Recently in apple Category

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I won an Apple iPad while I was at the ICANN meeting in Brussels.

So today was "D Day", with the latest "shiny object" arriving in my office.

The packaging is very similar to other Apple products, so it's neat and functional. The guys in Ascio made sure I got the right kind of plug, which was thoughtful of them.

It's the WIFI model, which was going to be a problem, but the technical team in the office got a WIFI network up and running fairly quickly, so that at least, ceased to be an issue.

The user interface is very similar to the iPhone and a lot of the iPhone apps that were on my desktop happily synced across to the iPad. Unfortunately a lot of apps that "work" on the iPad look terrible.

Playing video or using apps that make full use of the screen real estate is a wonderful experience

I'll be playing around with it over the next few days, so I'll be able to get a better idea of how well it suits me

Sky have been promoting their Sky Player service for quite some time.
At the moment you can access it on the XBox, though for some odd reason the XBox version doesn't have access to the "premium" content ie. Sky Box Office.

So if, like me, you don't have a phone line setup with your Sky box and you don't run Windows, your options are a bit limited.

You can, however, watch Sky Box Office on your desktop.

Word of warning. To use the Sky Player you will need to have the latest version of Microsoft's Silverlight installed.

For some bizarre reason the player will load fine in Firefox, but trying to watch anything using Firefox will not work. You might have better luck than me, but I ended up switching to Safari. In Firefox it seemed to be stuck permanently "buffering".

So what's the experience like?

To be honest I can't really complain. I'm using a 27" iMac, so once I was in a comfortable chair I was able to enjoy a couple of films without any issues. You can easily view the films in full screen view and the quality on a 27" screen was fine. It wasn't as good as watching on my TV with my full surround sound, but that was my choice (albeit one dictated by circumstance).

Renting films is pretty easy. Once you have an online account with Sky you can signup for their "wallet", which you can add funds to in order to watch films and other paid content.

It is unfortunate that the standalone player software is not available for the Mac as I suspect it might give more options in terms of quality and control. The Silverlight powered stream works fine, but has very little in the way of controls.

All in all it's not an unpleasant way to watch Sky Box Office films legally!

I go to a number of industry events every year.

At each and every single one of them there are exhibitors with bowls for business cards. The idea is simple. You give them your business card and are entered in a draw for some kind of prize.

I never win

Or more correctly.

I usually don't win!

I did win recently, which is why I'm writing this

The guys in Ascio are sending me a nice new shiny iPad and all because I put my business card in a bowl during the Brussels ICANN meeting ..

If you're a Big Bang Theory fan you'll remember their version of "rock, paper, scissors"....

So now we've got the iPhone case to go with it:


More info here

Apple recently started offering film rentals and purchases to Irish users via iTunes. For some reason they haven't started offering TV shows yet, though I suspect that's down to licensing problems (as usual!)

Last night I thought I'd try out the service, so I rented a film for a couple of Euro.

Since my mac book screen is small and my TV has a nice big screen I thought I'd be able to stream the video to it relatively easily using Connect360.

Unfortunately it simply does not work

Connect 360 cannot "see" the downloaded file in the iTunes folder. I tried copying it to the "Movies" folder, but while that rendered it visible it still won't actually play. Any attempt at playing returns a totally unhelpful error message on the Xbox.
After doing some searching it would appear that you simply cannot stream rented films! That's nuts! Seemingly it will work with ones that you "own", but not with rentals at all!
I wouldn't mind too much if the Zune selection on Xbox was semi-decent, but the Irish catalogue is very restricted. Sure, you can find some nice "oldies", but the new releases section is extremely limited.

So if anyone has a sane solution for this I'd love to hear

However I suspect that this is Apple DRM at its worst !

Since I first posted about iPhone tethering with Vodafone Ireland..

Vodafone launche the iPhone in Ireland
There's now a thread over on boards.ie about tethering
There's also a couple of oldish posts about setting up tethering on unlocked phones ..

And I still haven't had a proper reply from Vodafone on the subject.

If Vodafone's reply is that there is something "special" about packets of data when they go via an iPhone ... .. .

Vodafone Ireland are launching the iPhone in a few days time.

However the "standard" iPhone plans won't offer all the features that they could do. If you want "tethering" you're expected to pay more.

Most smart phones have bluetooth, so if you're stuck somewhere with a dodgy internet connection you can use your phone as a modem. For some stupid reason the Apple iPhone does not have this feature enabled by default, so you have to get it turned on by carriers.

Vodafone Ireland want to charge an extra €10 / month for this!! (The cost varies depending on the plan type)

So even if you have a data plan already ie. you're already paying them for bandwidth, they want an extra €10 / month to turn on an option.

How can Vodafone justify this??

According to Vodafone Ireland's Twitter account:

"Tethering on an iphone works differently to that on other handsets, so this service isn't included in your package."

Wow! That's the best non-answer I've seen this week!

One of the other mobile operators came out with this clanger:

"iPhone tethering costs more as it uses a lot more data than traditional browsing on your iPhone itself"

Logic? Zero

Welcome to rip off Ireland!

Vodafone Ireland have announced today that the iPhone and iPhone 3GS will be available from March 25th 2010.

What is semi-interesting is that Vodafone are pitching the device at their full range of clients ie. both pre-paid and monthly and also business users.

They're also going to be offering "tethering" which allows you to use your iPhone as a modem.

Though "tethering" is a "special" feature on the iPhone it's standard on most "smart" phones, such as the Nokia N95, for example.

The pricing seems to be quite competitive, but how well that will integrate with existing contracts is not at all clear. In our case, for example, we have about 15 handsets with Vodafone. I don't see why I'd want to pay a premium just for an iPhone - which I already have, as I bought an unlocked one from Expansys.

Trying to make sense of the pricing options on the Vodafone site would give you grey hair!

The price of the actual handsets (same model) vary from FREE to around €99 for the 8 Gb 3G, while the 32 GB 3GS can cost up to €300.

It's also not clear if the handsets will be 100% locked to Vodafone's network, which would render the incompatible with Maxroam and other services when travelling overseas.

Of course Vodafone already asked us all to sign up to be informed about the iPhone months ago, but have been silent ever since.

What kind of demand will they get?

Will they have enough hardware to handle it?

Will people be switching from rival carriers?

For the last few months we've had a SIP / VOIP setup in our offices.

My experiments with accessing the system using a SIP client on my iPhone were disastrous.

However I hadn't had any reason to do any proper experiments with using a SIP client on my desktop until today.

I'm currently using "Telephone", which is functional, but not exactly amazing.

So what SIP client software would people recommend for use on Mac OSX?

I've been trying out a number of different Twitter clients on the iPhone over the last few months.

I currently have three or four clients installed, but I keep coming back to Tweetdeck.
In many respects it's because I like uniformity. I like being able to use the same software on my various desktops, laptops and mobile devices. That might seem a bit boring, but it helps me maintain some semblance of sanity!

The latest update to the Tweetdeck iPhone client introduces several new features and improves some existing ones. One of the ones that I really really like is the new "update in background" option. If you're on a flaky mobile internet connection, like I am this weekend, waiting for your device to send an update can take several seconds, during which time your device is unresponsive. Pushing the update into the background means you don't lose access to your device while the update is being sent.

Other features include access to "recent people", "recent hashtags" and a bunch of other handy tweaks that they've somehow managed to squeeze into a handheld UI.

All in all the latest tweaks have made the user experience that little bit better and I honestly doubt if I'll bother using any of the other Twitter apps on the iPhone in the future