Distant Parts

You’ve probably heard of these, but they’ve taken up longterm residence on my iPhone 3G. In no particular order:

Google Earth – No explanation should be needed. It’s as near to the desktop version as you could reasonably expect

Twitterific – It’s free and it does Twitter beautifully

Camerabag – Turn the poor quality iPhone camera into an arty camera. I especially like the 1962 filter

Gazette – The best Google Reader app I have tried. Currently prefer it over Byline, as Gazette allows for browsing of individual feeds

MotionX Poker – This simple poker dice game is executed absolutely perfectly. A great app to demo the iPhone, and it has an addictive one more go quality

Galcon – Super fast real time strategy game. The videos out there don’t do it justice, it must be played to be appreciated

Topple – Boom Blox in reverse. Needs no further recommendation

eBay – eBay has a horrid website design. This app is cleaner and more focused than the parent website

Wikipanion – Just edges Kiwi as my favourite Wikipedia reader

FizzWeather – Beautiful and detailed weather app with good UK coverage

I’ve had an iPhone 3G 16Gb for about 3 months now, and have been meaning to post about it for ages. Rather than writing a detailed review, which has been done to death, I’m going to focus on my general impressions, and some less obvious points.

Stability: Firmware 2.0 was absolutely terrible, especially if you installed many 3rd party apps. Firmware 2.1 has been rock solid for me. Fingers crossed that 2.2 preserves the stability.

3G: Reception isn’t that great (not as good as my N95), and the handover between 3G and GPRS is slow, so I turn 3G off unless I’m somewhere that I know has a strong 3G signal. Not ideal, but more acceptable than I would have expected

3rd Party Apps: The range, quality and low price of 3rd party iPhone apps has blown me away. Yes, I wish there were less restrictions on the apps, but overall purchase and upgrade experience through the iTunes store, makes every other software purchasing experience look like something from a previous century.

Battery life: Very variable. Can be pretty good when mostly in standby, but heavy app use can kill it. Running the battery flat once a month (before charging) seems to increase the battery life.

Basic phone usage: Unusually (in my experience) for a smartphone, the call quality (at least for the caller) is very good.

Camera: Macro focus would be very helpful. More important than extra megapixels.

Gaming: The iPhone is an absolutely killer games machine. It’s a genuine competitor to the Nintendo DS, but for me, having multiple games on one device, all very cheap or free, and built into my phone, is just amazing. I defy anyone to be bored with an iPhone.

Media Player: It’s great, especially the YouTube integration, but for just playing music, I actually prefer the simpicity and solidity of my old 1G iPod nano.

App management: Not good enough. Both iTunes and the iPhone don’t cope well if you add lots of 3rd party apps. Managing and navigating through tens or hundreds of apps needs to be improved.

Overall: The iPhone 3G is definitely the best phone or PDA I’ve ever owned. I loved my old N95, but the apps on the iPhone take the smartphone experience to a whole new level.

I’ve always been a fan of large monitors, and until recently my experience has always been that bigger is better.

I’ve had a Dell 2405FPW (24″) for several years now, and it’s a big improvement for me, even over the 20″ screen of my old iMac.

With the recent release of Dell’s new 3008WFP (more features than just about any monitor out there), I was recently tempted into upgrading to a 30″ monitor. 30″ monitors are still very expensive, but as someone who stares at his computer screen for about 10 hours a day, I’d be prepared to pay the premium, if I got a similar improvement to previous size increases.

Once the monitor arrived, I was simultaneously impressed with physical build quality, and disappointed with a couple of faults in my particular unit. Having had a couple of hours to test it out, the monitor is being returned for a refund, rather than a replacement; partly for the faults, but mostly because it’s not the improvement I hoped for. Key to this is the fact that the pixels are significantly smaller on the 30″ screen than a 24″ ( 100.63 pixels per inch vs 94.34 pixels per inch). That makes standard sized font somewhat uncomfortable to read. Use this helpful calculator to compute the pixels per inch for different screen sizes.

I do really like the extra screen pixels, but as most of my usage is text oriented (surfing, reading and coding), I can’t compromised on reading comfort.

Where a 30″ is better:

• Photos – they look gorgeous
• Google Earth – again, gorgeous
• HD video editing – didn’t try this, but the extra screen area allows for 1080p videos plus toolbars etc
• People with much better than average vision. My eyes are slightly better than 20:20 with glasses (confirmed by an optician two weeks ago). If you’re a fighter pilot, or a bird of prey, buy a 30″ screen. If you’ve got the vision for it, large spreadsheets and long documents will look much better

Where a 24″ is better (for those with normal vision):

• Anything text based – most user interfaces assume a certain size of text, and whilst you can usually up the font size, things rarely scale without compromise (buttons, graphics not scaling etc)
• Web development – Scaling up the fonts for readability usually distorts the layout of web pages to some degree, as images don’t normally scale. Whilst I do test the impact of larger fonts on my site, it seems like bad practice to develop at font sizes other than the browser default
• Gaming – Much more support for 1920×1200 than 2560×1600, and less strain on graphics cards too

It’s a pity there are no commonly used resolutions between 1920×1200, and 2560×1600. Something like 2160×1350 in a 27″ or 28″ screen would probably be perfect for me. Extra resolution, without having to squint, or pretend you’re in an IMAX cinema.

Alternatively, I need to wait for the world to move to resolution independent user interfaces, but that doesn’t look like it’s happening any time soon.