http://stephenfry.com/blog/
Im personally blown away by his level of geekness. Im in awe.
But, being Stephen Fry, he also has a wonderful way of getting his point across. Here are some select cuts:
PS, this is a long read.
Im personally blown away by his level of geekness. Im in awe.
But, being Stephen Fry, he also has a wonderful way of getting his point across. Here are some select cuts:
Design matters
By design here, I mean GUI and OS as much as outer case design. Lets go back to houses. The sixties taught us, surely, that architectural design, commercial and domestic, is not an extra. The office you work in every day, the house you live in every day, they are more than the sum of their functions. We know that sick building syndrome is real, and we know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents. Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do is like saying my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, its got a kitchen too, and a bathroom. I accept that price is an issue here; if budget is a consideration then youll have to forgive me, Im writing from the privileged position of being able to indulge my taste for these objects. But who can deny that design really matters? Or that good design need not be more expensive? We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms - why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate **** deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees that? Why dont the other bastards GET IT??
Lets look at the WinMob now. The HTC Touch is called (by idiots) an iPhone killer because it comes without a keyboard and makes a brief and rather feeble nod towards the idea of a strokeably operated touch-screen offering a silly cube transformation effect with big buttons. Oh, and the Touch is WinMob 6 rather than 5 (you wont notice the difference - a quite cool coloured line fribble in the agenda which shows you which days of the week are busy is the best addition, otherwise its virtually indistinguishable from WM5).
Youre only on this planet once do something extraordinary, imaginative and inspiring. Thats the difference, ultimately. Those behind Palm OS and the Psion can justifiably be proud of what they did, what they created. WinMob just muscled in on a market they never spotted and they did it in a clumsy, bullying, ugly manner, exactly as they had with Windows before, and exactly as IBM had with the PC itself a decade earlier. Break free, all you corporate software engineers and designers: the excuse that you are under the rule of dullards, greedy share-price number crunchers and visually and ergonomically illiterate yahoos is not good enough. Persuade them. Otherwise we all get a digital environment thats a vile as a 60s housing estate.
AND THERES NO OFFLINE MODE!!!! A SmartPhone that insists you have a SIM card in at all times? Just bugger off Sony Ericsson, youve lost my respect. Youve had thousands of pounds out of me in the past. But stick to student mobile phones called Kxxx with crap silly little jukeboxes on them, SmartPhones are out of your league. If youre going to use UIQ, then take a leaf out of Motorolas book and apply it (in a newer version, Symbian 9.2, UIQ 3.1) to a teen phone, like the excellent new Z8. Either that or do the real design work and make a proper SmartPhone, not this insulting halfway house. As it stands, the P990i is a better phone that this P1i - it has all the same faults, but at least its double action transformer style flip makes it more usable.
Please Steve Jobs. Eat us for breakfast. Make us look slow-witted, clumsy, unimaginative, grey and idiotic. Help yourself to the entire market that isnt Blackberry, we dont want it. Wed rather make toys for children and knock-off Macbooks for credulous adults. And somebody might buy the P1i if they want a slow, joyless experience. You never know. And anyway Apple cheat by having better products, which is unfair. We were once Sony. Goodbye cruel world.
I could scream with vexation. This truly is NOT WHAT I WANTED. I dont know how many times I have to say this for you to believe me, but I want iPhone killers. HTC havent done it, Sony Ericsson have rolled over and asked to be kicked and shagged roughly, so what of the Big Finn? What of Nokia.
But thats about it. Everything else in the iPhone lives up to, even surpasses the hype. Another triumph for Jonathan Ive and his design team, Apple have made a wholly desirable and beautiful object. Only a cross and silly person would pretend to be unimpressed or make claims of parity about their O2 xda Trion or similar lumpen beast.
PS, this is a long read.
