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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about smart phones – what one is and how to choose among the different platforms. Read on for my speaking notes or listen to the podcast.
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It’s been two weeks since I got my new phone, and I’m impressed. I’m still in that phase of delight which follows me getting something new from Apple, such as my first iPod or my Powerbook. The iPhone isn’t perfect, but I’m struggling to find ways in which it under-performs my old Treo 650, and there are lots of ways in which it improves on the Treo.

Read on for a fuller review.

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For three years I have had a Palm Treo 650, which is one of the PalmOS based phones. That followed on from a succession of Palm Pilots I used from 2001 onwards. I liked the Palm platform – it did some nice things, and most importantly it was easy for people to develop software for so there was lots of it available. As an example, when I went to South America, I went with a Spanish-English dictionary embedded in my telephone.

And my Treo was nice. I liked the full QWERTY keyboard, the integration of the contacts list and calendar with the ones on my computer, the way an SMS conversation was laid out in a chat, and the external ’silent’ switch. Email was possible if rudimentary, and web surfing – well, you had to squint at the screen. Sometimes the phone crashed which was very annoying, but I forgave the instability for years because the phone was just so useful. Then I broke it.

I was sitting on a chair lift in France a couple of weeks ago, and I was slightly in the wrong place on the seat. When the safety bar came down, it and half a dozen burly skiers wound up resting on the screen of my Treo. And that was it for the phone. I wound up borrowing a phone in Switzerland – a small Nokia with menus in German. Then a Sony Ericson P990i in England – theoretically a smart phone, but everything I wanted to do with it was either not possible or just too hard to figure out. Then, back in New Zealand, another tiny Nokia loaner. I didn’t find it liberating trying to do without my contact list in a phone – just frustrating.

That brings me to my new phone. What to get? The Palm platform is looking pretty sick these days. I’d tried a Symbian phone (the P990i), although perhaps not the best example of one, and I was tempted by the Nokia E91i with its QWERTY keyboard and easy syncing to my Mac. But the E91i doesn’t have the SMS as chat feature that Treos have, or the external silent switch. Vodafone  sent me a new Treo as my old one was insured with them, but it runs Windows mobile not PalmOS, and won’t play with my Mac at all. So that’s on Trademe. As you’ve gathered if you are still with me, I care deeply about my technology. Call me finicky.

I have settled on an iPhone. It arrived less than a week ago so it’s early days yet, but I think we are going to get on just fine. It syncs beautifully with my Mac (of course!), has an increasing number of applications available for it, is easy to use, has the SMS chat feature and an external silent switch, and a full QWERTY virtual keyboard. Also, because it’s an iPod as well, that cuts down the number of machines I tote around on a daily basis. And it’s drop-dead gorgeous.

Here’s hoping for a long relationship!

Last week I spent a couple of days in Australia, and as part of it I was driven from Canberra to Sydney by the amazing Pia Waugh. In the car were not one, but two OLPCs.

The One Laptop Per Child is intended to be a cheap but functional laptop suitable for children in developing countries. It’s a very nice little machine, and I was really impressed.

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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about what I thought someone of a geeky persuasion might like for Christmas. Not that I have any first-hand knowledge, you know…

You can get the audio online, or read my notes below.

(And good luck for your Christmas presents )
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The new MyLocation feature on Google Maps for Mobile is spooky but cool.

Google Maps is a way of finding maps of just about anywhere, online on your computer. Check out maps.google.com if you haven’t seen it. It provides street maps, driving directions from A to B, and it can overlay satellite photos so you can see what the area looks like from above.

Google upped the ante on that service in the middle of this year when it introduced Google Maps for Mobile – the whole thing runs on most of the fancier kinds of mobile phone. So, if you’re lost or don’t know a street you are looking for, you can whip out your phone and get a street map of Wellington, say, and search for the street you want or the one you can see.

And you can switch between the map view and a satellite picture type view – a very detailed aerial photo just like in Google Earth. This is endless fun. You can armchair travel to all kinds of places, or just look down on familiar ones. (more…)

I’ve been fiddling with Linux for a decade now. And, frankly, back then it was a total bear to get it working – you had to really, really, want to. Once you could get Linux to fire up, it was rock solid of course as it has always been, but the process of installing it was challenging even for geeks. Then you had to figure out how to get it to use your screen as anything more than a line by line device – Linux could and can do this beautifully and flexibly, but you had to know so much about your hardware and edit the configurations just so before it would go.

How things have changed! First Mandrake through the early noughties, and now Ubuntu are making wonderfully good and easy to install CDs of Linux. (Just a note to the side – Linux is just the kernel or core of an operating system, and you need a lot of other software to make it work. A lot of that software comes from the GNU project, so it’s more proper to refer to GNU/Linux. And that’s how the different flavours, or distributions of GNU/Linux differ – it’s all a matter of which additional programs are supplied with the kernel, and how it is packaged up for installation.)

Ubuntu was founded by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African man who made a lot of money in the dot com boom and has obviously decided to put something back. And with its latest release, Ubuntu has surpassed the ease of use of Windows in many respects – especially those annoying registrations and activiations, because Ubuntu is totally free.

The latest release of Ubuntu, which goes by the names 7.10 or Gutsy Gibbon, is very good indeed. It installs easily, and provides access to an ocean of free software, some of which is of the highest quality, through the menus. You can try Ubuntu without installing it on your computer, or you can install it side by side with Windows, or you can put Ubuntu on first, then virtual machine software from Virtualbox and re-install your Windows in a VM so it lives in a window under Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a 700 megabyte download or a $15 CD purchase delivered from LinuxCDMall or Copyleft. Give it a go!

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about podcasts – what they are, why they are useful, and how to use them. You can use them to listen to radio programmes you have missed, or to ones that aren’t broadcast in New Zealand, or to programmes that were made for podcast and have never been on the radio. And you don’t even need an iPod – just a computer and broadband.

Read on for my notes, with links at the end.
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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about how you go about turning you CD collection into a music library you can listen to on your iPod or other portable music player. There’s some concrete advice in there, do read it if you are interested in having a go yourself.

Just one point before going ahead, though. As the law in New Zealand is currently, loading your CDs into your computer or iPod is illegal. That’s right, against the law. It’s perfectly legal in most other countries, of course. The government has shown us a draft law which is supposed to make it legal to use your iPod, but the last time anyone saw that, it still had big holes in. New Zealand badly needs the government to make iPods unconditionally legal as they are everywhere else.

Read on for the speaking notes, and some links at the end.

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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the Cult of the Mac – a slightly flippant look at the way Apple’s Macintosh computer is winning more and more converts around the world.

Macintosh computers have gone from being a marginal choice from an esoteric company that was about to go under, to the automatic choice of a high proportion of people who just love using computers. Macs have a reputation for being easier to use and more secure, and there’s little doubt they are better-looking than their competition.

Did I conclude that Mac worship is a cult? Read on. As always, there are links at the end.

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