Deep in O2’s terms and conditions for the iPhone…

Unlimited Data / WiFi Fair Use Policy:
Your O2 tariff for iPhone allows you unlimited use of O2 UK’s Edge / GPRS networks and The Cloud’s UK Wireless LAN network, for personal internet use, email and Visual Voicemail (VVM) on your iPhone only. All usage must be for your private, personal and non-commercial purposes.
You may not use your SIM Card in any other device, or use your SIM Card or iPhone to allow the continuous streaming of any audio / video content, enable P2P or file sharing or use them in such a way that adversely impacts the service to other O2 customers. If O2 reasonably suspect you are not acting in accordance with this policy O2 reserves the right to impose further charges or disconnect your tariff at any time, having attempted to contact you first.

So. I’m forbidden from using an iPhone, since I would be using it for commercial purposes (ie fielding the odd email about Media UK, the website I run).

And if you’re planning on running iRadio, a neat little app which copes with streaming MPEG streams for your iPhone, then - don’t. Not on O2’s tarrif, anyway.

(I’ve not got one. My iPod Touch is beautiful, particularly now it’s jailbroken and contains loads of apps; my Nokia N70 is acceptable, if not great.)

Photo: Otu Ekanem. Used under licence

Photo: ryaninc. Used under licence.

Overheard this morning in a Carphone Warehouse, as a customer was being shown the new Apple iPhone by the manager…

Yeah, like, take a look at this maps thing! It’s sick, man! You can see the trees and everything! And get this - Apple have launched loads of satellites - loads - and they’re all for the EXCLUSIVE USE of iPhone users, right. Look at that! It’s sick, man! Sick!

I’ve never taken advice/bullshit from a Carphone Warehouse person, and am so grateful that I’ll never need to.

I mentioned, over on Facebook, that I was getting most excited about the iPod Touch, and that I wanted to buy one. And I got two almost instant replies on my “wall”.

Andy, a man who’s unable to drink more than a pint of cider without running away, said: “I’d certainly appreciate a high quality Cridland review if you get the chance, very close to purchasing one myself.” And then, Trevor, a man who’s unable to write or talk without using language requiring strategically-positioned asterisks, added “What a sh*tting surprise.. James buying a gadget… HOLY T*TS! But I’m with Andy.. if it’s any good will you tell us.”

Well. I’ll give you a high-quality Cridland review in a bit. But here’s my ‘first impressions’ review. It’s very, very fine indeed. It’s thin - incredibly so - and a highly beautiful-looking device. And give that my phone, while O2, is under the cold grey hand of beaurocratic dullness, a new phone isn’t an option. So what was I waiting for?

The music player works well, and, to my cloth ears, sounds better than my previous Nano, though that might just be the embarrassment of spending so much money on a replacement for something which hadn’t broken yet. “Shuffle”, the way I always use my iPod, is quite easy to use, and the graphics are beautiful.

One of the downsides of the touchscreen is that it’s impossible to change the volume level without getting it out of your pocket, hitting the home button twice, and then fiddling with the screen. At least with my old trust Nano, I can feel for the volume control. If you’re wondering whether to get an iPhone or an iPod Touch, note that the volume control on the iPhone are buttons on the side.

But the touchscreen, and the user-interface that comes from it, is beautifully done. The “flick” works excellently; it’s quick and easy to find anything as a result. The whole UI is animated in such a way to make using it a joy. The ‘cover-flow’ is also a really usable way of exploring your music.

But naturally, you wouldn’t be interested if the only thing it did was play songs. Because that’s the least of this thing’s capabilities. It does video, too - things like CNET Live are crisp and clear on the screen (only playing in landscape format, incidentally). A double-tap smoothly switches between “fill the screen” and “see the whole picture”.

But if your own downloads aren’t quite enough, the YouTube application is astounding. Using the built-in wifi in the device, the video quality, to me, is impressively better than the same YouTube on the PC - probably because it uses H264 which’ll be supported in the next version of Flash.

The wifi is also used for the in-built Safari. The test of any browser, for me, is whether it’ll cope with the complication of loading, say, Gmail. The good news is that it does. You can even read your email in the fully zoomed-out view. Most users, though, will find the special PDA version of Gmail rather more usable; you can get to it via http://www.google.com/ig/mobile, a useful page to know about, since it also gets you to the mobile version of Google Reader. But, it coped happily with anything I threw at it - the BBC News website works just fine, for example (as long as you don’t want to watch any of the video content).

The device is surprisingly high-powered, too. I loaded a complicated website, www.nyt.com, on both my copy of Firefox on the PC, and Safari on the iPhone; having ensured the cache was clear on both occasions. My “battery lasts half an hour” PC loaded the page in 12 seconds; the iPhone iPod took a respectable 16 seconds. It should be noted that the page was visible and readable on both devices before it had fully loaded, so the wait-time was even lower.

This is a viable “take it into the garden and read the e-paper” device. The fact it’s an iPod is almost irrelevant.

The ‘contacts’ application, which syncs both ways (so you can add contacts on your device), is a good system - particularly when combined with Plaxo on my Mac, which means the changes I made on a boring tube journey are now part of my proper contacts book across the many devices I use.

Sadly, the ‘calendar’ application is less useful. Through no apparent reason other than a wish to cripple the device, Apple removed a chance of editing your calendar directly from the iPod; so it’s read-only. You -could-, I suppose, use Google Calendar through the wifi, and get iCal to sync that, but it’s a shame that this has been crippled in this way.

Connecting to wifi is quick, and the device is quite sensitive; it finds an amazing amount of wireless networks in central London, and connects almost instantly to my (hidden) WPA connection at home.

In conclusion, then, this is three devices in one. A surprisingly-usable web tablet. A splendidly capable contacts book. And it plays music (and video) too.

Add a phone in there and, well, you’ve really got something.

.

Looking for some tips and tricks?
- Make sure you use a powered USB hub, or plug it directly into your computer. Mine irritatingly made the “syncing” noise, but did nothing more, until I fiddled around. Just because your previous iPods charged happily on an unpowered hub doesn’t mean this new beauty will.
- Want a sensible case for it? An Apple iPod sock is just the ticket; it fits almost too perfectly.
- Developing for it? The user-agent contains “iPod” and not “iPhone”.

(Update 15 Oct: thank you John Naughton for noticing I’d turned my iPod into an iPhone in one paragraph. Now fixed.)

While I was there, I visited the electronics market in Singapore, and a few other electronic stores. Notable was a total absence of DAB Digital Radio sets, despite DAB launching many years ago in Singapore (and despite the fact that it’s the only country with 100% coverage). That’s a concern.

I did buy something, though - something I discover is known as a “ChiPod”: a chinese imitation iPod Nano. This unbranded machine - above - looks a quite passable imitation, and it cost just £27. Inside, it has three games; a video player (playing the mysterious MTV ‘format’); an audio player that plays MP3s and even displays lyrics; an eBook reader (of which there is no documentation at all); a photo viewer; a voice recorder; and last, but not least, an FM radio.

The FM radio is there, of course, because there’s an FM radio on the chip that’s inside the device, and support for it is written into the software. It was, arguably, more work to disable it.

But it does pose the question: Why, in a £149 device like the iPod Nano, is there no FM radio - when this ChiPod managed to include one, and a mains charger too incidentally, for £27?

If you pay 99p instead of 79p for your EMI download from iTunes, you get something special.

You get the music in double the quality - 256k instead of 128k. The music apparently sounds cleaner and more vibrant.

You also get the music without any Digital Rights Management. So you can copy it, move it around, play it on one of those nice new thin Sony Walkman nano-a-likes, etc.

And, as the Electronic Freedom Foundation have discovered, you also get those tracks embedded with your name, your email address, and possibly many other things too.

This, to me, makes perfect sense. They’ve stripped the DRM so that you can, for example, burn the tracks onto CD, or move them to your other player, play them on your mobile phone - a wealth of possibilities denied to us with DRM-protected files. However, they’ve not stripped the DRM to allow people to stick them on the internet for everyone to download or to share around the office; hence the embedded user information.

ArsTechnica appears to be fuming about this.

I don’t understand why.

But with the new ‘Google Maps Street View’ it can see home. Aw.

Actually, I’m really rather impressed: you can ‘walk’ the streets of San Francisco, turn around, and do virtually anything.

This Mac came from the San Francisco store you see here - an impulse purchase (easily the most expensive impulse I’ve ever made!). On the right-hand side is the Virgin Megastore, the thing that brought me to that part of town (ostensibly for some copyright-free images).

It’s like memory lane, except without the long plane ride.

My Sony DVD player, bought when we went digital in 1998, has been retired. Aw, bless you, Sony DVD player. We’ve had fun, even though you’re twice the size of any DVD player you can buy nowadays (and significantly more expensive).

The Mac Mini, which has been living next to the telly for the past year or so, is now occupying the space that the DVD player did. Realistically, it produces the same quality picture as the old DVD player; and it means less electrickery under the telly, which is probably good for the environment.

I wonder how many people have wired up computers, or Playstations, or XBoxs, to their television and done away with their DVD player? The only small issue with my Mac Mini, since it’s an original PowerPC version, is that it hasn’t got a remote - but realistically, what do you need a remote for once you’ve pressed play? I’ve used an old wireless mouse that I’ve had lying around for a while, and that works okay (though not quite far enough to reach the sofa).

Also, I’ve managed to get an external hard drive to put all my music on, since my hard drive was getting a little concerningly full.

Those getting bored with this posting should press ‘j’ (since you’re using Google Reader, no doubt) and get on with reading something more interesting.