Diary of a Disordered Mind

Engadget have published Oranges iPhone tariffs ahead of release later this week. Unlike O2, Orange are not offering 18 month contracts, instead tying customers into a two year contract. Otherwise, the two providers appear to offer identical tariffs, which begs the question, why would anyone choose a lengthy contract with Orange when O2 offer similar and shorter contracts?

O2 (as of 2nd November 2009):

Orange (as published by Engadget):

The O2-iPhone monopoly is soon to be over, according to a orange.co.uk press release. No details of pricing or tariff are given but, if they're smart, they should undercut O2's current pay monthly tariffs (which, incidentally, are the same as those soon to be offered for the Palm Pre).

Let the price war begin!

Why does it cost the same for TomTom UK & Ireland as it is for TomTom US & Canada and more than for TomTom Australia or New Zealand? How do they come up with the pricing for these apps? It's clearly not done on the basis of size or number of routes...
 
 

As you can probably tell from this and recent posts, I'm trying to convince myself that there's no need to buy an iPhone because my N95 can do the same cool things without the draw-backs of crappy camera, lack of MMS etc.

I'm in no way convinced! The iPhone is, quite frankly, an amazing device and when I upgrade in about 12 months time, I'll definitely be persuading O2 (or at least trying) that they want to give me a free one. In the meantime, I've been hunting for iPhone-like apps to keep me going.

One of the coolest photography apps I've seen on the iPhone recently was Autostitch, which creates panoramic images by, as the name suggests, automatically stitching images together. Leo Laporte's posterous blog has demonstrated how amazing the software is and I was, frankly, jealous!

However, a couple of quick google searches came up with the Panoman app, a neat image autostitcher that has very similar functionality to Autostitch. Panoman is Symbian only (as far as I can see; the company that developed it doesn't seem to have a webpage) and allows you to automatically take up to 12 images, balances the focus, exposure and colour, before stitching it all together and posting it to (at least in the N95's case) gallery.

I took a quick photo of our lab as a test of the software and it looks pretty good! The image is 6 photos stitched together rather than the full 12, which would probably have covered a full 360˚.

As I say, I couldn't find the company website, but if you're interested, I got the download link through this blog which has better instructions on how the software works.

Enjoy!

Or more specifically, Nokia N95 running Symbian S60.
 
When I first heard about AudioBoo I immediately thought it was a gimmick. I mean, seriously, do I really want to hear an worse-than-amateur podcast from that git in Texas who happens to have an iPhone? As you can imagine, the answer was an enthusiastic "hell no" until, that is, recently when Leo Laporte (online-celebrity and tech aficionado) started "booing" (ok, you come up for an adjective to describe it!) from his trip to China. I've listened to a number of Leo's podcasts for a while now and I'm always impressed by the way he describes the world around him and the passion he has for (seemingly dumb) things. So I subscribe to his AudioBoo stream through iTunes and it got me thinking, the technology AudioBoo are using is nothing particularly new. We've been able to record audi on through our phones for ages now and sending media from device to device is relatively straight forward (via bluetooth, USB, MMS, e-mail) and setting up an RSS feed of audio is pretty painless (using Wordpress or, preferably, posterous). So why is this app restricted to the iPhone crowd? Well, it isn't really. I mean, the app clearly is iPhone only but the tech isn't. take my N95 for instance. If you look in the applications folder, you'll find an app imaginatively call "Recorder" that records audio through the phone's microphone. Once recorded you can send this media by MMS, bluetooth or e-mail to anyone or anything with the appropriate technology. So, let's assume you have a posterous blog set up specifically for a stream of MP3s, by e-mailing sound recorded using Recorder to posterous, you have a AudioBoo-like set-up with an RSS stream easily integrated into iTunes and immediate posting to twitter, facebook etc.
 
Anyway, I had a go with it and, to be honest, it doesn't sound as bad as I first thought! If you ignore the fact I a) sound extremely Northern (although I don't sound quite as Yorkshire on my own head), b) am in a lift and c) sound like a complete tool, none of which I am able to change! See what you think...

Edit: OK, so the sound quality isn't quite as good as the iPhone/AudioBoo but I blame that on the hardware!