SoC (system on a chip). Instead they’ve opted for an in-house 1GHz A4 SoC. I have previously touted 2010 as the year for mobile devices, and mobile apps thanks to processors such as the Tegra 2 arriving so I would love to see the A4 benchmarked against the competition as it would be the perfect chip for future software and intensive video demands. Sadly it would also cost Apple millions just to get the chip from nVidia, so there was a strong chance that this wasn’t going to happen anyway.

Do I want the iPad? There is no doubt that it’ll be an awesome device for my parents as they have easy access to all my iTunes content. First impressions on the device are good, but lets see how badly the UK gets ripped off on pricing, as no prices for the UK have been stated just yet. Besides…I think five computers in this house is more than enough.

The A9 dual core Tegra 2 SoC

I have been following Mac Funamizu’s work for quite a few years now and have always been in awe at his thought processes that results in his conceptual designs. Mac Funamizu is amongst the best, he is a web/graphic/industrial designer working in Tokyo, Japan. His blog petitinvention has a wealth of some of the most gorgeous designs I’ve seen.

These are some of my favourites.

This first design is a transparent futuristic desktop known as Zafiro. It resembles designs that wouldn’t be out of place in Sci-Fi movies such as The Island, or Minority Report. Transparent OLED panels are already out and about today, but not perfected just yet. Several transparent OLED designs were shown off at the CES show this January.

Zafiro concept

Aluminium Bevel

Data disk docking?

Deformable metal keyboard

My second favourite design of Mac’s is known as Looking Glass. It seems to resemble a futuristic tablet modelled on the Augmented Reality concept, where live overlays can be displayed on a device pointed at a building, or shop. Augmented Reality technology has been around since early 2009 and 2010. AR will become popular on high end mobile phones through the latter stages of 2010.

Looking Glass

AR means you can point the tablet at a building and get overlay info

Grab incoming weather data

My third favourite is called iPetals, a stunning solar charger and stand. Just gorgeous. You are better off checking it out on Mac’s site though as he has a ton of cool designs that are somewhat awe-inspiring. Mac also resides on Twitter!

Some 8hrs after joining, Twitter is down...

About twelve hours ago, Microsoft founder Bill Gates joined Twitter. I am somewhat happy to say that I was amongst his first 1000 followers!

An hour after following him I went over to check his profile and he had 23,000 followers, expanding to 55,000 just half an hour later! Word of Mr.Gates arrival spread like wildfire thanks to the twitter trends, and as I type this the following day having just woken up – Twitter has been down for a full hour! Has the worlds most popular and richest man brought Twitter to it’s knee’s just by joining?

I have a feeling Mr.Gates will amass the largest follower count we have yet to see on the service and it’s great to see him online. “Hello World” indeed.
Bring on the Faaaaaail Whaaaaaaaale!

Update from Twitter: We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales.  Our on-call team is working on a fix.
Update: (5:18a): We are recovering from this incident. A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage.

This is why I worry about the education of todays children growing up in good old England, run under a decaying government. At the risk of sounding somewhat ego-driven here given that I am a fussy bastard, I truly worry for this nations children when my 14-15 year old neice sends me the following email. After a single split second glance I returned the email stating pretty much what the above picture states. Continue to speak like a twat, and you’ll end up failing everything – including life.

dude can you send me the pictures where your pg teddies have holes in them
or what not!!!
pleaseee!!
the one you have at work!!
you they had gun shots in emm!!
an wahh nott!!
pleaseeeeee!!

loll and ahhh ahahaha
omgg guess wahhh the bopizz fingiee has changeedd!
heheheh and my skwll is not that goodd!! but i am trying!!
for my science test i got 23 out of 50 – which is a d!!

sos but fankss!!! and ahhhh i carnt help itt!! loll
wen you coming down and don’t worry i wont let yyour dad near my fish tank!!
so thta aint and excuse!! lollll

Day After Tomorrow Fans, eat your heart out! Source: NASA

2009 saw me pretty much ignore this blog in favour of Twitter. By now most of you have some idea as to what Twitter is, and I must say that I am addicted to the service being a heavy user. It has been another great year for Twitter growth. Everyone is talking about it, both positively and negatively – and whilst both topic’s are relevant, the negativity revolving the stereotypical usage of the service ignores one important trait – everyone uses the service in a different way.

Of course this is reinforced by the fact that the very premise of Twitter changed in 2009. The service used to ask you one simple question “What are you doing?”. In 2009 this changed to “What’s happening?”, as users began using the service for different end purposes. Twitter for me became a replacement from bloated (see MSN/WLM) Instant Messaging Clients. In addition I use it to find out what is happening around me – in my town of Harrow for instance, especially with the unreliable public transport.

This blog was created as a way to air my thoughts, which worked fine for sometime. As life progressed onwards so did my ‘time’. It takes time to compose and lay out a blog post, whereas on Twitter you can just mindlessly type out your thoughts – just be prepared for feedback from others. Oh by the way, the iPhone was made for Twittering!

2009 was to become my most challenging year at work yet. Organisational changes meant that I had more responsibility at work and I have to admit that I struggled to ‘balance the plates’ as it were. On many occasions I found that I had to ignore my own job in order to lend support to other departments, mostly because we were short of staff.

Our company has it’s lease expire sometime in 2011 so obviously we will be moving to areas unknown at present. Given that a vast proportion of our workforce consists of ladies in their 60′s, it is fair to say that they won’t be following the company should they move to a far off location. As for myself I’ll stick with the company and will be around to train new staff until I can ascertain travel requirements.

2009 was a year in which I became….an APPLE TART. Yeah baby! Ok so I had already owned an iPod Touch, and presently own a jailbroken iPhone 3G, which I am incredibly fond of as it forms a central part of my day to day life. On the other side of things I have been using the RC (Release Candidate) release of Windows 7 for quite sometime, well before it’s October 22nd launch and I wasn’t really happy for reasons I’ll not expand on (it’s better this way).

After doing a heap of research OSX seemed perfect for me. So I purchased a £750 refurb Macbook Pro from Apple’s Online store. Instead what I got was a Macbook, even though the OS (Operating System) and receipt state Macbook Pro. After much head scratching and reading of the MacRumours forums it turned out I had a rare Macbook Hybrid. For the money I had paid I had been gifted a higher spec machine, with an extra 2GB of RAM and a backlit keyboard, the latter of which isn’t a Macbook feature.

Mac OSX was a breath of fresh air. Having grown up around Windows from it’s very first incarnation, OSX was just so damn slick that I fell in love with the OS inside a week. It is just a beautfiul OS to use on a daily basis. No faffing about with stupid application installers, you just drag and drop install. Applications are all self contained so they don’t scatter dependent files all over the place – it just works!… (famous last words I’m sure) I now use my Macbook more than I do my monster overclocked dual core 3.7ghz PC, hooked upto 10 TB of data. I already have plans to buy an iMac but have no desk space for one just yet.

2009 was a key year for Mobile Phones. Apple pretty much scared the living shit out of phone manufacturers by releasing the first iPhone back in 2007.  They followed up with the 3G a year later, and in 2009 released the 3Gs…a speed bumped version of the 3G in the same body…with very little new features. By bringing out the first iPhone Apple were a good 3yrs ahead of the competition, however towards the end of 2009 the competition have caught up and surpassed Apple’s current model in terms of hardware anyway.

Alarm bells are ringing for Apple now, and in 2010 they will face incredible competition on all fronts. Apple’s success with their AppStore has also been their downfall, they just cannot control the sheer number of apps being submitted, and a great deal of poor/untasteful apps have been approved and removed from the store giving the AppStore a rather poor reputation with both developers and customers. Couple this with Apple’s dictatorship like stance over developing apps mean that this can only hurt them more.

June 2010 will see them launch the next iPhone – I can see the obvious larger storage capacity, faster CPU being present and an AMOLED (vastly vibrant/low power) display, which is long overdue. I just hope we get a half decent camera as 2-3mp is just laughable in 2009.

Mobile OS’s will be the highlight of 2010 as iPhone’s Mobile OSX goes head to head against Google’s Android OS, Palm’s WebOS and the somewhat antiquated but hardened Windows Mobile OS from Microsoft. Mobile applications will dominate 2010 and they will be powered by either of these systems.

2009 saw yours truly spend a month and a half out of work, with Post-Infectious Encephalitis. Whilst at work during October I had picked up a nasty cold that just wouldn’t go away, even with three courses of Antibiotics. I thought nothing of it and carried on working despite the fact that I was getting progressively worse.

On a random day towards the end of October I had gone into work in a rather dazed state, but assumed it was the cold messing me about. I was struggling to string a single sentence together when talking to colleagues, and had begun stammering badly. I suddenly realised something was wrong when I was operating some high pressure test equipment and almost performed a dreadful mistake that could have endangered my colleagues not to mention myself – however I stopped myself before any of that could happen. My actions were horribly clouded at this point and thinking methodologically was impossible.

I took some time off work and had some check-ups. A Computerized Tomography (CT) scan revealed that I had Encephalitis, the Post-Infectious type. In other words – inflamed brain tissue after one’s immune system mistakenly attacks the brain instead of a viral/flu infection. In my case I had inflamed tissue at the rear of my brain.

The following month saw me having sheer head pains, which were enough to bring me to my knees half the time, as well as an aversion to bright light, dizzy spells, and random anger bouts. I confined myself to my house after almost blacking out whilst shopping, only leaving to visit the corner-shop/doctor/hospital. Sleeping at night was a bastard and a half. I’d have major head pains and would have to wait to sleep until my body caved in from tiredness, often at 3am ffs.

Only a few work colleagues know, as well as my friend Ayesha who has spent this Christmas with me…as well as eating the contents of my fridge. It would crush my parents if they actually knew about all this.

Visiting hospitals, and having injections – things that I hate had now become a weekly thing for me. I remember being shattered when I was told that recovery couldn’t be measured in weeks but months, many months. My workplace has been quite good about it and told me to get better first. The thing is, where do you I go from here? How do you return to work knowing that you could be clobbered at any time by what resembles a nuclear strike within your head?

So this has been my 2009 in a nutshell. I wouldn’t at all put it down as a bad year but I do hope 2010 will treat me better! Now excuse me whilst I go off in search of PIE…MINCE PIE.