DISQUS

Loading bars in banners. Whatever will we put up with next?

Heyup. I wouldn't do this unless I knew you lot, because it'd sound too much like astroturfing, but... we had an iPhone in the office last week (Daryl's, brought back from Cupertino) and It. Is. Sensational. It really, truly is as lovely as it's reported to be. Seriously. Size, weight, unscratchability, speed, stability, interface... and the touching thing has to be touched to be believed. It is so oddly intuitive, in terms of pressure, contact point(s) and movement, but best of all it's a technology on top of a GUI with the basics done just right. Anyone who picked it up at any stage used it easily and loved it.

For comparison Liuh Shyuan brought her new HTC Touch and oh my GOD it was SOOOO embarrassing. You have to DRAG your finger across the screen. It's a rub-screen or a wipe-screen phone, not a touch-screen. Sometimes. When it works. When you sort of get it right. And once out of the "flow" bit (by accident) it's just a shitty, too small, hideous-GUI windows phone. And not one of the twelve technophiles in the office could find their way back to the "flow" interface unaided, and even then couldn't repeat it unaided.

It was like vintage champagne vs flat homebrew.

Of course, not having CDMA or 3G or a decent camera is a bit lame tho.

Ben, get that car checked! It seems to be clocking up the miles while STANDING STILL!

A set of things for $8...?! Someone has their retail psychology calibration all wrong. It's not about constant markup ratios, it's about how much you would pay on the spot having travelled all that way for something that your machine won't work without... viz. Sony's earbud spongy bits: new headphones with spongy bits = $35; set of replacement spongy bits = $20. Awesome!

And meantime, Ben, go play DirtBike for an hour or so and rekindle that instinct for throttle on = backspin, throttle off = nosedive. Good-o!

That Zalman 7700Cu cooler seems like a great idea, but I worry how stupid it would look sitting on the keyboard of my new AlBook. I might have to stick with the classic SlikkaPad covered in an old teatowel for now -- not only does it cool the underside of the machine; it soothes the 'book-related scalded areas on my thighs.

I must say I was surprised to hear Apple chose to go with Moto for their first iTunes phone -- and then *not* surprised to see how long it took to come out, and how lame and icky it was when it finally appeared.

Having worked with Motorola for a year or so, and seen their MPX220 ("er... how do I make a call on this thing...?") and the keyboardless wonder 680i ("er... how do I even turn this thing *on*?! [30 seconds of fossicking later] oh, here... right... [90 seconds of splash screen later] ...what a crock!"), I would *hate* to think of the meetings between Ive's team and Moto. I guess i'm just a real stick-in-the-mud when it comes to designing products to SIMPLIFY people's lives. And when it comes to phones, I don't want some bystander spending three minutes of my golden hour waiting for the thing to even start up before they can call an ambulance...

AAAAnyway. I start a new job next week, and one of our clients is... Sony Ericsson. And one of our other clients is... Apple! [sfx: Happy Greg...] so I'll see if I can grab one of these and let you know.

At last, a flicker of a heartbeat from Sony! These guys have been sitting on the Walkman brand for tooo long - why none of the Minidisc players were properly Walkman-branded, I don't know. But now, yes, at last, a fatload of INTERNAL MEMORY and a BIG SCREEN and MULTI-FORMAT and it even *looks* like a WALKMAN PHONE, not just an unusably complex Motorola phone with an iTunes logo stuck on it. Yay! It just remains to be seen whether they've managed to fsck up the interface completely, like almost every other idiot phone manufacturer (c'mon, kids, keep it simple!). If not, I'll have one for sure. Although, could do with a chunky drive-based model; 20gig would be yum...

NOW look what you've done! "after a bit of hackery and testing" you've not only broken the Interweb - my email system has gone all bung too... spitting out nonsense like "This week's edition of the Molesworth & Featherston newsletter is attached." Thanks. Very Much. ;-)

Jesus... can you IMAGINE the SNORTING?!
Hngh hngh! Hngh hngh! Hngh hngh!

PS: http://telecom.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/telecom.cfg...

Dude. Once again I remember the reason I dont' want to come back to NZ just yet. It's not Helen. It's not Student Loans. It's not Bogans. It's not the Weather. It's Telecom...

Ha! I just read this, then remembered to pop over to your blog... http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB11174...

Silly Heather. Not such a high IQ after all... unless this was a fake ranty post to make the blog seem more real? Like a meta-blog... or... ARGH! BRAIN HURTING!

You should try being "not with it" while actually trying to CREATE this shit... I'm a big fan of transparent, corporate sponsored ARGs to increase involvement / add texture to the brand, but I find it creepy / weird / ineffectual / annoying when it's "disguised" so lamely: "Ooooh, look, it's the future trying to break through my browser! That MUST be real - especially as the URL was on the end of that HALO2 ad for only two seconds, not like five seconds, wow..."

ANYway. Apparently I Love Bees was some kind of weird marketing "success" - half a million players, a couple of million lurkers, a global community... but did it SELL any HALO2 product?

Look at Skype. Look at Google. Just make something good and show it to people; if they like it, they'll buy into it.

I would.

Prolly.

If I was 'with it'...