I’ve admired them since the early days, but until relatively recently never owned any of their products. A bit too expensive and not mainstream enough to be in use where I worked.

That all changed with the iPod. Still expensive but luckily I received one as a gift. I liked the simplicity; the controls, the minimalism. Then, more recently and long overdue, I got myself an iPhone; even better. Finally I took the big step and plunged into OSX and a MacBook; rock ‘n roll!

It’s all about the little design things for me. The way it looks, feels. The buttons are just right, the precision machining (the sim drawer on the iPhone for example), nothing is superfluous; all form, fit and function.

You’ll be hard-pushed to persuade me against any of the Apple products I own,  other than with newer, better versions of them.

And therein lies my gripe about Apple…

But back to that gripe in a minute.

General criticism of Apple falls into two areas; price and, well, price.

Apple products are damned expensive by comparison to others vendors in the same sector, and deliberately so. They’ve developed a knack for creating demand from their great product design, courtesy of Johnathan Ive, with an appropriate level of function and then they’re premium-pricing it. An almost arrogant, “If you don’t like the price, don’t buy it”, if you like.

As the oft mis-quoted saying goes, “If you build it, they (sic) will come.”

I think it’s more like, “If you build it beautifully, they will lust after it. And then they will put their hand in their pocket and pay. Handsomely.”

I’ve been following the hype and speculation about the iPad.

I did laugh when I saw Steve Jobs proudly holding one an iPad at the launch; it did look like a mini-Steve holding up an iPhone.

I too want an iPad. Of course I do, it’s gorgeous. I have no idea what I would use it for, that I don’t already have covered by my iPhone and MacBook. But I know it will be great.

Apple have hit the spot again; they have created yet another product that invokes the tech equivalent of lust.

But I’m not going to get one. Not just yet.

The problem with Apple is their penchant for continual evolution and therefore rapid ‘obsolescence’. No sooner have you saved up your hard-earned dosh, rush down to the Apple Store™, or online equivalent, and get your hands on a gorgeous piece of Apple kit, than a new one comes out.

The changes are usually small and subtle. Maybe a slightly glossier finish, or a different trackpad, or more rounded corners. But you’re still left feeling like the shop-staff changed the display the moment you left the store. A feeling compounded by the fact you’ve paid a premium price to start with.

Perhaps obsolescence is a strong word for it. After all, your iPhone, MacBook, etc. are all still great, but there’s a better one out now. So people who pay the same money you did, now have something better than you. We don’t like that.

I got my ‘standard’, white 13 inch MacBook in May last year. And a thing of beauty it was, but there are other posts about that.

However, comparing it to the ‘standard’ 13 inch model available in November, only 6 months later, I see the following differences:

• Glossier: The white finish is indeed glossier, it’s not my imagination.
• Thinner: The lid is thinner, and the corners more rounded.
• Trackpad: My dual touch with button is now multi-touch glass.
• Power: Slim magnetic-plug & the wire is no longer at 90 degrees.

All of these are nice form and/or function improvements, they’re all the right thing to do. The galling part is that at least the latter two of those improvements were available at the time I purchased mine, but only on the MacBook Pro model.

It’s as if Apple are rewarding those who held off buying one with features they could have included first time round but were using as a differentiator between models. That’s good for the late(r)-adopters but, dammit, that’s no good to me.

Bizarrely, and as if to contradict my rant here a little, I found an instance where they seem to have gone the wrong way.

• FireWire: No firewire port on the new MacBook.

Now that is a definite backwards step. I like my firewire drive, it’s quick. It gets its data and power from a single cable. The alternative on the new machine is to use 2x USB ports (one for power, one for data) and obviously lose the circa. 50% speed benefit.

That said, I’d probably swap that for the glass trackpad…

It’s quite simply the best phone I’ve had. Looks good, nice and slim in the pocket, fantastic UI and the apps, well, that’t where this phone sticks out in front of the rest.

If you don’t have an iPhone, this post will either be of no interest to you at all or may ust convice you to get one.

It already comes with some great apps, like Google Maps But you’re not stuck with just that, of course, there’s a wealth of apps you have to pay for, but in these economic times, let me run through a “Top 5″ of the coolest free apps I’ve downloaded so far…

Flixter

Like movies? Fire up the Flixter movies app and you’ve got access to all the current and past cincema releases and DVD’s too.

But, like a lot of iPhone apps, it’s a just little bit more than what you’d initially expect. Of course you get a still picture, synopsis of the movie, the certificate rating and the credits, but you also get the trailer, in good quality video, and the cinema times. Best of all it uses location services to come back with the cinemas closest to you in ‘distance from you’ order. Nice.

Google

Want to Google something on the move? Of course you do! Do you use the inbuilt iPhone browser, go to Google site and type in the search terms? No, of course you don’t; that’s the boring way.

You get the Google app, because it’s voice activated. You start the app and hold the phone up to your ear (you could of course type in the search term, but why would you?) it senses from the angle of the phone that you want to talk to it, then it uses voice recognition to search. The other good thing is it uses your current location with the search, so if you say, “Burger King”, it’ll find the one closest to you. OK, sometimes it’s not great at recognising what you say but hey, it’s cool.

Shazam

It’s been around for a while, but if you’ve never used Shazam before, this will knock your socks off. You ever been listening to the radio, or in a shopping centre, or a friend’s house and you hear some music and think, “oooh, what is that tune again?” (I won’t say pub-quiz, ‘cos that’s just cheating)

Well, if you have, Shazam is the app you’ve been waiting for. Start the app, let your phone listen to the music for about 10-15 seconds and it will come back and tell you what the tune is. It does this for free on a dat tariff (it used to charge you on old mobiles) and it even comes back with an iTunes links to purchase the tune if you so wish.

Wikipanion

You already know how good Wikipedia is.  Well Wikipanion is Wikipedia, on the move, with output formatted for the iPhone. Not much more I can say than, “look up anything you want to know about”.

The cool thing about the Wiki app over just using the browser is that as you type in your search term, it dynamically comes back with suggestions on what you may be searching for and then when you finally go for it, the results are returned nicely formatted for the small screen, not a zoomed desktop browser format.

Sky News

If you’re a news junkie, you never want to be too far from what’s going on. With this app the headlines are instantly at hand and you can simply tap through to the Sky new story itself.

Again, the app wins over just using the phone browser because it formats the headlines and stories nicely for the small screen. One added benefit is that it supports embedded video too, so if the story has a clip, it’s there for you too, although a little bit slow to load and jerky if you are on GSM.

Some also ran’s on the free front that didn’t quite make it into the top 5:

Facebook – update your facebook page on the move
eBay – track your bids and sales
WordPress – update your blog
WordWeb – dictionary
Oh, and about three screens worth of games…

Here are a couple of Arrow Frogs, at Deep Sea World in North Queensferry, which was good for passing a couple of hours on a cold and windy afternoon.

In the wild, each one of these little blighters contain enough poison to kill 200 men. That’s where they got their ‘arrow’ name from,; the natives used to utilise the poison on their arrows for more effective hunting.

The frogs apparently mellow out on toxin the front when in captivity, due to less exposure to some of the more interesting things in their natural habitat.

One cool thing I learned was that they carry their tadpoles around on their back. If you look at the nearest frog in the picture there, you can see them custered on its back.

With regards to the post, I had to do a bit of editing on WordPress proper, to tidy it up after the initial publish, but a pretty good feature for blogging on the go. Chalk another one up to WordPress.