What does it have going for it?

• It has a nipple!
  It’s not a real one, it’s a roller-ball style navigation like the traditional Blackberry Pearl. OK, so having a touchscreen is supposed to make this kind of thing obsolete, but if you’re not used to touch then a nipple can make navigation a lot simpler.

• Web-kit based browser.
  Just like apple’s Safari Surfing the net is going to be fast, but just like the iPhone there’s no flash support yet.

• Push email for gmail
  It’s push email for the masses, as soon as you get a mail it gets received by your phone – and you don’t need a Microsoft Exchange server.

• It’s the shape of things to come!
  Jump onto the bandwagon, and be one of the first to experience a phone with a Google OS.

• 3.2 mega-pixel camera.
  Ok, lets be honest – it’s nothing special, especially as phones are around with 5 mega-pixels,  but it’s still a higher resolution than the iPhone’s

• Memory card expansion slot
  It’s not innovative, but it means that unlike the iPhone you wont have to worry about all those applications using up your storage space.

• Digital Compass as well as GPS
  Real innovation here – it means there’s plenty of scope for navigational applications which orientate their maps directly to the way your facing.

• Open Platform
  Unrestricted applications, you can download what you want, when you want.

Let’s be honest – here’s what you’re really going to hate…

• No 3.5mm Audio Jack
  You can forget about plugging in your headphones without buying a chunky adaptor to stick out of the socket. You can always use the cheap plastic ones that come with it.

• No Exchange push email Support
  Definitely not a phone for the business, the only push email it supports is gmail.

• Build Quality
  It’s good(sort of) but when compared to Blackberry, or iPhone it’s certainly not as robust due to the slide-out keyboard

• Open Platform
  Unrestricted applications, Increased risk of unstable apps, exploits and potential virus threat.

• No front camera
  Those 3G video-calls will have to wait.

• No Multi-touch
  Single touch only means technology has to take a step back 2 years – no pinch-zooming or multiple touches is a big let down for touch based applications and games.

• It’s no iPod
  There’s no slick audio, video application integration like the iPod / iPhone it doesn’t even come within a million miles of it, It’s not a problem if you weren’t looking for that in a mobile. You’ll just have to use Amazon’s store instead.

• It’s ugly, ugly, Ugly!
  Looks aren’t everything, but it fell from the top of the ugly tree and hit every single branch. It’s not sleak and shiny, or thin. The kudos is only going to last until the next Android based phone is released.

You could say It’s a glorified XDA without the sheer number of applications supported on windows mobile. Unlike the latest Xda 3g’s there isn’t even a front-facing camera. Everything apart from the in-built digital compass is technology that’s several years old. Sure it’s got Google maps street view – but in reality has every street your going to been mapped? That’s also ignoring the fact that walking down the street holding your phone like that is an open invitation to get mugged, they just haven’t thought it through.

This entry into the market shows that It’s still very early days. This is the first phone out in the wild that supports Android, It’s not Googles fault that the phone is lacking in features, they all have to start somewhere. So it make sense for HTC to do this, they’ve got years of experience in the smartphone market dominated by Windows Mobile and this phone looks like a re-badged XDA with different OS.

The biggest problem is that while the Blackberry Storm, and the iPhone are moving with technology both within their handsets, and their OS – HTC is still producing a mishmash of technology within their handsets without showing real unification with the OS that they’ve chosen to run on it. It all seems rather rushed, and it could spark a worrying trend. If the phone creators are completely removed from the Operating System that their phone is built around then it just becomes another PC desktop style function war. The endless cycle of PC manufacturers increasing the specifications on their computers to cope with the ever bloated operating systems that are run on them. Lets hope Google doesn’t let that happen, then we will start to see some real standardisation in phone specification.

The LHC Large Hadron Collider is the worlds largest machine, Costing £2.6bn with thousands of people involved in a collaborative project designed to unlock the untold mysteries of our universe. They will have a live online broadcast of the first full beam run on September the 10th. There’s even a rap about it on youtube, so you would imagine they’re pretty crazy busy people – what with maybe the slim possibility of destroying the world and all that.

Well think again! Here’s some of the most exciting screen-grabs from the CERN Live feed today. – Brace yourself, you’ll see a coat stand move, followed by the amazing disappearance of staff. If you fancy having a look yourself before they take the feed down, check out their feed by clicking here (update) For more interesting science related webcams, Tomy suggests looking here http://www.abcwebcam.com/

Not content with just banner ad’s Admob are taking things to the next level, incorporating all the functions available on devices such as the iPhone. Take a look at the video example below.

Ad’s including direct mapping, or telephoning capability. While we have yet to see how many users adopt the iPhone as their choice of communication, what this does do is show us the way forward within mobile advertising. Location based information is at its most useful when the user is mobile, and this is exactly what this brings to the mobile user within their ads. Looking forward to seeing more of this.

The O2 upgrade store fell over today shortly before 8AM after it sent out text messages to all existing O2 iPhone owners informing them of the special pre-order page. Supposedly pre-orders for the iPhone 3G were available from 8AM although almost 2 hours with unresponsive pages and failed orders they took the site down for maintenance again. The backup ordering system that was supposed to cope with thedemand also failed miserably.

O2′s web capability  is normally something of a joke, but this was something they could have prepared for properly. They know exactly how many contracted iPhone users they have and could easily have done the sums for server capacity. This is just the demand from the existing iPhone owners, so it looks like a very good year for Apple.  I’ll update this post when it’s back up properly.

Edit: – Still down 2 hours 38 mins so far..

Edit:- site is backup but incredibly flakey – after over 4 hours!

The average age of a gamer in the UK is 33 – the highest out of the territories surveyed – and 42 per cent of UK game players have children.”

Some interesting stats from the report:-

In the UK, 37 % of the population aged between 16 and 49 describe themselves as active gamers defined as currently playing games on a console, handheld device or PC. The same is true for 28% of the population in Spain and Finland.

- 72% of European gamers use their games console as a multimedia device for broader media activities such as accessing the Internet, playing DVDs or listening to MP3’s.
- Video-games are not restricted to the ‘younger crowd’; 33% of those aged 30 to 49 in the UK classify themselves as active gamers, followed by 23% in Finland and 16% in Spain.
- Females represent a sizable proportion of the games market: 29% of women aged 16 to 49 in the UK, and 18% in Spain and Finland, describe themselves as active gamers.

This news is incredibly significant, meaning that console manufacturers, and developers will refocus more attention on Europe and Asia – these statistics may also give clues on the restricted supply of Wii into the US, as maybe stocks get diverted to key European and Asian markets first, especially seeing the strength of the US economy is so weak. Is this just another notch on the gradual decline of the US gaming market or a testament to the strength of Europe and Asia?

The original report is available from here.

No 3G
No GPS
You can’t picture message (MMS).
You can’t SMS more than one person at a time.
Bluetooth is nobbled. You can only use it for headsets.
The camera is average.
You can’t record video.
You can’t copy and paste.
Expensive contract & additional need to purchase the actual phone

That’s pretty big minus points. But lets be realistic from the list above only 1 (3G) is not doable – the rest is fixable through software updates, a slot-in card, reduced prices and contract changes.

But what makes the iphone so damn good?

I’ve been around smart phones and internet connected mobile devices pretty much ever since they’ve been out. The manufacturers of smart phones have all tended to try and integrate the computer into the phone to a greater or lesser extent for me. They all suffer the single biggest fault, the web browser sucks. When you want to go online to surf the web and check email (and that’s generally why you buy a smart phone) they all offer a horrible cut down browsing experience that looks like someone has puked up internet explorer inside your mobile device, it’s the same with email – you get a horrible chopped down mail client that looks like someone’s just tried to squish Microsoft Outlook into the phone without any thought for how it’s actually going to work.

The iphone and ipod touch offer the single best browsing experience on a mobile device bar none. It’s Safari on the iphone, and it’s simply gorgeous, the screen rendering is incredibly crisp, and zooming into web pages which look exactly how they do on a desktop machine is a relief after the squished endless scrolling experience of windows mobile. Email on the iphone, is a similar experience, looking at attachments, receiving and deleting email is almost as slick as on a desktop.

The lack of 3G is interesting, contrary to popular belief the UK isn’t totally a 3G connected hotbed, there’s a lot of places where getting a fast connection is a bit sketchy. O2 aren’t renowned for their massive

So how’s this going to affect marketing?

The Ipod was a revolution that not only changed the way people listened to music, it changed the music industry itself. The Ipod touch, and iphone do to video, and video casts what the ipod did to music. It’s far superior to the previous ipod video experiences – because it’s no longer a passive device, you can go off and get your own music and video.

It utterly decimates the Symbian, and windows mobile browsing experience and activity, don’t take my word for it – usage figures back that up. The iphone is already accounting for 0.09% of the browser market – that’s bigger than Any other mobile device:- (source and image credit from Roughly Drafted – with stats from Canalys). In only 6 months the iphone has come from no-where to grab 27% of the US smartphone market. While we won’t see UK iphone purchasing on the same level as in the US the browser stats really are pretty amazing.

What’s interesting about the iphone deal is that the usage plan includes unlimited internet access both on mobile internet, and wifi services through the cloud – that’s one of the things that’s pushing up that browser usage. People are really using these things on the go, they’re using them anywhere there’s wireless access, Star bucks, McDonald’s, pubs. In the UK we have fantastic coverage with apple using The Cloud to provide free access for iphone users. But you can also use an iphone/ipod touch with any other wireless provider such as BT Openzone. Companies are already making custom pages designed for the iphone and ipod touch, the BBC has a really slick podcast page which enables fast access to podcasts of all of it’s major radio shows and it’s specifically designed with touch-screen in mind. The iphone and ipod touch bring the simplicity of the ipod user interface, and the familiarity of the itunes store to the mobile population.

Make no mistake, whether you like it or loath it, the iphone has been a fantastic catalyst for change within the mobile and mobile media industry. If anyone has the ability to see your online image as you intended it, and take a little piece of your company with them anywhere they go, and interact with you – how are you going to keep them interested? Are you just going to carry on pretending mobile browsing doesn’t exist?

Go and find someone who has an iphone, or ipod touch, and borrow it for a week (if they’ll let you) – use it, play with it, add your photo’s, music, and movies, watch you-tube and understand why mobile devices will never be the same again.

I can’t do justice to this in one post, so I’m going to have to do a follow up really soon – In February Apple are going to allow developers to write their own applications for the iphone and ipod touch. I haven’t talked about the interface, the ease of use compared to other devices – there’s plenty of other blogs doing that anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Blogger – It’s been around a long time. Things in the Blogger development world just didn’t seem to move fast enough for me. Going from Blogger to WordPress feels like moving from a rented flat to your own house. It’s your own space, and whatever you want to do with it you can. I didn’t thing that switching blog systems would make a blogging feel so fresh. The move was so easy, I was able to setup WordPress and then inmport all my old Blogger posts just by using the ‘import’ feature inside WordPress.

I use the Joomla content management system for some of my other sites, and i’ve often thgouht it was kind of overkill for some of the content on those sites to use such an in-depth system like Joomla. I’m going to be looking at converting one of them as a test in the coming months just to see how smoothly it goes.

In addition any software written for Intel’s previous competitor (the ‘classmate pc’) will also work on the XO laptop

This is fantastic news and just what the project needed, cooperation between the large corporates to ultimately lower the cost of the technology.

The future’s looking a little bit brighter.

Click here for the BBC article