Distant Parts

Ordered by date acquired, with :

1. PalmPilot Professional - faulty, so I only had it for a few days
2. Psion Series 5 - never found a real use for it. Plus it was expensive, and the rubber skin started peeling
3. Palm V - slim, and beautifully made
4. Casio EM-500 - starved of RAM, but such a gorgeous screen for its time
5. Palm IIIxe - Cheap, rugged, lots of RAM
6. HP Jornada 568 - liked the flip down screen protector
7. Sony Ericsson P800 - weird but promising. Felt like an alpha product
8. Handspring Treo 600 - lovely build and software integration. Pity about the voice quality
9. i-mate JAM - great form factor, but unstable, and poor telephony
10. Dell Axim X50v - great screen, super fast, dual memory cards. It’s just a little too large
11. Nokia N95 - see my review

Eleven PDAs in 10 years, and still the search continues for my perfect device

I don’t have an iPhone

I have never touched, or even seen a real life iPhone

But based on all the comments out there, I’m going to offer my personal opinion anyway

At a high level Apple have done an amazing job. It looks like a killer iPod, and the slickest phone I’ve ever seen. But for me, the devil is the detail. Many of the details below come from this great Macworld article and Engadget’s review

Annoying things I could live with:

• 2 megapixel camera
• No video recording - a silly omission these days
• No 3rd party apps
• No landscape keyboard - hopefully there will be a software fix soon
• No support for memory cards
• No Flash support
• Non-standard headphone socket - what was the point of a non-standard 3.5mm socket?
• No MMS - this is 2007, not 2003
• No VOIP - annoying, but understandable
• No instant messaging - taking things too far in my view
• No GPS - if Apple add this, please make a good chipset. Fast acquisition really matters on a phone
• No MP3 ringtones - I want to at least be able to upload MIDI and WAV files. Why should Apple force me into some walled garden? It’s like deciding to stop supporting MP3 music. So much for no DRM Steve

Critical issues:

• No 3G - needs to be fixed before it arrives in the UK, otherwise the iPhone is dead to me
• Network restricted - if I can’t have it in the UK on a decent unlimited 3G data tariff (Three, or T-Mobile right now), I’m not interested. Ideally I’d like it sim free. And, yes, I’m prepared to pay a premium. O2, or worse Vodafone, will not be considered unless there are massive changes to their data tariffs
• Limited bluetooth support; no A2DP or OBEX - this lock really cripples the iPhone for me. I need the ability to transfer files and sync over bluetooth. My N95 is great at this, and it’s a non negotiable feature. A2DP would be nice as well
• Can’t be used a modem - not acceptable

The good news is that all the issues above are fixable. The question is will Apple fix enough to tempt me away from my N95?

My week is not complete without listening to the latest this WEEK in TECH and MacBreak Weekly podcasts in my garage, while the miles fly past on my turbo trainer.

Entertainment, useful news (if you work on the web), and physical exercise; what more could you ask for (except sunshine - riding in a garage has some downsides).

p.s. Leo, if you read this, more Merlin Mann and Wil Harris please

Since getting my N95, I’ve been using a small number of mobile optimised sites that I’d thoroughly recommend:

• Mini-Techmeme
• 7val Wikipedia - The best mobile Wikipedia in my view
• BBC’s PDA site
• New York Times Mobile (doesn’t work in desktop browsers)
• Google UK Mobile
• Guardian Unlimited

For those of us who are never satisfied with our current PDA, I can thoroughly recommend the following sites:

PDAdb.net is Windows Mobile only (no Symbian), but is fantastically comprehensive otherwise. I’ve wasted many hours searching in vain for my perfect PDA.

Steve Litchfield’s 3-Lib hosts a great comparison of all the Series 60 Symbian smartphones. I’d also recommend his Grid comparison (which includes some Windows Mobile devices), and his All About Symbian site for general Symbian news.

The more reviews links I implemented just over a month ago seem to be working well (visitors are viewing more pages per visit).

In light of this, I’ve just added additional links of this type, to other pages on Carsurvey.org and related sites.

Breadcrumbs alone don’t seem to be enough for visitors who are new to a site, as they’re easily scrolled off the top of the page.

As promised in my Simplified pages for adding comments post, I’ve now made a similar set of changes to process for adding a new review. The number of pages has fallen from 6 to 4, which will hopefully result in more reviews being added to the site.

Smints: Annoying, these are becoming very difficult to find in the shops. Forced to order from the Internet, I had 48 boxes arrive this morning (free delivery if purchased in bulk)

Diet Coke with Lime: Much more pleasant than Cherry or Lemon Coke. Unfortunately it no longer seems to be sold in the UK

Techmeme: I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s now pretty much the first site I check every morning. Can’t recommend it highly enough. Mini-Techmeme is also high up the bookmarks list on my N95

Forza Motorsport 2: Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini, rock solid 60 frames per second, 720p, surround sound, the Nordschleife, Xbox 360 control pad, and traction control and stability control turned off. This is the best racing game ever made

MotoGP: I know F1 is supposed to be getting better, but I watched the F1 race from Indianapolis, and whilst entertaining, it wasn’t a patch on MotoGP. And this is from someone who runs a car website, and has never even ridden a motorbike

Colin McRae: DiRT: The best rally game for years. Not quite up to the standard of Forza 2, but it’s still brilliant fun. Can’t wait to unlock the full Pike’s Peak event, so I can have a go at replicating Climb Dance

Horslips - Dearg Doom: 70s Folk Prog genius. The silver gloves are a great touch…

For a long time, I’ve played with the idea of switching off ads for Carsurvey.org members. How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs helped persuade me that it really was the right thing to do.

With immediate effect, anyone who has recently visited the Members Area of Carsurvey.org (the car site, not the airline site), will be able to view the main car site with almost all the ads removed. The members cookie lasts for 31 days. If you login to the Members Area at least once per month, the ads will stay removed, regardless of how many reviews or comments you rate.

The only exception to the ad removal is the UK used car search facility, which is doesn’t take up much screen real estate, and is subject to an agreement that I don’t want to break.

I’ve just made some changes that have massively improved the database performance of Carsurvey.org.

Back in 2000, when I added comments support to Carsurvey.org, I made the very silly decision to set the foreign key in the comments table to be a varchar (I thought I might want some flexibility above and beyond integer ids), and this varchar foreign key referenced an existing integer id field in the reviews table.

All seemed well, but for the last week I’ve been puzzling over why some of my join queries between comments and reviews were quite slow, and weren’t using the indices that I thought they should. After several days, I decided to change the comments foreign key datatype to integer, so it would match the reviews id datatype. Suddenly indices started being used in the way I was expecting, and I got a big performance increase.

So there are two lessons to be learnt here:

1. Unless you have a very very good reason, make your foreign key datatype match the datatype of the unique key in the reference table. It’s common sense for most people, but apparently not me circa 2000.

2. MySQL (version 4.1.20 anyway) doesn’t appear to optimise joins well where it has to match columns with different datatypes. This is presumably because of how it does type conversions.

Hopefully my confession will help anyone else who’s made a similar mistake, and is trying to work out why their query isn’t using the index they expect.