Tech subcontracting and working conditions in China

Some really interesting comments from Chinese readers on the New York Times’ article about working conditions in Apple’s subcontractors:

If not to buy Apple, what’s the substitute – Samsung? Don’t you know that Samsung’s products are from its OEM factory in Tianjin? Samsung workers’ income and benefits are even worse than those at Foxconn. If not to buy iPad – (do you think) I will buy Android Pad? Have you ever been to the OEM factories for Lenovo and ASUS? Quanta,
Compaq … factories of other companies are all worse than those for Apple. Not to buy iPod – (do you think) I will buy Aigo, Meizu? Do you know that Aigo’s Shenzhen factory will not pay their workers until the 19th of the second month? If you were to quit, fine, I’m sorry, your salary will be withdrawn. Foxconn never dares to do such things. First, their profit margin is higher than peers as they manufacture for Apple. Second, at least those foreign devils will regularly audit factories. Domestic brands will never care if workers live or die. I am not speaking for Foxconn. I am just speaking as an insider of this industry, and telling you some disturbing truth.

Is this really how we want our tech toys to be made?

iTunes Match: get a better music library for £21.99

iTunes Match, Apple’s music-in-the-cloud service, is very good – but it’s worth a look even if you don’t want or need cloud-based music. For your £21.99 you get two things: a backup of your entire music library (more than 10,000 songs, in my case, saving me the hassle of getting a bigger backup disk) and an upgrade for all your low bitrate music.

If you’re anything like me you’ve been ripping CDs and buying downloads for years, and back in the day file sizes mattered – so you’d rip at, say, 160Kbps to get as much music as possible on your player. Now, though, space isn’t the issue it used to be, and if you listen on good speakers or good headphones you can hear the flaws.

The problem is that actually re-ripping all that music (assuming you still have the CDs) is an enormous job: as of yesterday I had 6,500 songs at lower bitrates.

That’s where iTunes Match comes in. It takes a while, but it works brilliantly.  Jason Snell explains how to do it.

Parent? iPad owner? Here’s a free app

I’m really taken by children’s book apps, and you can get an award-winning one for free: the Jack and the Beanstalk iPad/iPhone app is available here. I haven’t tried this one yet, but it looks like fun.

The iPhone 4S: “the best thing Apple has ever made”

My friends at Techradar like the iPhone 4S, it seems, and they’ve put together a typically exhaustive review.

Executive summary: if you have an iPhone 4, there’s no real need to upgrade once you’ve installed iOS. If you’ve got an older iPhone, however, the 4GS is a huge upgrade.

I’d like to get my hands on one to play with the Siri voice recognition and see how it copes with my accent, but my car needs an MOT and service. Damn you, reality!

“Here’s to the crazy ones”

I hadn’t seen this before: the famous “here’s to the crazy ones” Apple ad with a different voiceover artist. The version that aired was narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, but this version was voiced by Steve Jobs. Naturally it’s all the more poignant now.

Bye, Steve

Steve Jobs’ obituary on Techradar. I was getting a bit teary as I was writing the end of it. We’ve lost a giant.

The next iPhone needn’t be fancy

Me, at Techradar:

It’s Apple’s new iPhone event tomorrow, and we know what that means: most of the internet is publishing “ten things Apple will announce tomorrow” articles, most of them split into eleventy-nine pages to rip off advertisers.

Steve Jobs steps down as Apple CEO

We’ll miss him.

They reckon that we’ll never have another Beatles or another Rolling Stones: the world is too different, too fragmented, and the perfect storm that created them will not happen again. Jobs and Bill Gates are tech’s Beatles and Stones. I’ll let you decide which one’s which.

How to get an iPhone 3G/3GS TomTom car kit to work with an iPhone 4

Of niche interest, I know, but: if you’ve got the TomTom car kit for an iPhone 3G or 3GS, you’ll know that it doesn’t work properly with the iPhone 4′s flat back. If you don’t have, or if you’ve lost, the official adapter, sticking a £1 coin behind the bottom of the phone works perfectly.

Amazon’s “up yours” to Apple

This is interesting: a cloud-based version of the Kindle app.  I’ve had a quick play with it and it works really well – it’s very fast and good-looking. The help pages say “Kindle Cloud Reader is compatible with PC Windows, or Mac, or Linux computers using the Google Chrome or Safari web browsers, on Linux computers using Google Chrome, and on an iPad using the Safari web browser.”

That’s one way around Apple’s ban on in-app purchases.