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Apple’s new flagship product, the iPad, was only just released in countries outside the USA last Friday, and I was fortunate to get my hands on one on launch day. Like many Apple products, this one has divided people, with a lot of people decrying it as a device looking for a purpose, a device that falls between two stools (not as portable as a phone, not as functional as a laptop), a device that is stifled within Apple’s walled garden. Despite there already being a plethora of reviews out there on the internet, I thought I’d give my initial impressions of it after the first weekend.

First, some context

It would be illustrative first of all to set out my reasons for wanting to lay down some cash on a product such as this, in order to frame the context in which I’m evaluating it. Some potentially relevant facts:

1. I don’t have an iPhone. I work from home, and I consider it extremely impolite to be constantly stabbing away at a phone while in a social gathering (you know who you are), therefore I can’t justify owning one. I have a far cheaper Nokia smartphone which does what I need just fine for the rare occasions when I need to check the internet on the go.
2. I like Macs. This is an opinion which I’ve come to only in the last few years – despite studying user interface design as a module of my compsci degree, my interest in practical applications of the subject has only recently been piqued, and I’ve learned that Apple definitely groks these things better than most. I’ve also changed – I used to love taking apart my PCs, customising them to the nth degree, knowing every tweaked and tricked out element of it. Now, after 20 years, I find that kind of a bore and generally just want something that works, gets out of the way and lets me get on with what else I want to do, and I find Macs are good at that.
3. I find touch interfaces very interesting. As an RSI sufferer for the last 7 or so years, I’ve become acutely aware of how terrible mice are as an ergonomic interface. Really, they’re awful – the wrist rotation, the fact your arm has to be right out to the side with most setups, these things are ergonomic suicide. At some point, unless you want chronic carpal tunnel syndrome, you’re going to have to switch to a track ball, a track pad, or one of those vastly overpriced vertically oriented mice. Personally, I try to use the keyboard for most things, which isn’t great but it’s better than the mouse, and a track pad on laptops as much as I can, which are much more natural. The prospect of a renaissance of user interfaces designed not to need a mouse, but to be entirely driven by touch, is something very appealing to me. It doesn’t work at all for sustained use when there are large, immovable vertical screens involved, and it doesn’t work that well when the device is too small – to me the pad form factor is the ideal for this approach.
4. I watched Star Trek:TNG and lusted after their pads for years (even though they were just fake plastic slabs). Now it’s a reality! Who wouldn’t want that?

Perhaps importantly, going into this I wasn’t one of those people looking to replace another device with the iPad, but I did see it as an opportunity to use an iPad in use cases where I considered the other devices I could already use to be sub-optimal. I’ll cover those use cases later on when I discuss how things turned out in practice. So now, on to my evalution…

Physical characteristics

I’ll try not to cover too much ground that’s already been adequately covered elsewhere. You already know the iPad is fantastically well constructed, beautiful to look at, has a wonderfully bright and sharp screen (which is prone to finger prints) – we’ll take all that as read. In my opinion, it’s not that heavy, but if you had planned to hold it up in front of your face with one hand for a long time, yeah that’s going to get uncomfortable. Personally, I don’t do that – like when I’m reading a book of any size, I rest the iPad on my lap, either flat or just propping it up on edge with one hand, and that’s fine for several hours in my experience. Having said that, the sleek and smooth exterior means you can be afraid of dropping it – however I’m using it in a leather flip-case (I’ll cover that in a future post, it’s a good one), and in this configuration gripping it becomes a total non-issue.

The screen was sharper than I expected, it seems to have approximately the same pixel size as my MacBook Pro, since even though the resolution is lower, the screen is only 9 inches. The default brightness setting was a little dark for me so I tweaked it up to about 75%, which was perfect. It’s a glossy screen which you may have problems with outside, but inside in full daylight (we have many windows in our house) and using regular lighting at night, reflection has not been an issue.

As has been pointed out, there are no cameras. Personally, that’s not something I care about – I don’t use my mobile phone camera either and I have a far superior camera within 10 feet of me in my lounge if I need one. I can imagine a camera for video conferencing might be useful to some people, but I’ve had one in my MacBooks for 3 years and I’ve never used them, so really, this is not important to me.

Connectivity wise, we’re talking minimal – just a dock connector and Wifi. It would have been nice to have a USB slot or two and especially a SD card slot (although you can get an adapter for that), but anyone who’s bought an iPod before knows the Apple way – don’t try to do everything, just try to do the core things better than anyone else. So, did they manage that?

General User Experience

I’d sum it up on one word – ‘butter’. The fact is that the iPad comes with only a small piece of card of instructions (and bizarrely, a 300 page downloadable manual which I don’t think they expect anyone to read), and you don’t even need to read that. Seriously, a monkey could work this thing, and it wouldn’t even need any training. I consider myself a geek still, and some geeks seem to find user friendly experiences offensive, as if it undermines the skills they’ve acquired, but I’m not one of them, and I admire what’s going on here. It’s a very direct, tactile experience that rewards experimentation and exploration, and just says “hey, come play with me, I won’t bite”. This, frankly, is how systems should be designed.

The lack of multitasking (due to be added in OS4 later in the year) is much less of an issue than I expected. Apps remember where you were, and tend to launch fast so switching between, say, Safari and an email that you’re in the middle of writing, works just fine and feels no different to true multitasking. The only thing missing is if you have apps which need to actively do things when you switch – such as IM or voice messaging, or music players other than the built-in iPod features. But honestly, so far I’m not missing it, even though I can imagine it being useful in some cases.

Many have said this is a bigger iPod Touch. They’re right, but in the same way that a bay window is just a bigger porthole. If you think that doesn’t matter, maybe you wouldn’t mind replacing all the windows in your house with portholes. In my opinion, the size of this device is absolutely perfect – for the purposes use it for (see below).

So What’s It Good For?

These are the primary things the iPad is being used for in our house:

1. Checking mail, web, news, social networks at home in a casual setting. When we’re doing things at home, watching TV, playing non-PC games, having guests around, or just between other things, it’s often useful to quickly check email or look something up on the web. Getting the laptop out takes too much time and it’s too bulky if you have friends around, and a phone is often too cramped, particularly if you want to show the contents to others or you want to type more comfortably. The iPad has instantly become the way my wife and I do all these things when we’re not at the PC anyway, and it works really well. Websites display legibly with no scrolling around, typing is fast (slower than a real keyboard but much faster than a phone). Most importantly, it doesn’t feel like a ‘work’ device and fits into a casual / social setting perfectly. My preferred way to check the detail of the day’s news after breakfast is now on the iPad via the Reuter’s app. YouTube works great on it too, I can catch up with my subscriptions very comfortably this way. As for the lack of Flash – in almost 3 days, I haven’t noticed, and I don’t think my wife even knows that Flash is not available. Maybe it’ll be an issue some time, but not so far.
2. Touch gaming. I’ve specifically added ‘touch’ there because people trying to play normal games with traditional controls (using virtual joysticks etc) are completely barking up the wrong tree. Games on the iPad, like the iPhone, work best when they’re designed with a touch interface in mind, or at least adapt well to it (e.g. Plants vs Zombies). Flight Control and Harbormaster are good examples of this, where there’s just no way you could implement a game like this efficiently with anything other than touch controls, and they click in 2 seconds flat. To be honest, my wife has the most experience of the games so far, but the fact that it’s hard to get her off them is a fairly solid endorsement of the gaming capabilities of the device
3. Documentation. I don’t think I’d use a device like this for casual reading. A paperback is more rugged, cheap, and appropriate in the majority of cases than even dedicated devices like the Kindle, IMO. However, I do think e-readers are perfect for reference documentation, the kind of stuff you need to access randomly, search and dip into at a moment’s notice, often over several volumes, and for that I’m using GoodReader. Of course, if you’d be using that documentation at a PC anyway, you don’t need an e-reader. However, if you’re not at a PC, and you need access to this kind of information, then e-readers suddenly become useful. Because I have a minority usage for this, a dedicated e-reader has never been a worthwhile purchase for me, but as one feature in a multi-function device – that’s useful. In particular, I run a D&D campaign one night a week, and thus far have always needed a big stack of books next to me, which is a pain for space when we have a full crowd in. I’ve tried using laptops before, but they suck – they take up too much room and if you have them in a comfortable position in front of you they’re just too distracting. The iPad is the perfect size, and replaces several physical tomes with fully bookmarked, searchable texts, and it can sit to the side of me, available but not obtrusive, large enough to read but not too large to dominate the space. It’s by far the most practical device I’ve ever come across for this purpose, and I can’t help but think others will find places where it’s useful too.
4. Photos. This might seem odd to call out as its own bullet point, but actually I think this is significant. Since we transitioned to digital photos, it’s made sharing them with family more awkward. Sure, you can use Facebook, but firstly – shockingly – many friends / family members don’t use Facebook (and no, I’m not going to pressure them to use it), and secondly it’s actually nice to show photos to people in person, and, you know, talk about them. Interact. Face to face. Radical stuff I know, but Facebook doesn’t solve that problem. In the past we’ve taken a laptop to other people’s houses, but that just feels clunky and geeky. And we don’t want to get them all printed, because that’s just a massive waste. And digital photo frames of any decent size are too expensive to justify. Enter the iPad – which can double as a photo frame and is very good at being a medium to share photos in person, just because its form factor works well – it’s easy to pass around or look at from multiple directions (rather than everyone crowding around a laptop screen). It’s a digital photo viewer that works in a multi-person environment, and the display is still large enough to do them justice.
5. Sketching. It may not be a match for my wife’s Wacom tablet, but as a casual sketching tool (via SketchBook Pro) it works quite well. Obviously the touch interface is a no-brainer for this – it’s missing things like pressure sensitivity and angle detection like the Wacom kit does, but even so it’s far more natural than drawing with a mouse, and considerably cheaper to try out than buying a full featured tablet.

The important thing is that none of these things could be done as well with devices of another form factor, IMO. You could do them, but you’d be compromising something – such as screen space, comfort, instant accessibility. I think a pad form factor hits a sweet spot for these things, and that Apple’s implementation is confident and slick. In the end, that’s all I really wanted.

Conclusion

My personal opinion is that there definitely is room for a device of this form factor in the lives of many people. You can argue that iPad version 2 will have more features, or that an Android tablet (whenever they arrive in a product form) will do better later on and will have more apps because of the open architecture, but  I think the phrase ‘a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush’ is relevant here. In technology, there’s always going to be something better in the future, that’s a universal constant at any point in time, for any product. Right now, the iPad pushes exactly the buttons I wanted it to push – that doesn’t mean there isn’t potential for more, but what it does do, it does extremely well. And more importantly, it does it right now, not at some theoretical point in the future. That has value to me.

Perhaps the best illustration is that the iPad has been in pretty much constant use since purchase, barring when it’s on charge, and so far the split has been 70/30 in favour of my wife, whose review comments are simple: “It’s cool”. I concur.

Yesterday saw a triple-whammy of sugary Apple gaming goodness:

1. Steam for Mac was released, meaning all the games you own on Steam that are ported to the Mac can also be played there, free.
2. Torchlight was a day-1 release on the service, meaning Ogre (and therefore code written by me) was among the very first on the service.
3. Portal became free (for Mac and PC)

Wow. A great day for Mac gaming. I noticed that World Of Goo was up on day 1 too, and since I’d bought it on Steam I could play it right away on my MBP too. Yummy.

Curiously, considering it’s based on Ogre, I don’t actually own Torchlight on Steam – I had a free Windows-only copy from Runic, I bought a physical (Windows-only) copy for my shelf, and I bought copies for both my wife and Diablo-obsessed brother in law on Steam but I never got a copy there myself, so I haven’t tried it on the Mac yet. I need to ask my wife to log in on the MBP so I can try it!

Yesterday saw world-plus-dog in the technology sector glued to Apple’s announcement of their new tablet device, which has now been officially dubbed the iPad. Basically, when you boil it down it’s a super-sized iPod Touch with optional 3G support and a few more apps.

Reaction has ranged, as usual, from the ecstatic “I’ve seen the face of God, and his name is Steve”, to “What a useless piece of junk”, stopping at most points in between. In the more negative camp, lots of talk has centred around what it doesn’t have (multitasking, a camera, a USB port, Flash), and that some people seem to find it hard to grasp the usage conditions of a device that neither fits in your pocket, nor does everything a laptop does.

Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic. The device was never supposed to be a phone or a laptop, so I’m curious why people are comparing it to one – the point is that it’s something else. I can actually think of multiple use cases where a device of this form factor and capability would be useful to me. Here are a few examples:

1. I’ve thought about buying an eReader before, but have always been completely unsatisfied with the existing solutions: current e-ink devices are fine for reading black and white novels, but don’t handle A4 formatted content at all well, can’t do colour, take far too long to flip through pages, and are basically unusable for keyboard input, making searching impractical – and therefore these devices do not satisfy my need for a reader that replaces my bookshelf (physical and virtual) of reference material at all. The iPad, however, looks like it would be able to do that much better.
2. Sometimes I’m in the living room or kitchen and I’d just like to look something up on the web; maybe check some news or look up a recipe maybe – just a 5-10 minute thing. Firing up the laptop just for this is overkill, but the pages are too small to really read properly on a phone. In the end I do one of these things anyway but it’s never ideal. Again a tablet form factor would be perfect for this.
3. When we’re showing photos to family and friends, these days we do it on a laptop because we never print anything. It’s not ideal, even the most elegantly built laptop requires everyone to crowd around the screen behind you or similar – it’s awkward. If I had a tablet to do it, one I can easily hold up and pass around, that would work much better.
4. When I’m in a social situation when it would be useful to have intermittent access to some documents or other information that’s too big to fit on a phone screen comfortably, currently you need a laptop to do it. Laptops are really, really unsociable to have out on a table with others around (say at a meeting), because of the way they need to be used, with a screen forming a psychological barrier between you and whoever else is on the opposite side of the table. This happens all over the place: I strongly feel that laptops are the scourge of coffee shops today, turning a social space into a cluster of virtual mini-cubicles with individuals hunched behind screens not talking to anyone. I also play pen-and-paper RPGs socially, and over the years I’ve tried to use a laptop with many highly useful applications as an accessory, and it’s never, ever worked. Even the smaller laptops are too obtrusive, but a phone is just too small to be useful. I’d love to try using an iPad with some dedicated apps for tracking things.

I’m sure there are other examples. Basically I think people need to get over the fact that it doesn’t improve on what they currently use their phone or laptop for – that’s really not the point. I see the iPad as a ‘gap filler’ – and I can certainly see some gaps for it to fill in my life.

The price is much better than expected too, mostly because it’s an upgrade of an iPod rather than a downgrade of a laptop. I’d skip the 3G option because it’s pointless for me, I’d only use it on wifi, so that makes it not that much more expensive than a top-end iPod Touch.

But, it’s not all roses. The lack of Flash is an issue for web compatibility, although at least video through HTML5 is starting to happen (YouTube added it recently). The lack of multitasking is a bit disappointing, but might be relaxed in an OS update later. The GPU capabilities are a bit unexplored online so far, it seems that it’s probably as powerful as an iPhone 3G, but falling short of the 3GS (so GLES 1.1). I’ve also heard today that iBooks might not be available in non-US countries at launch, which definitely undermines the offering as an eReader.

So, depending on the practicalities when it’s released over here, I may or may not grab one. I can definitely see places in my life where a not-a-phone-or-laptop device would be useful, and frankly, I’m intrigued by the possibilities of where this kind of device may go in future.

This was pretty interesting; CNet reports that according to NPD stats, Apple has 91% of the retail PC sales in the US above $1,000.

Now, let’s add the caveats here:

• That’s retail PCs. Of course, loads of people build their (desktop) PCs from OEM parts rather than buying a prebuilt machine, so it’s safe to say that these sales are almost all going to be laptops, where Apple particularly shines.
• Also, these are primarily going to be consumer purchases, because businesses tend to buy in bulk and not at retail (excluding the smaller businesses) – again Apple is far more popular in the consumer space than in business (barring the iPhone).
• The above $1,000 range is a minority of all sales; a majority of people buy cheap rubbish
• This is only the US, where Apple seems more popular

So, the headline isn’t quite as accurate in its crushing assessment as the wholesome reality, but even so it’s pretty impressive. When it comes to laptops, I always buy quality because I’ve been disappointed many times by machines that looked good on paper but turned out to be poorly constructed, poorly designed, and had all kinds of heat / battery life / general robustness issues, which led me to always buy from the ‘premium’ range in the last 6 years or so. At first that was the likes of the top-end Sonys, but after being convinced to try a MacBook Pro, I’ve been so pleased with the overall construction / design and the ability to use OS X as well as Windows that I’m very unlikely to buy anything else next time (my next hardware revision will be 2010, I generally switch every 3 years, which is reasonable if you buy something decent to begin with).

The talk now is about whether Apple will start making a netbook, to compete at the cheaper end of the market. Personally I don’t care – I quit buying cheap laptops ages ago, I don’t think it really ends up being cheaper in the long run. Powerful and cheap machines tend to be poorly built – I’ve burned through (literally in a couple of cases!) far too many laptops that couldn’t handle their power actually being used regularly, or which developed problems because the build quality was naff. Cheap machines with decent construction but lower spec (e.g. netbooks) just need upgrading faster if you have my sort of needs, or are just a supplement to a ‘real’ machine, either of which costs more in aggregate, and the resale value when you do upgrade is usually not even worth considering. In the round, buying a premium laptop relatively infrequently works far better for me, and as such Apple already provide what I want. YMMV

In the grand scheme of things, nothing really very surprising was announced at the WWDC 09 keynote; sure, we got a few hardware revisions and some more specific details on the next version of OS X, but there wasn’t anything singularly shattering about it. And yet, when taken as a whole, I think it was one of the most important WWDC’s yet.

iPhone 3GS

A speed increase, more memory, better battery life, better camera, addition of a compass so it can know which direction you’re facing as well as where you are. All fairly minor but no doubt welcome changes. But, in my view perhaps the more important fact is that following the release, the previous standard 3G revisions are being sold off for $99; I think that’s going to make a big difference in the number of people taking up the iPhone. I didn’t pick one up because of the price (especially because we get screwed on it over here, since we have no O2 to subsidise it), but had it been a $99 base price – well, that’s a lot easier. Being able to offer an iPhone to a wider range of buyers is certain to give more steam to the iPhone popularity train.

MacBook Pro

More speed & RAM, FireWire 800 is back (no use to me, but some people missed it), SD card slots are in, and perhaps more importantly, Lithium-polymer battery tech is in, for up to 7 hours on the go. Sweet. Interestingly, the entry-level MacBook is now replaced by the 13-inch MacBook Pro, with the same overall design but just lower specs. This allowed Apple to claim that the MacBook Pros now start cheaper, but really they don’t – the 15 inch (the one you’d really want to start at as a power user) is exactly the same price as before. [edit]Actually, it has dropped in price, but back to the same price as the 15″ MBP was in 2007, when I last bought one. 2008’s unibody design came with a price increase, so this decrease puts it back to how it was, hence my confusion.[/edit] But still, a faster chip, double the memory and bigger HD are welcome for the same price; I’m glad I didn’t buy a unibody yet, but I’ll definitely be tempted by the new ones.

The MacBook Air however did get a set of serious price cuts; they’re impractical for me still, despite being sexy as hell, but I’m sure people that don’t need so much local power and who desire sleek looks will be very happy.

OS X

We already knew that Snow Leopard would be basically a leaner, meaner version of Leopard with go-faster stripes and a few feature tweaks. The big announcement was that Apple would be releasing the upgrade for a mere $29 (or $49 for the multi-machine family pack), which was very well received. That basically makes it a no-brainer for all users, I know I’ll be upgrading soon after launch.

Most importantly, it’s a big contrast to the price that Microsoft want to charge for the Windows 7 upgrade, which contains roughly the same degree of change over Vista as Snow Leopard has over Leopard (although Leopard is a more efficient base than Vista is – does that make W7 worth more as an upgrade?). It’s rumoured that a Home Premium upgrade for W7 will be around $50, and a Professional upgrade about $100. Of course, OS X has no ‘graduations’ like Windows has, where you don’t get everything in the OS unless you buy an expensive ‘Ultimate’ version – OS X is just OS X (personally, that lack of fannying about with variable feature sets is attractive to me as a customer).  This is an obvious attempt to undermine Microsoft’s claim to be the ‘value’ player in the OS market, and frankly, it’s a good argument. Of course, you still can’t buy cheap-and-cheerful hardware to run OS X on like you can with Windows, but when I shell out $100 per machine for my Windows 7 Pro upgrade but only $29, or $49 for up to 5 Snow Leopard upgrades, hell yeah I’m going to notice the difference.

So, I think despite the lack of shattering announcements, this was an important WWDC for Apple, a consolidation move which in many ways is more important. Despite the often fiercely held opinions of people who haven’t even used them, Apple products are generally pretty damn good, and earn brand loyalty for a reason. Making them more accessible can only lead to more people trying them, and perhaps coming to conclusions for themselves, rather than just writing them off based on what they’ve heard from other people who haven’t used them either. 

It’s always fun to watch Apple and Microsoft slug it out in the advertising space – here in the UK we mostly have to do this via YouTube, since apart from a short stint of amusing Mitchell and Webb Apple ads and those pretty bland “I’m A PC” ripostes, we don’t really see the front-line assaults which take place on US TV screens.

So I hear that MS have a new set of ads out, where “regular” people go and look for a laptop, whereby they look at the Mac and say “whoah, far too expensive!” and then go and buy a Dell instead. Fair enough, the 3rd party PC market certainly gives you a wider choice of blending specifications than Apple does – in practice, Macs aren’t actually much different in price to a similarly specced PC, it’s just that all the components are generally of similar ‘grade’ – so you can’t cut corners to save money like buying something with a big screen but a crappy GPU, or a large HD with a slow motherboard, or a fast CPU but crappy battery life.  Of course, many people don’t realise they’re making these sacrifices and just look at the price – but if you do know what you’re doing, you can tailor a machine closer to your needs. Anyway, I enjoyed the “Homeless Frank” spoof of these new ads:

A couple of years ago I would have made the same arguments against the Mac that MS makes with it’s Laptop Hunter series; and indeed I did, when a Mac-owning friend tried to convince me to buy one, despite being a .Net guru (who now works for Microsoft!). However, now that I’ve owned a Mac for almost 2 years, I feel completely different – in a laptop at least, I’m very willing to sacrifice a little configuration flexibility in favour of having a device that is of uniformly good quality, and is nice to use. After all, laptops are always compromised in terms of upgradability once you’ve bought them, so it’s generally better to buy something decent from the outset anyway.

I know that buying a Mac laptop is going to encourage me to spend a little more money than I otherwise might get away with. But, what I get for that is a really nice device, that has the added bonus of being able to run OS X as well as Windows. I still use Windows every day, almost exclusively because of Visual Studio these days (and some games) since everything else I use runs on the Mac too anyway, but running both Windows and OS X on the same machine merely serves to make me love OS X more, despite still being a newbie with it in many ways. Windows is fine to use and all, but there’s something about the way OS X just gets out of the way, doesn’t pester me with stupid warnings all the time, doesn’t need a virus scanner to slow it down, allows me to unmount my USB drives without hunting down every Explorer window that is using it first, and countless other little things that have slowly endeared me to it despite being a total skeptic to begin with. I’m a technical guy by nature, but even I can appreciate technology that doesn’t waste my time with trivial stuff I don’t want to care about – and at the end of the day Windows (and Linux) still feels like it’s designed for “PC users”, whilst OS X feels like it’s designed for people, specifically people with stuff to do other than worrying about keeping the computer happy. The day that XCode equals Visual Studio in functionality (it’s not far off, but it’s not there yet), and I can run Steam on OS X, is the day I might seriously consider not using Windows on a daily basis anymore. But, we’ll see whether Windows 7 changes that view.

Via TechCrunch, Steve Jobs’ first public presentation of the Mac on 24th Jan 1984. And the crowd goes wild

I was 10 years old when this happened, and still using BBC Micros in school, so I guess I would have gone nuts over this too at the time, had I the chance to see one.

I’ve always admired the iPhone purely because of it’s sleek looks and elegant design, but it was encumbered by an excessive price tag, a lack of 3G (which for the price was scandalous), and a ridiculous telco tie-in that meant you could only (officially) use it on O2 here in the UK, which made it even more useless to me since O2 do not operate where I live.

However, the new 3G instalment which made its widely anticipated appearance at WWDC 08 is looking much more interesting. Obviously there’s the 3G support, which really should be a given in a modern high-end phone, although I can understand that since the US cell phone networks have been very slow to deploy it, it might not seem as important across the pond. GPS is in too, which is good, and Exchange support is probably for those who are wedded to it. But more importantly, they’re slashing the price; it’s half what it was last time ($199 for the 8GB model). Even better, Jobs is claiming that people are not going to pay an inflated price outside the US – they’ve promised that you won’t pay more than the converted price. Of course, given the fluctuations in the dollar rate, I’m not sure what rate they’re going to pick, but it would be a refreshing change not to get ripped off so badly here in Europe if they deliver on it.

The final issue is whether they’re going to lock the phone to a provider again, something I considered to be manifestly stupid from an adoption point of view. In the US they’re still doing this, via AT&T again for a pretty inflated monthly price which I guess is the point of them doing it. If they repeat this in the UK with O2 they’ll once again make it pointless me getting one. Sure I could try to bypass the locks, but the potential for my device to be bricked by a future update isn’t exactly enticing.

So if they lock to O2 again it will be a shame, because otherwise the new iPhone would be a likely purchase for me. It’s a great device, and if I have an excuse to have one I’d love to get Ogre running on it – the SEGA Super Monkey Ball demo in the video was certainly pretty cool

I don’t use my iPod as much as I used to, owing to the fact that I work from home now so I don’t have my daily walk to / from work in which to listen to it. Updating it for the first time in ages I was presented with a lovely "iTunes has detected an iPod in need of recovery" error message, which I thought was odd. Nevertheless I dutifully followed the instructions and performing the recovery, which is a pretty laborious process involving some waiting, disconnecting, rebooting of the iPod and reconnecting, at which point I got the same error. Rinse, and repeat. Scratch head.

Long story short, the eventual cause was a drive mapping – I had forgotten that since I last updated my iPod, I’d mapped the I: drive to a local folder (using subst) to replicate a customer setup on my machine, completely forgetting that I: is the drive the iPod likes to use, and if it’s in use it gets rather confused it seems. The resolution was to either to stop using the I: mapping (which is what I did, since I didn’t need it anymore), or telling the iPod to use a different drive letter in Disk Manager.

This is reported in the Apple knowledge base, although it’s a couple of links down from a typical Google search so easy to miss. You would have thought a more specific error message would have been better, since something like this is pretty easy to do by accident and then forget about, like I did.