Orange and T-Mobile customers can now roam across each firms’ networks, although for now it’s only 2G (ie. calls and texts, not Internet). You’ll need to sign up for it.
If you’re on Orange, you need this link.
If you’re on T-Mobile, you need this one.
Books are rubbish. They just sit there with their words and their plots and their characterisation and their background detail. Where’s the fun in that? What books need is… 3D audio clips!
From the press release:
Pan Macmillan Marketing Director Becky Ikin said:
‘We wanted to celebrate the phenomenal global publication of Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants with a genuinely exciting digital offering that built on Ken’s unique ability to take readers back in time to the sights and sounds of his period – in this new epic, World War I. 3D sound is something the games industry is beginning to dabble in, film is investing in 3D visuals and we think it’s exciting for the book industry to be experimenting in this way. So far books have looked at video or audio to sit alongside or after the main text (they force you to switch from reading the book) but this is a genuine ‘enhancement’ and far beyond the usual audio experience. It just hopefully fires your imagination alongside the author’s words.
There’s an iPad version too, where “sound files have been embedded into the ebook”. Personally I can’t think of anything I’d like less, but if you’re interested the website is over here.
Want to know the key differences between Apple’s iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and BlackBerry’s PlayBook? You do? Well, looky here then.
You won’t be able to buy a PlayBook until well into 2011, and by then Apple should have iPad 2 ready to roll. The second generation iPad may well address some of the apparent weaknesses in this company; we’d certainly expect more memory, a faster processor and a camera or two to appear in Apple’s 2011 tablet. And of course, Apple isn’t the only firm making tablets. The next few months are going to be very interesting indeed.
And I don’t mean a few copies of Microsoft Office. Symbian is looking increasingly isolated, so perhaps Nokia needs to kill it.
[hardware bossing the software guys about] wouldn’t be such an issue if specs were all that mattered, but in smartphones the reverse is true. In hardware terms the iPhone was and is rubbish compared to its much better specced – and priced – rivals, but superb software saw it fly off Apple’s shelves.
Windows Mobile 6.1 didn’t fall out of favour because the handsets weren’t good enough, but because the software wasn’t. And people aren’t excited about Windows Phone because the handsets promised hitherto unimaginable kinds of hardware heaven.
We know that Nokia can make awesome hardware, but can it make awesome software too?
This has been doing the rounds on Twitter, but just in case you missed it: Martin Robbins shows how to write a newspaper article about science-related topics.
In this paragraph I will provide balance with a quote from another scientist in the field. Since I picked their name at random from a Google search, and since the research probably hasn’t even been published yet for them to see it, their response to my e-mail will be bland and non-committal.
“The research is useful”, they will say, “and gives us new information. However, we need more research before we can say if the conclusions are correct, so I would advise caution for now.”
If the subject is politically sensitive this paragraph will contain quotes from some fringe special interest group of people who, though having no apparent understanding of the subject, help to give the impression that genuine public “controversy” exists.
Some more articles by me have made their way to the Internet. First, has Apple sold out?
It seems that Apple can’t do anything right nowadays. It has been accused of censorship and bullying, and implicated in subcontractor suicides and heavyhanded policing. Despite creating the most impressive, most popular products in its entire history in the form of the iPad and the iPhone 4, Apple is seen by many as a company that’s losing the plot.
And then, a piece about Apple’s telecoms rival, Google. Android is very good, but are Google’s partners messing it up? Here’s a clue: yes. Yes, they are.
When Google announced its Nexus One phone, it threw away the rulebook. Instead of selling phones with contracts attached, it would sell them directly to us.
Instead of letting manufacturers decide what features to include, Google would control the experience.
Instead of letting networks stuff the phones with proprietary software, Google would keep it clean.
Unfortunately it seems that the manufacturers and networks promptly found the rulebook and beat Google around the head with it, because the Nexus One is no more and Google’s partners are doing their very best to do what they’ve always done – that is, make mobile phones as confusing and as closed as possible.
Jane Smith’s How Publishing Really Works is worth a read at the best of times (if you’re interested in publishing, of course), but her five-part demolition of a “self-publishing is the future” screed is particularly delicious. Part five has just gone up; here are parts one, two, three and four.
But the people that you perceive as barriers—agents, editors, publishers—are, in fact, there to help good writers get published well, and to ensure that the reading public has access to good books, professionally produced. There’s nothing stopping anyone from putting their work on the internet if they want, or from self-publishing in print or electronic format: the technology has been there for years. The real problem for writers who can’t get published isn’t that barriers to publication exist, but that their writing just isn’t good enough.
In the comments Dan Holloway quibbles with the word “good” – he reckons “saleable” would be better, and I think he’s right; whether it’s good isn’t as important as whether it’ll sell – but you get the idea, I’m sure.
I think Wendy Roby enjoyed the gig.
…and Google’s the latest tech firm to jump into it. A wee op/ed piece by me:
One of my favourite TV programmes was Casualty. I didn’t like it for the acting, though. I liked it because of the hilariously protracted accidents in each episode. “I’ll just hammer this nail in with an UNEXPLODED BOMB!” this week’s trolley fodder would announce, with the inevitable explosion following shortly afterwards.
“I think I’ll leave this really sharp kitchen knife sticking out of the steering wheel as I drink and drive!” another would say. “I think I’ll attempt to combine the worlds of TV and computers!” a third would offer.
Oops. That last one wasn’t Casualty. That was Google.
Naturally, writing about the television business means I’m going to take the opportunity to quote Hunter S Thomson properly:
The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.
Great news for journalists and anyone else interested in newspapers and language: Waterhouse on Newspaper Style, by the late Keith Waterhouse, is back in print.
This is a typical Waterhouse quote:
When Sam Goldwyn advised that cliches should be avoided like the plague, he forgot that the plague, by its very nature, is almost impossible to avoid. That is what gave the Black Death such a bad name.