So 2011 then…as the saying goes ‘time flies’ and all that and it couldn’t have been more appropriate for this year. This year consisted of nothing but work dominating my life. Being at the same defence company I have been situated at for the past 6yrs+ now has seen me lose that ‘killer determination’ I once had. I have settled down there now to the point where my confidence is slowly waning on a daily basis and an ‘I can’t be arsed’ attitude is beginning to emerge.

August 2011 marked an important event in which I was chosen to work on a special project, which would be very good for my future. At the time of writing, the project is in full flow. Sadly it leaves me horribly tired by the week’s end. Enough about that anyway.

On the technology front it has been an incredible year:

• After dominating the Mobile market for many years, Apple are now feeling the heat of competition from the likes of HTC, and mainly electronics giant Samsung. So what better way to stall your competitors than suing their rear ends off. 2011 was the year in which every mobile company just sued everyone else – what a time to be a lawyer!
• Social Networking became gained even more popularity in 2011 and what better way to show off the brilliance of Twitter than by starting a RIOT. After the shooting of a seemingly innocent man in London, various folk took it as an excuse to set buildings on fire and raid shops….and then post photos on twitter of them with their ‘loot’ – clever that. It is also clever that Twitter was the main communications tool being used by the rioters to organise themselves. Twitter came in for the heaviest criticism as generations clashed as to its role, perpetuation and culpability.

The social network was pinned for inciting the riots though the Police used it against the rioters and convicted a great deal of them, therefore restoring some faith and the unstoppable momentum of social media services meant responsibility slowly became the key message.

• Sony were just as heavily criticised for the hacking of their PlayStation Network, which went unnoticed for several days before they released a statement admitting that data from over 100m+ users was compromised. Restoration to the service took well over a month, however Sony’s reputation had taken a colossal hit and apologies were simply not enough. For the following months, hackers continued to cause havoc with the stability of the network.
• Without a doubt the largest story of 2011 ws the passing of legendary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Plagued by health problems in the past few years, Seve had stepped down as CEO at the start of 2011 taking a long medical leave. He later resigned as CEO in August 2011 sparking rumours about his health. Tim Cook was to become the new CEO of Apple as a result.

Job’s passing had a profound impact on the tech world, and I have an unpublished article (too long!) to show exactly why. Suffice to say he had a hand in all the technology you utilise today. Music, Film, Personal Computers, Mobile Phones and of course Tablets.

I confess that prior to the release of the first iPhone in 2007 I was never an Apple fan – that one device changed the world. What really made me sit up and take notice was Steve quoting Alan Kay, a legend in the computing world and someone who I worshipped as a teenager. I recognised the quote immediately.

“People who are really serious about software, should make their own hardware”

So folks, it’s that time of the year again. That time where I look back on a year gone by and… no lets not kid around here – 2010 was about as muted and silent as it could possibly be to tell the truth.

After my Encephalitis scare in 2009, I returned to work in March a slightly different person, more arrogant and fiery tempered than I previously was – a side effect that is commonly observed from those who have suffered from it. I had to take things easy at work and I think my peers realised that, much to my annoyance at first. Work itself was rather challenging throughout the year though.

The biggest upset arrived with our new Government’s Security Defence review. Given that Sonobuoys are just one of our mainstream products we develop, the cancellation of the MRA4 Nimrod and Harrier jump jets were a huge blow to us and to the RAF. For us it meant an entire department being shutdown as the sonobuoy that was manufactured there was mainly deployed by Nimrod aircraft in the first place. I was upset as I had done a lot of work in 2008 on that very product. For the UK in general, it had lost one of the most iconic military aircraft it has ever had – the Harrier. I grew up playing with Airfix models of that stunning piece of engineering and I will miss it a lot. Edit: Final Harrier Photos at www.fast-air.co.uk.

2011 looks to be the most challenging year yet for yours truly and my company. After much thinking and head-banging over this festive period I am not really sure if I want to be a part of it anymore.

2010 Gaming

Assassins Creed Series – I finally got around to playing Assassins Creed 2 and what a title this turned out to be. I loved the first AC but the sequel just pulled out all the stops and for an 8GB title it had a great deal of gameplay, that is if you did everything of course. It’s follow up – Assassins Creed: Brotherhood came out just weeks after I had finished AC2 and this was almost as impressive – essentially this was almost the same game, albeit set in Rome with improved combat and the ability to recruit fellow assassin’s who were rarely used on the whole. These two titles were easily the best gaming experiences I had in 2010 by far.

Mass Effect II – The huge storyline of Mass Effect continues, sadly without the same strengths. You once again recruit new squad mates, none of which are particularly interesting and then trot around the galaxy trying to work out who these walking bumblebee winged aliens are and why they are kidnapping us hoomans. The gameplay remains rather strong, however the weapons/armour selection had been toned down hugely. I also just couldn’t bring myself to care for any of my team towards the end of the game, whereas in the first game almost every character was treasured. The third and final Mass Effect will be without a doubt one of the largest selling titles of 2011.

Mafia II – This was probably the largest ‘balls-up’ I have seen since Daikatana. Mafia 1 still holds the title as the best PC game I have ever played, with its deep storyline, and superb characters. It borrowed elements from every mafia film around at the time – namely Godfather and Goodfellas. Mafia II was strictly the opposite in every area. A very poor un-engaging plot from the start, boring missions, and a game world, which despite being large was just stale and empty with very little to do. What really hurt the game was that it was very short, and within days of its release 2K Games announced all ‘new’ downloadable content for a hefty price….’new’? Pull the other one. Almost the worst title of the year for me.

Fallout: New Vegas – Its predecessor Fallout 3 was an incredible title. So much so that I even wrote short stories of my adventures from my first day when I ventured out into the wastelands of an atomic fallout. The length of the stories however got out of hand so I never released them onto this blog. I wish I could state the same for this game. New Vegas was one of the areas, which wasn’t hit by the bombs so it was well preserved. Sadly so was the use of the Fallout 3 engine, which is looking incredibly dated in this day and age.

Every building, every room interior all looked like a Fallout 3 interior and I found one particular room to be an exact cut & paste slop job ripped out of Fallout 3. What really killed the game was that it was incredibly buggy on release and every review also stated the same thing. Random crashes meant that it was very hard to get into the game let alone venture anywhere, and boring quests and hardly anything new meant that this was merely an overpriced expansion pack instead of a new game it was marketed as. Worst title of 2010 for me.

Red Dead Redemption – Western themed sandbox game from the masters of the genre – Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto series). This title managed to grab of a huge number of awards all over the place this year. Quite how this was achieved I haven’t a clue because beyond the very good storyline, there is little else to do much alike Mafia II for the most part. It has yet another lovely world to venture around in and yet nothing compels you to actually do just that. Call of Juarez 1 was far better.

Supreme Commander 2 – (Sorry about this…) For the love of all that is bloody holy, what the fuck went wrong here Chris Taylor? You went from the most brilliant RTS known to mankind into a shitstink of a game, with utterly shite unit models with no detail whatsoever. The battlefield zoomed out even partially makes units look like un-identifiable blobs of fucking vegetables. You made Experimental units completely useless and you created a completely different game. Yet you hired one of the most talented AI developers to produce AI for the game but where is it? I see none of the AI traits that I saw in Forged Alliance. If I wasn’t so hyped for Mafia II in 2010, this would be the worst title for me.

An Apple A Day…

Bought an iPhone 4 in mid-2010 to replace my ancient iPhone 3G. The new model is a gorgeous work of art, and its operating system continues to be the one OS that all the others are judged against. 2011 will be a tough year for Apple, but Google’s Android with its fragmented arse-end should hopefully get itself sorted at some point. I’ve always kept a close eye on Android but even right now it just isn’t enough. HTC phones may have the better hardware in places but at the end of the day, it’s the user experience governed by the OS that matters and iOS is getting stronger with each release much to my surprise. That’s not to say work is still needed (Lockscreen Apple fs). It’ll be interesting to see how well Windows Mobile 7 matures this year as I find that more promising in the long run than Android.

I had long resisted the urge to purchase an iPad, deciding to wait for the second revision due in April 2011 instead. That urge crumbled in August/September when I purchased a 32GB 3G/Wifi model. I had good reasons to buy one though – my parents, who are technophobes love my iPhone 3/4. It is the first device that they feel confident using as I have mentioned many times. This is a common trend too as even young children pick up the simple skills to use the devices with startling ease so it is a great learning tool.

My parents can browse the web with Safari, use multi-touch gestures to bring up a huge collection of photos and they can use the TVGuide app to instantly see what is on the box, instead of having to use the newspaper with its small print. Best of all, it isn’t a bulky, unreliable beast like your average Windows based laptop with its poor battery life. They can’t break anything on the iPad due to its simplicity, and yet I can move them onto more advanced apps as their knowledge grows. They are slowly moving into the digital world. Must get them to dump the VHS recorder in 2011…

Another good use is for business trips, as its large 10″ screen and huge battery life means that my colleagues and I can use SatNav without getting lost in Gloucestershire, being chased by farmer Joe on his tractor followed by his herd of sheep. In addition being stuck on the bus as frequently as I am means I can just pull the device out and freely browse the web. If anyone looks like they’re about to grab it – the hard aluminium back makes a nice hooman bashing tool.

Twitter and Blog Stuffs

Twitter continues to be my driving force for getting through a working day. I know some amazing people on the network and continue to meet strange and amazing folk all the time. I have to say that without the existence of Twitter I’d have really struggled through 2010 as I wouldn’t have anyone to keep my brain alive after a long days work.

Aside from keeping up to date with friends, there is no better tool in obtaining realtime information on current events happening in our world today. On the negative side of things Twitter is to blame for the lack of updates on this blog!

Have a good 2011 peeps!

End of November Snow Blankets UK. Source: NASA

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 IPS 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!