Posts by Simon 10 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2007
The Tom Tom representative at WWDC said this was compatible with the existing 3g. Presumably, the car kit will include a digital compass, thereby making the experience identical on both versions of the iPhone. He also said that it would allow you to play music on your car stereo, which implies that there's an FM transmitter built in, but that remains to be seen and is open to interpretation.
A bit of research would be nice, ey reg?
Consider youself lucky you've even got something to brick. Ordered my iPhone from CPW yesterday lunchtime, got receipt and confirmation. Found out today that they accidentally sent it to the local branch, despite all the receipts and confirmations saying it was being delivered to my house. Went to the store, and they can't find it. Not only that, but I can't cancel my order because the department that does that sort of thing is closed, which means I can't walk down the road to O2 and buy one there. It's an absolute shambles, and the CPW customer service is easily the worse I've ever dealt with. So far, I've spent 30 minutes on the phone with the courier, 45 minutes on hold with CPW, and hour + in the store and I still don't have the damn phone. What's more, the store is out of stock, CPW online is out of stock, so there's no prospect of even getting one for 2 weeks.
So I could rent a movie from iTunes, paying the £3.50 and getting it fairly sharpish.
- OR -
I could drive to Blockbuster, pay £4 to rent it, £35 in petrol, including £34.99 in tax and have to deal with the spotty teenager behind the desk who thinks Donnie Darko was a life changing experience, and not a load of pretentious nonsensical pap.
I chose the I'll my coat not because I want my coat, but more because it looks like someone's nicking stuff out of my pocket. Although I can't decide whether it's Steve Jobs or the Studios. Ah screw that, it's Gordon bloody Brown isn't it.
This seems like a smart decision. The iPod is a MEDIA PLAYER, not a smart phone. You knew what you were buying. This is nothing more than a pack of applications that are available if you want to extend the functionality of your MEDIA PLAYER. Why isn't there a reaction like this when some random company releases an application for Series 60 that costs £13?
I think one of the reasons the iPlayer is effectively a failure is the DRM. And not the idea of DRM, but more it's implementation. I'd consider myself IT literate, and I have experience of DRM elsewhere (so probably not your typical iPlayer user, or at least not the target user), but the beeb's model is absolutely baffling. My understanding is that you download a show, which you can keep for X days, when you start to watch it, the period you can keep it for changes to Y.
For the average Joe on the street who just wants to watch Eastenders, it's a step too far and will completely baffle them.
You really have to wonder, if the PM (I still loathe calling him PM, seeing as he wasn't elected as such) thinks the BBC Trust has this in hand, despite 16,000 people saying otherwise, how many complaints does it take for them to realise the BBC trust is just as backward as the rest of the BBC (and entire television, radio, music etc. industries).
I had a corsa as a hire car a few weeks ago and had an absolute nightmare with it. Heading down the M4 at 6am the rev counter, speedo, radio and, more worryingly, power steering failed. If this happened at 6PM and not 6AM it would have been a disaster. The ABS light stayed on for the entire journey and the short trip through the timed speed trap was interesting as the speedo read 140mph and then 10mph, and various degrees in between. Great job there Vauxhall.
I can't be the only one wondering when they are going to stick a store in either Cardiff or Bristol. Not only is there a huge catchment area (M4, M5, Wales etc.) but both Cardiff and Bristol both have two universities and multiple colleges. Not to mention to tech heavy industries around the area. They also happen to be fairly affluent areas. The nearest store at the moment is Birmingham, which is a bit of a trek, especially if you need a "genius".
For those VM customers using on demand as a reason for VM bettering Sky, well if you've got a Sky+ box they have recently launched their very own on demand service. Just imagine, it'll be very similar to the VM offering, but they'll actually have some content worth watching. I moved house recently and used it as a perfect excuse to switch from Telewest/VM to Sky for TV. I stayed with VM for broadband though. That way, you get the best of both worlds (despite the recent "caps", cable is still years ahead of the ADSL crowd out there).
You can see how the conversation went at VM HQ... Hmm, we've been advertising out services as uncapped, but now we need a cap, how can we weasel out of this one....
And of course the answer was, instead of calling it a "cap" and applying it to _quantity_, they called it a "throttle" and applied it to _speed_. Give the solicitor who came up with that one a medal.
And can I just say, I'm on one of the 5meg (ish) plans, have been for a while and have been happy to pay the extra for cable bb over adsl. I've also evangelised Telewest in the past. No more. I was so excited about beta testing services like Joost and Mozy backups but now, they are going to be slow to the point of being unusable once this cap is reached. And using either of those services, I would guesstimate I'd reach the cap within an hour, easy. Absolutely shocking. So much for the on demand, always connected world we are supposedly heading towards.
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