Grombles

So my iPhone 4S fell on the floor. The screen crazed and my old faithful finally joined every other iPhone in the house. Tricky to read and not worth stealing. But it was only a couple of weeks away from the release of the much vaunted 6 and my network contract had expired long ago. These days I buy SIM only contracts with EE. Vastly better coverage than the loathsome Vodafone and O2, and cheaper to boot. So what I needed was an unlocked 6. No problem. Ordered it on Apple's website and within a few days it arrived. Hurrah. Although Apple did send me an SMS text to my old iPhone with a link to a website that an iPhone can't read! iTwats. Now the most important thing not to do to an iPhone, as I had already discovered, is drop it. The fancy box it arrives in has a tight fitting lid that you have to pull off as the increasing vacuum inside tries to stop you. Finally the lid popped off, releasing my precious and precariously balanced, as I now discovered, £700 iPhone. In slow ...

This morning, as usual, I plugged my iPhone into my PC. It needs iTunes running to 'sync'. Or in other words, to remain stuck in the iJobs max security prison. Unless, mysteriously during the night, my PC has become 'de-authorised'. Just let me use the damn thing!! If it's on my bloody computer, it IS authorised. So I click 'Authorise'. "You are only allowed 5 computers to be authorised. You've reached your limit. This computer cannot be authorised unless you de-authorise one of the others." In the meantime another message tells me my iPhone will have 130 apps deleted if I proceed with the sync and don't authorise the PC. I can't, you bastards, because when I've long ago had to authorise this same bloody computer 5 times, and when I de-authorise ALL of them, I'll lose my bloody apps. Then I'll have to load every single one of them using my < 1MB internet connection - if it allows me to do so at all and I don't have ...

Should have listened to the wife. "Buy an iPad" she says. "No", says I, "Androids are more popular so why spend £600 on an iJobs that's incompatible with the rest of the world when I can spend £150 on a tablet that's faster and does everything any iJobs can do - and it's part of Google not Jobble". Big mistake! (But don't tell her) We'd already experimented with a Samsung Galaxy Android phone and gave up trying to sync it with Outlook (let alone get it to dial a phone number). Everything seemed deliberately hidden behind fiddly little pictures and horrible little icons that suggested nothing. Swiping and clicking and dragging and tossing in the air and shaking it and using a combination of feet, hands and shouting at it to see if there was some hidden control to make it do things I thought it might, drove us mad. We sent it back to Vodafone and paid over the top, again, for another iJobs. But I wasn't going to be sucked into a...

I'm typing this on a train between Guildford (the wealthiest city in the UK) and London, 35 miles away. Mobile signals (forget 3G) drop out between 10 and 15 times during this popular 45 minute journey through mostly built-up areas. And when I am connected, I'm hanging onto 1 bar (did you know that means 1 bar for reception, not transmission). Where I live, in SW Surrey, we rarely get a mobile signal at all. So much for the UK being in the vanguard of technology. We're in the dark ages compared to most developed countries, and many more far less economically successful. Why? Get used to it (notice the bars mean nothing) There are four major mobile networks competing for our money in the UK (now that Orange and T-Mobile have combined). In 2000 the British government had a wheeze. 'Lets have an auction for the mobile 3G bandwidth'. So every company who wanted to provide a 3G service tried to outbid each other for a slice, and ended up paying billions of pound...

If you've got an iJobs, you've got to use iTunes. He's a genius, and we're all twats for buying his stuff and ensuring we're stuck with his software bollocks that now controls our lives. In particular iTunes (and all the IOS crap his ghost infects our 'soon-to-be-bricks' with). Now iTunes does a couple of things fairly well (although there are no doubt vast numbers of examples out there that do all of these infinitely better, but I'm too busy writing stuff no-one reads to waste my life investigating them). iTunes enables you get stuff you know exists. And it automatically updates stuff you want to be kept updated, like podcasts (we used to call them recordings) and app releases. What it is truly shit at doing is helping you find an app that does something you need. It could be so much better if it took a leaf or two out of Amazon or Ebay's books. But in iTunes there's virtually no index. The closest you can get down to is this: and then...