I moved to the dark side, I bought an iPhone - maybe.

With my mobile contract nearly up for renewal it was time to be on the look out for my next phone upgrade!
I'd been umm'ing and ahh'ing over the 3g iPhone for sometime, I figured there were one or two things I'd really miss from my Blackberry but all the other features the new iPhone would give me would out weigh those! Besides there is a really nice Brightkite application for the iPhone :)

So, a couple of days before Christmas I made a trip to the local O2 shop and came out an hour or so later with a shiny new 16gb, white, iPhone 3g!

Wow, it's a damn sexy phone alright! The interface is so slick, the phone itself feels so nice in your hand, it's packed with neat features and an application store which makes downloading and installing new programs a 10 second job!

Ok, so now fast-forward one week, how do I like the phone.

Well certainly not as much as I did to begin with. Yes it still feels so good in your hands, it's well made and the touch interface is very nice, however it misses something which I use on a daily basis with my Blackberry!

Click to dial from within calendar events!

Lets say you enter a calendar event and put a customers phone number in the notes field of the entry. On my Blackberry, I scroll down to the notes, hover over the phone number, click and DIAL. No problem.

Today I was due to visit a customer and was running a little late, I pulled out my iPhone, went to the calendar entry, opened it and to my horror found that I could not click on the phone number in the notes! What!

There was a moment of utter disbelief as I tried to open the entry again in the calendar, nope, it was just not having any of it. I knew I could not cut and paste the number from the notes field in to the phone app as the iPhone does not have the ability to do this, I thought I could live without the cut and paste but I just cannot get by without the ability to click on a phone number in the calendar and dial, no way !

I mean does nobody at Apple put an entry in their calendar at 3pm that says:-

"Call Steve on 0779O9123456 to talk about blah blah"

Maybe they do and then get a pen and paper out, jot the number down then dial it?!

So, I've got 7 days in which to take the phone back and get a refund. I have no idea what Apple were thinking when they designed this phone. They made a big thing about it being ready for business? Not sure what business they were thinking.

Also another feature I use at least weekly is the search feature. I search through my calendar or emails for some particular text. Guess what, yup, there is NO search facility on the iPhone? Steve, what are you thiking?

So here is a short list of things the iPhone needs ASAP.

• Click to dial from the calendar.


• Search all contacts, email and calendar.


• Copy & Paste.


• Ability to forward a SMS to other recipients.


• MMS picture message. iPhone has no multimedia message capability.


• Video recording. Yes, that's right you cannot record a video.


• Decent battery life. One that allows you to leave 3g on for a few hours.

I've been really trying to get to grips with the iPhone but at the moment it's just not up to many of the jobs that I need a smart phone to do. It's not like we are at version one either. This is phone version 2 and software revision .2 (December 2008)

C'mon Apple, get your act together and listen to your customers.

MythTV update.

It's been a while since I posted anything about my MythTV box. So here is a short update, prompted by todays disk upgrade.

I saw an article recently that Seagate were going to reduce their warranty period on their hard drives in the new year from 5 years down to 3 years. As we have been using MythTV more of recent and beginning to run out of disk space, I decided to take this oppertunity to buy a new 500gb Seagate disk. 

The new disk came yesterday and I decided to install it this afternoon assisted by my eldest son Morgan. Once we'd fitted it I decided to partition it in to two parts, one 'small' 10gb partition which I plan to use to make backups of the Myth database each day and the main one ~490gb for recordings.
I ssh'd in to the myth box and used 'fdisk' command to create these partitions and set them to Linux type 83. Next I formatted them both as XFS filessystems and made the needed changes to /etc/fstab so that they are mounted at boot time.

Next I made a simple change in the mythtv-setup program to extend my exisiting recordings on to this new filesystem. As you can see we now have an extra 270 hours or recording space which should keep us going over the Christmas period!

Damn you Blackberry Maps!

In an attempt to get the very alpha/beta version of Brightkite Mobile working today I attempted to use the Blackberry Maps application on my Blackberry Curve 8320. The app in itself looks and works fine, its just when you come to try to get it to retrieve your location from your GPS where it fails!

The Brightkite Mobile application is in its very early stages but basically it has 2 features.

1) It will query the GPS and when it reaches within 50m of one of your placemarks it will check you in.

2) From within Blackberry Maps you can go to the menu and check in from your current location.

With these 2 options, posting photos via email and using the mobile website to post notes you can just about get by. Well you would be able to if it werent for the damn problem I discovered today where Blackberry Maps just refused to talk to my GPS. The phone itself communicates fine with the GPS, so does Google Maps! I've no idea why Blackberry Maps would not work, it did work on one occasion and seemed fine once it connected, but 90% of the time it just sits there and displayes "Searching for satellites..." Grrrr, so annoying.

My teeny Acer Aspire One

Sorry for not posting in a long time. Been rather busy and instead of posting on here sparodically I tend to update my brightkite account on at least a daily basis. Follow the link to the right for more details of that.

I purchased one of the so called 'netbooks' recently. I decided I wanted something very small I could carry with me to each job instead of struggling with my 12" iBook.
 
The iBook is not that big I hear you say, well maybe not but it is a pretty hefty object when you are also carrying your tool case, notebook, parts etc in to a customers premisis. I wanted something durable and quick to start up too, so with those points in mind I decided to go for the Acer Aspire One with Linux and solid state (flash memory) 'hard disk'. 

With this I have no need to worry too much if it gets knocked around in the boot of the car, its very quick to boot up and be ready for action, about 15 seconds from cold. It has a build in ethernet port and wireless which are essential for my work. There is a built in webcam and microphone. I also have a USB 3g/HSDPA modem which I have managed to get working with it so I am never without and internet connection.

The bad points of this model are the battery life, about 2 hours and the small trackpad. I can put up with these and will probably purchase a higher capacity battery in the future. I managed to negotiate a small discount as the box had been opened, I got it for £173.