It is done then

Well, I've now finalised my plans regarding the iPhone 3G and my exam completion gift. I still intend to buy an iPhone 3G, but I only intend to do so when it becomes available on Pay/Go. And so I shall, funded by my wages from Tesco and my EMA. Contract was really not an option. I hate to wait, but O2 have forced my hand on this issue.

In the iPhone 3G's stead, my exam completion gift is to be the Halo 3 Edition Xbox 360. The effing awesome green one. This is the one I've wanted pretty much since Peter Moore raised it with one hand.

Additionally, in exchange for taking possession of my PC, my parents have bought me a 750GB USB Hard Drive and an Elgato eyeTV for DTT (TV Tuner). Two things I was going to buy myself which I now don't have to. Between those and the Xbox, my PC is redundant apart from Blu-Ray playing anyway. And I can always use the PS3 downstairs for that.

Which means my disposable income for this coming paycheck is £195...Less £59 for MobileMe and I've got £135 to spend.

And you know what? I've run out of major buys. All the big things I decided I wanted are gone (iPhone 3G excepted). So I'll buy iWork and probably try and nab MGS:TTS (Because I'm a Metal Gear freak and I simply must have a Metal Gear game I can play in my room - remember, our PS2s don't work. Long story).

But basically, from now on I'm on impulse and/or small buys until I start saving for the iPhone 3G. There's a chance that instead of iWork and MGS I'll buy a w580i this month, or do that next month if I buy the software this month, but other than that, it's uncharted territory.

I'll have to start buying my "back of the mind" wants. What I might do at some point is buy a DS Lite. That said, I'm half expecting The Reginator to reveal a new DS at E3 next week. I might buy that instead.

It's a Golden Age as far as I'm concrned.

Jens Out

PS: Oh god, I should ask the guy in the Shopping Centre about the signed Jenson Button stuff...I'll start small, with the cap or the (I don't think signed, but rare) Jenson Button F3 car...Then ask about the price of the signed 2000 Williams.

-Evil Grin-

Plans

Okay, so O2 have totally effed me over here. But, I still want the iPhone and I still intend to go with Pay/Go. For that reason, I will buy one this winter by saving up for a couple of months (All it will take, my monthly income will be increasing to start at £275 come Autumn).

In the meantime, I'm going to have my parents buy me a cheaper new phone on the Tesco Mobile network. Probably the cheaper Sony Ericsson slider in white. Additionally, I'll have them buy the hard drive I have my eye on, the 750GB one. Anything left over I'll spend on a game or something, perhaps making use of my GameStation Gift Voucher (I'm praying for Twin Snakes).

That leaves me to buy my new TV Tuner and MobileMe. All told, that still leaves me with £95 after I take into account LOVEFiLM. If I don't end up with Twin Snakes, I might use some fo that for that, otherwise there's some miscellaneous stuff I've yet to buy like iWork and iTunes films.

Next month is probably my Xbox 360 in that scenario. It's gonna take over the PC's place in the VGA Switcher. But its physical location? I have no idea.

There's a chance I'll buy a DS Lite with that £95. I'm not sure, I'm just thinking about it. In that case, the 360 will be a month later and next month will be iWork and stuff.

Jens Out

iPhone Europe: O2 accidentally shows its Pay/Go Hand

Well, the cat would seem to be out of the bag. Multiple sites are reporting that O2 posted handset prices, rates and offer details for the iPhone 3G on the Pay/Go tariff to their site, apparently late last night.

The details have since been withdrawn from the site, but are still available to us through various rumour sites and blogs which caught them.

So, how much is the handset gonna set us back? 8GB will be priced at £299.99 and 16GB at £359.99 (MacWorld UK erroneously states £400, however even their cited source disagrees). These represent modest £30.99 price hikes on the elder models.

However, O2 has seen fit to sweeten the deal. Primarily through those "top up £X each month and receive" offers, but more importantly by bundling 6 months of unlimited (3G) data. Naturally, a fair use policy is in place and the offer only applies to phones activated before...December 31st. Some time away at least.
After the bundled data period is over, unlimited data can be added for £10 a month, a neatly non-committed solution, much better than the £30 tariff.

Incidentally, the 6 Months of data is therefore worth £60. I would have been buying it each month anyway, so I like to think of it as a £300 phone (16GB model) with unlimited data at £10 a month, £60 of which is paid upfront.

At these prices, with these deals, I'm definitely going to go ahead and get a 16GB iPhone 3G with a white back. I pretty much have to now. My touch is nearing the limits because I've bought three movies, and I plan to buy at least 2, maybe 3 more.

So, all in all, I'm pretty happy.

Jens Out

WWDC: iPhones, MobileMe and a Big Cat in a Cold Country

Wow, that OS X iPhone SDK stuff sure was one helluva Dog and Pony show. Nothing much new there except those cool little notifications apps can send you. That sounds cool my friends. Very cool.

Oh, and I want the AP app. It's free and will enable me to do skunk works reporting, which you can no doubt guess I would love to do.

From that, you have no doubt inferred I intend on using a device running Apple's OS X iPhone 2.0. And you'd be correct. Which neatly leads us to the big news from Steve's Keynote yesterday: iPhone 3G.

Well, it's damned pretty. The new plastic back looks nothing like those ugly mockups, it's a thing of beauty.


It's got 3G (As implied) for high-speed data access over-the-air, GPS for precise positional data, allowing breakthrough location-based apps like Loopt to give us a truly awesome experience. The battery offers 10 (Up from 8) hours of 2G talk and 5 hours of 3G talk, beating competing 3G devices by some 1.5-2 hours.

Aside from that, it's the same great phone it's always been. Same gorgeous front with the awesome 3.5" Multi-Touch display, same Home button and (upgraded) iPhone OS software.

And O2 have made my (And WizzKid's) day. The iPhone 3G will be available Pay/Go here in the UK. This means there is no reason I can't get one. As such, assuming O2 are nice and allow the Pay/Go-ers to buy on launch day (Oh yeah, July 11) along with the contract signers and the price for the 16GB is less than or equal to £329, I will be at my local Carphone Warehouse store (Just 10 minutes away) on launch day to pick mine up.

As for contract signers, O2 has dramatically improved the deal for you:


Very good deals there, I think you'll agree. The £30 tariff is weird. Yes, it's good the monthly cost now has a new bottom end, but the difference between the £30 and the £35 is so great the extra £5 is more than justified. Still, good if you're on a budget and mostly just want data.


Now, onto the next big thing from Steve's talk. MobileMe. Yes, the rumours were true. And MobileMe does indeed look like a huge improvement, Exchange for the rest of us. With MobileMe, I'll be able to keep my desktop (The Mac mini I mean. I can of course do it on a PC too, but I'm transitioning to an Apple oriented environment) and my phone (iPhone 3G 16GB in Special White Version) in constant sync, all over the air.


That's e-mail, contacts, calendar, photos, bookmarks, the whole deal. Nice.

Furthermore, it will enable me to share my photos from iPhoto and to some extent my videos from iMovie. And all of this...With my jensonb(at)mac(dot)com e-mail address.

I knew it was a good idea to get in on that early. Best part is, my .Mac trial will be automagically upgraded to a MobileMe trial in early July, so I'll run out the trial period in MobileMe. Then, I'll be buying the 1 year 20GB (Yes, they doubled the storage) for the new prie of £59 - down £10. Awesome.

And you know. It was kind of important I move to an all-new e-mail account anyway. My Hotmail was set up for me some time ago. Probably over a decade and I've used it ever since. And I've never used folders. It's a mess. Windows Live Mail (The desktop app) allows me to easily search all the e-mails, but seriously...Change was needed.

So now I'm in my ultra-tidy new @mac.com e-mail account and I love it. Much better UI as well.

I recommend all my friends reading this now begin to use my @mac.com address for all personal communication with me.

And finally, Steve has revealed there is indeed a 10.6 being previewed, it's called Snow Leopard. I for one like that name, it's befitting of this release which is said to focus on giving OS X a smaller footprint and optimisig it, for example making it work better with multiple cores.

All very exciting stuff.

Jens Out

Housecleaning

Switched to a new design you may have noticed, it reflects the gradual change in tone up in here. I'm also currently in the process of tagging all the posts in the archive, and since I don't have any exams until June 3rd now, I should be getting that done in the next week or so.

I'm now on Twitter, dunno what I'm going to do with it, but I imagine I'll find some use for micro-blogging in the future. Follow me if you use it, but right now it's probably not worth joining just to follow me.

I'm hoping to get around to those exam reviews next week, I have some issues with all three I've done so far so stay tuned for that.

I finally enabled Advanced Desktop (Vanilla Xandros) on my Eee the other day, so I've been kind of geeking out. That's how I roll, yo.

Nintendo are bringing a turquoise DS Lite out. Hot damn. That might be the thing that makes me upgrade. That thing is lush.

Rumours abound Apple will unveil a 3G iPhone soon (Like, within 3 weeks) which will go on sale shortly thereafter worldwide. The most exciting rumour is that it may be sold contract-free at the fll price, with carriers offering rebates (Similar to the one offered by Carphone Warehouse and O2 recently) to drive contract sales. Well if I can get a 3G 16GB iPhone for £269, contract-free, then I might just have to go for that instead of the Sony.

I'd be more aprehensive about an 8GB, it wouldn't be a big enough upgrade on the touch.

Right, I'm off to spec up a computer to drool over at VooDooPC's website. I'll finish the upgrades to the blog soon.

Goodbye my Coney Island baby
Jens

On Mobile Telephony and the Months Ahead

Mbile Telephony

So I've finally picked out my new phone. Amazingly, it's a Sony Ericsson Slider. Why's that amazing you ask? Well, I hate most sliders and I hate most Sony Ericssons. Ironically, the only Sony Ericssons I do like are sliders. Some of the clamshells are okay.

So which one you ask? The W910i. Not really because of the Walkman, I have 3 iPods, but more because as a piece of kit, it suits my needs and it's a good upgrade on the RAZR.

It's a bit of a looker. If I ever end up somewhere with decent 3G coverage, I might even try sticking a 3 Sim Card in it to try and get in on some of that mobile TV love. I really want portable TV. If I need to, I'll buy one of those portable FreeView TVs...Speaking of, someone should put a hard drive in one of those.

Motor Racing

In other great news, Jenson Button came home an awesome 6th from 13th on the grid, setting the 5th fastest lap, reaffirming the point that Honda Racing F1 are back and their car is a quick racer, even if it's ultimate pace (IE, 1 lap pace) is not brilliant. They've shown they can mix it with Renault and Williams. Our faith has paid off. I'm very, very happy.

Multiplayer

On a brief Multiplayer note, we may have a graphics man lined up. Stay tuned. I would however like at this stage to announce that I am partnering with WizzKid, of WizzHack.co.uk, for the development of the Multiplayer Magazine website. WizzKid is a supremely talented web developer and I'm confident he can put together a brilliant package for Multiplayer.

The Months Ahead

GTA IV is released this coming Tuesday. Assuming someone's in to collect my brother's package, expect to hear from me about it - and the Xbox 360 being relocated to my room for the duration fo my brother's exams. He has more time consuming revision etc. than I will.

You'll probably hear from me again the following day when we finally get the final details of our exams and important dates, like when Study Leave starts. From then, expect content to be as normal only until Study Leave, at which stage it will be throttled (Though not, I imagine, shelved) until June 17th. But I intend to provide extensive coverage of my Mac mini's arrival and setup.

As to content in the exam period, I might post my impressions of how the exam went and review the exams themselves, something which I feel is sorely lacking. Exams are sorely in need of criticism. I'm planning to supply it.

After the exam period, I'm considering migrating this blog into a full-blown personal website, featuring pages dedicated to showing what hardware and software I use, an extended bio, dedicated links and contact page etc. I will, after all, have 2 months of free time and a brand new Mac with iWeb on it.

Also, below is the first in my series of music-themed signoffs. Anyone who can guess where each one's from (Song title, artist) gets the standard Jensonb reward.

That is to say, a cookie.

Going crazy and we're out,
Jens