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Apple Wins Again

October 4, 2009 By George Leave a Comment

I heard in the last few days that Orange (the mobile network I use) were going to be selling the iPhone 3G / 3GS to their customers in the next few months. This excited me quite a bit, because I’ve always loved the iPhone, and if the o2 signal wasn’t so awful around here I might have looked at one.

Aside from that though, any detailed thought about this shows just how well Apple have planned this thing. They’ve been very clever in releasing it at this point, because now, their giving it to Orange just as the original 24 month contracts on the first iPhone are expiring with o2. That plus Orange lowering iPhone prices to compete with o2 is going to give customers an incentive to jump.

And that means more unit sales. = more profit for Apple.

They’ve also managed to do it just as the *sheen* is wearing off the iPhone, it’s giving it a new lease of life just as it’s sales start to lag. It’s an incredibly well thought out marketing plan, in my eyes.

As it is, I’m considering getting one, because as I mentioned before, I need a new phone, and having played with a friends, I fell in love with the iPhone. I guess the price that Orange releases it at will be the decider for me.

Filed Under Technology Tagged With Apple, iPhone, o2, Orange

BBC Blast

July 4, 2009 By George Leave a Comment

I went to a BBC Blast workshop yesterday afternoon, which was held at the seafront in Aberystwyth. And it was great. It’s really obvious the huge amount of planning that went into it, and while I only went to one workshop, Film Music (I’ll explain in a minute) it was great fun and everything looked really well run.

I actually originally wanted to go to the Dr Who prosthetics workshop, they were doing injury makeup and such, but I missed my chance with that, and went to a different one instead, which turned out to be great fun. We made music, using Mac software called Garageband, either just to our own, or to go with some premade videos that they provided.

I chose to do mine to the blast video, hopefully I’ll be able to link it from Youtube below. We had a great guy, I don’t remember his name, who taught us all about how to use it, very quickly, and then stuck around to help us out making some cool music.

Garageband is a really cool piece of software, and yesterday was the first time I’ve really had a chance to play with a Macbook Pro, and I think their great. Really great. I love the way the touchpad works, that’s one of the first things I noticed.

I’m *hoping* that my first EVER upload to Youtube will be a success, and that it will appear *magically* below :D

There’s a red box on Wordpress, so hopefully it’s worked :)

Anyhow, that’s the first I’ve heard about any of the workshops the BBC have been running throughout this year, and it’s got to be said, this one was really well run, everyone enjoyed the various different workshops, and everything was great.

And I even got a free t-shirt.

Filed Under Life Tagged With Aberystwyth, Apple, BBC, Blast, Garageband, Music

Safari 3.1 – It’s Out Of Beta

March 25, 2008 By George 2 Comments

I’m not sure how recently it was released, but ArsTechnica (those who matter) have just reviewed this, so I thought I’d try it out.

I ran the original beta a while ago, and although I liked it, it was laggy on my machine, even more so than Ie in some cases, and it crashed a little intermittantly.

I also found a few small problems with the rendering, but they were just niggles, and nothing like as bad as the IE8 rendering system.

The look hasn’t changed at all, and that’s a good thing, I feel, but it has sped up, and I can’t find the rendering issues I had before, so I think it’s all good :)

I’m writing this post on Safari, and it’s working fine. so it’s all good :P

- I’ve included a screenshot, mainly because I’m playing with the wordpress Gallery feature, but also because it looks pretty good. The change in the submit button from the other two, bigger browsers is brilliant, I think it looks 10x better :D

Safari 3.1 Screenshot

Although I’ve only used it briefly, I think this could possibly be a competitor to the greats, like IE and FF ;)

Filed Under Technology Tagged With Apple, safari

My (MacBook) Air! It’s Gone!

March 11, 2008 By George 1 Comment

Have you ever thrown out a gadget unintentionally? I havn’t had the misfortune of this yet, but I’m sure I will one day.

Steven Levvy, the technology journalist for Newsweek had almost this exact problem this week. He recently reviewed the MacBook Air, and liked it so much that he decided to keep it. After a few weeks of having it, his laptop vanished.

He called Apple, thinking it had been stolen, and reportedly, they laughed at him. Then came searching, and finally he decided that it had been thrown out with the Sunday Papers, by his “less clutter tolerant” wife,

My wife, whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will
swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to
the trash-compactor room just down the hall from our apartment, dumping
the pile into a plastic recycling bin.

Ars Technica thinks that his biggest mistake may not have been letting it vanish in the first place, but allowing himself to name his wife as a suspect.

That’s great. While it is a pretty dumb mistake (remember, papers are normally flexible, a laptop isn’t ;) ), it’s probably not the last.

The best bit is that Newsweek is going to stump up to replace it, apparently ;)

Filed Under Ramblings Tagged With Apple, laptop, mac, macbook
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