In Australia, the opposition Labour party has promised, if elected, to spend $A5 billion of government money on broadband infrastructure. Prime Minister John Howard has hit back saying his conservative coalition government will shell out $A2 billion. 15 months out from our next election (give or take) how are broadband promises shaping up on this side of the ditch?

Last week, opposition leader John Key told me broadband would be a major election issue. Apparantly after house prices, broadband woes are the second most common gripe he gets from punters. This was at a the launch of Turnstone's new VoIP service, where Key gave an articulate speech about the need for better broadband, and its role in helping NZ overcome its isolation. It was very smartly phrased, but of course it's a point that's been made before, and one which no-one in any party disputes. What we need now, from all quarters, is details.

Key praised countries like Singapore, where the government has already invested in a fibre optic broadband network, and Australia, where it's now only a question of which party will spend more federal money on fast internet. Here, the lack of rural broadband is a big issue for Key, and one that he returned to several times last Monday.

However, Key also said that any government he leads would not directly follow Singapore or Australia's example, but rather subsidise broadband infrastructure providers so the government doesn't have to pick which technology - DSL, fibre, wireless - is best for New Zealand's population, which of course is relatively small and dispersed over a relatively large, hilly area. Overall, Key sounded like he was describing the current government's PROBE scheme, which is technology agnostic and indirectly subsides rural broadband - and in fact Key has no fundamental issues with PROBE. How much his government spend? Key won't be pinned down at this point.

On Friday night, at the Computerworld Excellence Awards, I also had the chance for a quick chat with the incumbent IT and Communications Minister, David Cunliffe. Like Key, Cunliffe is keeping a sharp eye on the broadband promises being made across the Tasman. Of course, as has been well chronicled, Cunliffe has already been our most proactive IT minister by some miles, with the opening of local phone lines to exchanges to competition, naked DSL and so fourth, as has been well chronicled.

But as for directly spending government money on broadband, Cunliffe says before he announces any other major initiatives, it has to be seen how the current raft of changes play out (the final details and implementation of Telecom's operational separation will not be finalised for another couple of months). Cunliffe did say that his plans for reshaping NZ's broadband landscape are far from finished.

As things stand, Cunliffe has wrought radical change on the broadband regulatory environment, but for his government to reap any benefits, meaningful price and internet service improvements will have to be felt by voters within the next 15 months.

If polls stay the way they are, I'm not sure John Key will particularly feel the need to fill in much more detail on his own broadband plans. When I asked him if Maurice Williamson - IT minister during the 1990s and the current National spokesman - would return to his old position if National wins power, Key was noncommittal, saying it was too early to say who would fill any post. He did, however, muse that broadband is more of an economic issue than an IT issue, so maybe the post could suit Bill English. Maurice, don't take that lying down ...

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Met John Key for the first time a couple of nights back. I'll cover what he said about our broadband future in the Monday instalment of this blog, not wishing to scoop our sister publication Computerworld, out Monday.

A couple of interesting titbits: Key said he'd been looking to new UK Tory leader David Cameron for ideas about online campaigning. One he's keen on is how Cameron has replaced weekly email dirges with a brief, preppy video. Key said people like video better, because they can decide whether they trust someone or not (visual appeal is sufficiently important that political focus groups are always shown TV news clips or ads with the sound turned down, Key said).

After an extended honeymoon period, Cameron has had rather a bad time of it recently, with disastrous results in the first two byelections of Labour's new Gordon Brown era.

So perhaps wisely - if surprisingly - Key is also looking to the online best-practices of a more successful politician, US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. He likes Hills' cloying 'join the conversation' line, and particularly her online poll to choose her theme song.

On a side note, Key said his daughter had no trouble surfing the web for free, piggybacking on their neighbour's wi-fi. That's in Parnell, so I dare say they can afford it. If you're more fiscally prudent, make sure your wi-fi connection has security enabled (learn how here).

AOL's Compuserve exits NZ
Got a letter this morning saying that PC World's Compuserve internet account was going to be terminated this month. Compuserve's parent - an ailing giant of an ISP called AOL, part of Time Warner - is pulling out of New Zealand, Australia and South East Asia.

In fact, AOL's local profile was so subterranean I'd forgotten they were even represented here, let alone that PC World had a complementary account.
Though certainly, once upon a time back in the mid-90s, we very much appreciated our free Compuserve connection, given that regular punters had to pay $70 (yes $70) an hour for its dial-up crawl.

(Our publisher has never had a complementary connection for our everyday internet use, incidentally. We pay, and suffer, like everyone else.)

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

NDP US sales charts for June show the bung old PlayStation2 continues to outsell both its successor, and Microsoft's Xbox 360. Again, the bobble-headed Nintendo Wii continues to outpace all contenders, and everyone's expectations.

Console: units sold June 2007, US retail
Nintendo Wii: 381,800
Sony PlayStation2: 270,763
Microsoft Xbox 360: 198,400
Sony PlayStation3: 98,469

Hand-held console: units sold June 2007, US retail
Nintendo DS 561,900
Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP): 290,108

In terms of growth, PS3 was the big winner for June with sales jumping 21% from May, even though a $US100 ($NZ99.95) price cut only kicked in half way through the month. Sony Computer Entertainment NZ tells PC World it currently has no plans to implement the price cut here. The other big recent console news - Microsoft's "red ring of death" Xbox 360 service and support payouts - didn't hit until the beginning of July.

Sony also had the momentum in the hand-held market, with PSP sales increasing 31% year-on-year, though Nintendo DS maintains its strong lead overall.

In the portable market
Sales of Sony's handheld game console, PlayStation Portable, increased 31% year-over-year with 290,108 devices sold in June.

Overall, June was a pretty sweet time for everybody Stateside, with the total games revenue for the month, including hardware, software, and accessories growing 31% year-on-ear to $US1.1 billion.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

This morning I had a preview of iYomu, a social networking site founded by UK ex-pat David Wolf-Rooney. It's currently in beta, and due to launch August 13.

iYomu's line is that it's a social networking site for grown-ups, and it features a clean, simple design that aims to make it easy for its target 25-55 year-old market to sign-up. It's less formal looking than LinkedIn, the grand-daddy, so to speak, of soc-net sites for grown-ups, but less edgy and more newbie-friendly than Facebook.

Yes, it does seem like every second grown-up is already on Facebook, but iYomu has a couple of key points of difference.

One is that there will be no ads (Facebook features scads of madly blinking low-fi banners).

Second is a 'vault', or up to 1GB of free storage for back-up, or sharing photos, videos and music in any common format. If you want a second gigabyte, you'll have to pay $US12.95 ($NZ12.94) a month, which is how the ad-free iYomu plans to make money (though of course the ultimate aim has to be to sell). Wolf-Rooney acknowledges that online storage is not much of a goer on most NZ broadband connections, but his ambitions are global, and the service will be hosted in the US.

Third, the site makes it's grown-ups only stance explicit with a no-kids, R18 policy.

iYomu also has a more involved social profile than most sites, with a set of 10 questions to determine your social 'DNA'.

Other features, such as creating local networks, and networks around areas of interest, will be familiar to Facebook users though - at least with its modest few hundred beta users - iYomu has a cleaner, more graphical way of representing them.

I actually had little idea of how Facebook or LinkedIn worked before I joined them, and only did so because people I knew sent invites. Facebook, particularly, seems to have gone bananas in NZ after ex-pat Kiwis in the UK started using it heavily. And there in lies the rub: no one wants to join (yet another) social networking site unless there are lots of people already on board to invite them, or link to them. How does a site based in little old NZ gain that all-important critical mass?

On this score, Wolf-Rooney and his co-director Frances Valintine are coy.

They say they have a killer marketing idea. One so original and powerful that they've told the US data centre that will host iYomu that it should prepare for up to one million users in the first month, with potential to scale to 10 million in quick time.

As business partners, Wolf-Rooney and Valintine make an attractive couple. Although he's not from an IT background (he worked in the oil and gas industry in Eastern Europe before emigrating to New Zealand around three years ago), Wolf-Rooney has obviously thought carefully about what features his target market would like to see in iYomu, and is does not seem to have any of the usual developer snobbery about beta users' feedback. And through her background as GM of the Media Design School - I learn through her entry on LinkedIn (!) - Valintine obviously knows her way around what works, or not, on a website. Still, from a huddle in a Symonds Street cafe to capturing tens of millions of people's attention in the US, India and elsewhere seems quite a stretch. The IT world is littered with great ideas no-one noticed.

Until iYomu's official launch day, August 13, Wolf-Rooney refuses to give any hint of his killer idea for capturing the world's attention. So until then it's hard to tell if he, Valintine, and their 44 investors are stunningly naive, or do in fact have an unbelievably cunning plan up their sleeves.

Posted by Chris Keall at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Rumours are starting to swirl around the blogosphere that Microsoft will buy Facebook for $US6 billion ($NZ5.98 billion). Microsoft is, of course, chasing Google, and a social networking service is conspicuouslylacking from its portfolio. Six billion dollars seems crazy, but that's the amount Microsoft recently dropped to buy online advertising specialist aQuantive.

It's certainly a hot area. After a worldwide survey of 6500 adults, market researcher Ipsos Insight estimates that 1 in 5 belong to a soc-net site, rising to 1 in 4 in the US, and 1 in 2 in Korea.

Tomorrow morning, an ambitious start-up is going to announce a New Zealand-developed social networking service. Where MySpace and Bebo are for teens, this will be a soc-net site "for grown-ups". Hmm, can you say "Facebook" and "LinkedIn"?

Meanwhile, is it just me, or has the NZ membership of Facebook gone crazy over the past couple of weeks? Certainly, like LinkedIn, it's broken through into the mainstream, with seemingly every media and IT industry person on one or the other (curiously, few are found on Google's soc-net service, Orkut).

Is there room for yet another? Check in tomorrow afternoon and I'll let you know what bright ideas our budding Kiwi networkers had to offer.

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Six months after its release, Vista is making slow but steady progress, as measured by the number of pcworld.co.nz visitors who use Microsoft's new OS.

When we last checked in, for the week ending Feb 02, Vista stood at 2.27%, and at 4th place on our chart.

Here's how Nielsen//NetRatings' numbers stack up for the week ending July 15, 2007:

OS: % of visitors to pcworld.co.nz
Windows XP: 81.49%
Windows Vista: 8.06%
Windows 2000: 4.00%
MacOS: 1.87%
Linux: 1.25%
Windows 98: 1.21%
Windows Server 2003: 1.21%
Windows ME: 0.51%

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

I've been using Nokia's N95 cellphone over the past few weeks (see July 2007 NZ PC World for a full review). There's no denying the engineering achievement of packing 3G Broadband cellular, Bluetooth, wi-fi, FM radio and GPS chips into a mobile that weighs a mere 120g (a Palm Treo 680, by contrast, is 154g). It's a genuine James Bond gadget (with genuine Martini pricing: $1599).

And that camera! FIVE megapixels, or a million more than my splashy Panasonic Lumix FZ10. Actually, speaking of the Lumix, it's jumbo size Leica lens means I don't usually pack it for casual outings, and I've been in the market for a compact camera. But do I even need one now that I've got a Nokia N95, with its 5mP camera? Especially given it's got frills like four ISO settings?

Well, yes. The N95's weak flash means you need excellent lighting conditions to get photos that look like they've been taken on a 5mP camera. But the thing that really got me was the shutter lag, or having to wait a second after you click for a picture to be taken. This was a big issue for early digital cameras, but hasn't been for so long I'd forgotten about it. Speed is the N95 Archilles' heel overall. All software menus take just a beat too long to appear or refresh.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

After rapidly growing to around 30% during 2006, the number of pcworld.co.nz visitors using Firefox seems to have plateaued over the past six months. Last week, Nielsen Net//Ratings clocked 62.53% of our unique browsers using some version of Microsoft Internet Explorer (steady from 62.8% during November 06). Mozilla Firefox users, meanwhile, hold a total 32.8% share (up 2% over November).

Firefoxers are easily the most active upgraders, with almost all having upgraded to Firefox 2 (see full chart below) while the ranks of Microsofties are dominated by laggards still on IE 6.

Browser: % of unique visitors to pcworld.co.nz (July 9-15, 2007)
Internet Explorer 6.0: 32.88%
Mozilla Firefox 2.0: 30.17%
Internet Explorer 7.0: 28.92%
Opera 9.2: 2.20%
Mozilla Firefox 1.5: 1.54%
Safari: 1.25%
Mozilla Firefox 1.0%
Netscape 5.0: 0.44%
Internet Explorer 5.0: 0.40%
Internet Explorer 5.5: 0.33%
Source: Nielsen Net//Ratings

Apple's Safari has miniscule share (mirroring its worldwide stats), but it will be interesting to see if it climbs now that its first Windows version is in beta (install a copy from PC World August's cover disc, on newsstands July 30).

The latest stats out of Europe show Firefox rising to a healthy 27% market share in Europe for July (up 3.6% since March) versus Microsoft's IE is on 66.5%. The keenest Firefoxers include Germany (38%), Ireland (38.6%), Poland (39.6%) and Finland (47.9%)

Yanks are proving slower to catch on. Firefox's North American market share was pegged at 18.7% for July (according to XiTiMonitor, the French measuring company that also supplied the above European figures). Still, it's a much healthier situation than a couple of years back when IE's dominance went almost totally unchallenged (and, not uncoincidentally, IE users had to wait half a decade between major upgrades).

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

This just in:

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Last week I panned parliament for introducing new rules that prohibit video footage of its proceedings being used for satirical purposes. The answer to dumbo politician clips being posted to YouTube, it seems, is not to stop MPs giving the finger, falling asleep or braying at each other like horses on P, but rather strict prohibitions on how such images could be revealed to voters (the "out of context" argument is a total red herring, since there are already rules governing images being used out of context in political ads and so fourth).

I said that rather than having any rules about video coverage, the entire debating chamber should always be available, uncensored, to the general public via webcam.

Unbeknown to me, a web video project was already in the works, and it's due to go live tomorrow (July 17).

Eight remote controlled cams will capture 17.5 hours of parliament a week, which you'll be able to watch via www.parliament.nz. The crux of it will be whether the cams focus boringly on whoever is officially speaking at any given time, or if they capture the circus around them. We'll find out tomorrow.

Incidentally, the Speaker's Office press release says the cameras cost $4.137 million to set up (including a separate control room) and will cost $1.785 million a year to run. For that price, I expect high definition. If you want high def at your place, check out August NZ PC World - if I may neatly segue into some promo - which features a group test of HD digital video camcorders from $1999.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

I helped to create Kiwi porn king Steve Crow, or at least the open, breezy attitude he has to his trade today. It goes back to the late 1990s when I wrote a story for Unlimited magazine called "Learning from the porn sites", on the theme that adult websites are always the first to adopt the latest net trends (the issue's busty cover remained Unlimited's best-selling for at least half a decade).

Anyhow, I interviewed Steve, who at that time was selling X-rated discs via PC World's classified section. Steve stayed in the background, with his then girlfriend being the public face of their company, Vixen. When I quoted the (then) mild-mannered Steve in my article, referring to him by his real name (it never occurred to me not to), he phoned me shortly after publication. He was quite freaked out. Apart from his own rep, he had a business on the side, with other partners, developing property in Remuera. Straight-laced Christian John Banks was a customer. Steve's partners weren't happy that his day job had been revealed to the world.

I don't know how the property biz turned out in the end. But certainly, once outed, Steve quickly warmed to his role and soon became the positively flamboyant porno king we know today, and proprietor of the Erotica expo, among other adventures - including a plan to run for the Auckland mayoralty against the aforementioned Banks (and of course the incumbent Dick Hubbard).

Steve gets a lengthy, good-humoured profile in today's NZ Herald, coupled with a story on his plans for a $5 million share float that would make Vixen only the 10th publicly-traded adult entertainment company in the world, and help fund further expansion. I won't bother wishing him luck, since I don't think the planet's particularly short on porn. But on his form so far, I don't think Steve will need it.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

It was a sorry sight and I had to laugh.

A couple of Wednesday nights back I was at the Hollie Smith concert that also served to launch Motorola's MOTORAZR2 (you plebs might have seen it on C4 last night).

Anyhow, after the most excellent and soulful Ms Smith had finished her set, a DJ started up. He had a laptop running iTunes plugged into the sound system. Nothing usual with that, in this digital age. What made me laugh was that when queuing up the next track in his set, he did not hold one cup of his headphones to his ear in the time-honoured club fashion, but rather held his laptop up to his ear, cradling the whole thing in an ungainly manner as he tried to listen to its external speaker.

In another very modern moment, Motorola sent me a copy of Hollie Smith's new album Long Player, but not on CD, but a fingernail-sized miniSD card, reader to be slotted into a RAZR2. Beats downloading.

So what does it sound on the the RAZR2? Don't know yet, though hopefully will shortly. A whole swag of very cool phones, including two that run Microsoft's new Windows Mobile 6 - the svelte Motorola Q and Samsung's BlackJack - are idling in Vodafone's approval queue.

Lastly, on an unrelated note: What happens to the Minister of IT's limo after he's gone home? It gets hijacked by TV3's Duncan Garner.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Nielsen staff around the world were caught on the hop today by a Wall Street Journal story, apparently based on a leak, that announced the company's Net//Ratings service "will scrap rankings based on the industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend on Web sites".

An insider at Nielsen's NZ operation says the Journal's report is mostly correct.

In the US, Nielsen will start highlighting time spent on a site, which the company judges a better measure at time when technologies like video and Ajax (which automatically updates content within a page) are becoming so prevalent, and watching a YouTube clip could actually involve a bigger commitment than flicking through a half dozen plain text pages.

However, in NZ, where we lag in such whirly-gig frills (and Nielsen uses a different tracking system) it's unlikely that the time-spent metric will be pushed to the fore in the near or medium term. And in the US, page views will still be tracked for those interested. They'll just have to dig for them a bit.

Posted by Chris Keall at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Inspired by Live Earth, I dug out my Solio solar charger over the weekend. Telecom actually sent it to me back in May, but it's taken the sight of the reformed Spinal Tap onstage with Metellica to sufficiently awaken my environmental consciousness to the point where I could be bothered opening the box.

Anyhow, the portable, 156g Solio ($139), when it's closed, is just a little bigger than your hand, and consists of three solar panels, one also housing a battery. The three panels fan out, in petal fashion, the better to catch the sun's rays. Leave them in sunlight for 10 hours then, via its battery, the Solio should be able to charge your cellphone (or iPod) at least twice. A cellphone recharge takes the same amount of time as plugging your phone into a normal power socket.

For emergency (but hopefully sunny) situations, you should be able to get 25 minutes' talk time from the Solio's battery after just 60 minutes of sunlight.

For me, in my laid-back, non-emergency office situation, two immediate problems have emerged.

One, on this glum Auckland day, my Solio is only intermittently getting enough sunlight to actually start charging (indicated by a red light). And to find that sunlight I had to leave the shadows of my office and leave it in a dangerously unguarded little alcove by our reception.
(Once you do manage to charge the Solio, it should hold the charge for up to a year.)

Two, although the Solio comes with a slew of adapters - including ones for Nokia, Sanyo, Samsung and Motorola phones - there aint one for my Sony Ericsson mobile (though I could fashion a workaround, since the Solio does have a miniUSB adapter - which is where it becomes so handy for recharging MP3 players - and my Sony Ericsson W880i, supports a full-size USB jack, which I guess I could find a miniUSB adapter for ...

Better news: our finance manager reports she (and a literal truckload of fellow adventurers) travelled all around Africa, charging their iPods as they went using a Solio-style device the whole way.

And new recruit Jan (nrJ) reports a member of his family got around Europe with a similar device, albeit with a slightly different paradigm from the Solio's petals: sheet-style solar collectors that could be glued to the back of a back-pack (Reseller News' subeditor Rodney Fletcher also points out that the Solio could be stuck on the top of a cap, propeller style, for the traveller with class).

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Well, you've got to give them points for fronting up. Microsoft has just announced it's setting aside $US1.05 billion to $US1.15 billion to cover Xbox 360 defects after experiencing an "unacceptable" number of consumer requests for repairs. The company doesn't specify what's causing the problems, but as we've previously reported on this site, overheating has been an issue. Anyhow, whatever the cause, Microsoft says it will reimburse any customers who've had to pay for repairs after receiving a so-called "red ring of death" error message on their Xbox 360, or the flashing red light that signifies a hardware error. A new, expanded warranty will cover red ring of death (RROD?) malfunctions for up to three years after you've bought one of its consoles.

Stuff the Americas Cup
Meanwhile, on the good old PC side of the gaming fence (well, with a little Xbox 360 signage thrown in), our new recruit Jan Birkeland will be competing in the New Zealand leg of the Pan Asian qualifying series for the World Cyber Games this weekend.
Winners will get the chance to compete in the Grand Final of the World Cyber Games in October. If you're into your gaming, this is bigger than the Olympics, or that yacht race.

Posted by Chris Keall at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Attention, case modders: PC World's Hottest Mod competition is back, with $14,000 in prizes over three categories. If you think your rig has what it takes, check out the competition details in our July issue, on newsstands now, or click here.

Also, this just in on the high technology upgrade front: Japan is adding expansion modules.
Mark Twain once said, "Buy land, son. They're not making any more of it".
Well, in Nippon they sort of are.

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Was just at a Samsung exhibition at Auckland's Aotea Centre, where the company is demo'ing a bunch of new product, including cameras, printers, Blu-Ray drives, LCD TVs and MP3 players (where the company claims it's now number two in this booming market - booming as in 250,000 units sold across all brands in New Zealand in the past 12 months).

The new Samsung M8 series of LCD TVs - all 1080p and spouting multiple HDMI jacks - is simply stunning. We're getting one in for review, so watch out for that in our print edition. We've already got one of Samsung's Blu-Ray players in our test centre for our coming August issue Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD feature. However, as the folk setting up Samsung's expo also discovered, not all Blu-Ray movies are created equal. Some are very poorly mastered, negating the new format's high def potention. More on this in PC World August.

Swinging both ways
There was also tentative news on Samsung's combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive, which should be released in Australia during October, with possible NZ release in November.
Samsung's Korean rival LG is also covering both options in the format war. An LG drive we've got in for Scott's August PC World feature couples an HD-DVD ROM player with a Blu-Ray writer. Nice (but $1800 worth of nice?).

HD nation
Interestingly, a Samsung product manager said the company is now selling around 4000 flat panel TVs a month in New Zealand - and they're all HD-ready. Other major brands like Sony, Philips and Panasonic must be moving a similar amount, not to mention the likes of JVC, Pioneer and Sharp, and many others. That's definitely something for Freeview (TVNZ + TV3) and Sky TV to think about as they slowly lurch toward upgrading from digital TV to high definition broadcasts (TV3 could be first off the block in the new year when it upgrades selected to programming to HD broadcast for Freeview viewers).

In other important news today:
According to Fox News, Bill Gates must say Hasta La Vista to his long-held position as the planet's richest human. His place has been taken by a Mexican cellphone pusher.

And reviews editor Scott has finally found his dream house. Personally I'd go for a plasma rather than a big-ass Runco projector in the bedroom. But that's just me.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

At first it seemed like the iPhone would be just another smartphone that little old NZ didn't get to see. Annoying, but not the end of the world. But with iPhone hysteria going off the scale (Microsoft employees have been sighted in queues), and saturation coverage on US tech sites and mainstream media over the weekend, I am starting to get a teensy weensy bit jealous. More so when I read some of the most influential American critiques who, for the most part, say Apple's little gadget does match its hype. Here's a couple of snippets:

"The phone is so sleek and thin, it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese ... But the bigger achievement is the software. It's fast, beautiful, menu-free, and dead simple to operate. You can't get lost, because the solitary physical button below the screen always opens the Home page, arrayed with icons for the iPhone's 16 functions." - David Pogue, The New York Times

"iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry ...

"The iPhone's most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favour of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt -- who did most of the testing for this review -- was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly." - Walter Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal

The iPhone also gets dibs for smudging but not scratching; for boasting longer battery life and more internal memory (4GB or 8GB) than its competitors (1GB is the upper limit of most phones); a quick and handy web browser; clever integration of Google's mapping and street view services; a seamlessly designed universal inbox, including a BlackBerry-style 'push' email service courtesy of Yahoo; and of course iPod-style music playing ability.

The major downer is connection speed. The iPhone only ramps up to GPRS (the cellular food chain going from standard GSM to GPRS to 3G to HSDPA, aka 3.5G or '3G Broadband', which is available in the US). However, even here the iPhone wins raves for its ability to seamlessly (that word again) jump from cellular to wi-fi networks for faster and cheaper mobile broadband. I want one.

Pictured above: Spike Lee becomes one of the first people in the world to buy an iPhone, and saves a child's life in the process! Is there anything the iPhone can't do?

Read some of our more measured coverage here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )