Willow Design

It all began with a cordial invite from the Prime Minister to a select group to attend a reception at 10 Downing Street to “Celebrate the Success of Small Business”. Everyone had a personal invite and we individually had to RSVP directly to number 10.

Arriving at the scene by taxi last night I wasn’t really sure what to expect but I can confirm that they’ve converted Downing Street into something like a prison camp, a sad reflection of our times – you simply can’t get into the street AT ALL without the full metal detector bit. To be fair the police were very friendly with it all and this didn’t really detract from the experience..

After passing security we walked up to number 10 which in itself is quite an experience and from there on it got a lot easier and civilised. We were welcomed inside and asked to leave coats and mobile phones at reception. The place is a lot bigger than I imagined and there is a large entrance-way with lots of racks for coats etc. Everything is well-lit. Having been relieved of our weapons of mass destruction it was each man for himself. Past reception is a large staircase and all the way up are images of past prime ministers – very impressive. I took my time to enjoy the moment. Once upstairs we were greeted not with champagne but simply a choice of red of white wine and very nice too! We were free to wander about the place, I don’t think anyone got to to see the cabinet room which is apparently in the basement (good idea thinking about it) but the place is pretty impressive non-the-less. The inside of 10 Downing Street is suitably impressive.

As colleagues arrived the wine flowed very nicely. Various well known faces appeared including “Sir” Alan Michael Sugar. Next up was Lord Mandleson who proceeded to apologise for Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s absence as he was off on important business and who then gave us a very polished speech about the importance of small business.

As the speech rolled out, those present for the most part stood politely in their lounge suits and merely listened… but looking at their faces one could see that most of us will be happier when there is a change of government, none of which detracts from the excellent experience of actually BEING THERE and of course that was the whole point. I’m sure Lord Mandleson didn’t really believe business representatives would let him off lightly!

Within half an hour or less the speech was over and everyone was pretty much free to network or simply drink more and enjoy the view. I was having a nice chat with one of my fellow FSB directors when a microphone appeared out of no-where..  For the life of me I can’t remember which newspaper or radio station it was but the reporter went through a whole list of questions about how we felt about government, banking, you name it, clearly he was onto a goldmine with the two of us as we were taking turns at the microphone for well over 15 minutes – a MOST enjoyable way to round off the evening.

Several glasses of wine and umpteen nibbles later, though not under any pressure to exit the premises, a small group of us decided it was time to take our leave and wandered back down the excellent stairway and out of the door to be greeted by the official photographer – results you see at the top.

Having had the iPhone 3GS for some weeks now, it is well past my normal “novelty-wearing-off time” in which the greatest NEW thing normally becomes somehow… normal – and yet I still feel that somehow life has changed irrevocably in a small but worthwhile way.

The problem is in the title “iPhone”. In reality these devices have been so much more than phones for some time. I’ve been using Microsoft smartphones for some years and recently there have been times when I’ve left the laptop back at the office and relied on the mobile for email. This works only so well because of the limited keyboards but it sure beats carrying a huge laptop around. The MS phones are also ok for the odd game of backgammon on the train and the addition of WIFI makes them handy for receiving RSS news – ie BBC news etc. But that’s about it. They soon become out of date and Orange don’t exactly fall over themselves to encourage updates.

Exit MS phones, enter the iPhone. Their real innovation is the APP store on the phone, not that horrible iTunes program on the PC. Not only can you idle the hours away looking for new APPS but you’re informed automatically of any updates to existing APPS which then come in pretty much without any attention (preferably on WIFI but I’ve updated a few over 3G without problems). So what is actually happening here is that your “phone” is evolving on an almost daily basis without being connected to any PC.. and that’s part of what keeps up the interest.

Every couple of days I see something new, some new idea that might never have occurred to me – or some gripe I have with an existing app simply goes away due to constant improvement. Who would have thought you could use a phone to monitor sleep patterns or to identify stars or point to restaurants using the camera or remote control your media centre or measure distance or go shopping… the list is never-ending and continually growing.

I have over 120 APPS on my 16G iPhone and the biggest of the lot is TOMTOM which covers all of Europe – yet looking at the graph below as you can see, I’ve used only a small part of available memory, under 3GB out of 16GB on APPS.

I can see where it might be worth getting the 32GB version if you really want to carry around a bunch of videos and thousands of tunes as well. Personally I’m happy with access to thousands of radio stations and my entire music collection back home as long as I have a 3G connection…. yes, a decent 3G connection is perfectly adequate for streaming music to the device.

And that’s really what this is… it’s an “iDevice”, no longer a simple phone but a portable entertainment system. Does this make it any less valid as a business tool? Hell no, email handling is superb, I have multiple email accounts in there along with the ability to read business documents (WORD and PDF as examples) with ease – within the limitations of the screen size of course. The copy and paste ideas implemented by Apple are superb and until you’ve seen them in action along with the associated magnifying glass, it’s hard to describe other than to say they are completely intuitive and need no training to use unless you’re very, very slow.

Let me say that the phone itself is NOT perfect… the battery life is ATTROCIOUS, fortunately there’s a way around that and so my phone is permanently carried around in a MILI sleeve which fits snuggly over the phone and includes a battery, taking the combination to well over 24 hours operation and removing the need to use the ridiculously complicated Apple connector in favour of a bog-standard mini-USB socket. Thankfully the iPhone power supply is one of those mains plugs with a USB connector on the bottom so it’s just a case of ditching the Apple lead (curiously white even though I bought a black iPhone) and replacing it with a usb lead.

From serious business using multiple email accounts including MS Exchange (which the iPhone handles flawlessly including email, contacts, notes and the all-important calendar) through novelty business applications to full-on gaming this is in my mind currently the best option for a mobile device – loving every minute of it.

Anyone for GOLF?

Those of you who know me might be inclined to to assume I’d automatically pick a Microsoft Smartphone – and indeed I use one of these, the HP Touch Pro 2 – and very nice it is.. as a phone. I’ve been using Smartphones since day 1 so I know what to expect. The HTC handles Exchange mail very efficiently, it handles Google mail slowly and as for calendars and contacts I have no problems. It runs Tom-tom and other sat-nav software and when you stop the car it hasn’t a clue where it is facing.. and that perhaps starts to paint a picture.

When Apple developed the iPhone 3GS they included not only a sat-nav but also a compass and an inclinometer.  Sat-navs only work if you’re moving – because they compare your location at one moment to that at the next moment and hence calculate your direction and speed.

So to go back a little… the later HTC smartphones have sat-nav, inclinometer, touch screen and sound.  The only thing the iPhone adds there is a compass and multi-touch. These simple changes form a large part of the improved experience.  What seems to be the other important item is a strange one.. LACK of multi-tasking. HTC phones almost always feel underpowered – you find yourself thinking.. wouldn’t this be great if only it was a little faster.   It may be horsepower or the fact that the iPhone only seems to want to do one thing at once, but it IS fast enough.

No-where can this be bettered than when performing that most urgent of business tasks – PLAYING RACING GAMES!

I present to you “GTI Racing” – the best racing game I’ve seen for ages. I’ve played DOZENS of these in my time – the PC versions are great but using a keyboard is not the best way to steer and there is not much room on my office desk for a steering wheel (though I hate to admit I do have one somewhere gathering dust). Then there is the X-BOX 360 – I just do not like those controls at all. How about the WII?  Had one of those – sold it – generally speaking the graphics are pretty awful – not a patch on the X-BOX… so I’d just about given up when I spotted GTI racing for the iPhone – the demo is free and so I thought “why not”. It’s brilliant! Acceleration and braking is automatic though putting your thumb on the screen gives you manual control over the latter… it’s the steering that does it for me. Holding the phone in both hands (or one if you’re clever) you simply TURN the iPhone to the left or right to steer – it’s as intuitive as it gets… 

You’d think on a phone the graphics would be limited and a little jerky? No. They are marvellous. On the basis that a picture paints a thousand words, here are some pictures of me totally blowing a race. There is FAR more that can be said of the iPhone and no doubt given time I will – but this one game makes it worthwhile.

Regards

Peter Scargill

This will be part of a regular series of blogs on a variety of subjects from programming, through web design and more.