Stephen Morton’s Blog

With “Hype” almost a daily occurance the lives of most of us today, the last couple of months could have gone totally unnoticed. There has been a few significant “things” that im my opinion, have changed my world.

IPhone – The release of the New Apple IPhone 3G less than a few short months ago, has totally changed the way I live and work.

Now I know that’s a pretty huge claim. And I don’t say it lightly. I personally hate Hype in all it’s forms, and reserve mine for really, truly amazing things. Well, in my opinion, the IPhone is such a thing.

Firstly, it has a “working” web browser on it. Since my business is a web developer/designer, It’s really important that the browser renders webpages accurately (or atleast as you would expect).

The Maps feature is great. Maps can be used to navigate as you drive, however, to be honest, it doesn’t do a great job of that (don’t buy the iPhone because you want a GPS car navigator, you’d do better to buy a $200 el ceepo one from target). Don’t get me wrong, the GPS functionality in the IPhone is great, but the turm by turn navigation isn’t as advanced (it doesn’t rotate to show the direction you are driving, and it doesn’t announce, eg 100m turn right).

The real power of the maps on the Apple IPhone in my opinion is it’s ability to bring up things you search for in the area you are at currently. Eg, if you are in Frenchs Forest in Sydney NSW, and if you opened the maps application in your IPhone, it would indicate where you are (using GPS). Then, say you wanted to find a local coffee shop, you simply type “coffee shop” into the maps application, and it goes away, does a google search (actually on google local), and brings up the coffee shops in the area. Now the issue, is that Google Local Business needs to know about the coffee shops first. I think this is a total winner, and I just hope business owners get a move on and make sure they are listed in google local.

Ofcourse, the IPhone has a great interface, great WifI capability, the camera is pretty good, and it sounds pretty good. The battery life could be improved, however, I guess it does have a large screen, so what do you want??????

The IPhone also intefaces nicely with the apple iStore, so if your in your car, and you want a new tune while your waiting for your girlfriend to arrive, then you can press the iTunes button, search for the song you want, enter your credit card, download and listen. ITunes is a Great idea by Apple, wish I thought of it.

Something to be careful of with the IPhone. Make sure you your phone carrier gives you planty of MB’s download with your plan. A phone like the IPhone has such great internet integration, it would be possible to use several 100MB’s quite easily per month I would imagine.

Something also worth noting, is since the IPhone has WiFI, if you have WiFi at home, then most of your traffic will come from your own WiFi connection (will cost much less).

Also worth noting, is that in Australia, Telstra offer free wiFi hotspot access with IPhone plans. So this is great!!!! With a Telstra IPhone plan, while sitting at McDonalds, you can connect up to the Telstra WiFI, read the Sydney Morning Herald, and it won’t cost you anything.

I like how Telstra offers FREE WiFI with the IPhone plans, at the time of writting, I don’t think the other carriers in Australia offered this. I would love to stand corrected! 

 

Ok Onto Google Chrome,

This was only released a few days ago. I downloaded it only lastnight. To be honest, I really didn’t want another internet browser on my computer. However, I must confess I am a bit of a google fan. I wanted to give it a try.

Well, I LOVE IT!

Google Chrome is fantastic. It integrates with google (which in my opinion, is the only search engine to use) without having to use the google toolbar. The browser searches while you type the URL – not just history like IE 7.

It seems to be quite lightweight, it downloads quickly, the favourites seem to work well. It has a page that shows your 9 most viewed webpages, and it just seems to work really nice.

I’m using it now to publish this blog entry on my site, and I’ve had no issues with Google Chrome. It’s only in Beta right now, so if the Beta is this good, imagine how great the 1st release will be.?.? 

Let’s put it this way, after being a devoted fan of IE7 (even downloading IE8 beta), never really liking Firefox, or Opera etc… I have now made Chrome my computer’s default browser. Since my business does Web development, one of the things that has always annoyed me, is that a webpage will work well in Firefox2, but not in firefox 3. Or it will work in IE7, but not IE6. IE 8 has been a real issue, it seems like it doesn’t render any web pages properly.

So in my opinion, it’s time to leave Firefox and IE to feude it out about standards, while I try a browser that seems to support them all, and is more interested in offering real enhancements, than dominance (for now).