I am one of the late Steve Irwin’s greatest fans, although at first I was unsure that his larger-than-life-persona was not just that; a persona.  Something he took off like a hat when he got home.  I soon learned my mistake by watching one episode of his program where his wife and he came across a large pod of whales that had beached themselves and lay dying in the sun.  Steve was heartbroken and it was very clear to me that he was genuinely upset.  Steve Irwin, I realised, was the real deal.

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What is the best thing in life? The love of a good women? The smile of a child?

Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.

A few of those who read my original review of Sins Of A Solar Empire (Sins for short) have commented that they are still on the fence regarding this game’s greatness.

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In honour of this momentous occasion I present “The Electrowerkz Darkangels Tan Sketch” with apologies to Monty Python!

Scene: Electrowerkz, London.

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Sins of a Solar Empire (or just Sins as it is known around town) is the latest RTS game from Stardock and Ironclad.

Stardock is perhaps a name that you don’t know well, mainly due no doubt to their penchant of making software that mods windows XP or Vista. Such fare as ObjectDock and the like. The sort of thing we have all installed once, but removed once it dragged Windows to its very knees. They also pioneered the online product delivery method back when Steam was just a gleam in a fat mans eye. To order a Stardock game it is required that you download and install their horrendous client first. This then unlocks the game itself and downloads the content.

Yes, Stardock are strange alright.

I was lucky enough to come across their previous games thanks to Penny Arcade,when they introduced me to Galactic Civilisations II. In the office, Gal Civ was a God of games. It had more depth than the Mariana trench and yet managed to remain accessible. Hour after hour was sucked into this game and even on a limited and simple map one could easily start to need vitamin D supplements. I spent so much time telling my staff to get back to work that I almost felt that I should do some too.

But I don’t know how to dance the dance of the Australian aboriginals, so I wont beat around the bush; Gal Civ II was deep, involving and brilliant but it was also slow. Glacially slow. So glacially slow that Polar Bears could take up residence and global warming start taking effect before anything actually happened.

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This thread: http://www.arniesairsoft.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=127559

After the game briefs by Andy, it strikes me that we don’t organise our teams and or tactics. We just traipse to our start point and mill around waiting for the ‘go go go’. We get a good 10 people just not knowing WTF is going on, or what to do.

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Game Of The Year Awards!

This year has surely been The Golden Year Of Gaming since the launch of the SNES. So many good games have been launched this year that simply picking one and naming it Game Of The Year would deny the others their just deserts. Also, such an approach would be too subjective as my tastes in gaming have evolved over 20 years of playing games and the fact that the majority of my gaming is on the PC. So this year I am going to change to a categorised list.

I love gaming. Gaming brings many positives in my life.  Increasing such things as hand eye coordination, reasoning ability, awareness and even morality. I love the worldwide community that has sprung up, testament to the fact that gamers are really a social bunch who just sometimes lack the skills or confidence to be ‘face to face’. ‘Screen to screen’ offers gamers the chance to fulfil the need for friends and the need to challenge and be challenged in what amounts to a very safe environment. Size matters not while on-line.  Only skill, determination and the will to win with style.

In the history of gaming there have been many golden years, but there has not been one recently to match the output this year. Almost every genre has had a masterpiece released, some have had three or four, and some have been record breakers in all possible senses of the word.  There has also been disappointments.  In defence of the over hyped games this has to also go down as hardest release year of all time since many games that would have been lauded by the pundits and public have been up against such leviathans that they have barely made a splash in the heaving sea of major releases.  Similarly some games that we have all been looking forwards to for many years have been over analysed for critical faults that would have been simply overlooked in a more fallow season.  It has been survival of the fittest.

I have endeavoured to remove much of the subjective reasoning in this list, but some, of course, may remain.  This was the year that the major releases, with a few political exceptions, were released on all the major platforms at the same time.  Finally the person who doesn’t own all the different platforms doesn’t have to miss out!  So without further ado here is my personal gaming set for this year:

Graphical Achievement Of The Year

Honourable Mentions

The Orange Box - Halo 3 - BioShock

This category is made for First-Person-Shooters and 2007, more than anything else, will be remembered for the high quality of the FPS’s released. Other top shelf games released against the entrants in this list have vanished without trace and will never reach their full potential.  This says something about hype, and the amount of cash pumped into the market, that I don’t much like.  On the positive side indy games are going strong.  I still play the brilliant Mount and Blade (which costs a tenner) and Gal Civ 2, which remains a top seller.  However, since making the games in the following list costs millions, don’t expect the situation regarding marketing to change soon.

Runner Up

Crysis

Crysis is without doubt the best looking game ever released onto the PC at least it is if you have a PC with the power of a 2001 monolith.

My rig was considered top of the range a year ago, but now struggles to display this game in all its undoubted glory. In the old days simply having a graphics engine this good would have been enough, but not this year, The Golden Year.

Crysis suffers in only few areas. Firstly, the AI is a dumb as a bucket of spanners. This is on purpose as the game’s main fun feature is playing “Predator” and hiding in the jungle laying traps for the patrols.

This is a sandbox zone where you are making your own fun and not at the mercy of the developers. Nothing is as fun as sneaking up to a sniper, leaping clean over his head, grabbing him from behind and throwing him off a cliff. If our friend sniper had better AI, and shot you clean through the eye the second he saw you, the whole effect would have been ruined. Anyhow this AI restriction does show up the gaps in play (Unlike FarCry where the dumb AI fitted the dumb mercenary enemies). Another thing similar to Far Cry is the sudden change of play style.  Here, around half way through, the entire game stops with the sandbox and becomes something else. As if the creators realised that Half life 2: Episode 2 was coming out and they damn well better put back in the cinematic themes. This jars with the jungle sections and you find yourself missing them. Finally, the game steals shamelessly from any action film in the last 15 years. Especially Predator, Aliens and Starship Troopers.

The actual shooting in the game is well handled and the sense of combat is clearly attenuated to some sense of realism, especially on the ultra hard “delta” difficulty. The gun mechanics are flawless and the feel is well handled.

A worthy runner up just don’t mention the ending.

What ending?

Exactly!

Winner

Call Of Duty 4

The winner in this category has to be Call Of Duty 4.

This modern interpretation of the prior Call of Duty games steps up to some of the best on-rails shooting ever designed. Fantastically themed levels combine with a very interesting plot that engages the player totally, eventually leading to a strange effect to find in an FPS; starting to really care. By the end of the game I actually felt an emotion regarding the NPC’s fates. Also top banana in this game are the graphics and perspective shifts. This game defines why you need good graphics.  Graphics must drive the story, be part of the action, not just be a background.  This game uses the graphics, it doesn’t just display them.

The very clean design of the graphical system leads the player through some amazing set pieces that really deliver. Whether it is protecting a stricken tank from suicide bombers, blasting through a rain shattered tanker in a stormy sea or engaging in SAS house-to-house hunting the game is peerless in its approach to immersing the player.

Even the introductory credits are in game as you play the part of a third-world-dictator being driven through the city and dragged to his execution. By the end of the game you are so used to seeing the amazing amounts of scenery that you get quite spoilt by it.  The final chase section features entire cities of high quality 3D being chucked about as your truck flashes by. This is a titanic achievement.

Explosion, bullet and battle effects are all excellently presented and at times I felt that I was playing the film Black Hawk Down, or any number of top-draw modern war films. This effect is further enhanced with some fanboy quotes from such films as Aliens being peppered around the place (which all raise a smile for those “in the loop”). Also the sounds are expertly cued to the action and all the voice acting is timely and of a high quality.

One particular mission deserves a mention, which is the sniper mission to Prypriat near Chernobyl. This mission is the probably one of the best designed and smoothly executed pieces of gaming ever set to disk. Everyone loves this mission and rightly so. A perfectly encapsulated experience that ranks alongside the best output of any game ever.

Shooting in this game is entirely governed by the difficulty level set by the player. On top difficulty it is very very tough and sometimes even getting the first shot off will not guarantee victory in a fire fight. Tactics, luck and an exacting aim are all necessary to win and the enjoyment level can suffer in response. However, with the difficulty turned down a notch the game opens up a little and is probably the best fun gunplay ever.

Problems do exist. On some levels the enemies can pop into view and on the harder difficulty settings you will suffer many replays as you get nailed again and again. Also the whole “keep moving forwards or enemies re-spawn” dynamic is not to my taste. But, set against the positive experiences in this game, these are seriously minor points of contention.

Truly the best shooting game this year and possibly any year and an amazing graphical achievement.

The COD4 trailer:

Best Multiplayer Experience

Honourable Mentions

 

Call of Duty 4 - Halo 3 - Enemy Territory: Quake Wars 

Runner Up

World in Conflict

World In Conflict is a smashing game and one which has received a lot of effort in the design of the multiplayer elements.

The single player game has some of the most interesting effects ever seen in Real Time Strategy, including a very high standard of graphics outside the players actual focus, which lends itself to the immersive feeling that you are playing only a part in a greater conflict. The multiplayer is the natural extension of this in that you are actually only playing a part in the greater conflict. By forcing the player to pick the role of a commander of one type of force the game places you into a storming battle, the winning of which is not entirely in your hands, and you step up to become part of a larger team effort.

This is true multiplayer team combat. With the right team in place victory by combined arms can become a mesmerising experience that you really feel a part of.

The only issue is in finding said team.

Playing with “Internet puddings (TM)” can be dispiriting for exactly the same reason. Since you cannot win the battle alone, plus that fact that every unit type has its nemesis, you can sometimes feel that multiplayer is like banging your head against a brick wall.

Whilst this is not the designers fault, it prevents the game taking the top slot.

Winner

The Orange Box: Team Fortress 2

So the top slot goes to the remake of an old classic.

TF2 re-imagines the entire on-line shooter in a way that no other developer would have the balls to do. Only Valve have balls this big. The Orange Box is already a default top buy this year and in no small part this is due to this king of on-line FPS games.

The original concept of Team Fortress and Team Fortress Classic (my old TFC site) has been honed to a fine point. This would be good enough, but then Valve have layed over the top a cartoon look-and-feel that works. Not too camp and not too cartoon like at all really. The characterisations are simply a masterpiece of design. Whereas you imagine the cartoon look to detract from the animation and shading, this is a cartoon by Pixar not Hanna-Barbera.  It is all high shaded 3D and smooth animation which beguiles the player into acting more to type. So, spies become more sneaky and soldiers charge into more battles all thanks to the most fun class balancing ever created.

The clever maps mean that you never get bogged down and the variations on a theme means that the different rounds, modes and styles all mesh together. The fact that the maps are quite similar is entirely on purpose so that a style of play can be honed into a set of play parameters that work on any map. This is what happened to Counter Strike and why the older maps were dropped in favour of dust-U-likes. Dedication to your character is never un-rewarded by the design layout of the map.

This is why many other games are not in this top list.

Team Fortress 2 is simply too much fun to put down and has depth in spades for those willing to look beyond the screen shots.

Best ending

Winner

The Orange Box: Portal

The best ending this year is perhaps also the best ending of all time.

/spoilers

Portal started out as a minor project to add to The Orange Box. The sort of long-shot that only a company like Valve would go for.  Well, long-shots sometimes pay off. The ending to Portal is a long-shot inside a long-shot.  On paper having the computer you just killed sing to you would be a recipe for, if not disaster, marking your game as completely weird.  In reality the song is so charming that you wont care. GLADOS surely hit the nail on the head when she wrote: HUGE SUCCESS.

Brilliant, funny and it will have you humming it for weeks. If ever a small, quick game stuck in my mind it was this one. Why? Because of that song.

Here is the winning ending in all its glory:

Best opening

Winner

BioShock

Redefining openings.

/spoilers

BioShock wanted to impress me from the first moment.

I started watching the intro sat back deep into my chair with a beer in hand. I watched as it unfolded noting the aesthetics of the scene. Then the main character fell into the sea and it was on fire. I watched the sea glisten and the fire burn. I remember thinking that this was some of the best CGI I had ever seen and a very neat looking opening; what with all the droplet effects. Then nothing happened. I looked closer, suddenly I realised that this wasn’t CGI, this was in real time! I moved the mouse and the camera smoothly panned across the fiery devastation. My jaw hit the floor and with small whimpers of “Wow” coming from my lips I swam my character’s body towards the Rapture elevator.

No game intro has had that effect on me.  BioShock disappointed me eventually, but that intro lifted my spirits through the first two thirds. It was a hell of a thing for any game to live up to. That is the perfect intro. Something that starts the player’s engines. Starts them start falling in love with the game. Sure a game needs to live up to that intro, but like all those who we fall in love with, fate is decided in those first few seconds.

/spoilers

The intro set-up the twist in the tale quite nicely. The simple accidental nature of your arrival to the city, the trip down to the sea bed and the huge sense of “newness” the city evokes is all one with the awe of discovery. Since you are seeing the game in the first person this sense delays the player from realising that you are simply a puppet in this play and this strange city being revealed to you is no stranger after all. All good intro’s trick you in this way. They set-up the feelings for a reason.

BioShock’s is a masterpiece.  Here is its opening, watch and learn:

Best Innovation

Winner

The Orange Box: Portal

I include this as a category mainly in response to the Edge article on the same subject I read today, they have Halo 3 as the most innovative game of the year. Now I have played Halo 3 and if anything it is simply an extension of Halo 2. Even a little derivative of Halo 1. Claiming it is innovative, not to mention they gave it 10 (there is no accounting for taste), is akin to an actual crime.

Of all the games released this year the obvious choice for innovation is Portal.

Portal has rebuilt the puzzle game, rescuing it from Pop games and on-line lunchtime pursuits. The sense of space being manipulated, the core dynamic of Portal, is amazing. Being thrown around and flipped as you dive into portals from heights and come out at odd angles, all from the first person perspective, is completely new. Completely. Portal is miles ahead of anything else released this year in terms of fresh ideas up on screen.

Real throw-away ideas that should, by all rights, have been dropped onto the cutting room floor.  Not be picked up, polished, buffed up to a mirror shine and given to us like some rescued pearl of a game. The core mechanic is so simple but that is essentially its strength. The new trick is to shift it to the first person. Of course, they didn’t stop there. Valve, like a great movie director, ladles detail into the background plot holding this story together. New ideas wheel out of Portal such as Cake, GLADOS, the Companion Cube and the empty observation rooms. This is all not core to the game, but it is core to the player enjoying the actual puzzles. Portal is a simple story beautifully told. Like a pot from ancient China; It has the most intricate and dazzling painting on the surface, took expert craftsmen much effort to paint it, master potters to bake it and weeks of glazing to fix it but in the end you still just keep flowers in it.

Portal is a innovation masterpiece bar none and no one but Valve could take such a small idea and build it into something that everyone loves.

Game of the year

Winner

The Orange Box

Game Of The Year is always a subjective judgement. Edge may say Mario. Microsoft may say Halo. PC magazines may say whoever they are most bribed to support.

I say that it is The Orange Box.

Not just because it is the best. Not just because the game play of its components are all brilliant. Not just because it comes from the best developers in the world. No, rather because it represents the best value I have ever seen in a gaming package. So many games do not live up to their hype. Half Life 2 has exceeded the hype in every sense.

Episode 2 manages to refresh the entire game and still come up with new and interesting ways to play in this amazing environment.

Team Fortress 2 redefines what you can do with the on-line genre. It is the granddaddy of the FPS reborn as a new and exciting injection into the dead arm of online gaming.  Other games may disappear up their own arse, but TF2 never takes itself too seriously all the while having a history that blows all others clean away.

As for Portal, it is genius.

In this world of bribed on-line reviews, fat-cat gaming sites and the EA ‘Masters of Gaming’ all getting their cut of my hard earned money The Orange Box is sticking it to The Man.  Why? Because all the money goes straight to the developer, bypassing the cancerous polyps that infest the rest of the industry.  HL2, Steam and The Orange Box are ensuring that future years of gaming can be as golden as this one was.

Buying The Orange Box is to a strike a blow for the freedom of the gaming industry.  Quality years await us ahead with content like this coming out, see you in 2008 and remember to damn The Man!

The HL2:E2 trailer:

Comments welcome!

Basho

Many people have jumped both onto and off of the iPhone release wagon. First it was touted as the next-big-thing, a mind blowing, life changing and stylish entry into the phone market. Bringing with it some amazing connectivity apps and the Apple pledge “that if you used this phone then you were officially cool” Even the price wasn’t putting too many people off. Then, with cameras ready and mikes checked, the UK media circus descended onto London to catch a glimpse of the “thousands” queing for this wonder device.

In the end they had to take photos of themselves. The ‘launch of the century’ fell over its own booster rockets and very strange phenomenon happened;

It seems that everyone stayed home.

What was wrong with the launch and, by proxy, the device is something the pundits have speculated about endlessly since then. Even those who were unabashedly positive about the iPhone before release, such as Stuff Magazine, sat around on their asses. In fact, on the launch night podcast, they came up with all sorts of reasons why they were going to tuck in early and give it a miss.

The real reason, the pundits agreed, was that the iPhone had lost its cool tag. Something Apple paid millions of pounds to setup, lost in a single release. Or maybe the punters had come to their senses; after all, “surely it was just a phone?”

I listened in carefully to Stuff’s podcast and read many blog reviews before purchasing my phone online at the Apple website. Most pundits had whined about the lack of 3G or mentioned hanging on for a new version that was to come out 2008 and somehow solve all the ‘problems’ with the device. At the moment it was proclaimed to be a “compromise”.

Compromise!?

Perhaps if us mere mortals lived in the magazine world of super-high-tech, where the stereos cost £2000, the gadgets are all reviewer only previews or freebees and the nearest next gen console was a joy pad away;

“Oh the Wii, yeah, [picks up wiimote] well it’s just not got the HD of the Sony has it [picks up the PS3 controller] “ [deep sigh] “Yeah, but then the largest collection of games are on the 360, just look at my gamer tag…[reaches for Xbox]”

I don’t live in that world. My stereo is a £43 T-Amp combined with 2 speakers from the bargain bucket at Richer Sounds. My last console purchase was a Gameboy Advanced, I haven’t even played a PS3 and if I want to play an Xbox 360 I have to take a 20 minute drive over to my brothers flat and kick him out of bed.

In other words, I am a fairly normal guy. I have a PC and I have a website, but essentially I am paying for this with my own money and living with it. For 18 months.

To be sure PDA’s combined with phones are nothing new, even to me. I have been using these so called ‘smart phones’ for a few years now. The best of which was the brilliant Nokia 9500 (which I have for sale if you are interested) the only problem with which was, put simply, that it was only slightly bigger than the Deathstar*. Others, like the N73, were more phone than smart and really didn’t offer me anything.

Eventually I went for a PDA for business. I run a department for a bank and I needed a system that could be used as a minor note taker, connect to our email, manage my meetings and not be a hassle to use. I also need to be able to access documents and pull up pdf’s in meetings where we have no WIFI or network ability.

I got so fed up with electronic methods that I even used a Hipster PDA for 6 months!

To say that I had used PDA’s “for pleasure” would have been an outright lie. Honestly I can only say that I have “tried” to use PDA’s for pleasure, but that the PDA itself has always succeeded to thwart me somewhere along the way. My first PDA was a Psion 1 given to me by my father at the age of 10, something akin to a Hitchhikers Guide that was so heavy you could beat whales to death with it (not to mention a non-qwerty keypad). My second was a Psion 3a that I used to write upon when working for Tempo. I then also tried the Sony range including the Clie and the P800. All of these had problems that prevented them from being “fun” and the most I could get out of them was emulating Monkey Island using the SCUMM emu software.

Finally I bought the HP Communicator. The HP was my first attempt to replace a dedicated PDA with a true PDA-phone. It was a disaster.

I tried to like HPs, but they all suck serious ass. My network administrator colleague now openly cries when he hears yet another support call incoming from our MD, who has a particularly bad model. He is constantly getting it fixed/replaced.

So can Apple please a man who has been around the houses on this issue? People who read my stuff will know that I don’t have much truck with Apple’s iPod advertising, which I think is aimed philosophically in the wrong direction. I have never owned a Mac, but my wife has had 3 in the time I have known her.

The issues that I wanted the iPhone to solve were as follows:

1. Carrying multiple devices. I was starting to feel more machine than man. Twisted up in cables and getting evil in frustration and the risk off losing things that cost a lot and go beep. A phone, a PDA, an mp3 player, a notepad, a pen, a laptop and a good book. Could I do all that with one device?
2. I was also getting narked by having to convert my music before I could copy it to selected device. Extremely narked. My mp3 player was not Audible compatible and thus I had to burn books to CD before re recording them back into the PC as MP3’s. A serious pain in the ass.
3. Internet access. Sure my Nokia N73 claimed to have internet, but it didn’t really. Not internet like we are using now.

So does the purchase of the iPhone make up for all that? We all know the basic features of the iPhone: the internet and the rotation of the image when turning the screen.

The Basic features list:

Calls, SMS, Voicemail, Photos, Ringtones, Music, Video, Wi-Fi Store, Safari, Mail, Maps, Widgets, YouTube, Multi-touch, OS X, Wireless, Accelerometer, Proximity Sensor

But, what is it actually like to live and work with? What are its good and bad points? What about the little things you don’t hear about in most reviews? The little peccadilloes?

The interface has been written about endlessly and indeed it is the unit’s main selling point. You really have to use it see how suave it is. If anything on the iPhone will go down as a design classic it will be the interface. Comparing it to the HP Communicator’s interface of MS Windows is like comparing a stick with a cruise missile. Moving between menus is classy. The amount of buttons have been pared down to an absolute minimum and while you will find yourself getting tired of the gestures (a simple click is always better) you will enjoy using it 90% of the time.

Once sufficiently trained and practiced you will navigate the iPhone astonishingly swiftly, much quicker than a novice. So, when you show it to someone there is a slight moment of disappointment. The interface hides the correct gesture, expecting you to know it and your super-proficient-demonstration, pinching and twisting the unit like you are doing jujutsu on a roof tile, will be hard for the newbie to replicate straight off the bat.

The phone is designed to be used by the person holding it. Not by anyone else. This necessitates constantly handing back and forth when demoing it or the touch screen fails to work correctly.

In three weeks I have had to reset the iPhone twice. Both times when taking off the cradle. This is probably a small bug in iTunes. Twice may sound like a lot but actually it is amazing for a PDA phone. My HP needed resetting every single time I looked at it.

iPod functions are exactly as expected; perfect. The system syncs with iTunes and the software is another smooth experience. In use the power button works as a hold button for when the unit is in your pocket. However, there is no inline remote yet. In order to stop the music you need to take out the iPhone, turn it on, slide the lock and then press pause. This is a slow process. Quicker is to simply yank out the headphones from the socket which stops the track where you are. One feature is that the position of the current track carries across to the PC. So, if you are half way through a podcast on your PC the iPhone will continue from that point. Exceedingly cool. The touch controls are OK, but moving through the track using the time slider is not as granular as I would have liked.

The camera is much much better than the 2mp suggests. However, there is not much more here than a plain camera; no video or night mode, no zoom or attempt to replicate any great function.

Here are some images I took on a trip to Kew Gardens (click for full size):

Simplicity is this devices byword in the Getting-Things-Done sense. Where a function isn’t necessary it has been left out. For some that will be a deal breaker. For me it is a God-send. I am so fed up of the branding powers that be promising a function that in the end is missing or doesn’t work properly. Too many gadgets promise and don’t deliver. GPS on the Nokia N95 is a recent example.

There is no cut and paste or application switching beyond having the iPod in the background. So, you write a note don’t expect to be able to cut it into a SMS. In fact the SMS app is strangely missing many features. Perhaps this is a USA thing but for us English, the lack of being able to send SMS’s to multiple recipients is bloody annoying. It annoyed me straight away as I couldn’t text all my contacts my new number and had to use my old phone! You can’t forward SMSs either.

On the other hand, SMSs are now threaded. In other words they are exactly alike the Mac chatting app (which this is obviously a relation of). I simply pick the person and bingo I have all the communications we have sent to each other in the form of a simple conversation. I like this feature a lot and it saves me considerable time. I just wish that I could chose whether to use it or not. This is a programming thing. Apple can fix this. Apple needs to fix this.

Using the unit whilst laying down is not easy as the unit thinks you are tilting it and may rotate the screen.

Internet on the device is REAL internet and is glorious. The large screen makes all the difference and the slick zoom function is easy and simple to use. The only thing missing is Flash, so YouTube won’t work outside the built in app.

The alarm app again overuses the touch interface by having a rolling timer. It is fun, but not super quick.

The Googlemaps app is amazing. I loved it. It is for me the killer app on the iPhone. While it isn’t a GPS, it is very quick. You can zoom in, plot a course and add bookmarks. Never get lost again! never have to find the map in the car! Applications just don’t get any better than this.

Phone quality is very good, and I have had no problems at all with calls, taking calls, or ringing. Clarity is also very good and the screen turns itself off when held up to your ear. Reception is similarly better than other PDA-Phones, being one step down from perfect. I don’t have any problems connecting or reconnecting after train tunnels etc.

One thing that must be mentioned is online applications. Anything web based can be built to work in an integrated way with the iPhone. This means that they become as easy as built in apps. This is remarkably clever. Google has just added this functionality to Gmail and Facebook also has it.

The onscreen keyboard is smart in helping those of use with big hands in working out what we meant to type rather than what we actually did. The application is well designed but the method of moving the cursor position is not as easy as it could have been. There are no arrow-keys and you move the cursor by pressing and holding down on the screen and then moving the pointer via a little magifying lens that pops up. Neat but overkill?

Apple have taken so many of the phone specific features we all take for granted with Nokia, et al, off the machine. Such things as the SMS I mentioned, but also depth of configuration. The setup menus are half the depth of the average Nokia. I suspect this is because they ran up against the same software walls that Microsoft run up against and rather than bluff it out they simply stuck to what they knew worked well. After all the rest can be rolled out as an upgrade later. This adds to the air of simplicty the device exudes. A classy quality that states that whatever you find on the phone will be well done.

This is my average iPhone day,

1. I get awoken by the iPhone’s rather evil alarm at 6am. I roll the slider to select snooze.
2. 15 Minutes later, I get reawakened by the iPhone’s alarm. This is a really evil one that sounds like a reversing supertanker. Like a sealion’s roar spoken through a robotic voice box.
3. I get up and do the usual morning stuff people do.
4. When dressed I use the iPhone to check the weather using the special app. This takes 5 seconds and is very slick.
5. I check my calendar as the items due pop up a reminder. This application saved my ass today as a meeting had changed day and I didnt know.
6. On the way to work I listen to an Audible book. Currently I am listening to “Stein: On Writing”, which is excellent.
7. Near work I quick call Kieran or Jim to see if the team wants coffee.
8. In the the office, I then sync up my iPhone with my work laptop. I have screen protector film sheet installed. This is the one vital accessory I recommend to all.
9. The sync also charges the phone.
10. New podcasts, Ask Ninja episodes and videos are downloaded to the iPhone along with any updated PIM information.
11. During the day I then carry the iPhone around with me as a short note taker and diary.
12. Today for example I checked an email in a meeting by connecting into my M$ Exchange POP server over EDGE. Speed over EDGE is fine. I have no complaints at all.
13. On the way home I use the iPhone as an iPod again, this time listening to podcasts or watching a film. I like both Virginworlds and MOGarmy
14. I always call my wife on the way home.
15. At home and before bed I check my personal email account (Gmail), now via my home WIFI, which is seamless in transition from EDGE. Speed over WIFI is amazing.
16. I head to bed and set the iPhone alarm.

That is an average day. On a good iPhone day I may surf the net to look something up, use Google maps to plot how to get to a meeting (my personal killer app) or even write poetry.

Sure it doesn’t take the place of ‘real’ computing, but it is bloody brilliant to be able to do all this without costing the earth in usage charges.

The sheer smoothness of using the device, the accessibility and the combination of…

• Phone
• Mp3 player including audible
• Googlemaps
• Notes
• Email both work and play
• PIM
• Internet
• Films
• WIFI

…in a small sexy looking tablet phone is bloody brilliant.

So, in conclusion, and your mileage may vary, but for me the iPhone is a massive win and you should get one.  I have never had such a seamlessly integrated system before, which is easy to use and very easy to live with. I love the device and combined with the excellent free usage rules on O2 means I am connected in ways I have never been before.

I find that my personal tech gear must be seamlessly integrated and that I will  have no truck with bad design or any ‘clunk’.  I need the stress free experience not the beta release.  The iPhone is the most stress free device I have ever owned and that alone is worth the money.

It scores a straight 10. Sure there are a few items that take getting used to, but all in all it is a marvelous device.

*Of course the Nokia 9500 isn’t as big as a Deathstar, since there is no such thing as a Deathstar. Perhaps a better comparison would have been with the Crab Nebula, which is tiny in comparison.