Wooo, iPad 2 launch I hear (from the US at least). When the original iPad was released, I became rather (in)famous for bashing the hell out of it. I thought it was overpriced, heavy, and lacked a lot of features that make it a viable alternative to something like a netbook. Now that the second one has been launched, the original iPad now makes perfect sense to me. 

The trouble with the state of the iPad at the original launch, for me, stemmed from two things: 1) Lack of multitasking was a disaster, and 2) It was priced out of the netbook alternative range. Recently, multitasking has been brought to the iPad with various releases of iOS 4.x, and even more recently prices of the original iPad have dropped. Prices of the iPad 2 have not changed (starting at around £430 for the basic, non-3G version), but Apple has dropped prices of the original iPad (which is still on sale) by about £100. Essentially, this means that the original, 16GB wifi-only iPad’s price has dropped right into my netbook budget. 

I’d been looking at various Dell and Sony netbooks to use as a sort of ‘side bitch’ to my main setup, and all of these start at around £350. So you can see what my dilemma is; a netbook for £350 that runs full Windows 7 (albeit, the Starter edition), or for £20 less an iPad that runs iOS 4.3? Before any of the fanboys play the ‘it has better graphics and two cameras’ card, I won’t be using my iPad/netbook for any serious gaming or for video chatting/photography. While I’m on the subject, I think having a camera on the back of a tablet is stupid; but that’s a different blog post. The iPad’s email application looks outstanding, and for casual on-the-go web browsing and multimedia, it’s perfect. I only plan to use my netbook/iPad for writing documents (Pages for iPad supports .docx, a huge win in my books), emailing, web browsing, and video/music playing. 

The main attraction of the original iPad though is its new price. A 16GB wifi-only model is perfect for my needs (I won’t need 3G as my phone has hotspot functionality); it’s also about £30 cheaper than the netbook I’m looking at. I’ll need some time to decide, and I’m going to wait for a friend of mine to pick up an iPad 2 before making any final decision. 

Sidebar: If y’all think think these are the justifications of a fanboy, I wrote this post on a computer running Windows 7 and I have an HTC Android phone sitting on my desk. 

Yeah, shock horror skid slide smoke. Everyone is constantly telling me how amazing their Android phone is after root. It’s not that I can’t see the advantages; I could probably think of more to do with a rooted Android device than most people, but the reasons behind why I won’t root stem from which side of the argument I take. Before I go on, I use an HTC Android phone and probably always will, because I don’t like stock Android. At this point you’re probably ready to quit reading because I come across as a complete idiot, but hear me out on this one. There are two reasons why I use Android over other platforms: i) You can customise the hell out of Android, and ii) Deep integration and synchronisation of services. The latter is the main reason, and HTC’s Sense actually takes this to another level with even deeper social integration within Android. I love that my Android phone is constantly tied to my Google account, so if I create an appointment on my Google Calendar at my desktop, it appears in my phone’s calendar instantly, and vice versa. Synchronisation is at the core of Android’s appeal for me, and in my opinion is light years ahead of iOS and Blackberry in this department. 

This brings me on to the main point about why I won’t root. The image above is misleading in my opinion; it insinuates the view that many have toward rooting Android, which is that their device will be set free. The point I’m making is that non-rooted Android, for me, is already an incredibly open and free platform. I don’t need any hacks to make my HTC’s experience any better, far from it. You all know about the consequences of rooting an Android device, and also the consequences if it all goes wrong. For me, that’s a big risk that won’t really be worth it in the end. Sure, many people will disagree, but for how I use my phone, rooting is totally unnecessary. 

Somewhat ironically, I’ve jailbroken my iPod Touch, but this is a perfect illustration of what will happen if I were to root my Android phone: I hardly ever take advantage of the potential that a jailbreak gives me, so I won’t do the same with Android. 

I was lucky enough to interview Boy Genius Report founder Jonathan Geller for Technorati, so here’s the interview: 

1)      When did your passion for technology start?

Honestly, as far as I can remember. I have always been passionate about technology and mobile devices and how they evolve. I had my first cell phone around the age of 10 – it was a grey Motorola StarTAC and one of my favorite phones. My parents also have a home video of me using a VCR at the age of 2.

2)      When you started it, did you think BGR would grow to the size that it is today?

I didn’t originally start BGR with the hopes of starting a business, but rather as a vehicle to share information I had access to, and I saw that people became incredibly interested in and excited about it. After this happened, I quickly saw that BGR could be a long-term, profitable business and brand, so I started devoting all of my time to it. I was working 20 hour days 7 days a week managing the entire business front to back, and I only took around 10 days off in the first three years. Now that we’re growing faster than ever, I continue to devote an enormous amount of time to the site and business.

3)      During your years of anonymity, was it a necessity to conceal your identity? Or was it purely a style thing?

The interesting thing about my identity is that I didn’t decide to conceal it for the seemingly obvious reason of being afraid of what would happen after leaking sensitive and highly secret information about upcoming phones and devices sometimes years in advance of their debut. I wanted to create a brand — an online personality that people would enjoy. I think as far as the identity goes, it was a great decision and something I’m very happy I did. It also let me have two personalities before I started working on BGR fulltime, so I was able to work on other things while also constantly breaking news on BGR.

4)      Where did you get the nickname ‘Boy Genius’?

Boy Genius was a name that a close friend of mine, Just Blaze, came up with while we were hanging out when I was 16 years old. I first met Just through a mutual friend of ours and brought him an unreleased (and unannounced) Motorola MPx to play with. He’s a big tech lover and we just hit it off from that point on. He saw how well I understood different aspects of technology and devices, and the industry as a whole. He (along with other celebrities) would normally ask me questions or ask me to come help him or a friend out with a tech issue, and as a result, he started calling me Boy Genius.

5)      How do you feel about being one of the most influential people in tech?

It’s truly flattering to know that the news that my team and I break can literally influence an entire industry, and it’s great to have an avenue where I can speak my mind and share it with all of our readers.

6)      Apple and Google are in a boxing ring; who do you cheer for, and why?

You know, I’m a big supporter of both. I think the competition is great for them and ultimately for us, the consumers. Both companies are incredibly innovative, but they’re very different, and it’s always fun to see how different their approaches are to the same thing.

7)      What hints and/or tips would you give to someone starting out in tech blogging?

It all comes down to your voice, man. Having something original and interesting to say is what it’s all about… there is so much unoriginal content out there and if you’re just starting out, no one is going to care too much about what you have to say unless you’re doing it in a unique and engaging way. Being able to have your own point of view or your own take on things is very important. I’ve never been afraid to speak my mind, and I think that’s one of the major reasons people really respect what I say and BGR as a whole. If you have something unique to say, I think you can get people interested, though the tech space is incredibly crowded right now and being able to provide something that no other sites can is obviously important.

8)      What is your favourite gadget of all time? (can be a phone, laptop, et cetera)

That’s really tough… I’d have to say iPhone 4 is my favorite gadget of all time. It’s truly amazing how capable smartphones are nowadays and how many different experiences there are through apps. I can literally run my business from iPhone 4 in addition to communicate and share moments with family and friends — and that’s invaluable to me.

9)      Anything big plans for BGR coming up?

Always! I’m really happy to have partnered with MMC to continue growing BGR and expanding the brand together. We’re about to launch BGR in two countries outside of the Americas and extend the brand beyond just the website. Definitely stay tuned!

10)  Finally, you drive an Aston Martin and lead a pretty good lifestyle; how how does it feel to have such a rewarding dream job? Does your job make you leap out of bed in the mornings?

It’s amazing on pretty much every level — I love what I do, I work with a great group of guys, and even though BGR reaches millions of people, I try and answer every single email I get from readers, and that’s why I started BGR — to share information and connect with people.

Big thanks to Boy Genius for giving up some of his time to answer my questions. He’s a truly inspiring figure in the tech blogging world. 

Read the original article, written by me, over here. 

I always like to keep a wishlist of tech-related items; it helps me distinguish what I want from what I need. So, in no particular order: 

Macbook Air 13”

At the time of writing, there will be a line of new Macbooks launched, but the 13” Air still does it for me. It’s fast, and features such as instant on and its super battery life make it a real winner. 

Seeing as everyone is talking shit about HTC following MWC, I thought I’d give them some praise. The Incredible never made it to the UK, for some strange reason, but I really liked its design. The square and chunky form factor made it look like something solid; a contrast to the flimsy all-glass feel of the iPhone 4 (Apple fanboys, abuse me in the comments below). One of the main HTC shit talking points following MWC was the fact that they didn’t bring out any dual-core handsets. Big deal! Who sits down with an Incredible S, powered by a single-core 1Ghz processor, compares it to a dual-core LG and complains about the Incredible being too slow? Nobody will. 

Yes, I know, the fans of dual-core smartphone chips will play the ‘it will improve 3D gaming’ card. I agree; dual-core will make gaming on these Android phones incredible (no pun intended), but I’m not a gamer. The Incredible S doesn’t run Gingerbread, but I don’t particularly care as with HTC Sense running on top, I won’t notice much of a difference. It also has Sense 2.0, which adds Sense themes, as well as a bunch of other cool features not present in the current Froyo Sense build I have on my Legend. Also, I’m pretty certain the Incredible S will be upgradeable to Gingerbread in due course. 

The other thing that people have criticised the Incredible S for is its screen resolution, of ‘only’ 480x800 pixels. Come on, people, it’s a super LCD display that will look amazing. Full stop. Incidentally, screen and device size is the only thing that’s concerning me: 4 inches is pushing the boundaries of what I’m comfortable with holding in my hand (that’s what she said). 

A feature of the Incredible S that I’m looking forward to is the 8MP camera with HD video capture. I was considering investing in an HD camcorder this summer, but this phone might just replace that for me. I say ‘might’, because previous HTC Android devices that had HD video capture didn’t seem to be able to record it that well. 8MP stills will be incredible, though (again, no pun intended). The 5MP camera on the back of my Legend takes pretty good shots, so with 8MP on the back of my Incredible S the phone might also replace my digital camera. 

I like my phone to feel indestructible in the hand, and the Legend absolutely does. For the past 9 months I’ve used it, it’s been dropped on the floor countless times, and survived two pretty bad cycling crashes. There isn’t a single scratch on it, and the all-metal construction makes it feel bombproof. The Incredible S is blacked out completely, and it looks like they’ve built an Otterbox Case into the phone itself. 

So, the Incredible S is sexy, strong, powerful, and feature-packed. I love HTC Sense, and this is arguably the best Sense device you’ll be able to buy. 

P.S: The ‘Intelligent Buttons’ are a small addition, but the fact that HTC has paid attention to such a small detail makes me smile. 

“If you fail to prepare, you must prepare to fail.”

Other than being a neat little phrase, this actually applies to many areas in life. While a lot of people get away in life by ‘winging it’, we’re often told that it’s much better to prepare for things in order to give us the best chance. At the end of the day, this kind of thing is something that individuals must make up their own minds about; nobody has the right to tell you how to live your life, or what the boundaries of your life should be, might I add. 

I’m the kind of person who leans toward the side of ‘winging’. Having said that, I do believe that in certain cases preparation is everything, but in the majority of tests and tribulations that we will encounter in everyday life isn’t something you can plan for. After all, life isn’t an exam: you can’t revise for it. It’s all to do with dealing with pressure, and I tend to do things better when I’m driven by pressure. I get extremely irritated when people point out my faults, or tell me how I should do things, and this tends to translate itself into a passive anger, which gives me the motivation and passion to do things well. 

Fear of failure is something that everybody has; nobody likes to fail. Why is failure so feared? Well, humiliation is certainly a part of it, but failure makes you stronger. If you are willing to learn from your mistakes, then failure can be a good thing. 

This brings me back to the title of the post; true, it may be better off safe than sorry, but what I’m saying is that being sorry for something brings you back round to the very start of the argument. If you don’t prepare, you will fail, but in my view lack of preparation and subsequent failure (in any aspect of life) counts as preparation. 

Time for another one of my emo-esque posts. I came across a rather funny line recently, from a demotivational poster:

“Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a Ferrari, and when have you ever seen an unhappy Ferrari driver?”

While this is obviously intended as a joke and cannot stand as an important philosophical or moral belief, I saw something very interesting in it. Sure, money can’t buy happiness, but it most certainly can buy you temporary happiness. Humans are always looking for something better than they already have; it’s part of our instincts, and those of us who are most successful are always pushing higher and higher to get, or be, the best. 

So what happens when you’ve reached the top? Well, I’d like to quote Lil’ Wayne:

“You know you at the top when only Heaven’s right above it…”

What he’s essentially saying is that when you’re at the top, the only thing above you is Heaven. Later on in the song, Wayne says that he’s been “…fly for so long I(he) fell asleep on the fuckin’ plane”. The obliviousness that people with money have toward the basic requirements of being a human being gives them a bubble of perceived happiness. When you believe money makes your world revolve, you get a huge shock when you return to reality. 

I recently read a similar post to this by a friend, and felt inspired to let off a bit of steam, so to speak. I’m happy to admit that I am an unabashed optimist; no matter how bad something or a situation is, I always see the good that often is not at the end of the tunnel. The trouble with this view is that it only tends to keep oneself happy through the next 24 hours, and in some ways you could call this denial. I can always see at least one good point about a situation and use this to my advantage. That’s the main problem with this mindset I have; I constantly have to find new ways to boost my optimism and motivation, which includes twisting the truth. Many of my friends will disagree with this but I am in fact a very good liar, lol; when things go badly I tend to keep myself sane to some extent by convincing myself and others that things are nowhere near as bad as they really are. To most people, this is an unhealthy mindset, however it actually works for me. Covering up the real truth is something I’m very good at, and however unattractive this trait may be, I’m good at it and I count it as a talent (insert quip about me being an asshole here, I don’t care what you think). 

I wish I could have started out on the Internet with an entirely concealed identity, that way I could say so much more about myself without giving away information that I don’t wish to be disclosed, which is why the next part will be suitably ambiguous. I believe that to fully assess a human being (as inhumane as that is) one needs to take into account and combine every aspect of that person, whether good or bad, and provide a balanced and fair-minded judgement. Judging me on the basis that you have spoken to me only three times in the space of the three weeks I’ve been working with you and the fact you don’t know me at all is, quite frankly, fucking insulting. I’m one of those people who you need to get to know in order to find out what I’m really like, so I know instantly when people judge me having not known me. 

There are only a select few people in my life who I could call a true friend, and there are a lot of people who like to entertain the fact that they are my friend when in fact they don’t know the first thing about me. I’m a cold-hearted bastard, you may think, but I’m actually much more forgiving and (dare I say it) loving than I make out to be; being taken advantage of and lied to and persecuted by a group of people I now call my friends takes a big piece of forgiveness, huh? I thought so.

In short, this post is not designed as a cold-hearted, ambiguous attack on those individuals who are the reason I’m writing this, take from it what you want, and if you think you know to whom or what I am referring directly then it’s likely you are wrong. The vast majority of people who know me via the Internet think I have a pretty perfect life from the seemingly constant happiness I ‘radiate’, this post is to tell you that it isn’t all like that, and not to judge me by my cover; too many people have done this as of late, and it hurts. I’m sorry you had to read this, and I’m sorry I can’t be my usual happy self. Wish me luck. 

Sidebar: The weather has been pretty cold recently; typing this was a minefield of spelling errors, lol. 

I often have people coming to me for some kind of emotional support, mainly because people assume that because I’m a ‘nice guy’ I’ll be able to give a ton of advice very easily. Trouble is, people thinking I’m nice actually makes me feel very uncomfortable, as I don’t like to be considered as a nice guy; they get nowhere in life. I’ve had too many people take advantage of me, which sickens me, and that’s why I like to come over as a bit of a cold-hearted bastard. Everyone goes through stages in life where you start to feel that there is no way forward, when you’ve reached a point when your life is fucked and there’s nothing you can do about it. This has happened to me at more points in the past twenty-four months than I care to remember, but I’m always one to put on a happy face and look forward; if there’s one thing I hate it’s dwelling on the past, especially on events that I’d rather not remember. However I think it’s good to occasionally look back and reflect.

I’m pretty spontaneous, meaning that I often cannot plan things before doing them, I just go ahead and do it when I feel like doing so. I also find it very hard to motivate myself, even in things that I have an interest in. I also see no point in doing things that won’t give me a reward at the end, which makes some things in life pretty hard for me to get to grips with. People have also told me that I’m too lazy to use my brain at times, which I’ll admit to, as if I don’t see the point in doing something, I won’t give it 1% of my time or effort. Trouble with me is that anything that goes wrong in my life tends to have repercussions elsewhere, a sort of ‘knock on’ effect, if you like. Sitting next to someone who means everything to you for nearly a year with the knowledge you mean nothing to them hurts, and took a lot out of my already hard to come by motivation. Funnily enough, for a while she was the only reason I got up in the morning, lol. 

I have more online friends than real-life friends, mainly due to the fact that I can censor myself to some extent on the Internet, which is something I find hard to do in real life. I hate it when people see a side or aspect of me that I don’t want them to see or I don’t like, and the beauty of the Internet is that I can choose what parts of me people see. Sounds selfish and devious, right? Well that’s what I’m like so deal with it. 

The conclusion I want to come to here is that nobody is perfect, and nobody should expect perfection out of anybody. There will be times when you mess up, when you feel so pissed of at yourself that you feel like jumping off a bridge, but before you look at the bad, look at all the good in your life. I know no matter what I do, or how many mistakes I make, there will always be a few people out there who love me for who I am, and that makes me smile. You should think the same. As for me, well I’ll keep truckin’ through life, dodging obstacles, but sometimes hitting them, not really knowing for sure where I’m going. But if there’s something I know for sure it’s that there must be something at the end of the tunnel. 

“In order to see the rainbow, sometimes you have to get through the rain..”