Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • With tablets, small is beautiful

    I wrote a wee thing about tablets for Techradar, in which I suggest that for most people, buying a full-sized tablet is an unnecessary expense.

    You may be thinking that I’m having a Damascene conversion: when Apple didn’t make seven-inch tablets I said small tablets were rubbish, and now Apple does make a seven-ish-inch tablet I’m saying that small tablets are ace. But I’ve changed my mind because tablets have changed.
    …The biggest obstacle to seven-inch tablet adoption was that seven-inch tablets were terrible. Now that they aren’t, for most people they’re the best choice. They’re more portable than their bigger brothers. They’re lighter to hold, easier to fit into a large pocket or handbag, easier for kids to handle – and they’re much, much cheaper too.

    I do hope I’m right, because if I’m wrong I’ve promised to buy and eat an iPad mini.

  • He who pays the piper

    There’s been a big scandal in the world of videogames writing, and the short version goes something like this: comedian Robert Florence wrote a column about writers and PRs being a wee bit too close together, legal threats were made, the column was edited and Florence quit. Then it all exploded.

    Stuart Campbell has a detailed post about the whole sorry saga, which is worth a read if you’re interested in journalistic ethics and that kind of thing. I thought this bit was particularly true:

    games journalists are merely serving the people who pay the bills, and that isn’t the readers any more, because they demand all their journalism for free. If you’re not even prepared to pay peanuts, you’re going to get something less than monkeys.

     

  • Review: SuperTooth Disco Bluetooth Stereo Speaker

    Update, 2013: I decided not do to any more of these, for anybody, because I realised I was being a silly arse. Reviewers should be paid for their reviews, not allowed to keep the things they review: otherwise you’re in the Scoring Free Stuff business, not the Telling The Truth business. For what it’s worth I reckon I told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth here, but payment-in-kit isn’t a road I’m comfortable travelling down.

    Phones4U gave me a thing and said I could keep it if I blogged about it. The thing is he SuperTooth Disco Stereo Speaker, which the firm was selling for £99.

    Here’s the blurb:

    The stylish SuperTooth Disco can be connected wirelessly to any Bluetooth A2DP mobile phone, PDA, or Bluetooth A2DP enabled computer. Once connected, simply stream your favourite tunes through the high efficiency subwoofer system.

    And here’s what it looks like.

    There’s lots to like about the SuperTooth Disco. First of all, it’s loud – properly, neighbour-annoyingly loud – and when you turn off the pointless bass boost the sound is very good. It can’t quite cope with, say, the low frequency “wub” sounds of Muse’s Madness, which cause it to rattle a bit, but you can solve that by turning it down slightly. Bluetooth pairing is quick and painless, battery life is pretty good (10 hours at reasonable volume or three hours turned up; it takes three-ish hours to charge and has a standby time of 1500 hours) and while it’s not the prettiest speaker you’ll ever see it hasn’t been beaten by the ugly stick either.

    There are some negatives, though. The first is that it’s really big (bigger than a grown man’s forearm) and really heavy, tipping the scales at a horrendous 1,140 grams. For me at least that rules it out as a holiday speaker – that’s a big chunk of your baggage allowance, and I wouldn’t fancy carrying it around in its fancy case for too long either – and puts it firmly in bedroom/office/barbecue territory.

    The other big negative is the Bluetooth. It might just be my house, where there are stacks of gadgets in the same 2.4GHz frequency as well as next door’s Wi-Fi leaking through, but the Bluetooth Disco suffers from constant and very noticeable interference when you’re using it wirelessly. I’ve tried it with two iPads, an iPhone 4, an iPhone 4S and an iPhone 5, and it’s the same thing with each one, noticeable hissing, fizzing and fluttering in the higher frequencies. You know the way a poorly encoded MP3 sounds, with squishy guitars and drums? It’s very much like that, and if that kind of thing annoys you as much as it annoys me then you won’t be able to listen to it for very long.

    I’ve read other reviews suggesting that the Disco suffers from the same problem with cabled connections, but I didn’t find that: if I hooked it up to something using the supplied 3.5mm cable, the sibilance disappeared.

    It’s worth mentioning here that there is a newer (and to my eyes, much uglier) version of the Disco, the excitingly named Disco 2, which ups the Bluetooth version from 2.0 to 4.0. That may well solve the interference problem, although it’s a mono rather than a stereo device. It’s more portable, though, 552 grams instead of 1,140.

    Whether you’ll like the SuperTooth Disco, then, depends on what you want it for. If it’s wireless that really matters to you, I don’t think this is the speaker for you – and if you want something for your holidays that won’t have you frantically swapping luggage around at the Ryanair check-in, the same applies. However, if you want something really loud for your flat, bedroom or barbecue and don’t mind connecting with a cable, it’s worth considering.

    Five months on and I still agree with this: it’s far too heavy to take anywhere, but it’s worthwhile as a spare speaker – for example if there’s a do on at my in-laws’ house, I take the speaker and my phone rather than armfuls of CDs. It’s awfully expensive, though, even if you do shop around.

  • That “leaked” Jimmy Saville TV transcript is a hoax. An old hoax

    The supposed Jimmy Saville / Paul Merton TV show transcript is doing the rounds again. Here’s some news from 2000:

    Paul Merton is always a man to push the televisual boundaries of libel laws as far as they will stretch but the transcript went a lot further than anything you would have seen on the show. The trouble is – according to sources – a huge chunk of the middle section of the email is fabricated.

    And here’s one of the perpetrators:

    we decided it would be fun to stick some obviously fake stuff on the site, just to see whether or not people would actually question it. Part of the site’s remit was to get comedy fans questioning the media, refusing to accept everything at face value, etc.

    Faking some HIGNFY out-takes was originally going to be part of that initial plan. We probably decided on it after watching the ‘Unbroadcastable Have I Got News…’ video (which itself features rushes material), but mainly because we enjoy the idea of rushes per se. The original idea was to stick the page on the site in Hidden Archive and see if anyone noticed/cared. Emergency Lalla Ward went off and wrote the actual page – based on a tape of the broadcast itself (if you watch the show in tandem with the fakery you’ll note that he’s specifically ‘filled in’ stuff where there was an obvious edit-point).

  • Don’t stare at the sun

    I went to see Richard Hawley play Glasgow’s Barrowland last night. I’m not a huge fan – I like a lot of what I’ve heard, but I haven’t heard a lot – but last night’s performance of Don’t Stare At The Sun was one of those rare goosebumps-on-goosebumps moments. Beautiful.

    Here’s the same song on the Later… TV programme.

  • Why Apple gave Google Maps the boot

    An interesting piece from The Verge suggesting that Google Maps got the boot a year before Apple and Google’s contract was up:

    Apple apparently felt that the older Google Maps-powered Maps in iOS were falling behind Android — particularly since they didn’t have access to turn-by-turn navigation, which Google has shipped on Android phones for several years. The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Google also wanted more prominent branding and the ability to add features like Latitude, and executives at the search giant were unhappy with Apple’s renewal terms.

    Neither company looks good here.

  • Apple Maps, and why you should read multiple reviews

    I reviewed Apple’s iOS 6 this week, and one of the areas I focused on was the new Maps app (the Google one is gone, allegedly because Google were being dicks about their mapping API).

    It’s an important app, and I set out to see if I could break it. I used a quarter of a tank of diesel trying and failing to confuse the turn-by-turn navigation in and around Glasgow and its suburbs; I deliberately asked it for directions to places where the roads have been significantly changed in recent months; and I threw loads of randomly chosen addresses and businesses at it to see if it got them right.

    With a few exceptions – businesses shown in slightly wrong places on the map, one result that was completely wrong – it performed really well. If it knew about the new roundabout they’ve just stuck between Milngavie and Clydebank, then clearly it was safe to assume that it knows where the big stuff is. As I wrote in the piece:

    We half expected an app that was just great in America and utterly useless in the UK. We were wrong.

    …Maps is a decent app, but we think existing, dedicated sat-nav apps have more finger-friendly UIs and more features, even if they do charge for traffic data – and if you’ve got an iPhone 3GS or 4, those apps are your only option.

    Over at the Guardian, technology editor Charles Arthur took a similar approach and came to similar conclusions. Like me, he wrote:

    it’s very good. Here we need to distinguish between the maps themselves, and the maps app. The maps don’t have all the highlighting of Google’s, but the amount of detail such as road names seems to me greater… [it] brings feature parity with Android – as does the introduction of turn-by-turn voice navigation, so that your satnav can now play music and make or receive phone calls.

    It looks like Charles and I were lucky, because as we’re discovering today the Maps app contains lots of problems. My personal favourite is that it lists Our Price branches; for younger and/or overseas readers, Our Price was a record shop chain that closed almost a decade ago. Some towns are missing altogether; other sensible queries don’t work unless they’re phrased in a specific way (eg “Paddington” doesn’t work; “London Paddington” does); and sometimes the context awareness is broken, so a UK user searching for Christchurch near Bournemouth gets directions to New Zealand.

    What’s interesting is that in many cases, it’s the populous areas that have the problems: apparently Leeds is particularly poor. I came to Maps assuming that the big places, such as London, would be perfect, and that if screw-ups were to be found they’d be more likely in more northern and more rural areas – so I went looking for such screw-ups and found they were relatively rare.

    It’s clear that Maps has been rushed out, that some of its data is inaccurate and/or ancient, and that it’s going to be a while before it’s as good as Google’s multi-billion dollar mapping system. Apple doesn’t screw up like this very often: the last one like this I can remember is MobileMe, whose unhappy launch led to an unhappy Steve Jobs making the relevant employees very unhappy.

    Maps will get better, but the issue demonstrates something important: individual journalists and bloggers can’t cover every conceivable use case for technology products, and sometimes problems don’t emerge until a product has actually been released.

    If you’re considering spending lots of money on something, or if an upgrade is replacing a feature you rely upon, it pays to wait.

  • “If you don’t go the Apple way you’re on your own. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.”

    I’ve written a review of iOS 6, the latest free upgrade for Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. Is it good? Yes, but the newer your hardware the better it is.

    the older the kit the less of iOS 6 you actually get. Some of the big features – Siri, turn-by-turn navigation, panoramic photos and FaceTime over 3G – aren’t available for the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4.

    The 3GS doesn’t even get the offline reading list feature, and Siri’s not available for the iPad 2.

    Is it worth the upgrade? We’ve installed iOS across multiple iOS devices: an iPhone 4, an iPhone 4S, an iPad 2 and a new iPad (that latter one courtesy of Vodafone) to find out.

    As we discovered, even when you don’t get all the new features, there are still enough improvements to make the jump worthwhile.

    On a tangent, spending any time whatsoever with a new iPad makes older iPads feel ancient. That retina display is a thing of beauty. Weight-adding, battery-killing beauty, but beauty nevertheless. The more I use it the more I think I’ll barricade myself in when Vodafone comes to take it back again.

  • Buying an iPhone 5 on contract vs buying SIM-free: there’s not much in it

    The iPhone 5’s out, but if you’re buying one can you save cash by going SIM-free? The answer’s yes, but the difference isn’t as big as you might expect.

    Take Orange: the 32GB iPhone 5 is £219, then £36 per month over two years. That’s £864, so the total cost of ownership over two years is £1,083.

    SIM-free from Apple, the same phone is £599. The pick of Three’s SIM-only deals is £12.90 a month, so that’s £309.60. Total cost, £908.60. There’s a difference, but over two years it’s not a huge amount: it’s just over £7 per month.

    Remember too that you can get some cash back by trading in your existing phone (shop around though – trade-in prices vary widely) and you might be able to wangle a discount if you upgrade with your current provider.

  • Everything you ever wanted to know about the iPhone 5

    My friends at Techradar and Tap! have been up all night covering the iPhone 5 announcement – literally all night in the case of Tap! – so if you want to know about the latest iteration of the iPhone then have I got links for you.

    First up, Tap!’s very excellent iPhone guide [iTunes link], featuring some words from me; this one is for Newsstand, so it works on iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. It’s a wonderful publication, with some great design touches. The writing ain’t bad either.

    Next, Techradar’s hands-on, me on the “meh” that greeted the iPhone 5 launch, and my esteemed colleague Gareth Beavis taking a very different view. There’s only one way to solve this. Fiiiiiiight!