No it isn’t home made explosives nor is it mentos in diet coke! I give you Water Balls!

Simply amazing!

I love Dilbert because Scott Adams can so quickly summarise so many of the frustrations in my day to day work. Take this comic for example:

How many times do you get called out to meetings where they are just talking about planning to do the work when you stop and think - I could have actually just done it myself in the time it takes to plan! I am all for taking a cautious approach when it comes to sensitive projects but there needs to be some common sense around it as well. I think I need to plan for a meeting to discuss the creation of an appropriate project sizing methodology for when to use a committee planning approach rather than just going ahead and getting the project done. I’ll just schedule that some time in between meetings.

After a couple of weeks with the iphone I was really disappointed with the battery life. I thought that with the new firmware that it would be able to stretch out the battery life quite considerably. I carry around a blackberry at the same time and am used to the performance on that tool (3 days standby and it generally pulls down email quicker than I get it on my mac). However I was getting significantly less battery life on the iphone and would frequently have to charge it up during the day. At night I would just leave it on the charging station.

I also found that I was using significant amounts of data. After the first two weeks I had used around 220MB out of my miserly 250MB per month. After I saw that I immediately switched the iphone to not pull data down off exchange and put it onto a half hourly fetch cycle.

Once I did this I noticed a marked improvement in battery life. Even with fairly active calling I don’t really see much drain on the battery! I wonder, therefore, how aggressively the iPhone is calling back to exchange to see if there is any mail waiting for it. The data traffic now is also extremely low - even with 30 minute polls I have only done 1.2MB today (no browsing traffic) which is a lot better than before.

Keep discovering new apps for the phone - downloaded fring, bloomberg, aroundme, tomizone, igolf and ibowl the other day so it is definitely still keeping me amused. By far the most heavily used application is eReader. I love being able to take books everywhere without needing to lug around the big trade paperbacks etc so this was a must have application for me. It is a pity that mobipocket hasn’t hooked onto the iphone bandwagon yet as I have quite a few books on their platform that I wouldn’t mind transferring over.

I have finally succumbed and have bought an iPhone. After the initial euphoria at having rejoined Jobs’ reality distortion zone I have started playing with some of the applications.

Some of my new favourites now that I have an always on connection include twinkle (a localised twitted client), linkedin, facebook, face melter (an awesome little application that lets you mess with photos), shazam (never wonder what that song that is playing is again!) and of course wordpress.

I still don’t think that the iPhone is quite ready for the enterprise but it I’d close. I think that they just need to fix up the global search and the mail application (starting with collapsible mail folders!) and they would have my vote.

Also spent a bit of time activating the phone to my developer certificates. When I get some more time I hope to actually start writing some applications!

I don’t know about you, but I don’t understand why multi-touch vendors all assume that people want to work in the same paradigm as a messy, cluttered desk. I am all for sweeping things aside when I want to clear some desktop space but I personally don’t have things all arranged haphazardly over the desktop. They all tend to be aligned and nice and in easy to reach piles. I just don’t see myself picking up photos from a dog-pile like collection, reorienting them before flicking them on their way.

The Microsoft Surface demo is also very much like this but I just don’t get it at this stage. Maybe I just like things to be orderly.

My wife was after a new phone. She has an existing Nokia N73 that was deciding to crash intermittently when she was on a call. Not a great phone to have when you are trying to run a business at the same time. She also wanted access to her emails when she was away from her desk. Admittedly that this is not a huge amount of the time but it is handy to be able to respond to emails when you may be out at a client site.

We looked at a couple of plans and decided that the 8GB iphone was right for her on a vodafone plan. We chose Vodafone because of the free phone calls between her and another Vodafone mobile (her business partner is also on Vodafone).

Getting her set up was a snap but here are some of my first impressions of using the iPhone 3G in a business context:

1. The synchronisation using iTunes is broken for Calendar. I have tried to work out which one it actually syncs with but it never seems to actually pick up any new calendar entries. I believe this would be better with active sync and a proper exchange account but she doesn’t have any of this at the moment.
2. Keyboard - the keyboard sucks compared to the Blackberry. I can’t seem to get the right characters most of the time. I like to type out stuff pretty quickly on my Blackberry but can see that this is going to be a nightmare on the iPhone. Luckily she has smaller fingers than myself.
3. How do you search through your emails on the iphone? I don’t see this at all. On my blackberry it has a great search interface that allows me to look through the last 30 days worth of emails in a couple of seconds.
4. No spell check. Was asked this during the week about the iPhone and spell check. Now I can confirm that it isn’t there. Not a problem for me as I don’t think I would be able to type out long emails on the device.
5. Cut and paste. this is an old complaint but I thought that they would have figured out how to do it by now.

Things that I think are fantastic on it though are:

1. Obviously the web browser and the choice between wi-fi and 3G connections.
2. AppStore. Very nice and easy way to get applications on to the device. I can’t believe how many high quality applications are already available for the device.
3. Google Maps - great looking user interface that is integrated with assisted GPS.

All in all I think that this is a great consumer device. Is it going to be a Blackberry killer - no. I don’t think it has the user experience that an advanced/power user will be looking for. I think it is great if you write the occasional email and do a lot of web surfing but if you want some serious corporate usage out of it then it has a way to go.

Have you always been an over person but found that you had to justify with people who insisted on it being under? Do you even understand what I am talking about? If not then head to this site that gives irrefutable proof that over is the correct way to lay out your toilet roll

If you download the latest iTunes (7.7) you can now get access to the AppStore for iPod Touch and iPhone. You can’t see it directly from the itunes store but you can get there by searching for “App” and then heading in to the search results.

At the moment I can see around 7 pages of free apps for iPod touch and iPhone. Some apps are iPhone only so just have a look at the requirements before buying or downloading anything