The iphone is good … but not that good.

As Paul Jozefak rightly points out on his blog, it is truly unreal that after all the bitching about lack of cut and paste, they have still left it out. Maybe it will be a Christmas present from them instead

That aside, I still rate the iphone as a fantastic piece of engineering. As a net device, or for apps, its truly fantastic. But as a phone, it truly sucks. Its still better than a Windows Mobile phone, but that isnt good enough – nor should that be a measurement of success!

The iphone came down from Heaven and thus they were all in a clammer.
(know this artist? I’d like to leave credit and link – please leave a comment if you know)

If a phone is going to be “a phone” then it has to do one thing well first: Be a phone.  That means decent battery life, and easy one hand operation for making calls. If I cant retrieve someone from my address book, in the dark with one hand (this is a test, not a regular use case for me and get the right number atleast 50% of the time, its a FAIL.

My life is too rushed, too busy, too many calls to be faffing around with both hands, head dug into my phone screen.

Lastly, there are other more subtle problems– Why do I have to go back to the SETTINGS screen to do basic config changes which I should able to access from with the current mode? Why cant I add a photo into an email, FROM the email I’m writing, rather than START from the photos gallery?…..I could go on.

Currently, I’ll have to carry my beloved Crackberry 8800, the best phone Ive owned in 5 years, and find space in my clothing for the beautiful but flawed iphone, too.

• Want to know about phones? use GSM Arena – fantastic free and well updated resource on phones old and new. Not an ad, I’ve just used it for years and its a great site!

Piclens makes Flash slideshows look like something from the last decade

Every so often you bump into something on the web and you just think “wow, thats really cool” shortly in my case followed by “damn I’d really like to hire the developer who created that!”. This was exactly my reaction on installing Piclens fantastic add-on to Firefox.

It even runs OK on my 4 year old Pentium M 1.6 Thinkpad (which I might add despite being shortly replaced by a Thinkpad X300 is probably the most sturdy reliable piece of hardware I have ever owned – I cannot compliment it enough, no wonder IBM Thinkpads have such a reputation with serious computer users). Anyway, back to Piclens. Rather than me waffle on trying to describe it, I suggest you simply install it and try it out.

Lifes a Pitch – quite a good book.

Prompted by an article on the excellent blog Found and Read I thought I’d mention the most recent good book I’ve read. I’m not a huge reader and certainly not of many business or life-coach-esque titles; but occasionally I discover something or am recommended something particularly good which I am willing to invest my time in.

Lifes a Pitch is a title of a book which certainly falls into this category.
The book contains invaluable and priceless info (especially in the first half) about how to pitch; both write, prepare, its structure and delivery and how to achieve good delivery. Its relevant to giving a presentation to sell, to win a contract, to get investment or simply as an inter-department presentation to colleagues or a boss.

It’s down to earth and REAL – written by someone who knows from the front how to really fight the war; not by some consultant who has never actually tasted and chewed on the grit of giving presentations to win business or win people over.

The rest of the book is pretty good too; talking about general business issues and one’s own personal approach to the challenged of trying to achieve something in one’s life. Split into two books, its laid out in an easy to read way, amusingly illustrated and unusually structured, split into two books – each one written by one of the two authors.

If you read it, let me know what you think – it would be great to have others opinions.