Donald Jenkins

The time has now come, in the light of recent legal and personal developments, to draw this five-year adventure to a close.

I was too harsh on the iPhone 4 camera: the disappointing quality of shots taken in certain light conditions may be more to do with software that doesn’t do justic to the high-quality Omnivision sensor Apple installed in the device, finally reversing its habit of fitting shoddy hardware in earlier versions of the iPhone. Although you still can’t use RAW images, the good news is that existing photo processing apps, contrary to what I initially feared, seem to save work at the new high resolution, meaning you can immediately start using them to process your pictures on the phone itself prior to sharing them wirthout having to use your Mac.

Orange very kindly arranged for me to upgrade to one Apple’s new iPhone 4 phones yesterday night on the eve of the world-wide launch and I’ve been playing with the device for the past twenty-four hours or so. Despite the major irritant of having to fit everything into an inadequate 32GB, technologically and, above all, aesthetically, Mr Job’s latest creation is a triumph. It’s a considerably more reliable telephone, not a mean feat for a company that has only been in this business for three years and its dazzlingly powerful iOS 4 will, temporarily at least, eclipse even the recently launched iPad. Developers, however, will need to rise to the challenge of submitting applications capable of making the most of the phone’s capabilities. This will especially be true of photography applications, given that the phone’s much heralded five-megapixel camera is actually slightly underwhelming.

The iPad, as many people quickly realised, is the best device by far to read news stories. Since I spend more time reading RSS than anything else when I’m online, I have always invested heavily in finding the most efficient and user-friendly way of doing so, especially as I also actively share a lot of the content I find interesting. Until yesterday, the choice of available RSS clients on the iPad was pathetic: Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder for iPad, which, like it’s iPhone brother, is simply the best RSS App, around, has just changed that. As a result, I’ve stopped using Shaun Inman’s Fever, which while incredibly clever, doesn’t offer such a flexible experience. I’ve also been looking at Pulse, which was in the news this week after being briefly pulled from the App Store and has started developing something of a cult following: while some of its features are incredibly innovative, it can’t be used as a serious full-time RSS client until it syncs to Google Reader and allows you to have more than twenty feeds.

There’s no point in dwelling in extenso on the very beautiful new iPhone 4 (I’m glad plastic has been ditched for metal and glass, which Apple has always chosen for its best-looking products), since Apple provided a remarkable if slightly embellished presentation of its new toy. I’m just going to focus here on a few points I think are of particular interest in this new release: the very nice new camera that could possibly kill the cheaper compacts, VoIP calls, the huge disappointment of not having a 64GB flash drive, and the uncertain issue of the data strain on AT&T’s network.

The accusation of being ‘closed’ rather than ‘open’ has been freely brandished by various major actors in the tech sector in recent weeks. Yet little thought has been given to what these labels actually mean. In reality, few IT companies have shown significant growth without resorting to economic models that have been perceived as ‘closed’, when it suited their strategy or their users’ needs. Yet history teaches us that whenever they have abused this instrument, they have fallen out of favour and users have moved on to the next ‘cool’ company. With the exception of Facebook, whose abuse of privacy impinges on the borderline area of personal web identity, there isn’t actually any threat to the freedom of users of the Internet—at least in those jurisdictions that don’t attempt to tamper with access to the global network itself. Providing Net neutrality is not compromised, innovation won’t be stifled by the existence of ever-recurring walled gardens.

You really don’t need an iPad 3G in France. Just use it in conjunction with Orange’s E5832, a tiny device that runs on its own dedicated SIM card and converts a 3G signal to a high-quality, fast WiFi network. You can use it not just with your iPad, but with any of your WiFi-enabled devices, including a Mac or even a camera, in conjunction with an Eye-Fi SDHC card. It’s also better value than Orange’s existing iPad 3G plans.

I won’t be using my iPad for much apart from reading books, newspapers and magazines or in special situations like meetings or plane and train journeys. Until application standards emerge that provide users with a way to interact more effectively with the device, which can only happen over time, it will remain essentially a glorified PDF reader. The iPhone already does most of what the iPad does and, indeed, does some of it, like listening to music, better. I can’t see the point of switching to the iPad for any of those tasks until developers write much better applications than are on offer today.

Following last week’s inconclusive General Election result, I’m struck by how people have focused on the short-term issue of how a functioning administration can be cobbled together, to the detriment of what a Tory government, which must still be the most likely eventual outcome, will actually stand for. There would a lot to be said for it refocusing on its traditional values: pride in tradition, an end to constitutional vandalism, inclusiveness in the conservative sense, and a clear commitment to protecting the environment.

Facebook has kept remarkably quiet about its latest move in a recent series designed to stealthily remove what it had previously scrupulously stood for: respect for data its users have chosen to share on it with friends they know in real life, confident that this information would not be shared with the world at large. A change in policy announced last week allows Facebook to share all your date with anyone they please. It’s still possible to opt out of this if you know where to go to do it. But it’s unlikely that Facebook will stop here in its attempt to sell its users’ data in a bid to increase its valuation even further on the back of its users’ privacy.