OMG, 4GB RAM!

My previous machine could only handle 3GB of RAM. So I stuck with the 2GB I had all the way through as 2GB chips were much more pricey back then and I wasn’t too sure how well mixing different sizes of chips worked. I used the opportunity of getting the new machine to upgrade to 4GB from the measly 1GB it comes with. Not only is RAM for these machines ridiculously cheap these days (if you don’t buy with Apple), having the 4GB actually makes a big difference. I won’t claim that I actually understand why this is the case as Unix memory management remains a mystery to me (and, I claim, to everybody else). In particular I don’t think that I am using the machine so heavily that I should actually require 2GB of RAM. But OS X prefers to disagree.

So I gave in and now I can actually run a crappy photo management software, a music player, a web browser, an e-mail application, a text editor and a virtual machine while still having free memory. Fan-fucking-tastic! While I don’t really care about free memory per se, having it seems to make the system less sluggish. And I certainly care for that.

Shitty screen

Back in the mid 1990s everybody moved from 8-bit 256 colour graphics to the full glory of 24-bit with ‘millions’ of colours. Apple was always a bit ahead of the curve and people using Windows could enjoy less colourful icons a a bit longer. How times change. Apparently Apple don’t give a damn about graphics quality anymore and they seem to design their machines with crappy displays which cannot display the full range of 24bit colour - or anything close to it - anymore. My machine has one of those displays. It renders some photos blatantly ugly and, more significantly, it makes gradients look like shit.

Now of course that wouldn’t need to be a huge problem if only both the hardware and the software were ‘crafted’ by the same company and they cooperated to minimise the ugly looking effects of this (oh well… too much hope there). Instead, I keep seeing ‘dithered’ images on screen which make presumably smooth areas or gradients look pixelish or give plainly coloured rectangles a slightly grainy look. I frequently see the effect in the stuff I see through the transparent menus, or in the light areas of gradients. Once I move my head away from a perfect 90° angle to the screen, they become painfully obvious.

I tried taking photos of this and it turns out to be quite difficult because the camera will resolve all the fine detail of red, green and blue pixels, thus giving an image with many many little lines and elements instead of what I actually perceive. Putting the camera slightly out of focus removes that, but going too far in that direction also blurs away the pixelish dithering.

It looks quite pronounced to me in a vertical linear gradient from black to white which should have two pixels per level of brightness:

A ‘real life’ example of this can be seen in Safari’s navigation buttons, say…

The menu bar in the image also highlights how very sensitive the screen is to changes in the vertical viewing angle - a fact that, btw, I’ve always found extremely stupid: All my Apple laptop displays have had screens with relatively wide horizontal viewing angles - to ensure whoever happens to be sitting next to me on the train can indulge in reading my stuff - but relatively narrow vertical viewing angles - to ensure that even a slightly suboptimal screen angle which may be forced on me by the tray table will lead to an illegible screen.

Keyboard

This isn’t exactly new but new to me: Apple changed their keyboards a little for the umpteenth time in 2007. One thing they did was to move the volume buttons from F3-5 to F10-12 and adding a set of iTunes control buttons along with those on F7-9. Of course this breaks a decade of muscle memory; well done. I assume one could get used to that if Apple hadn’t introduced Exposé and the Dashboard in the past years, which used the F9-12 keys by default, and now put extra buttons - with what must be the silliest key cap icons in their history - for a subset of their features on F3-4. And those buttons they arranged in a stupid™ way with Exposé being F3 and the Dashboard F4, meaning that you can’t really assign all the three Exposé functions to adjacent buttons now.

The iTunes control buttons seem like a nice idea and the rest wouldn’t be a big deal if they let you swap their order (I don’t care too much about what’s printed on my keyboard, the muscle memory seems to take care of that). Now what will happen when you are using Macs of different ages? Hilarity ensues. A particular question to ask is how you can make all these functions work consistently between both the MacBook’s built-in keyboard and an Extended Ⅱ (or any other USB keyboard that’s not a current Apple one). In case you figure it out, be sure to let me know and to count the number of steps.

I doubt that it’s possible to do that, btw, because the only way I can see to do it would be to turn off the ‘special’ functions of those keys and simply map the brightness, volume, Exposé and Dashboard settings to the corresponding F-keys. Which will probably render those F-keys useless otherwise.

In addition to that the iTunes control keys utilise the remote control demon (rcd) process to do their job and seem to be non-remappable. Hooray for yet another completely different way of using keys which seems to be totally hard-wired!

A nice touch of the new keyboard is that it comes without a NumLock key. I never figured who actually used it and it did have a habit of getting into the way. Other things I noticed, besides the widely reported decease of the Apple logo from the command keys was that the text on the escape key is now centred. I always liked the old left-aligned design a lot (but then I also disapproved of the typeface change for the keyboard labels). It seems more bland this way.

A final stupid change is the removal of the enter at the right of the space bar. Well, this one has actually been travelling a lot, from being the first key to the right of the space bar, to being the second key to the right of the space bar to oblivion. Consistency is different than this. But even more so, that key is - used to be -  extremely useful because it let you quickly dismiss annoying dialogue boxes with a single finger move while you were using the trackpad. I am using this all the time and hit the newly acquired option key many times in the first days of having this machine. Googling then found me the tool Double Command which lets do plenty of key remappings including the one I want.

Fan

Unfortunately the new machine’s fan seems to be much louder than the old machine’s. That’s really annoying. I suspect it may not be installed correctly, if that’s possible, because it occasionally seems to transfer a slight vibration to the MacBook’s case as well. I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on that.

DVD writer

Usually Apple are annoyingly stingy when it comes to providing machines with adequate optical drives. While every other computer maker on the planet will give you an optical drive with all the acronyms there are in the standard package, Apple always tried to use those acronyms as an ‘incentive’ for upselling. Amusingly this latest model of the white MacBook, which may well be the cheapest laptop they ever sold, includes a fully fledged DVD writer. Not that I’d really need that, but it’s about time… Now we can perhaps just ban optical drives from portable computers?

Apple’s newer slot-in drives (the one in the TiBook was still OK) have the annoying habit of making a sound when the computer is powered up (or in fact any other occasion when the machine may want to access the drive). I always considered that on the annoying side of useless, even embarrassing in quiet environments. The sound is still there, but it’s shorter and sharper on this drive.

Fingers Crossed

Now let’s hope that this machine isn’t as keen on needing repairs as its predecessors were.

Want one? [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

While the new MacBooks are tempting from the way they look, I couldn’t convince myself to get one. They are first generation models and compared to the white MacBooks they are hellishly expensive without actually doing more. As far as I can tell the differences between the models come down to

• €250 in price
• €60 in RAM price (4GB of RAM cost €60 for the white MacBook but €120 for the aluminium one
• €60 in new screen adaptors
• FireWire port
• glossy display bezel
• weaker graphics chip
• less prestigious plastic case
• less capable trackpad

So that’s €370 for what exactly? Particularly if you gave up on having a ‘stylish’ computer after your TiBook disintegrated and don’t play games? Besides, we all know how much of a gamble it is to buy a first generation Apple product. The white MacBook may not be great, but at least its deficiencies are somewhat understood already.

Many people will be delighted that MacBooks now come in metal as well, and finally getting a case for the MacBook Pro that doesn’t look like ass (two friggin hinges and a hole in the bezel) probably doesn’t hurt. On the other hand, having a whole line of laptops with pimpy looking glass display makes you question Apple’s sense of æsthetics. Or not, they’re mostly known for their business acumen these days anyway.

Personally I have been thinking about replacing my MacBook yet again just to make sure I’m rid of it before it will break down completely. Totally anti-social behaviour of course but - hey! - according to Apple authorised service personnel there’s nothing wrong with the machine! With the back-to-school iPod promo still running, this may be an opportunity.

And not just an opportunity to get rid of my current machine but also one to get a machine that can handle 4GB of RAM. Somehow those 2GB which sound like they should be plenty - I’d say I’m doing less with the machine than I did two years ago - always feel seriously cramped and my hard drive regularly is a swap file haven.

Of course a question when (and if) buying a new machine would be whether to go for another of those plastic models with their built-to-crack handrests which have a rather attractive price now or whether to go for an item of a first generation Apple product. One which has a nicer case than its predecessor but sounds a bit like it isn’t actually faster or can do more.

In fact, the new model seems to come without a FireWire port. Now isn’t that interesting? The point that my 3G iPod requires FireWire to be charged may seem minor. But on a bigger scale isn’t this strange? Is this just an indication of the inability of Apple engineers to put a FireWire port with all its implications on power consumption in the machine? Or is it a stronger sign that DV is considered dead (I suppose you can Always get an EOS 5D Ⅱ for high quality video via USB these days…)? And what about the wonderful target disk mode, no news about its replacement seem to be available yet.

The odd thing about FireWire is that USB-2 trumps it in numbers and that in casual usage like the occasional Time Machine run you’ll rarely notice a difference. But somehow - possibly also because of OS X rotten-ish USB implementation (?) - when you need to copy a load of data quickly, FireWire always seems to win hands down.

A further turn-off is the fact that Apple elected to introduce yet another video connector on their machines, Mini Display Port, a custom tiny version of a connector which may or may not become accepted in the market - along with a series of overpriced and most likely incompatible adaptors of course. Is anybody still able to list all video connectors and adaptors that Apple shipped in the past years? That’s pure user-hostility. [Old-schoolers may even find it ironic that back in the early 1990s people bitched about Apple’s ‘incompatible’ video connectors, even though things weren’t less compatible than they are today.]

On the other hand there’s nice stuff. Like the no-button trackpad. Woot! I’ll be first in line when it comes to ridiculing multi-button mouse proponents and here we go: no buttons at all. It’ll be interesting to see to which extent multi-touch stuff can be used by applications and to which extent it will actually be useful. My guess is that it will mostly be used for gimmicks as - unlike in the iPhone - many people will have to run software on machines without those features. Also, from a usability point of view I’d say that multi-finger gestures can at most be an optional way of using software both for discoverability and accessibility reasons. Still a nice toy! I’ll also be interested to hear how people deal with that huge trackpad. I already find the old MacBook’s trackpad to be a bit on the large side - meaning the hard- and software will have to be really clever when it comes to distinguishing intended and unintended trackpad touching.

What I find disappointing is that Apple aren’t bolder when it comes to optical media. Apple seem to hate Blue Ray (all in the interest of the customer of course) and I suspect they don’t see much use for optical media when you can buy all the music and films they think you should enjoy on their internet store. Furthermore there are cheap high-capacity USB sticks around which are much more convenient than optical media. Which to me looks a bit like many people simply won’t use their optical drive much [when did you last use yours] and that simply kicking those out of the normal notebooks would have been a bold but reasonable step (just as shipping a machine without SCSI or ADB back in the days was).

Finally, Apple offer a redesigned screen. Does anybody care? I don’t know. All I know is that on the one hand it’s a neat idea to put a laptop charger into the screen (and a slightly less neat implementation of that idea with a bunch of cables coming out of the screen), but on the other hand it’s a rather expensive device which probably won’t appeal to people who actually need a good screen. So it’s hard to see the point of it besides not needing to buy the overpriced adaptor those new MacBooks require to drive other screens. Well done.

That said, wouldn’t it finally be a good time if all those manufacturers of electronic junk could simply agree on a standard power connector or two. Many - but by far not enough - small devices can be charged on USB ports already which is good. But this needs to go further. And the next step will be that the higher powered portable devices should all have standardised chargers as well. Perhaps we need some regulation there… now that people are crying for it in banking, it may be an opportunity to force companies to be more user-friendly as well.

Dreaming on…

If I read its blinkenlights correctly that is because the battery doesn't charge - despite the device blinking and heating up slightly when connected to the USB port. The battery was perfectly good before it stopped recharging, so here's another mark on the shitty quality scorecard:

Because I like the idea of the first generation iPod shuffle so much, I tried getting another one. And eventually I found one on eBay which I could get for less than €20 (what an outrageous price for two year old used plastic toy with a tiny capacity!) and it does the job - let's hope for more than just a few months. Less agony and boredom at the gym!

What's a bit of a nuisance now is the naming drama. Of course every nameable toy needs a name. Hence my first iPod Shuffle was named 'Spongebob' and I quite like that name! To keep it around I thus re-named the broken iPod Shuffle to 'Bernd das Brot' (another rectangular bit of kiddy-television) and the new one remains Spongebob. Whew!

Anyway, in case you have use for a non-working first generation iPod shuffle called 'Bernd das Brot', send me the postage needed to get it to you and it's yours...

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

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.