Hidden gem for iPhone

If you think, like I do, that iPhone's only real hardware shortcoming (software ones such as missing video recording will hopefully be dealt with soon) is that there is actually too little of it, i.e. that its battery doesn't survive a day of heavy usage, then I have found a must-have little gadget for you: the portable charger LT025 from tiny Swiss firm Lifetrons. The charger takes a charge of 4800 mAh (probably about 3 iPhone charges), which it delivers actively to iPhone, i.e. it is not an external battery pack that needs to remain connected to be effective, it actually charges iPhone, and it does it very quickly. The gadget's power input is USB and it charges lots of other mobile devices via a plethora of adapters for its USB cable. The device's footprint is smaller than iPhone's, but it is about 2 2.5 times thicker. The device is well designed and nicely executed.

But as the title of this post holds, it is a hidden gem. So much so, in fact, that I only stumbled across it in a duty free catalogue. Strangely, Lifetrons only distributes via airlines and duty free shops, and they don't market their wares actively - it is not even available in their own online store. At least not for the moment, I'm told by their CEO. Another instance of under-marketed Swiss engineering ingenuity? You bet! I hope they get their marketing act together really soon, because they deserve it!

Here's the anecdote of the purchase: I saw the description on my way to Brussels and decided to hold off on buying until I could do a little online research, which I did in Brussels. But it yielded very little, there's virtually no online reviews available nor, as mentioned, alternative distribution. So, I decided to buy on the way back, even though Swiss has all three colours as long as it's white/silver. But I created a bit of a stumbling block for the friendly flight attendants - the catalogue advertises that you can pay with M&M Miles rather than cash, which I wanted to. But their payment appliance didn't work, so we had to use a regular credit card slip. Now, I'm a little nervous that I am going to be charged CHF 22'000 for the device rather than 22'000 miles ... keep your fingers crossed!�

Betting against Jobs

We've been fairly early in beginning to speculate that Steve Jobs might sooner or later end his tenure at Apple - some will say, way too early, especially seeing how discussions are heating up again following Apple's cancellation of its Macworld participation. But now, we have it from His Steveness, namely that he is not intending to step down just now.�

On the very same day, intrade has opened two contracts where participants can speculate about whether Jobs will resign before June or December 09. I'll make sure to keep watching. There's no trading so far, and both contracts are at about 20% likelihood. If you own AAPL, you may want to go long those contracts ...

Renewing MobileMe

On my last trip to London, I picked up a boxed MobileMe activation key at the Regent Street Apple store. On account of Sterling dropping like a stone, this works out substanially cheaper than renewing online in the local currency, and it actually works! Although I'll say that Apple doesn't exactly go out of its way to make it easy - the option is absent from inside your MM account. You have to use this link - which I obtained from MM support via a pleasant online chat. It was the first time I actually used that support feature, and it worked really well, so thanks for that!

The Switch

I just switched. But don't worry, I am still a Mac fan. Although the switch is PC-related, because I switched the vehicle of my virtual PC. Hitherto I used to be a Parallels customer, but now, I've taken advantage of VMware's CyberMondayDeal which is only valid today. You get their Fusion 2 product for 50% off, which is just about as much as the upgrade to Parallels' version 4 would cost. Since reviews give a slight advantage to VMware over Parallels, there's not much point in staying with Parallels because they seem to be milking their customer base all along the upgrade path, which VMware doesn't.�

Hurry, the offer is up just a few more hours ...

Size matters!

This is a technology forecast of sorts. It is the result of using iPhone for the last few months, confirming my suspicion that iPhone indeed is the game changing device that it is heralded to be. Those who say that there's nothing new about it in technology terms are right, of course. But they suffer a very common geek mistake: it's not the feature set that counts, it is the mainstream ease of use of those features. Recently, I've had quite a enlightening insight into how that works when I showed my iPhone to a Lady in her seventies who had never even used a PC. Within minutes or less, she was happily zapping through photos, zooming & rotating, and she looked up stuff on the Maps app. I am pretty sure she is going to have one of her own soon, if they are available at all. I'm expecting my black 16 GB iPhone 3G with an Orange plan on Monday.

But that was no forecast, that's reality. iPhone shines because of its ingenious user interface with multitouch. As with every innovation, multitouch is now being tried on other devices such as laptops or computer screens. And here's my forecast: Those are going to fail utterly. Why? iPhone works because you hold it in your hand, so you can easily wipe its screen on your sleeve to get rid of those fingerprints. I'm doing that Monk-like almost whenever I use it. But try that with a laptop or - worse - a computer screen ... QED.

Apple pays

That was quick! Local newspaper BaZ seems to keep close tabs on the Apple-Suisa skirmish - we've reported earlier. �Now BaZ breaks the news that Apple has backed down on Saturday and will be paying up the millions that it has accrued in levies. But apparently not before getting a letter from a Swiss consumerism organisation demanding that Apple pays back the surcharge retained from consumers, should it be successful against Suisa. So that matter's settled - but Suisa continues to look into whether iPhone will be considered a media player that is subject to the levy.

Apple refuses to pay levy

This story is about our preferred purveyor of fine fruit, and I post it because I haven't seen it anywhere else - probably no netizen reads Basler Zeitung ... anyway: they have this story about Apple refusing to pay a blank media levy imposed on the sale of media players (i.e. the iPod) by Suisa (Swiss Society for the Rights of Authors of Musical Works). Apple apparently refuses to pay because their online store is located in Ireland and mails iPods directly to its Swiss clients and therefore, Apple thinks, it is not liable to pay. Suisa's levy on RAM-based media players used to be extremely hefty: until 1 April, the levy on a 32 GB iPod touch was CHF 153. Under heavy attack, Suisa decided to lower that levy unilaterally to 42 francs.

Now I am certainly no friend of Suisa's. Nevertheless, I think Apple's position in this matter is quite untenable. They claim that they never included any levy in the pricing of the players, yet the price difference between the Swiss Apple store and others magically is about equal to what the levy amounted to before it was lowered. And it hasn't been lowered still, so everybody who buys an iPod on Apple's Swiss online store is not very intelligent. This certainly does not generate much goodwill with clients either. What's more, Swiss VAT is applied to the goods sold online, and the store claims to be subject to Swiss law, so ... I'm guessing that the legal goings-on in a tiny province of Apple's vast realm (that doesn't even have the iPhone, yet - legally) has escaped the eye of Cupertino's lawyers so far. This is bound to change soon, and we'll hopefully see a levy refund to Swiss Apple Store clients soon.

Update: As this post creates so much traffic, I went back to check my facts and, lo & behold, the prices of the Swiss Apple Store have been brought back in line with the Euro pricing: CHF 719 (EUR 440) for the 32GB iPod touch, down from ca. 840 on last check. This is lower than the price at the German store (EUR 459), but not by as much as the roughly 10% points difference in VAT would suggest. The difference, again, is close enough to 42 francs. Therefore, the retail price includes the levy, but Apple refuses to fess up. Good policy?�

Screw Yoga

This is excellent stuff!

Bored of the dance

Surely, some fellow travellers on my train trip to Zurich yesterday must have thought me nuts as I was smiling and sniggering to myself while I was listening to Stephen Fry's latest podgram edition on the iPhone. I'm so perfectly with him on his innate aversion to dancing that it's uncanny! Why don't you subscribe to it yourself - he's utterly dry and funny.

Woohooo!

This is the first blogpost I'm creating on my new iPhone, lying on my bed in NYC. And it works great!
Too bad the 16GB model is sold out, but hey, you can't have it all!

Swiss iPhone 2.0?

So, there will be an announcement during the Mobile World Congress that Swisscom will start selling a UMTS capable version of the iPhone in the Swiss market come 29 February 2008. This is the gist of several recent reports quoted by Macworld UK. The sources appear to be rather good and the news would be perfectly plausible as well.�

This report changes my shopping plans (as well as those of four more family members, I guess) as I had every intention to get an iPhone in London tomorrow, to use it jailbroken. And I still would, just to avoid the incredibly cheeky Suisa surcharge levied on Swiss music players, if there wasn't the likelihood of a new version imminent. But as I will be in London again during said Congress, I can still get it, should the announcement fail to materialise. In any case, I am looking forward to having an incredibly durable iPhone on either 14 or 29 February ...

10.5.2 imminent

Cupertino has just blessed us with upgrades to all elements of the iWork '08 suite of applications, quoting compatibility issues with Mac OS X that need addressing. As I haven't noticed any compatibility issues with 10.5.1, that can only mean one thing, I guess ...

In other Mac related news, I can report a successful conclusion of an experiment. The other day I read about a guy who had his white USB keyboard washed in his dishwasher, and it came out squeaky clean and working. Since my bluetooth keyboard is a real mess and I don't need it anymore anyway (upgraded to the new flat iMac kb, remember?), I thought, heck, why not give it a try. So to the dishwasher it went, in the eco programme and without detergent (that's important, I think). Now it's really seriously clean, and after waiting for two weeks to complete the drying, it works perfectly. So, it's ready for auctioning!

A Swiss iPhone

Please sign this petition, asking Apple and Swiss mobile phone companies Orange, Sunrise and Swisscom for a release date of the iPhone in the Swiss market!�

Playing around

Who the heck needs Photoshop when they can have Gimp�(the free GNU Image Manipulation Program)?�

Granted, it takes a bit of getting used to when you use X11 for the first time, especially since it needed a bit of tweaking to run under Leopard, but everything seems to run just fine now.�

My phone

To my considerable regret and shame, I have to notify the world (or at least those parts that care), that I have resolved to change my mobile phone. From the introduction, you can safely deduct that my new phone is not an iPhone, at least not yet. I have reverted from the broken Nokia to an ancient Sony Ericsson T610. Amazingly, the difference in features& usability �between the T610 and the rather current 6280 is not as big as the T610's age would suggest. But you don't care about that, do you.

The reason why I didn't get an iPhone to hack was that I couldn't get my mitts on a $ priced item. The ? priced ones are just not attractive enough, given the fact that firmware 1.1.2 is still tough to deal with. Then the French unlocked version is just priced to kill, especially considering hoping that there will be an updated version available for the Swiss market early next year. Yes, I know, hope springs eternal ...

I ..... .. phone

Seriously! I didn't do it on purpose, but I broke my phone! Well, it's not entirely broken, yet. It just has a huge crack across the display, which gets bigger all the time. Nevertheless, I definitely need that iPhone now, although it's not even known when it comes to this peripheral market that is Switzerland. Probably I'll just get one during my next trip to the UK on 13 December, unless one of my resourceful readers happens to travel from the US to Switzerland before then, as the US version is considerably cheaper than the European edition ...

Panthera pardus

This is the first post written on my new iMac, running on Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard! I can happily report that it's a great experience - the new machine is extremely racy, and I certainly won't go back to the previous cat, either. Although the fact that I am already using Leopard is not exactly Apple's merit, as the Mac came with Tiger preinstalled. Ordering Leopard via the Up to date programme resulted in an ETA of 3 (three!) weeks! But luckily I have extremely understanding and helpful alternative sources to bridge over the transitory gap between felines ...

Fruit matters

Yay! I just ordered a top of the range iMac (think 24", 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 750 GB HD) yesterday, and now I am auctioning my good old Cinema Display. How disloyal is that! No bids taken for the MacBook btw, I'll keep that around for my mobile computing needs.

Asia pics

Thanks to iPhoto '08, check out my new web gallery with the pictures from my recent trip to Singapore and Seoul! The things you can do with web gallery are neat, but it's a bit of a bandwidth hog ...

File Vault trouble?

I'm a bit paranoid about security, that's why I use File Vault on my laptop to protect sensitive (client) information. However, that might have nasty side effects, as I think I've uncovered. Let me quote my posting on Apple's discussion forums:

When travelling abroad, I've repeatedly encountered very serious system instabilities, involving the loss of application preferences, keychains and other vital system information. This was always easily recovered by restoring the backup back home. But naturally, the home backup is not really handy on the move ...
I think I've narrowed the cause of these instabilities now down to a combination of using File Vault and changing the time zone from the account that is protected by File Vault. Is anyone unfortunate enough to be able to confirm this, and might any expert out there have an idea about a plausible explanation and fix for this? Thank you very much!
Incidentally, the workaround (short of not changing the time zone) is changing the time zone in a user account that is not protected by File Vault.

I hope someone can comment on that. Meanwhile, don't try to replicate this on the move, and be sure to have a working backup!

Parallel worlds

Check out the rest of these excellent commercials for Parallel's virtualisation software, which I can highly recommend. The Coherence mode is kind of eerie, though!

iPhone to come with GPS?

Have you already seen the new iPhone advertisements with which the launch date of 29 June is finally confirmed?

One of them promotes the hottest feature in my view, namely Google Maps. This is not new in itself, since it was part of the initial demo, but now the iPhone is advertised with it specifically, so it's for real, not just a feature preview. Now the only thing I am wondering about is: Does the iPhone know where it is, and if so, how? The obvious answer is that it has a GPS chip built in, but why hasn't that been mentioned anywhere? Or does it rely on GSM cell triangulation? I hope not, because that method's precision is inferior to GPS and depends on the topology of the network the phone is in just now. Thoughts, anyone?

Where?

Windows is for grandmas ...

Nice piece, but what else is new?

One more thing ...

If you like computer fruit, then you'll know the phrase: It's the sentence used by Apple CEO Steve Jobs to introduce a product surprise at the end of one of his keynote presentations. I think we might hear the following variation on the theme from Mr Jobs later this year: Oh, and one more thing - here's my successor!

Whence that outrageous allegation, now that we know about Mr Jobs' value to the firm? That's exactly the point. If Mr Jobs were to resign from Apple just like that, this would likely cause a considerable drop in the share price, ceteris paribus.

But I have a feeling that Mr Jobs his character is not one to allow for that assumption that everything else remains the same: he'll just change it thanks to his famous RDF. That's what's happening now at One Infinity Drive IMHO: Apple is being preened for an important change in the near future. The technology leadership in the No 1 strategic asset (OS X) is affirmed with Leopard, and its installable base is multiplied by the introduction of the iPhone, Apple TV and another thing that we don't know of, yet. Market demand for all these items will easily beat expectations and the Mac market share will expand, too, pushing the stock price through the roof. And then ... then we'll get that ominous announcement in a carefully orchestrated fashion so as to minimise the damage. I have a feeling that this is Mr Jobs' Grand Plan that goes well together with his dramatic persona. Remember, you've read it here first.