Points that come to mind are:

• Unsurprisingly the phone didn’t gain any features in the year. It remains a very simple and limited device.
• I found the voice quality of phone calls good enough. In fact, it usually seemed better than on the phones of other people I used.
• Battery life started at a bit above a week when the phone was new and dropped a bit below a week after a while just to go back to a bit above a week recently. Those times are for use in Göttingen which probably means little to no excitement for the phone in terms of contacting new base stations. Something like a weekend trip to Berlin with a train ride and above-average usage of the phone didn’t really seem to make a difference to the battery life. Being in South Africa, with more moving around and – I suppose – weaker network coverage, drained the battery much more quickly, within four or five days, though.
• It’s annoying that the phone loses the date and time when the battery runs out or is removed.
• The loss of date and time is even more of a practical problem as dropping the phone on a hard floor usually means that it will open and the battery will come out.
• I never wrap the phone and just throw it in the backpack, yet it is essentially unscratched after a year of that. Pockets were shared with coins and keys as well to no detrimental effect.
• I am still not sure about what happens when the memory for received SMS messages (10) is full. The manual seems to claim the oldest message is deleted to make space for the newest one, but my impression is that an envelope symbol appears at the top of the screen and no new messages are received until you delete some of the old ones. Not that great, IMO, particularly as deleting a message is rather laborious unless you do it right after having read it.
• The first major annoyance with the device is its sluggishness. If the phone reacted to my keypresses a bit more promptly the experience would be significantly better.
• The second major annoyance is the keyboard. It’s feel is actually all right. But when pressing keys quickly – say when having to hit the ‘7’ key four times to ‘type’ an ‘S’ in a SMS – frequently one of the presses doesn’t register. I keep having the impression that this isn’t a hardware problem (the ‘feel’ of having pressed the key is OK) but rather another aspect of the software being sub-par and failing to keep up with my tremendous finger moving speed.
• Another slightly annoying quirkiness is what happens when you press and hold keys while entering things. Not only is this required to get a ‘+’ sign, but the original letter will appear when you press the key, the ‘cursor’ will move forward to the next position and then, after a second of holding or so, the character to the left of the cursor will change to the desired symbol. This still irritates me every single time as the advancing of the cursor always suggests to me that input has finished (and that I accidentally slipped off the key), and thus I’ll release the key too early, delete the wrong letter and try again. – Needlessly.
• The phone’s alarm is loud and works well.
• The phone’s ringing is too quiet and the vibrating is too weak. Not that I receive many calls but I miss a good percentage of them. Particularly as I prefer to use the vibrating only to avoid the chance of forgetting to turn the noise off. Even when having the phone in a pocket, I often don’t notice the vibration.
• The phone comes with a single socket for the charger. Apparently a headset can be used with it. Unfortunately that’s not a USB socket so the phone can’t be charged that way.
• A little plastic thing must have broken off inside the phone at some stage. This has no detrimental effects so far – except that shaking the phone now makes a little rattling noise.

In total I think the phone is holding up well. The interaction is tolerable but could be better in a few places, the durability seems quite amazing.

It may be interesting to add two more remarks. The first is that pretty much every single person who saw the phone really liked it at first sight. It’s simple, it’s sleek, it’s no-nonsense. Of course I enjoy pointing out the lack of features to them and some people turn out to be quite feature addicted once they hear that. But still, from the looks people are generally impressed.

And then there’s the obligatory iPhone comparison. As I pointed out the iPhone is not for me. The technology may be interesting but the toy is expensive, bound to break in my hands (as all other Apple products do), and I don’t actually need a mobile phone, so its price along with the hefty subscription fees completely rule it out: I computed my mobile telephony expenses and in the past year I spent around €50. That’s for the whole year, including the cost of the phone and calls in South Africa. With an iPhone people would have to spend that yearly total every month just for the phone contract. And they’d probably not use the phone at all in South Africa because they couldn’t just put in a local SIM card for €2 and would be submitted to the rip-off known as roaming fees instead.

In addition, with a cheap phone like that, I could just leave it in my bag at the beach while going for a swim. Even if it had been stolen it wouldn’t have been a big deal…

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

MacBook Air

The biggest thing to come out of the keynote was the MacBook Air with which Apple tries to return to the small portable computer market again. Over all, I don’t really like the machine, but it still seems quite interesting in places. Being the superficial type of person that I am, this comes mainly from the machine’s looks. Let’s just say that if Sony started selling a computer with loads of strange curves all over and with a few ports to ‘fold out’ then I’d just laugh and shrug that off as half-assed design which misses the point. If they started touting a really small number of millimetres as the machine’s thickness (at the thinnest place), I’d consider them to be misleading at least. And if I saw their users fiddle with a handful of adaptors to attach to a screen, a wired network and a camera, I’d snicker. So, just for fairness’ sake, I think I should do the same when Apple release such a machine.

Still, I think it’s good for Apple to give light machines a try again. People have wanted them back since the demise of the Powerbook Duo and 12″ Powerbooks seem to be among the most-liked machines simply because they’re quite small. And at least weight-wise, the MacBook Air with its 1,5kg mass outdoes Apple’s other computers. Just size-wise they didn’t get it. Yes, the machine is thin. But it’s still large. It has the size of a MacBook, rather than that of a novel. That makes a lot of a difference when carrying it.

In my opinion, it would have been preferable to just leave away all those generous bezels around the machine and make it a bit thicker at the edges. Of course, it could be that Apple still remember their ultra-breakable Titanium Powerbooks which tried to go with less bezels and that they still can’t manage to produce such machines. But that’d be a shame. Other computer makers can. And did I say, I think it’s an ugly machine? Now I did…

Then the trackpad. I absolutely love the idea of enabling more gestures on it. Using computers without double finger scrolling already frustrates me to no end and having gestures like Back and Forward in a browser right there without a click is a cool thing (the rotation looked a bit cumbersome to me). I wonder to which extent these new features are a matter of the hardware and how many of them could come to existing machines as well via improved drivers. Just from its proportions, I find the track pad’s button rather ugly to look at. If they wanted to be daring, they could have left it out. But I suppose the machine’s demographic has too unagile fingers for that.

The keyboard looks just like the MacBook’s. So I assume it will be OK but far from the best. It comes with background lighting which is a cool looking but essentially useless feature. A cool looking and essentially useless feature which people love, nonetheless. Particularly what I’d consider the MacBook Air’s demographic.

As for technicalities, from the spec sheet the machine sounds good as far as its processing power is concerned. The fact that speed doesn’t really matter these days helps with that of course. I’d say if they offered the normal MacBook with that slower processor and I’d get less of that annoying fan noise for giving up 20% of the clock-speed, then I’d absolutely take it. Less heat, less noise, longer battery life, probably cheaper and all that for a reduction in speed which most people won’t even notice. What’s not to like? I suppose that the machine’s graphics capabilities will be all right as well. Which means that in some way they suck (Quartz Composer performance can seriously struggle even on simple tasks with the crappy Intel chip sets), for normal situations they’ll be just fine and the gamers will whine anyway.

The machine’s ports are interesting. If I told you that you can have four ports which ones would you choose? Probably the ones for listening to music, attaching your camera, attaching a screen and charging the machine. From that point of view, Apple’s choice of ports is completely reasonable. They wanted to simplify and simplify they did. Leaving out FireWire is forgivable these days (even though I’ll be the first to admit that it beats USB if you need the speed and that it’s essential for charging my old iPod from back in the times when Apple didn’t take USB seriously – but they hardly ever win prizes for consistency or doing the right things do they?). Hardly anybody uses it. And those ‘serious’ people probably don’t want to get the lifestyle MacBook anyway. In addition, I have the impression that FireWire has much stronger power requirements that USB which might have imbalanced the small machine’s power-supply or forced Apple to use that silly 4-pin FireWire socket which all the crappy laptops have.

What really infuriates irritates me, though, is Apple’s port design. Apparently the MacBook Air comes with yet another DVI socket, thus creating maximum confusion and inconvenience. Sure, that may be better for Apple’s bottom line, but at least I am the kind of person who appreciates being able to boot his 1987 Mac SE from his 1995 zip drive, to fire his 1970s flash with a 2003 digital camera or to fire a 2003 flash with a 1970s camera. That stuff ‘just works’. Computer stuff, on the other hand, hardly ever works. And Apple seem to have given up trying just to produce more crappy chargers and make people wonder about the wonderful worlds of Micro-, Mini- and normal DVI on the one hand, with added extras of VGA, S-Video and ‘Composite’.

Of course I can see the size limitations of the MacBook Air. I could even foresee them. And I am pretty sure that Apple – the company who work in secret on future products for years – did foresee that as well. And with that bit of foresight they could have easily cut down the number of different ports they use.

The hard drive in the MacBook Air seems to be a bit of a downer. Perhaps its limitation to a 80GB iPod size drive suggests that space inside the machine is so scarce that they couldn’t even fit in the 160GB version used in large iPods today? But the main issue will of course be speed rather than size. Mac OS X loves using its hard drive. Situations where the machine feels sluggish appear all the time. And hardly ever that is due to the machine actually doing a lot of work, it’s mostly due to swapping being slow or several applications trying to use the hard drive at the same time. And iPod size drives tend to be even slower than their laptop size siblings. Which makes me wonder how fast the MacBook Air will ‘feel’. I’d guess that the slower hard drive will have a bigger effect on this than the reduced clock speed.

Apparently you can solve that problem by dropping another thousand bucks on a 60G flash drive instead. That’s a hefty price, but someone has to start going down that road. And I’ll be curious to hear about the real world performance of these. They should be faster than mechanical drives. And what about their failure rates (my impression is that failures with mechanical drives have gone up in the past decade, could this be a solution)? And what about them only being writable a limited number of times? Is that number high enough to support activities like swapping over years?

I’m quite happy to see Apple do the natural thing and drop the DVD drive from the machine as I had hoped for a while. It looks like they made a real effort there. And lets hope that this spreads to their other machines. To overcome resistance of DVD drive lovers, Apple offer what looks like a reasonable pretty external USB powered DVD drive. It is sold with a MacBook Air (only?) for just a hundred dollars. That’s the kind of money Apple usual charge for a 60G upgrade of your internal hard drive and the price seems competitive with that of other manufacturers. It remains to be seen whether the drive can actually be used with non MacBook Air machines or whether Apple managed to go all ass-y on this one.

What’s much cooler – if not exactly practical for people who don’t want more than a single computer, and who in their right mind would want that kind of a nightmare? – though, is the disk sharing that Apple seem to have developed. This simply lets you share an optical drive over the network. I will be curious to see how far this support goes. Will it work (for simple file sharing, not for booting, perhaps?) with their other machines as well? Will it work for hard drives? Will it work for importing CDs and playing DVDs. There are good chances that the answer to all of these questions will be a sound ‘no’. And, once more, that’d be a shame.

Finally, the battery. Making the battery non-customer-replacable will certainly make the MacBook Air a no-go compute for those who are away from wall sockets for a long time. But those aren’t many. It will also make the obligatory battery replacement after a few years and the not-so-unusual warranty battery replacements (both my MacBooks had bad batteries that needed replacement) more expensive and more hasslesome than they need be. Will you be keen on giving the machine away for a week just to swap the batteries? In particular if you like your data enough to fell compelled to do a full backup, delete and restore of it to ensure that Apple can neither abuse nor lose any of it? To me it looks like Apple bought simpler engineering at the cost of the convenience of their customers here.

But the great thing is that this won’t matter. I see the MacBook Air’s demographic with people who could perhaps be stereotyped by the machine’s acronym as MBAs or as bloggers or ‘Scobles’. People who just ‘need’ the newest flashy stuff because – uh! – its new and flashy. And! totally! amazing! of course. They don’t create data they need to keep anyway, so all the fuss about that is a non-issue. And surely enough they’ll already have needed to upgrade to a newer, shinier machine before the issues with the machines might hit them. With everybody having iPhones already, this will be their new opportunity to ‘shine’.

And in a way, I have to congratulate Apple. Take all the money from these people that you can get your hands on. Perhaps try to spend it on a few good designers and engineers. Kthx.

Airport Time Machine

Cross an Airport extreme station with a hard drive and you get Airport Time Machine or whatever they called it. It seems a very logical thing to do and people may even need it. If you don’t have a wireless base station, the price (for the 500GB model at least) even seems reasonable. But if you do have a wireless base station already – and who hasn’t? – I’d consider it a bit overpriced.

The interesting point here of course is that with the Airport Time Machine, Apple will have to enable some sort of network-based backup. This feature was originally announced for Mac OS X.5 but allegedly dropped out before the release [That’s what I read on the internet, anyway. Oddly, when using File Sharing between two Mac OS X.5.1 machines recently, I noticed that the shared volumes were offered in the Time Machine preference pane. Of course I had to try that out and it seemed to work just fine with the backup going to a disk image. So I’m not really sure what to make of those reports.]. The Airport Time Machine would mean that the feature finally makes it to OS X.5. Which in turn lets us speculate again whether that will be for Apple’s own Airport Time machine drives only or a generally working solution.

 TV

The  TV seems to have gotten an update as well. And a downgrade on its price, perhaps. Which is probably good. Let’s hope they finally managed to turn it into less of an energy waster. I remain unenthusiastic about this device. Not only because I don’t even have a TV I could attach it to, but also because it’s so iTunes centric. Simply ignoring all the other stuff people might want to enjoy.

iPhone / iPod touch updates

Probably nice for the people who have those toys. Charging iPod touch owners for new widgets seems a bit mean, though. Next we’ll have to wonder what Google do with the data they gain by tracking people via their Apple toys.

iTunes Movie Rentals

Uh, well, whatever. Apparently people want that. I still suppose it’s a nightmare software-wise. Software should be made for the users rather than for some lawyers. And that’s what playing ‘rented’ films seems to be all about. Let’s just hope, Apple finally managed to get film playing in iTunes right with the newest version. Ever since they introduced film playing to the application I found that it was the non-smoothest QuickTime playback I had ever seen. Even simple interactions with iTunes could get it to drop frames in playback.

I suppose this will be like printing money for Apple and the copyright cartels. Their price is higher than that of a normal hardware video store. And they don’t need to rent a large room in each town, hire as much staff and deal with the problem of idiots scratching the DVDs. Yet they want to charge more than a dollar per rental.

Convergence

None of these Apple updates seems compelling to me. I might find a really small notebook interesting. I might even find a pretty, open and easy to use media centre interesting if I were really open minded. And I can appreciate a wireless network drive, just not in Apple’s way of bundling it. In each of these devices/gadgets/machines/toys there are interesting ideas, but Apple always manage to package them up with enough bling, crud or other things I don’t want, that I can’t like them. Currently they seem to have many ideas but they seem to lack a clean direction. They also seem to want to sell many different devices to you all of which have to be connected via their infrastructure. That seems a bit mean. More openness would feel a lot more comfortable there.

One thing I don’t get, for example, is how all their square boxes (Mac mini,  TV, Airport Base Station, Airport Time Machine) are slightly different in size, design and setup. Each of them comes with a power supply of its own as well. Which, in a way, just cries for moving these things together. Buy a square box for your network, one for your TV and one for backups. Just stack them on top of each other and they’ll only need a single energy wasting power supply and they’ll be set up to share their features before you even had to open iTunes. Wouldn’t that be neat? I thought so.

And once you thought thus far – or actually a few paragraphs above already – you start wondering why the MacBook Air’s DVD drive comes with a USB cable. Where is the WLAN support in there. MacBook Air, you remember? The computer can boot of a wirelessly shared drive. So this should at least be an option. Going a step further, I can also see it turn the  TV into a DVD player: ideally the  TV just ‘sees’ a shared DVD drive on the network and then offers to play the DVD if one is inserted. Just saying…

Of course people will point my inner Apple fan towards the newly released iPhone. And I have to admit that it certainly gives a bunch of new ideas to phone design and that it definitely gets a number of things right which other phone manufacturers chose to ignore so far. However, I am not in the market for an iPhone. I still consider mobile telephony mostly superfluous as the situations in which I actually need to be reached at once and I am not in the vicinity of an actual phone aren’t that frequent. As a consequence I don’t plan or expect to use such a phone a lot. And the money I expect to spend on it in a year will be what people pay for their iPhone in a month - a different order of magnitude, that is.

Add to that that I am a bit weary of putting money into shiny electronics devices, particularly those from Apple, as every single one I got in the past years needed constant care, attention and warranty fixes I had to look after. I really don’t want to throw any more cash in that direction. I rather wanted something cheap and dispensible. Something I won’t care about. Something I wouldn’t be sad about breaking, losing or scratching. And still something that isn’t entirely crap. Obviously that last bit was the tricky one.

And so I decided to give Motorola’s Motofone F3 a try after I read about it. While made by Motorola, the mother of crappy user interfaces, it is one of the very rare devices which dares to do things differently, breaking standard practices and trying out new ideas. The main point about this phone - which is said to be aimed at developing countries - is that it can’t do much. There’s no camera in there, no music player, no radio, no e-mail, no web browser, no coffee-machine, no games, no colour display, no multi-level menus, no computer connection, no nothing. But it can be used for phone calls, you can sort-of use it for text messages and as a bonus there’s even an alarm clock.

I shall discuss a few points I found interesting about the phone in what follows.

Screen

The most noticeably different thing about the phone is its screen. The numbers don’t just look like 1980s alarm clock numbers, that’s actually the ‘resolution’ the screen gives you. Two lines with six glyphs each (the upper line being text capable 14-segment ones and the bottom line being number only 7-segment ones) and that’s it. In addition to the two lines there are also a number of icons that the screen can display at the bottom and the top of the display. The status indicators for network and battery strength seem to be part of the screen as well.

Technically the screen is this often heard-of electronic paper, meaning that it’s even high-tech in some odd way. Which probably explains the low ‘resolution’ and which also means that the display can be read without problems even in bright sunlight. In fact, the photo above was taken in bright sunlight as the reflections and the hard shadow may have hinted already. Apparently another advantage of the electronic paper is that it only needs very little electrical power. Particularly as it only requires power to switch the display, not to maintain its state (which can be easily checked by removing the battery, btw).

Of course this kind of screen is very limiting. It doesn’t give you a full range of characters. You get one set of A-Z (no distinction between capital and small letters), obviously there’s 0-9 and as a bonus, you also get ,?@+*#. And that’s it. No hope for umlauts or accented characters and so on. It all looks a bit funny. But possibly it doesn’t really make a difference in the mobile world.

All that said, the screen can’t display much but it displays well and in huge readable letters. My mum immediately liked that.

Phone Calls

This may need mentioning these days: You can use this phone for phone calls. And it works quite well. I thought that the sound quality was quite good compared to my parents’ phones for example. I can hear the caller very clearly and loudly. Which probably is a good thing. You can use the built-in phonebook for storing numbers or you can just type them in as you’d do on a real phone. Pressing the green key will magically give you the list of the previous numbers you called which I didn’t find entirely obvious but which is quite handy.

Ringtones

You can’t add additional ringtones to this phone. Six are built-in. And one or two of those may be tolerable. You have a choice of six volume levels - mute through five - and you can add the vibration alarm to the mute and the five level. Which I thought was a clever way of simplifying things. Not that I had the ringer turned on frequently so far, but my impression is that even the highest level will not be loud enough if you are outside, so this isn’t too impressive. The vibration alarm is quite weak as well. But I suppose that’s true for most vibration alarms of this millennium.

As a bonus, try closely looking at the photo above. What do you think the icon at the top of the screen signifies? To me it always looks like a bell and some vibration, thus that the phone will ring noisily and vibratingly. But behold! There’s actually a little cross inside the bell which is supposed to mean that the sound has been turned off. Bad icons in my opinion. It’d be more intuitive if the bell weren’t displayed or if the cross were larger than the bell.

Text Messages

Text messages and me don’t go together very well. I don’t like the space limitation and I’m not particularly good at entering text through a numeric keypad. When having borrowed my mum’s phone previously I had friends offering to type stuff for me. So pathetic is the impression I give when entering them.

Which definitely makes this phone one for me. With its screen it’s not made for text messages. When you receive them you can see a full six characters of the message at a time and have to scroll through them horizontally. A bit of a pain but working much better than I expected. I think the phone is able to store ten old messages and then it’ll start dumping the oldest one when a new message arrives (at least that’s what I have read, I kind of suspect it doesn’t do the auto-delete thing but I’m not sure about that). Very basic and simple. Which I appreciate as the phone doesn’t even pretend to be an archive (which other phones do pretend but factually aren’t). Of course you could end up being a bit screwed if people send you messages with fancy characters, but just as the internet survived on ASCII, text messaging in the languages I can converse it does as well.

Writing a text message is straight from the stone age as well. While pretty much any phone has that clever T9 system built in and will probably also try to complete your words for you, this phone doesn’t. You have to tap in each character with the correct number of keypresses. As this makes interaction with the device more predictable that isn’t necessarily bad (and also evades the problem of needing UI for turning T9 on and off and for setting the language to be used, quite complex stuff). However, my impression is that the keyboard, despite having quite a good feel to it that nicely communicates when the key has been (supposedly) pressed, isn’t up to the job.

Pressing the same button three times in a row quickly sometimes only registers two keypresses. Which of course ruins the whole text entry process as you will have focused on the next character by the time you realise there’s a problem and then you get out of the flow and need to correct the mistake first (as - another strike of simplicity - you cannot move the cursor backwards in the text without deleting). Slowing down a little bit resolved this problem. But I hardly consider that a real solution.

Clock

As seen in the first screenshot the phone includes a large, easily readable clock. As I don’t wear a watch I really like that. The clock isn’t very precise, though, and seems to easily go off by a minute or two within just a few weeks. Ironically, the only ‘setting’ the whole phone has is to set the clock. The clock is complimented by an alarm clock. Which I quite appreciate. Particularly as the alarm it gives is so hideously loud and annoying that even I can’t see me sleeping through it. Of course I would have appreciated a countdown timer with seconds precision as well (for boiling eggs) but I guess that would have made things too complex.

Battery Life

The phone’s battery lasts a bit over a week for me. With me hardly using the phone, but possibly taking it on long train journeys, that is. So this probably isn’t too impressive, but it’s not too shabby either. When running out of power the phone seems to properly shut itself down rather than just losing power. At least I found it with the screen turned to all-black when the battery had run out, rather than still displaying the time it ran out of power. It’s battery indicator isn’t the best, though. While it will need days to take the first bar off the battery status, the phone can be dead within a day when it’s down to a single bar of battery power.

Reception

I have no good way to compare these things. But I didn’t find reception to be a problem so far. The phone always seems to find a network and didn’t have problems connecting and displaying some network bars. But I have no real experience with this and don’t know the situations which are actually problematic. An oddity is that both the battery and signal strength displays consist of five bars. But the display/phone is set up to switch the ‘upper’ two of them on and off at the same time. Needlessly irritating, I say. If they only wanted four bars why didn’t they just use four?

Phonebook

As the phone cannot be connected to a computer the only way I could fill the phone book was by typing numbers in. Obviously it’s annoying and keeping things reasonably up-to-date won’t be fun either. Navigating to phonebook entries isn’t a big problem although they managed to put some strangeness in there: Say you want to navigate to some name starting with H and thus press the 4 (GHI) key. Then the phone will only jump there if you actually have entries starting with G in your phone book. You’ll have to press the key twice to make it jump to H. But I’d expect it to jump to the next best match when pressing the key once as well, rather than doing nothing.

Obviously I would have loved having a phone that synchronises with my computer’s address book. Wirelessly. And correctly. But that is not to be had with this phone. Syncing seems to be difficult. (Not even Apple can sync my addresses to their own iPod properly…)

Design

The phone is simple. And luckily that aspect made it to its design as well. Just the necessary keys on the front and a rather simple back, most of which can be taken off to reveal the battery and the magic chip. It does have a little hook so you can pretend to be a Japanese girl and attach some little Pokemon or whatever and it has a single other socket to plug in the charger (and possible even a headset). I’d call this design no-nonsense. Which proabably is quite good for these days.

On the back there are four shiny silver Torx screws holding the black plastic case together. That looks quite clean. The phone is quite thin (less than a centimetre) and seems even thinner because its back narrower than the from. It feels surprisingly solid for that. The plastic case seems to be a bit flexible and I wonder what it’d take to break it. So far I haven’t even gotten a scratch on it despite just stuffing it into pockets and rucksacks without extra protection. So it’s more scratch resistant than an iPod. I was also surprised that the keypad and the navigation button have a rather good feel to them.

Price

The phone itself is not excessively expensive. You can buy it for €30 at amazon [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de], get it for €5 with some fixed prepaid plan tied to an operator or at various levels of price and limitation in between depending on the crookiness of whom you do business with.

&c

As the phone can’t do that much I actually have discussed many points about it already. But other things can be remarked. The user manual is a single sheet of paper with step-by-step instructions. And that’s really all you get. Apparently it’s also aimed at people who can’t read. The phone supports three languages and has voice prompts for the things it does. You get to select those when first setting the phone up and I turned them off immediately, but I found that quite interesting.

There are a few additional, more advanced, settings. The lack of an actual menu means that you have to get the manual, look things up and type stuff like ***250* to change the settings. Not convenient, but not a real problem either - particularly when keeping in mind that most people will stick with the defaults anyway.

One thing that keeps reminding me I’m using a Motorola product is the way the phone operates its (weak but not really needed backlight): As soon as you press a button the light will come on. And if you keep buttons pressed for more than two seconds without fully releasing them, the light will go out again. I suppose that’s just a clever way to deal with buttons being accidentally pressed when the phone is in your pocket or bag. However, where this starts looking rather dumb, is when you unlock the phone. You do that by holding the * key for about three seconds. Which means that you press the button, the light goes on, you hold the button, the light goes off, and finally the phone unlocks itself. I think the light should remain on all the way or be turned on at the same moment the phone is unlocked. But it isn’t. Instead the light will just come on when you release the * button again. Odd!

Finally, the charger. While it’s annoying that the phone doesn’t charge via USB - I mean most things could charge via USB, so why don’t they? Having some sort of standardised low-voltage plug to charge things with would certainly be great. But this phone has pretty much the smallest charger I have seen so far.

Conclusion

This phone certainly isn’t perfect. But if you don’t need (nor imagine that you need) all those fancypants features which modern phones have, it actually is a viable option. And of course it’s just refreshing to have a piece of technology with less features these days. In a way it seems daring.

Read how I destroyed the phone and see photos of it disassembled.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

And as far as I can tell, the unmapped key just remains dead. Pressing it won’t do anything. Thanks a lot. My suspicious is that this is due to the iMate being a good old American product and as we all know (well Americans seem to be mostly unaware of that fact) American keyboards usually come with one key less than all others. It’s unclear to my why that is the case as generally the US pride themselves quite successfully in having a bigger choice and huger sizes of everything. But as far as keyboards go there is a key missing (to the right of the left shift key, usually).

And while Apple themselves have been handling these differences rather well for as long as I can remember, it appears that in conjunction with the iMate things manage to go wrong after all and one of the keys remains stubbornly dead. Luckily I don’t type that many circumflexed characters or tempereatures that this would be a really bad problem but it does ruin the good first impression I got of the iMate.

I think I quite liked the idea of getting an iMate USB to ADB adaptor ever since I got my first Powerbook. Not because I missed my own ADB keyboard but because my dad still had an unused Extended II keyboard sitting around. As I considered this to be more of a toy, I didn’t want to start a big spending spree for it and as I could easily get hold of used iMac and then ‘Pro’ USB keyboards over the years, I never really bothered.

Unfortunately neither of those keyboards are great. I find their touch a bit too soft and they certainly won’t be the instrument you need to keep the neighbours awake just by typing. Similarly Apple’s new external MacBook-style keyboards don’t feel particularly good to me. And hence I went looking for an iMate and finally managed to get a used one for an OK price on eBay.

And so far I’m quite happy with it. It’s pseudo-translucent design looks a bit aged today, but it ‘just works’: Plug it into a USB port, plug the ADB keyboard into iMate and you’re done. Even better, the iMate also lets you use an ADB mouse that’s plugged into the keyboard.

When first connecting the keyboard – not yet the Extended II but rather the ‘Apple Keyboard’ belonging to the SE – I was pleasantly surprised by OS X. It realised that it couldn’t identify the exact keyboard type (which I guess is quite tricky for old-school devices like this one, particularly when only been seen through whatever magic iMate provides) and the Keyboard Assistant came up. It asked me to press two keys on the keyboard, the one to the right of the left shift key and the one to the left of the right shift key and then deduced the correct keyboard type. I assume that those two may be enough to tell American (with one missing key) from other keyboards and probably narrow down the possible ‘other’ keyboards sufficiently to know which type is being used. The tiny old keyboard I am using is American I think and thus the keys I typed were ‘z’ and ‘/’, On a German keyboard they would have been ‘<’ and ‘-‘. I suppose it was fun/interesting to create a full yet minimal list of keys the user should press in order to identify the keyboard.

Actually this keyboard’s feel is rather good and it’s clicketyclick all over which makes me (or at least gives me the impression that I) indulge less in typos. Unfortunately the missing/mis-located key for ‘>’ (when using the American hardware with the German software keyboard layout) is driving me nuts, as is the all-horizontal arrangement of arrow keys that differs from the 3 horizontal one on the Apple Keyboard II. And thus I’m looking forward to getting my dad’s aircraft carrier size Extended II with a German layout soon.

And while I don’t actually use the caps lock key and have it turned off since I started using Mac OS X.4, I obviously enjoy the fact of having a mechanical caps lock key. And a keyboard with a power button (which at least works to bring up the shut down dialogue while the MacBook is running).

Looking around at eBay, I found that fake replacement batteries are ridiculously cheap. Something like €7,50 will get you one. And, formally, that’s €2 for the battery and some strange plastic thingies which allegedly help opening the iPod (and which are definitely broken after being used once) with the rest being for shipping straight from Hong Kong.

Such a price is so good – with the total being less than the shipping charges for many items within Germany – that I thought I’d give it a try. Unless the battery spontaneously self-combusts it should be better than the three hours my old battery gives me and even if it’s just good for a year, it’s a reasonable deal.

And the battery arrived, I installed it, now it’s charging and it remains to be seen how much of a disappointment it will be.

One change that triggered a lot of hubbub was the loss of the Apple symbol on the command key, even though this is much less critical a change than removing the option key symbol from the option key as the Apple symbol isn’t actually used in the user interface. As long as the place of interest / propeller / cauliflower (I never really understood how people see a likeness here / ⌘ - symbol remains, keyboard equivalents for menu commands can be understood just fine.

But still, people became more nervous about a lack of Apple symbol than about the lack of option or shift key symbol which can make keyboard equivalents for menu items had to read. And many a blog post has been written about it. So many in fact that even the German yellow press seem to have jumped on the bandwagon and managed to extract a ‘no comment’ from Apple.

Once you start thinking about this issue, it’s really a bit tricky. As local habits do play a role. And seeing that the different language versions of Apple’s new keyboards do vary a bit in how the modifier keys are labelled suggests that people at Apple at least gave this a little thought. The main issue seems to be that there are at least two things associated to a modifier key. The name that people use when talking about the key and a symbol which is used to represent the key on screen, usually for keyboard equivalents. And there’s not much you can do to eliminate these two layers as having spelled out key names in your user interface will need a load of space and, I suspect, make it harder to grasp a keyboard equivalent at a glance. On the other hand, you need a speakable and typeable name for these keys.

With these two points in mind, you can judge the advantages and disadvantages of Apple’s new keyboard labelling. On their U.S. keyboards they seem to no longer have symbols on the shift and option keys. Bad for denoting keyboard equivalents in the user interface but possibly helpful for the telephone support situation. Assuming that novice users will not use keyboard equivalents anyway, this should make the situation easier for beginners. However, it will make learning keyboard equivalents harder.

For the command key, Apple decided to leave the place of interest symbol on the keycap but go with the word ‘command’ or the abbreviation ‘cmd’ instead. That probably makes quite a bit of sense because many people seem say things like and then do command-A command-C command-Tab command-V…. I.e. this labelling covers both the telephone help sessions and the learning of keyboard equivalents rather well. Just the people who say Apple-A Apple-C… will lose out. It’s not clear to me whether that’s a big deal. On the one hand the Apple symbol was easily recognisable (in fact pretty much the only easily described symbol on the modifier keys) and thus referencing it was great. On the other hand, using the term command seems to be quite natural to many people and give a smoother flow in how people speak.

For the option and shift keys, however, the lack of a symbol may make it harder for people. (And an interesting question is whether Apple’s software update for the new keyboard [which makes me choke because it’s friggin’ keyboard that should ‘just work’ without software updates] updated the Keyboard Viewer application to precisely match the labels on the keys of the new keyboard or whether it sticks with the symbols).

Looking at the German or British version of the new keyboard reveals a different picture: There still are symbols on the shift and option keys. I’m not quite sure about the rationale for this on the British version but one could argue that the word English ‘Shift’ on a German keyboard would be strange. However, going down that road would also mean that labelling the command key with ‘cmd’ is a bit strange. And labelling the control key with ctrl is consistent with Apple’s tradition but may be considered even stranger, particularly as non-Apple German keyboards tend to label that key ‘Strg’ (which is not short for ‘String’ but for ‘Steuerung, German for the noun control). Interestingly, the option key on the German keyboard didn’t gain an ‘opt’ label but just has the additional ‘alt’ label which I assume is for PC compatibility. As this label has been on Apple keyboards for a long time, that’s still a good thing as it is presents a quicker way of specifying the key on the phone than describing its odd symbol would be.

Finally the command key: It lost its Apple symbol in the German version as well and gained a label ‘cmd’. I think that is a bit unfortunate for two reasons. One of them being that nobody refers to the key as ‘command key’ in German. Apple translates this properly as ‘Befehlstaste’. And thus the key’s label doesn’t actually help people but will lead to silly descriptions of mysterious things like ‘the key with c-m-d and a strange propeller on it’. That doesn’t convince me. In addition, the vast majority of German Mac users I know do refer to keyboard commands in terms of Apfel-A, Apfel-C…. I assume that is because saying Befehl-A, Befehl-C… would sound somewhat strange or broken. In that sense, I think, the Apple symbol on the command key made somewhat more sense in the German version as it is referred to quite frequently.

Putting all these things together still leaves me puzzled. It seems that the key cap labels for the new keyboard were specifically done on a language-by-language basis. But the result of this seems neither particularly consistent nor taking into account all the idiosyncrasies of local usage. Which in the end does leave me wondering what exactly they were thinking.

iMac

As much as Apple’s PR engine rambles about new materials and how aluminium and glass are great, the iMac update mainly looks like a careful next step in developing the machine further. It’s nice (in a somewhat irrelevant way) that it can be a bit thinner now. And a small speed bump here or FireWire 800 port there may be welcome additions for some. Although I doubt that any of these are really important. How many people will really notice the difference?

The big difference is of course the design change. Making the machine look more ‘professional’ by having more metal and shinyness on it. I definitely know people who’ll appreciate the metal look. And I quite like how they made the bottom of the screen’s frame rounded. Yet, I find this a rather straightforward and risk-less update as it’s quite agreeable and middle of the road. If Dell hat a tiny bit of taste, they’d do the same.

And while Apple subtly hints that aluminium and glass can be easily recycled, thus hoping for more green karma, I’d prefer waiting for an analysis by people with no interest in Apple’s financial well-doing to see whether this presents a real ecological advantage over the previous model. I am curious to see how much standby power this version of the iMac uses. Previous models are said to be quite piggish in their energy consumption even when turned off.

Personally I quite liked the white design (particularly in its original more angular incarnation) because it was so light and clean. It also made the machine stand out. The new one is more common in that respect.

Final point: Judging from Apple’s photos, the DVD drive is at the very back of the machine. I suspect that will make inserting a disc without seeing the slot feel unnecessarily uncomfortable.

Mac mini

I don’t particularly care for the Mac mini and I never thought they were a particularly good deal. Especially since the Intel price bump they saw. But having their innards in a current state probably is a good thing for the people who have use for the mini.

Keyboard

It had been rumoured for a while that Apple will introduce a new keyboard. I had dismissed those photos because the thing looked quite ugly. But the rumours were true after all. And from what I could see on Apple’s web site, the keyboard isn’t particularly impressive. It’s quite thin, all right. But what’s the point of that after showing off for a few seconds? Particularly if that thinnish look doesn’t really go with the look of the computer it’s attached to?

And judging from the photos on Apple’s site, a number of other things are strange/surprising/idiotic about the keyboard as well. The Option key seems to have lost its symbol. Having the word ‘option’ spelled out may be handy for phone-call support (although my mum could deal just fine with looking for the key that says ‘alt’ so far) but I wonder how it will be recognised as the key corresponding to keyboard equivalents that are listed with menu items. The same issue for keyboard equivalents holds for the shift key. And I guess to a lesser extent for a tab/delete/return/enter.

Likewise, the Command key lost its Apple symbol. Indeed – brave new world! – the keyboard seems to be an Apple device on which you will not see an Apple logo during normal usage. This is less critical than the Option key change but people will have to adjust.

First photos suggest that the actual look of the keyboards may vary from what is seen on Apple’s web site, depending on the keyboard’s localisation, weather conditions and whatnot.

The keyboard also features laptop style F1-F2000 keys above the actual keyboard. A number of them have extra symbols printed on them. For adjusting the volume, the screen brightness, controlling music or activating the Dashboard. And, frankly, I think not only are certain of these icons rather ugly but their placement is just silly. Shouldn’t Apple try to match the placement they have on their laptop or other external keyboards? If only to avoid confusion of long-term users or people who use an external keyboard with their laptop at home? Obviously Apple thought otherwise.

And they thought so much otherwise that they put the symbols for sound adjustment on the F7 through F12 keys. Thus giving you the benefit of completely unused F13 through F19 keys which I’m sure some emacs user will appreciate. And also making it much harder to blindly hit the key for ejecting a CD on the external keyboard. Whoever designed this must have tried to give people the worst of both worlds.

Other silly things: the symbol on the delete key just is too dark. There is a fn key now, presumably, to switch the behaviour of the F-keys between their special functions and normal F-key behaviour. How having such a modifier key in the position of the Help key can be considered as usable will most likely remain a mystery.

But the bottom line is different I guess. If you have a keyboard that kicks ass because it feels good and lets you type more quickly and with less errors, it’s pretty much irrelevant what the thing looks like. It’s not like there were eyes on your fingertips. But how likely will it be that such an ultra thin keyboard will actually have an extraordinarily good ‘touch’? Unlikely I think. And from my experience with the MacBook keyboard, the little bars between the keys make it unnecessarily hard to press two adjacent modifier keys with a single finger and thus wouldn’t be a feature you expect on a great keyboard.

In short, Apple had two great ideas for keyboards so far: Keyboards that are actually small (like those which they shipped until the mid 1990s or possibly the first iMac keyboard). While these didn’t have the greatest touch, they didn’t take up a lot of space and were very lap compatible. The other great thing was of course the legendary Extended . It may have been the size and weight of an aircraft carrier, but it had an excellent touch to it and was a joy to type (I’m still hoping to snipe a USB-to-ADB adaptor to use one :). The new keyboard looks like it will excel neither in being small and handy nor that it will have a great touch.

Final point: I think the different radii of the keyboard’s rounded corners and those of the keycaps really look like ass when seen next to each other at the escape key for example.

iLife

The long overdue iLife update was announced as well. It sounds like they put a lot of work into iMovie which may be nice. But which – with a single film ever made – I could care more about. In addition iPhoto has gotten significant revisions as well. And those sound quite good. Real world tests will show whether these improvements will actually kick iPhoto from its sluggish memory hog throne in practice. But at least it looks like an effort has been made to streamline iPhoto usage.

iPhoto will sort photos by the occasion they were taken at. And it looks like it’ll probably make a reasonable guess at first but still let you change things if necessary. That’s good. And having collections like that rather than the fully blown photo library with its thousands of thumbnails hopefully helps to keep iPhoto’s memory usage in more reasonable regions.

I also think the photo publishing options look quite good on the web site. But I presume this programming effort can be used by .mac users only and will not be available for publishing to your own site.

.mac

I’m not a big fan of Apple’s .mac service. For two reasons. The first is that it’s just not a very compelling offer. Paying a hundred monetary units per year for a tiny bit of storage space along with a so-so e-mail service and a few more gimmicks isn’t exactly a good deal. But that’s not really a problem if you don’t buy the service. The bigger problem is Apple’s tendency to litter their operating system and applications with .mac stuff.

You buy iLife and you’ll get a fair share of features which can only be (comfortably) used if you also happen to pay for the .mac service every year. And the same is true for Mac OS X which will not even let you sync the address books of two of your computers which stand next to each other unless you pay for Apple’s service. I.e. Apple specifically leaves features out of their software just to make .mac look attractive.

It looks like Apple at least make an effort to update the storage capacity and bandwidth allotment on the .mac service for subscribers now. Which makes things a bit more attractive and may even make .mac a reasonable deal if you actually use all the storage and bandwidth. Without the usual web server toys like scripts, databases, .htaccess files or your own domain names, I doubt that .mac will ever become a real option for people who already have their own site.

So while .mac may just have become a bit better, it’s still crap. I want the features which are artificially exlusive for .mac pay-tards to be available for me as well without having to pay another yearly Apple tax. Having to buy a new computer every year to stay within warranty is expensive enough…

iWork

And finally iWork will be updated as well. Not that I have actually used its applications so far, because I don’t exactly need them. Sure, Keynote looks neat. And Pages may be a reasonable compromise for those cases where T_EX won’t do the trick and a ‘pro’ layout application would be overkill. But what I really missed so far was a spreadsheet. For that reason I am using AppleWorks to this day for the few spreadsheet computations I need to do. And that works reasonably well.

With iWork finally gaining its spreadsheet application Numbers, the package looks much more interesting to me. But, coming to think about it, AppleWorks still does the job just fine. It’s just looking a bit old. Like you would expect an early 1990s piece of software that has been submitted to a questionable redesign and Carbonisation to look.

Tricky situation! I guess I’ll wait what people say about Numbers first (and by that I mean people who actually use it rather than those writing for magazines) and decide then. The description and demos Apple give on their site focus so extremely on the glossy bits, ‘smartness’, questionable ‘templates’ and diagrams with wooden textures that I’m put off a bit and started to doubt that the application will actually be good enough…

Wouldn’t that make sense for both the phone companies as well as the network operators as people might be more tempted to use their phone if using it were enjoyable? Apparently the MBAs think otherwise and instead people run around with phones that are larger, have more buttons, more menus and more settings than their previous phones. With each of those new ‘features’ being situated in the range between half-assed and useless.

And then, recently, Apple released the iPhone which got plenty of coverage and discussion on the web. Obviously we shouldn’t expect all of these descriptions and discussions to be competent as they were invariably written by more-or-less skilled journalists who didn’t even have to pay with their own money for the iPhones or by geeks/fashion victims [and who thought we’ll need to mention these two groups together…] who are able and willing to drop $500 - 2000 for a toy. Only very few will be able or willing to review the device in a way that is thorough, competent or even both.

Of course you cannot compare the hideously expensive iPhone to a freebie phone. Of course I wouldn’t expect a phone costing 5-10% of the iPhone to reach the same level of features, materials or software polish. But it’s not just the touch screen, the iPod or the presumably potent software that makes the iPhone shine. It’s also the exterior design. Particularly when seeing photos that directly compare it to other phones, it becomes obvious that phone ‘designers’ find it hard to even ‘design’ a straight line or a side without holes, logos and buttons.

Quite a shame really. I mean I never saw the point of those flip-open phones, but still, that RAZR thing just looks like ass once you actually look at it. Altogether this makes me wonder whether that huge and rich mobile phone industry actually employs people who are good at designing things. And assuming they do, I wonder whether these people actually get to make a difference. Because with mobile phones finding their way into the hands and lives of billions of people, these designers really should exist and make a difference.

Many things can be said about this announcement. A first, positive thing would be that Apple actually tells people before June. It wouldn’t seem quite unlike them to just keep the mystery going until then. Another positive thing is that Mr Jobs doesn’t seem to have fired the whole OS X development team. I mean the last time someone (IBM) promised something (3GHz G5) which he then announced and later had to admit he can’t live up to the announcement, we saw that someone being kicked out and replaced by someone else.

A further good thing about this is that, yes, Apple got this wrong. Things just went a little too well for Apple in the past years and the Mac zealots have become a bit too cocky and developed to much of an ‘nothing can go wrong, it’s Apple’ attitude, so this delay may tone them down a little. Which I consider to be a good thing. Now we are just waiting for the Windows zealots to use this opportunity to snicker back at the Mac camp for making fun of their delayed Vista game. And they’re welcome to do that – they deserve a laugh every now and again as well. Although I guess we will not see a I’m a Mac. I’m a PC ad touching this topic. Apple’s humour has been pretty much non-existant in any non-trivial direction so far (not that I blame them for that – it’s in-character for a huge corporation).

Even without being overly keen on X.5 – after all, currently it seems to have much less exciting new stuff for the user than X.4 had – I am still a bit disappointed by this. Mainly because my interest in the Apple Phone is quite low and I’d rather see them spend my money to develop stuff I will actually use. But it’s not a huge deal. If only the friggin’ Spotlight worked, OS X.4 wouldn’t be too bad.

Daniel Jalkut throws in some interesting thoughts on that which made John Gruber put on his Apple apologist hat to answer that Apple are doing just the right thing. Um, yeah, whatever. No idea whether it’s right or wrong, let’s hope they’ll at least do things properly. If they manage to finally turn OS X into something that is capable of browsing (as in actually seeing computers on) Windows networks without problems and displaying non anti-aliased Monaco 10pt properly that’d be progress…

The real problems Apple have are with their hardware though. Not only have those problems been numerous in recent years. A quick count shows that in our family we have used around 14 Macs since 1993, half of which since 2000. Before 2000 we had one minor problem with a machine IIRC and that one was corrected by replacing the battery. Since 2000 we had ten problems with machines – or eight, if you don’t count crack at the front of the Pismo which isn’t a massive problem and the PowerBook battery recall.

And about two of those problems I only learned today. The first is on my MacBook. When returning home last weekend I noticed there was a small black stripe at the front of the palmrest. I assumed it was just a bit of dirt and finally wanted to clean that today. But then I saw that it was actually a crack in the top cover:

Now how could that possibly happen? Well, let me give you a hint: When closing the MacBook, its lid is held shut by magnets. It turns out that those magnets are rather strong. Not only can they hold cans of cashews or pans at the computer’s screen, they also mean you need quite a bit of force to open the lid. And they mean that the lid isn’t just held shut but rather that it is held shut with force. And that force presses the little (and not exactly pretty) plastic bars in the display bezel which I think are there to keep the screen at some distance when the computer is closed (and they’re not particularly good at this, I still find keycap grease on my screen) into the top case (which seems to be Apple-speak for ‘upper part of the computer part of the laptop’. And the place where those little bars are pressed into the top case is just where that break is.

And my break isn’t unique. A quick trip to Google revealed several similar incidents reported on the internet. There’s even a flickr Pool on the topic. It looks like such reports started coming up in December, so perhaps it’s a fatigue of the material which just wasn’t engineered / manufactured / tested to be up to the task? People also say that they got their whole top case replaced (which stupidly includes the whole keyboard – I guess Apple just has to pay to learn…) meaning I’ll be on yet another trip to my local Apple dealer. This sucks.

While the breakage sucked, my local dealer managed to replace the broken part within a few minutes on the following day. So rectifying this problem at least was less painful than expected.

And while I was discovering this problem, my dad mailed that one of the RAM slots in his PowerBook stopped working. Apparently that is a well known problem about several of the aluminium PowerBook generations as well. And Apple set up a repair program for that. But one that according to what I read is far from including all affected machines. Like my dad’s.

Both these problems once more raise my suspicion that Apple’s engineering and quality control are somewhat questionable. And for problems like this – problems that aren’t apparent immediately but will only kick in after a year or two when support ‘unfortunately’ has run out – it leaves a rather bad aftertaste.

I’d wait for X.5 for years if Apple promise to make a computer that actually works until then.