Declan Jewell’s Blog

Well after a long debate and I mean long, I finally decided to give the iPhone 3G a go. On the 15th December I ordered an iPhone 3G White Pay&Go directly from Apple. In true Apple fashion the next day delivery turned into four day delivery, Apple have to get this sorted, 24 hour shipping never ever works in my opinion. If other company’s can manage this a massive company like Apple should.

Anyway back to the iPhone, I received it from the UPS man and removed it from it’s cardboard box, the actual iPhone box was white as was the phone inside. I then removed the cellophane from the iPhone box and opened it, at the top was the actual phone in protective wrapping, I lifted it out and looked and what’s included. Talk about the basics, there was a charger and a pair of earphones, that’s your lot. No dock like the first iPhone, not even a universal dock adaptor, come on Apple, this is the flagship phone, get it sorted.

I just removed my dock adaptor (1st Gen iPod Touch) from my Universal Dock and the iPhone sat in but I had to be careful as it shook about quite a bit as there was no support of an adaptor. I then opened iTunes and just like when setting up an iPod I got the little wizard that sets up your device. I had to put in my account details, name and bank stuff, luckily I had already put all this stuff in due to me having an iTunes account so that saved a bit of time, next I choose my tariff, there is two choices, one for people that talk more and one for people whom text more, I choose the text one and that was it all done.

I thought that would be me ready to use the phone but nope, I then went to take the phone out the dock and on the screen it had a bubble with the text “Waiting for activation…” A good hour and a half later it finally changed to “iPhone is now activated.” and the O2-UK text appeared up the top of the screen. Unfortunately I live in a non 3G area hence I only had an E indicating I had an Edge connection. I tried opening a Safari window but it was so slow I just gave up. Once I had it connected to my AirPort network everything sped up as expected.

The next few days I spent living with the iPhone 3G showed it’s good and bad points:

Good
• The way it groups texts, those speech bubbles are just genius.
• It’s interface, really Apple have the market cornered with the beautiful interface of mobile OS X.
• The standard audio jack, really every phone should have this, using your own earphones is so easy when this is in place, instead of using stupid adaptors and stuff.
• GPS, this thing gets a GPS fix faster than my TomTom Go 520 which is a bonus, it’s pretty accurate outside and the Google Maps application is a joy to use however software like TomTom Navigation would make this a thousand times more useful.

Bad
• The fingerprint issues, this isn’t exclusive to the iPhone, any touch screen devices suffer from this, but I have OCD making sure the screen is clean, maybe it’s just me but this drives me mad. • The speed of the internet when on the mobile network, even with 3G signal it’s still really, really slow to load pages, when using Google Maps in a moving vehicle it cannot keep up with feeding images of maps making it appear you are in a brown field of nothing.
• The camera, the must have device of the year should really have more than a 2 megapixel camera, Nokia and Sony Ericsson have been using 5 megapixel for ages, what gives Apple?
• The one network situation, what’s with this, like every other phone it should be available on more than one network, what happens if you don’t get O2 signal where you live? Luckily I like O2 and take all my mobile business to them however I know other people that would like to use other networks, however this should soon be solved with the iPhone Dev team releasing their unlock in the new year.
• The price, for what you get it is overpriced on Pay&Go, it should be around £200 and free on contracts like every other similar phone on the market, Apple are really having a laugh with pricing on everything they sell.

Unfortunately the high price tag and bad points got to me and I found the iPhone quite un-enjoyable to use, this went to the point where I told Apple to stuff it and took it back for a refund, I have now went back to my Sony Ericsson W880i which is a much better phone in both looks and features and only cost £40-60, I have an upgrade on my contract due on February 2009 and will have a look at what is available on the market at that point.

Photo: Jamie McCall on Flickr.

A few days ago, I was in Tesco getting the last of my Christmas shopping and noticed they were doing a deal on xBox 360’s, It was £110 with a free game. This is a great deal as it’s the 60GB Pro version which retails at about £169. I purchased one and chose the new 007 Quantum Of Solace game. That came to £110, handed over my staff discount card and it brought it down to £100 which is an amazing price. Got it home and setup, pretty nice looking console, looks better than the PS3 in my opinion. My xBox 360 gamertag is “Declan Jewell” if you have a 360 and want to add me. The new dashboard is much better than the previous version however it’s still not as good as the PS3 XMB.

Overall a great purchase, just waiting on some more games and the HD-DVD drive attachment arriving which cost pennies now that HD-DVD is dead, however as I am still receiving HD-DVD titles from my LoveFiLM subscription it will come in handy. I will need to get some pictures up on Flickr so keep an eye out for them.
Merry Christmas Everyone!

Those are the best PS3 games ever!

Bought LittleBigPlanet first thinking it would be a bit of a laugh as it’s clearly designed for younger children, but maybe just because I am childish, I find it great! The fact that more or less the whole game is user generated content makes it exciting, sure there is built in levels that you can work up on if you don’t have online access but once you have signed in to PSN all the other user designed levels show up and you can play and even edit them yourself. If you wish you can choose to start with a blank canvas and create you own level, this can be played alone, shared with only friends or shared to the whole world if you wish. It so creative and you can spend hours just playing around with it. Totally recommend the game!

My Audi TT in NFS:Underground.

Secondly I pre-ordered Need For Speed Underground from Tesco with my staff discount, it came last Friday and since then I haven’t been able to put it down. It’s the most addictive game I have played to date. It’s a basic story line that you are an undercover cop that is trying to take out a network of smugglers. You take part in events and races to gain their trust but ultimately you have to take them down. The amount of car modifications you can make is dazzling and every car can truly be your own, it’s much better than the previous NFS (ProStreet). Physics also seems a lot better with cars actually moving them in the way you expect rather than tapping the control and you car goes flying into the nearest wall. Races and such are rewarding and you get cars and other points that gets you discount on parts. Overall a very good and addictive game, I have only been playing it for a week and I am at 70% complete already.