Tablet and Mobile

Archive for December, 2010

AT LAST and without even as much as an announcement that reached my enthusiastic ears (I regularly check, Skype have made a FREE upgrade to allow VIDEO calls on the iPhone and iPad.

In an amazingly understated development which was not appearing in any of the usual chatter blogs, an update for Skype appeared today for the iPhone and the iPad, to version 3 – which supports video.  Obviously video OUT isn’t going to happen on the iPad but incoming video works a treat – and on the iPhone it’s down to which model. The 3GS has only the one camera (unfortunately on the wrong side of the phone) – I’ve no doubt now some enterprising Chinese company will come up with a clip-on mirror arrangement to turn the camera around because this development finally turns both iPhone and iPad into serious communication tools. Forget about Facetime, Skype has countless millions of users and apart from last week where they screwed something up, has proven to be an excellent alternative to the telephone and at least for one-to-one video it has for some time worked across a variety of platforms excluding of course the mobile phone and iPad.

All of that is now history, it worked at least for me straight out of the box and I’m now scouring the web for a mirror arrangement so I can do full video calls while I’m out and about.

While I’ve no doubt Skype will eventually get around to supporting the many and varied Android phones, don’t count on instant success there due to the hardware variations – iPhone users on the other hand – not a problem! Needless to say, their website doesn’t even MENTION Windows Phone!

What a nice Christmas present – Thank you, Skype! All you need to do now is add a “Send to Apple TV” button just to round things off nicely.

 

Couple of new things to tell you about… I’m sure most of you have had a go at a putting screen saver onto your smartphone. If not, ask yourself, what are you going to do when you want a new phone – are you going to be smart, look after your phone and sell it on EBay for up to £150 – or dumb and put it in a cupboard – or worse, let it get into a such a state you can’t get a bean for it?  Some months ago shortly after I got my phone, I was lucky enough to be wandering around the London underground and stumbled upon an SME who did phone repairs. On asking him if he could put on the screensavers he delighted in telling me that he was the BEST – and promptly put a screensaver on my phone which I have to say was virtually perfect.  Over time, keys and other items make a mess of even the best screensavers and a couple of weeks ago I started looking for a replacement.

It’s important to get the 3 layer ones because the extra stiff-ness makes them easier to fit which minimising bubbles.  I tried several 2-layer ones – and ended up immediately throwing them in the bin – being impossible to fit without bubbles. Then I was sold a 3-layer model for a fiver which worked reasonably well, except when I got it home it turned out it was a mirror version. Now, these might be good for young girls as vanity mirrors – but for looking at your phone they’re utterly useless. Some the sunshine you can’t see a thing but your reflection!

As luck would happen, Tesco sell 3 unbranded in a pack for under a fiver.. no markings, just a red pack that says SCREEN PROTECTORS and tells you what model they are for. In fact, they are clear, 3-layer units, and really do look good quality. I got them home, got out the air blower and kitchen roll, washed my hands, cleaned the screen, blew any bits of dust away with the blower – and set to work. First of the three RUINED.  Another belt of air, a little more care starting in the middle and working outwards and… SPOT ON, my phone now has a satin finish protector and one ONE imperfection or bubble, it’s better than new in fact. At under £5 for three, who CARES if it takes 2 attempts!

The second item you see in the photo! It’s the JuiceBar! After only a short time in the sun, it is currently – as you can see, charging my phone! It doesn’t come with an iPhone connector – but then it does come with USB socket so you just plug your ordinary iPhone cable into it. It does however come with a connector with a variety of plugs AND a mini-USB in so you can charge IT in the absence of sunshine – think of it as a solar powered spare battery! It’s staying in my car window from now in for emergencies.

Excellent stuff! I’ll report back when we get some proper sun – and it’s coming with me to Spain next time! Comes complete with shirt clip so when you’re out and about you can be charging it’s batteries! Comes complete with internal 800maH battery and a large surface area to collect the sun.

I’m still counting on SKYPE getting their act together and bringing out a Video Skype around the same time that Apple bring out an iPad 2…   I’ve been following Skype and ooVoo and it’s hard to tell which one is making the biggest mess. You’ll be aware of the SKYPE outage – well, I’ve also had crashes on PC Skype recently – indeed ever since they brought out version 5… there have been sound issues. ooVoo has much better sound but it’s so riddled with adverts it’s almost embarrassing. The problem for the iPad and iPhone is that ooVoo don’t have running versions for these operating systems. They’ve just released ooVoo beta for Android and I just tried it.  The video just doesn’t work AT ALL, in either direction – at least, not on the HTC Desire.  Someday one of these companies will get their act together and clean up house.

Meanwhile I have to say I’m still sticking to my guns – Android is just not making an alternative to Apple… many of the so-called iPad killers have fallen by the wayside and the only one to really get anywhere, the Galaxy Tab is too small for many purposes.  Meanwhile APPS for the iPad just keep getting better and better. There are now a couple of games out that are as good as console games (Infinity Blade being one example), there are now a ton of newspapers and magazines for the iPad and various other programs for both iPhone and iPad just keep improving and improving.

After all the media hype about “iPad killers” – has anyone noticed how quiet things have gotten recently? Novatech’s Windows 7 tablet got a severe bashing because Windows 7 remains badly-equipped for use by large fingers and the screen on that machine apparently isn’t that clever at an angle. Currys withdrew one of their two available Android models and so basically if you go shopping you’ll find the iPad and the Galaxy Tab, the latter of course being only 7” and having a lower-resolution screen than the iPad – the Tab did however in it’s first month manage to sell a respectable 1 million units so one would be daft to ignore it.

Other than that, what? The Dell Streak is basically a phone so really the Tab and the iPad are the only real players actually out there if you ignore the many units available on the web using older versions of Android and therefore hardly in the game. It amazes me that other manufacturers look to be going to miss the Christmas opportunity – I’d hoped that the Archos 101 would be the next contender because of it’s amazing price but according to PC PRO, it too has issues with poor screen readability. The reason this is important is because, unlike software, you can’t really upgrade the unit later to overcome such difficulties.

So why do we even need competition for the iPad? The unit is solid, reasonably priced, works a treat… yes indeed but the Apple unit still has some way to go before you’d throw the laptop out…

I’ve written a lot about the benefits of the iPad…. here’s a list of things that are NOT so good about the current iPad:

• No memory expansion
• No USB
• No camera
• No FLASH
• Airplay is still far from perfect
• Airprint is currently a joke, working only with a very limited number of printers
• The WIFI on the iPad still does not handle multiple access points properly

When the iPad came out, mobile connectivity packages were pants in the UK, with Orange and Vodafone competing to see who could offer the least monthly download for your money – and so 3G connectivity seemed like a joke which is why I bought the WIFI-only model – well that and the price, the top-of-the-range iPad is IMHO just too expensive for what you get – but then along came THREE who offer up to 15GB a month – now THAT’S more like it.  I’m using their branded MIFI unit and believe me, going through that amount of data is QUITE DO-ABLE so running a tablet on 3G really does need this kind of monthly allocation if you’re going to make heavy use of the unit.

Internet beginners might well ask “how on earth can you use up 15GB in a month” – well, let’s see, in a one-hour trip up the M6 listening to “The Big Cheese” radio station (as against various crap BBC stations which fade in and out and tend to bore one to death) I managed to consume 250Mb. I’ve never checked but I’m prepared to bet that watching an episode of “Have I got News for You” on the iPlayer would use up even more! Hopefully you get the point… if all you do is browse the web then the likes of the 3GM/monthly packages will probably do the job for you but once you see the possibilities that modern mobile systems such as the iPad, Galaxy and the new, larger mobile phones can give you, data use tends to rocket. I could see daily use of 1GB quite easily which takes you up to around the 15GB monthly allowance.

Once Apple get their act together with Skype and give us an iPad 2 with Skype video (or more likely, short term, Skype adds video to it’s Android line-up?) I could see video calls finally taking off en-masse – and that could change everything.

The good news is that various mobile operators are now starting to subsidise these tablets with contracts so the price barrier is starting to go away.

Meanwhile I’ve been struggling with the limits of Apple’s iTunes, probably the most miserable program in my PC armada of programs, iTunes excels in one thing and one thing only – organising your music collection.  If you’ve never looked at this, here’s my music line-up….

I’ve one PC at home that looks after our pictures, music and videos and stays turned on (monitor off) 24/7. It runs iTunes and talks to the Apple TV2 unit attached to our TV. Simply inserting a CD into the computer results in the entire contents of the CD including cover artwork, ending up copied to the hard drive and hence available within iTunes along with our pics and movies.

That in itself isn’t a great deal of use, but thanks to the addition of Apple TV and REMOTE (an App for both iPhone and iPad which lets you remotely control iTunes, select tracks and even build playlists) it is now possible to access all our media on the TV via a choice of remote control, iPhone or iPad – and it all works very well indeed. We tend to keep our latest pictures on Google Web Albums and access to that is missing like a sore thumb from Apple TV which prefers FLICKR (I don’t, mainly because of their association with Getty and Corbis) and I’m looking forward to the advent of APPS for Apple TV in the hope that one of them will add Google Web Album capability.

iTunes of course is far from perfect, the Airplay output to Apple TV straight from the PC will not work on either our main media PC or my laptop however thankfully via REMOTE, the PC will indeed stream to the TV without issue.

iTunes however is woefully inadequate at sorting tunes from a variety of sources or even in some cases at getting the right artwork so I’ve pressed two other programs into service – TUNEUP which is not free but does a great jog of getting artworks – and MediaMonkey which can be free and has some great facilities for organising your media. At long last I now have a working, practical media setup. All I need now is something to convert the optical output from the Apple unit – to work with my slightly-out-of-date HI-FI amplifier – it’s either that or scrap the TV and get one which has audio OUTPUT as well as input!