Maxpedition are a company with an aim. I don’t think that this is an aim written on their literature or website. Instead it is written large – very large – on every product they make. The aim is this: A Maxpedition product must never stop working. To this end they over-engineer everything and refuse point-blank to cut corners that would have a lesser company’s accountants snapping their pencils in half and issuing a “seal all exits” alert.
I rather think I like this approach!
Please note: All misunderstandings and errors in this review are all mine!
I have collected through dint of much effort and investment of time quite a comprehensive martial arts library. Including the classic writings of such authors as Musashi, Sun Tzu, Yagyu Munenori , Gichin Funakoshi, Ueshiba and Takuan Soho as well as the more modern works of the likes of Bruce Lee, Geoff Thompson, Vernon Bell, W E Fairburn and Tomiki to name only a few. I have the great pleasure in adding Sensei Mulholland’s work to this list and not least of all because it is comprised entirely of crystal clear prose. Few living martial arts teachers are able to express themselves as articulately and it is a critical part of the pleasure found in reading Four Shades Of Black.
Here I am going to discuss the content of the writing, but I must mention that this is a brilliantly presented book. The pictures and layout of the text are lightyears ahead of 90% of most martial arts books.
“I know that Okinawan Goju Ryu contains all of these things because Chojun Miyagi Sensei told me… he did it through kata.”
Four Shades Of Black
I have heard many teachers discuss the vital nature of the katas or patterns found in their systems, but I have yet to come across such an integrated approach of using the katas to drive the lessons themselves and provide structure to the practice of the art. Goju in general and Daigaku Karate Kai in particular is able to point to a heritage that is not simply direct from the art’s source in terms of its teacher’s lineage but also direct in terms of what is actually being taught. Many arts I have been involved with in the last 15 years have either been “following the motions” when it came to kata or had modified the originals through a misunderstanding of the techniques involved through a belief that katas were essentially anachronistic. Goju Karate is different and it is this that is the main focus of the book. Sensei Mulholland contends that the katas found in Goju are a layered roadmap through which the student is led from the first principles of combat through to and advanced and subtle manipulation of the opponent. Each Kata brings the fight closer and closer in range until the kata is directly describing grappling and what to do about it. From the “attack and smash” approach found in the hard side of Go to the softer “sensitivity” that is present in the Ju katas. This is something very similar to what I had encountered in a particular Wado Ryu seminar in my teenage years and once explained to you in such explicit terms it is immediately and obviously the truth.
There is more. The map is not the territory and each kata is partnered with a complete set of one-step sparing drills and conditioning exercises that expose the “secrets” held in the kata proper. Without these vital ingredients the practice of Goju would risk ending up like so many other martial arts and only be going “through the motions” without bringing the teachings out of the kata and onto the mat.
I have had the privilege of training at the London Daigaku Karate Kai for the last 6 months and a couple of things struck immediately upon entering. Firstly, Goju is tough. Its methods forge the bodies of its practitioners by the development of a strong and indomitable will. It does this at full pace from day one and continues right through years of practice. Not here will you find the black belts relaxing at the head of the class. Here the Yudansha lead by example. The lesson is clearly outlined in the book; that the Black Belt represents the beginning of the martial instruction and not the end. This is an often repeated claim in many martial art styles but in Goju I can attest to the truth of the matter. The belt system of Goju, Sensei Mulholland writes, is the compass that the student uses and indeed needs to progress through the ‘Four Shades’. Each belt emphasises a different mental set. One thing I was immediately impressed with in the DKK club and it is reiterated here in the book is that the Goju student learns to fight from day one. He learns this not through advanced techniques, but rather through forming a martial mind set. Combat is necessarily aggressive and violent. In order to master this one must first have the capability of being violent. I have known brown belts with soft natures fail their black belts in Wado because they didn’t have the necessary aggression to fight. Goju practice and training develops that aggression needed immediately. For those with an abundance of aggressiveness or a violent past (like myself) Goju gifts the beginner controlled direction through the first stage of combat found in the very first kata; attack and smash. This “Hulk-like” language disguises what is for me the most important lesson of the martial arts; mental strength. That is it found at the beginning is another testament to Goju’s effectiveness as a system of combat. This is because it recognises the true nature of that arena.
One of the most pleasurable moments of my time at DKK Goju was when I fought a black belt for the first time. I had a 1st Dan in Taekwondo from the fantastic Master De Breton (WIF) together with 2 national and one international title to my name. That I was knocked straight of this pedestal by Akintunde Oladimeji (one of the book’s models) was a brilliantly humbling moment of clarity. I had found the previous battles against lower grades that lead up to this fight challenging but essentially straightforward. Akintunde was a whole new world that is present in all the Goju black belts I subsequently encountered. I remember thinking at the time that the only way I could step up to the plate against this guy was “to actually fight him”. This of course led to me to wonder what the hell I had been doing up until then? I wondered hard at this until reading Four Shades Of Black. It outlines how the Goju system is a controlled progression. Each junior student I had faced was essentially not yet a complete fighter across-the-board. They were in the process of being built, moulded into rounded combatives, and were all strong fighters but not there yet. The Yudansha were a different thing all together; they had rounded off all the corners of their art and thus were a much stronger force to face. This is entirely to Sensei’s plan and outlined in Four Shades.
“Think back to any fights in any format you have ever watched and try to pinpoint an act of psychological suppression’.”
Four Shades Of Black
The concept of Goju progression is best highlighted in the “Trial By Breaking” chapter. In other arts I have practiced breaking was a very common and usual part of every single lesson. In ITF Taekwondo breaking is so commonplace that for me the concept outlined in Four Shades had completely passed me by until I had read that chapter. Around Christmas 2007 I had attended a DKK Goju grading and watched as a green belt contender faced off against a single board to complete his pass. This person had already been purposely exhausted by bag work, then fought against all grades, performed katas and generally stood up to a real “shoeing” with a demonstration of a remarkably developed indomitable spirit. Yet facing that single board I could sense the tension in the air and on the body of the contender. Why was this? I had seen 10 year olds do what he was about to attempt, surely he would find this easy? Upon reading Four Shades it all became clear. Sensei had purposely setup this event in such a way that:
1) It was known about for months ahead of time.
2) The student was conditioned by bag work, press-ups, etc.
3) The student was not allowed to practice breaking.
That last number was the vital ingredient. By not being able to practice breaking the whole thing had been built up in the students mind. Could he do it? Would he fail in front of everyone? Many people were present including a master from another style. Thus the fact that breaking one board is easy was irrelevant. This student was facing a true trial of spirit and determination. Did he have the will to be a Goju green belt? Could he face the fear of the board? As the hushed audience watched he struck with confidence and will, thus banishing his fear, and succeeded. This was probably the hardest break I have ever seen because in his mind the board was probably 2 feet thick. The book explains how this was all to the sensei’s planning and this nature is present in all of Goju.
This mental aspect highlights what is perhaps the true secret of Karate and the hardest insight to teach or learn. It is often referred to as “Empty Hand” in terms of the lack of weapons. This of course doesn’t answer why there are weapons in Karate, but I have heard it enough to be a classic interpretation of the name. Others point to the link with “China Hand” and the masters who didn’t like the “non-Japanese-ness” of the art they studied and so changed it to “Empty” and this rings true. However I feel that there is another more fundamental secret to this name. When thinking of Karate as “Empty Hand”, for me, it is not the hand that is empty at all. It is the mind. It is being of “no mind”, being in “the moment” and acting. On one hand not holding back by turning away from the truth of combat and violence, and on the other hand not losing oneself in the rage of aggression and thus being blinded by the “red mist” and “tunnel vision”. It is expressing oneself at a fundamental level of being in the “moment of combat” and letting the lessons flow through you out into the world. You can only truly react and do this if it is your mind that is empty. Ignoring the pain, the complaining limbs, the bubbling brook of your thoughts and most importantly; your fears. Only relying on trained instinct are the keys to combat and the meaning of “martial spirit”. This is developed in no greater way than in the kata of Goju and in the lessons outlined by Sensei Mulholland in this book.
I think that Karate has had a large share of punishment from the press and on the internet from other more “modern” arts such as MMA and Systema. This has sometimes been accurate as all arts are simply convenient umbrella terms for a very wide range of teaching quality and methods. However, of all the “Te-based” arts that I have studied, Goju is the most complete in both its development of spirit and that it has not just tacked on the trappings of grappling as a reaction to the criticisms of the present. As Sensei Mulholland writes so eloquently these things have been part of Goju from the very beginning and the proof, maps and compass are found in the kata.
Whether new to Goju, new to Karate or crossing from another art this book is vital reading as an accessory to training. As a martial arts work on its own I proudly display it on my shelf alongside my other great works of combative writing.
Regards,
James Bell (Basho)
If you are interested in buying this book (and you should be!), you can do so here: Four Shades Of Black
21 days ago I decided to dive into the Eve-Online Steam demo.
Steam - Just click to play
I knew that Eve was too big a prospect to be able to review in more than the lightest terms and indeed to cover everything would reduce me to bullet-points PowerPoint style. I had avoided Eve for many years mainly due to timing in that I was too heavily involved in other games to give it the attention it certainly deserved. I did however try it about a year ago before the last major upgrade. I was fresh out of other MMO’s at that point but found the clashing change of style and the famous learning curve to be a major hindrance. Eve seemed to be inscrutable, complex and baffling. The newbie missions proved too much for me to understand and the interface very badly implemented. I put it to bed after only a few nights struggle.
So why return?
Anyone paying attention to the MMO news and websites could not help but notice the shockingly high scores that Eve has and continues to receive in the press. I looked further than just these. The strength of any MMO is in its community and from some of the incidents I have read about it was clear that Eve possessed a community of special significance.
In space no one can hear you Cha, Cha, Cha!
But would this community be penetrable by a newbie? Eve has been out for a long time and large and powerful guilds (corporations in Eve) have claimed parts of the game territory as their own kingdoms. This would put off all but the most stalwart of hearts as how can one start afresh when everyone else is so far ahead of you? I wanted to find out if this was true and my opportunity to test the theory was granted when Steam launched a 21 day free demo of Eve.
I am a big fan of Steam and, unlike the myriads making complaints on Steampowered’s forums, I have never had a single problem with it. In fact I pretty much see such services as the only future path for gaming delivery and community building. The ability to click one button and have Eve delivered to my desk, installed and ready no less, was too much temptation for me to resist. So I clicked to install fully expecting to be as disappointed as last time.
How wrong can you be?
A NPC Space Station
Much has been written about Eve’s graphics, and justly so as they are mind bracingly beautiful, but this is a facet of a greater truth: Eve is the best programmed MMO I have ever played. I have never found a game, let alone an MMO, that is so alt-tab friendly. Diving in and out of Eve is not only smooth it is actually a joy. It is quite possible to set your ship on a journey, alt-tab out to surf or write and then alt-tab back in when you get to your destination. You can even surf in game through a basic browser window built into the client. The prodigious programming skill demonstration does not end there. Eve features a single (cluster) of servers. All players are in one place and when logging in at night expect to be sharing Eve with over 30 thousand players.
That’s 30 thousand ways to die
The Space Journeys in Eve are amazingly beautiful and all colours
Moreover, and often overlooked, the music and sounds of Eve are startling. Drums and bass tunes sound the coming of battle with a pulse quickening action tempo, which give way to Bladerunner like soulful space-musings as you either loot the fallen or yourself get looted. Whilst in station the sound provides a much needed injection of bustle, an atmosphere that would otherwise have been missing as stations are essentially instanced and you can’t get out of your ship at all and walk around.
This is the first of the design decisions that one must get used to with Eve. You, to all intents and purposes, are your ship. You never get to see anything more of yourself than your portrait. This may strike some as strange because, since your character can of course change ships merrily, this can lead to Eve having a sense of disembodiment and dislocation.
Inside a Station - each race has very different architectural styles
Most MMO’s spend much of their design budget in making you feel ever more your avatar but here that is taken care of in the portrait designer in the first ten minutes of play. I personally imagine that I am a ship “Mind” from Iain M Banks’ Culture novels and play the game that way. This works surprisingly well since also like the Culture I use a lot of drones to do my fighting.
My lovely Drones
So what can one expect in the first 21 days of play?
If you are a long time Elite or X3 player you will quickly find slipping into what is called “Carebear” Eve to be very simple and welcoming. The gargantuan amount of Space in Eve is split into core systems (based on 4 factional play areas) and the dangerous “low-Sec” space, which is similar to the Wild West in that the gun is the only law.
You have been warned
Staying in “High-Sec” space is safe enough that one can play the entire demo and, with luck, not get into any conflicts with players at all. I say ‘with luck’ because Eve is permanent PVP and players can opt to become pirates earning their living by the highway robbery of other players. This usually revolves around camping the large jump gates that connect all the zones with a team of specially rigged friends and blasting anyone too slow to get away or defend themselves. This is not only allowed in Eve; it is actually positively encouraged.
My Vexor Cruiser
However as a “Trial” player I knew I stood very little chance in such scenarios and so spent much of my time avoiding them. My plan was to understand the game before diving into PVP and thus I focussed on the missions available whilst improving my skills. This is essentially because of the way progress is managed. All of the game’s skills can be learned by anyone. Many have prerequisites in the form of core skills and require skills books to be bought from Universities or the Marketplace, but there is nothing holding you back in any other way. The catch is that learning skills in Eve takes place in Real-Time™. So a skill that is 3 days to learn will literally take 3 real days before it is ready for use. This means that a “Trial” player is completely outclassed by players with months into the game and has absolutely no chance of winning in PVP. On the other hand the game is impossible to twink and the old problem of new players with gear above their station is gone. The size of the skill tree is so large that it would take literal years to learn it all and so there is plenty of room to specialise in different areas and indeed this is the way it has been designed.
My Character Sheet and skills
Complexity is the watchword in Eve. Where something could have been smoothed over and made simple, ala’ WOW, Eve has purposely gone more complex. Indeed interface is often viewed as being too complex, but I feel that this is entirely the plan CCP have followed. They want Eve to be deep in every way and having a large amount of information is an aspect of this. The whole experience of playing Eve is alike to operating Microsoft Windows. Similar to Microsoft’s approach, there are many different ways to do any one thing. For example, locking onto a ship; which requires that you are in range of your ship’s abilities; your own targeting skills, away from any interference; both yours and the target’s velocities; any ECM active in the area and finally that you haven’t used all your available lock-on’s (which is based on your memory ability); can be performed by clicking on the target in space and clicking lock on or clicking and holding down the mouse and picking lock-on from the pop up menu or clicking with the RMB and selecting lock-on or right clicking on the target in the Overview and selecting lock-on or throwing all that aside and fitting a “Auto Lock-on” module to your loadout. And that’s just to lock-on. To actually shoot something you need to consider your ships power capacity, the range of the gun, the range of the ammo in the gun, the bonus’s of any modules you have installed, both ships velocities & facing, ECM again, your implant bonus’s and any possible legal implications of attacking this target. Not for nothing did I play the game with a calculator and a pad of paper next to me.
That my friends: is DEPTH!
However, one man’s depth is another man’s confusion and the newbie help channel is chock full of new payers completely lost. Moreover, most of the help they receive is also from slightly less newbie players who perhaps have only a few days extra play on them.
Rookie Help Chat in full flow
Many people have complained about the cliff-like learning curve, but I prefer to think of Eve as an enormous meal. Like a Christmas dinner or banquet. Your eyes will definitely be bigger than your stomach and it takes an awful lot of digesting to get through the starter before one can even consider the main course. In fact even the volauvents are filling. This leads many new players into a great feeling of indigestion and frustration in that they are reading about all the fun things in Eve but that they cannot yet do any of them and will not be able for quite some time.
Relief congestion tablets come in the form of surrogate programs and websites that surround Eve and are essential to play. One such program is EveMon that logs into your account while you are logged out and keeps an eye on your training and when you can expect the current skill to complete. It also allows you to make a plan for the future of your character by picking a job, ship, loadout or skill set and showing the correct progression through to that glorious achievement. This is only slightly dented when one reads that the best plans are all over 90 days of training away and to fly a Titan is 250+ days itself! Another good system is that found at Battleclinic.com, which outlines all sorts of useful information and has a program for uploading ship loadouts and reviewing popular fits. Actually being able to fit all you could want on a ship is an art form in itself and I have spend an inordinate amount of time playing with my modules to find the best balance for my ship. For example: my level 1 destroyer was paper thin but could mount an impressive 8 guns. Thus my fit was all about keeping a long way from the enemy and using multiple long-range mods and long-range railgun ammunition to blast them from afar. This is in contrast to my Vexor Cruiser that specialises in remote combat drones and so I was loaded with high end armour and automatic repair systems that would keep me alive until my combat drones could destroy the opponents. This means that the ships it is possible to fly all require a different playing style.
Styles you will need to learn to avoid death
Caught in the rays of the pirates
OMG a pirate is on me!
Death in Eve is in two flavours. Firstly your ship can be blown up. Scratch that. Your ship WILL EVENTUALLY be blown up. This leaves you in a tiny little escape pod which is then your transport home to collect the insurance (that you really should take out) and buy another ship. If your pod is killed then you wake up in a clone, which is like life insurance, and it costs money to purchase a clone that is good enough to recover all your skill points.
System Jump-Gates, often surrounded by pirates
Thus death in Eve can seem expensive and it is only in the supreme job of game balancing that has gone on in Eve development that means that this is not as bad as it first appears. Firstly, cash in Eve is everywhere. Very soon it is possible to earn a ton of cash from either mining or mission running and you can own any number of ships. Secondly, the business side of Eve is even more advanced than the basic gameplay.
The market is vast and well designed
I am talking here about Corporations
Most MMO’s have Guilds, but Eve has taken that to a new level. Here Guilds can actually own (control) parts of space and declare war on each other to contest entire areas. Alliance tools and every type of Corp’ management function is available and the entire process is very advanced. More advanced than even in SWG. There is even a system to create contracts that can be for anything at all. This means that the only real limit in Eve is the imagination of the players and the corp leaders. I have read of teams of players that sell themselves out as mercenaries and fight dirty little wars on a larger corps behalf, or act as security for a mining corp that has been targeted by pirates. Massive fleet battles abound in “Low Sec” space as rival corps battle each other in hundred strong teams of carriers and even mighty Titans (which are 3 mile long super-ships).
It is all amazingly complex but far away from a 21 day account
A mighty transporter ship
Complexity is like Marmite then. Myself I love it in a game and those without it such as WOW turn me right off. Eve has it in spades and one can completely envelop your mind in the deep waters of Eve’s gameplay, only occasionally surfacing for air and to remember that you were married.
However no good corp touches a “Trial” player and so I spent my 21 day’s solo’ing missions and building my skills up to the point I could fly something worthwhile. The missions are all given out by NPC faction based agents of varying quality and level. High level agents give harder missions and it was not long before the search for new agents became a highlight of an evenings play. Eventually I found 3 good level 2 agents in one star system and could take 3 missions at a time. This quickly boosted my ISK (cash) reserves and I was able to graduate to a cruiser and thence to a BattleCruiser. Some of the missions were very hard indeed and required I took time off to think of the best approach to beat them. This was all great fun and I happily salvaged the wrecks of my fallen enemies while planning my next missions and helping out on the newbie boards.
Acceleration Gates lead to “deadspace” and your missions
I must admit however that in all that time I haven’t died once (more through luck than judgement): so I cannot quite explain the nuances of that to you all.
Each red cross represents an enemy ship, the larger the cross the higher the class
Of course Eve can be boring at times but this is actually vital to any MMO. An MMO is not a flat line of high excitement, like say an FPS, an MMO is something you live in. Somewhere you go to relax, to unwind. Eve is a great tool for unwinding after a hard day at the office. A little mining, a little mission or two, just check those blasters you put on the market have sold, make sure the skills are learning correctly, yadda yadda yadda. You can spend ages in Eve just ‘living’ through your character. Then suddenly and without warning a simple system jump can turn into a vicious battle for your ship, your life and everything in your hold as you are ganked by a group of player pirates. Like a cold bucket of water to the face, you are suddenly broken from your slumbering idleness and thrown head first into intense combat. That means that the line of Eve is more like the EEG graph of a heart attack patient at times and the EEG of a stoner at others. I am sure that this has led to more “the-dinners-in-the-dog” scenarios for married men than people realise.
So Eve is tough like EQ1, deep and player led like SWG, graphically ahead of Vanguard and fun like WOW.
Battle!
Is it therefore the perfect MMO?
No, it is also like a mega-tsunami of complexity that is split very firmly into two camps of “Carebear” space and “YArrr!” piracy. If you give it enough time to win you over you will learn to love it with a passion, but if you try and run before you can walk, or even walk before you can crawl, you will only be frustrated and lost in a complexity of options and depth the like of which has not been seen before in an online game.
I have only scraped the top off this game; truly my review could be 20 thousand words.
A Station up close
The same station as I warp away
I have really enjoyed Eve. If I was single, and not about to go swanning off around the world for a year, I would play it every night. As it is I have to step away as it is quite the most life sucking MMO I have ever encountered. That is for me its greatest achievement and it’s greatest failing. If you have the time and the love of learning to play this game I can assure you of almost limitless adventures.
I award it 9/10
Regards,
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:
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,
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…
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.
