BGR posted that iPod sales were down 10% in January of this year, in the US. I actually find it somewhat ironic that Apple markets the iPhone as an all-in-one device, yet they continue to produce things such as the iPod Classic. It doesn’t come as a surprise to me that iPod sales have diminished because people don’t want to carry two devices around with them. If you can make a device that performs well as a phone and well as an iPod, such as the iPhone (insert antenna-related joke here), then you’re onto a winner. You’re also going to subsequently destroy the market for MP3 players. I think this is the situation that Apple has created, and it may result in the demise of the product that started it all for them: the iPod. 

In the space of time before owning an iPod Touch and after I started using a smartphone, I used my phone as my portable music player. It functioned just as well as my iPod does now. As a friend of mine pointed out recently, “You haven’t owned an MP3 until you’ve owned an iPod”; when other non-iOS devices, such as Android, start shipping with their own music store and music player, Apple and iTunes might just loose their monopoly. If this happens, will we see devices such as the iPod Nano or Classic die out? Yes, that’s more than likely. 

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. 

I’ve wanted to write this post for a long time, however a recent increase in workload meant that I only had time to draft a few parts of it. In the past three years the human race has advanced so rapidly in terms of technology that we are, in my opinion, almost at a point where everything is the same. For instance, if you’re a guy walk into a bar holding either a Blackberry, iPhone, or HTC to impress, your average girl isn’t going to know the difference between them and will probably think they are all equally amazing, discuss. A huge majority of smartphone buyers today don’t know about the various fights that Apple and Google have had with each other, or about the controversy surrounding the original television advertisement for the Blackberry Storm, or about how Android is quickly eating away at Apple’s market share, they’ll buy a smartphone because they like the way it looks and the way it functions. Android and iPhone are supposedly the leaders today, but the smartphone you see most frequently is a Blackberry, right? 

The mindset of the consumer is, in most cases, to be able to purchase the best product that they think they are getting, at the best possible price. However, in the technology industry, Apple threw a proverbial spanner in the works: people were more than happy to front the extra cash to get an Apple product, such as a Mac or iPod. This is the sole driving force behind Apple’s success of recent; they make a quality product, but so do Blackberry and Microsoft you may argue, but everyone knows that Apple make the best quality products out there. Present a non-techie with some sort of Android device (dare I say it, iPhone ‘rip-off’) or an iPhone and ask them to pick which is best, they’re going to pick the iPhone. This is due to the fact that during their success, Apple has planted a mindset and thought pattern into the minds of customers: think ‘Apple’ and you relate that word to the iPod and iPhone; were those products successful? Even if you’re a non-techie you know that is the case. Apple has consistently produced products without fault; the design of an Apple product has a certain ’wow factor’ that other brands cannot seem to replicate, however hard they try. 

An aspect of successful business is building up your brand’s reputation, and as much as there is wrong with Apple, the fact that they have a virtually bulletproof image, and the way in which they have acquired this, are things to be greatly admired. 

Sidebar: I use an Android phone, and I typed this on a laptop running Windows 7, lol. 

“Sure i love reading books on a bright LED screen that hurts my eyes, because i fucking hate myself”

Although there seems to be a huge hatred arising from the more traditional readers about eBooks, one cannot deny that they are going to take over the entire publishing and reading industry pretty darn soon. About ten or fifteen years ago when the internet first started out, people thought that it would only be possible to use this technology on a computer hooked upto the cloud via a telephone line. Then came wifi, and then came probably the most important technological accomplishment of the 21st century, mobile internet. Gone are the days when only a Blackberry would be able to send email via a GSM network, now we can browse pages in full view over 3G, HSDPA, and even 4G networks (for you lucky bastards in the States). If you were to look at all of the things that previously had not caught on immediately, but have been steadily improved over time, then you’ll also notice that it is very easy to apply this theory to eBooks. eBooks have had a slow start, but then along came Amazon’s Kindle eReaders, which actually made reading on a portable electronic device a pretty pleasant experience. Now to consider the iPhone for a minute. Somebody at Amazon decided to create an application for the iPhone called, you’ve guessed it, Kindle for iPhone. With this, the user could easily synchonise all of the books they had purchased from the Kindle store to their device, and also sync things such as reading settings and bookmarks from the Kindle desktop application for Mac and PC. Kindle arrived for Android the other week, which, very conveniently, coincided with my desire to read The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. I purchased the book from the Kindle store and am now reading it on both my PC and Android phone:

Another factor to consider is the enormous growth of smartphones over the past two years; there is a huge number of people who use their smartphone not just for business, but also for pleasure (yes that can include porn, lol). If you look at both the growth of different smartphone platforms, or lack thereof, as well as the ever-increasing amount of applications centred toward things such as reading, it is easy to see how this is going to end up in perhaps only a few years time. We are starting to use our smartphones more and more, and for different reasons, and I think that within the next few years we will really be able to see a potentially massive growth in things such as Kindle, or iBooks for iDevices. 

If you’ve actually listened to one of my podcasts the entire way through without stabbing yourself, then I applaud you good sir/madam. I am currently in a state of utter bemusement as to what I am going to speak upon in my next podcast, so I am happily taking suggestions and requests. Think of it as requesting a song to be played on your favourite radio station, but it’ll be me ranting on about something. Topics can be anything in the world really, you can get me to talk about why Barack Obama is nowhere near as good as people would be lead to believe, or even why I love people who drive four-wheel-drives in a city (which I honestly do, by the way). 

So, what are your requests?

Okay at this point I should mention that if you don’t know what Twitter is, the a) You shouldn’t be on my website, and/or b) You should really stick your head down the toilet. Now that that announcement is over, we can move on. Those of you who like to write prose on the Internet in the form of one hundred and forty character blurbs will notice that Twitter has been down a heck of a lot recently, as the lovely people over in San Francisco wanted to upgrade a feature of the timeline cache system, in order to improve the overall experience. Thing is, they chose a pretty darn bad time to do this, right at the start of the World Cup where they knew that everybody is going to be tweeting their arses off about the football. Then, rolling into the equation comes Twitter’s API, which basically allows third-party apps such as Tweetdeck to access Twitter, thus allowing users to utilise these apps in order to use the Twitter service. Once the number of tweets being ‘requested’ in a certain time frame gets to a certain point, then the API literally dies. This means that third-party apps stop working. Once the API is overloaded, people start switching to Twitter’s standard twitter.com web interface, and then what usually happens in these situations is that users are greeted with the following page:

(those of you who are on Twitter will be more than familiar with this!)

Now once you’ve got to this point, you’ll probably be very annoyed, unless you have the patience of a saint. What you’ll do in your frustration is leave the fail whale tab open and refresh it every two minutes in order to see whether Twitter has sorted itself out yet. However annoyed you may be, this is actually going to make the whole situation worse. So basically, if everyone were to tweet one hundred times a week, then Twitter’ll be fine, however if everyone tweeted 100 times an hour, then it’s highly likely that you’ll fuck up the Twitter API. 

So the moral of the past few days has been the following:

1. Calm down

If Twitter goes down, then just remember that it’s likely that it won’t be down for more than an hour or so, or even less than that. There’s plenty of other things to do with your time! Personally, I tend to use this time as an opportunity to take a break, sit outside with a beer for half an hour or something, listen to some music, make a cake. If you insist on being on the Internet then go on YouTube or something. Or if you’re in the mood, go watch some porn. 

2. Twitter, get better servers

Seriously, Twitter needs to stop adding new features before having upgraded their servers from Linux to Mac or something. It’s like adding thousands of hugely complex animations to a phone OS without bumping up the processor speed in order for it to actually cope with all the enhancements. 

Rant over. Good afternoon.