Aquarionics

A short list of companies who use Foxconn manufacturing’s services and aren’t Apple Inc.

Acer Inc., Amazon.com, ASRock, Asus, Barnes & Noble, Cisco, Dell, EVGA Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Lenovo, Logitech, Microsoft, MSI, Motorola, Netgear, Nintendo, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Vizio.

(Source)

A short list of Foxconn’s customers mentioned in articles about Foxconn’s working conditions:

Apple Inc in all of them, and “Xboxes” twice.

(Source, Doing a google news search for “Foxconn”, reading the top articles for each story on the front page, and a random selection of the non-top stories, around 20 in total)

Foxconn’s conditions are awful. The latest round of allegations makes me upset at what we do to human beings, and a lot of this coverage comes from Apple’s recent release of a report on how they have to do better by the workforce, but every Foxconn tragedy story I’ve read since they came to light has mentioned iPhones (Which is fair enough, they’re a good and well known example to use) and very few have mentioned any other company at all.

Notably absent from either of these lists is HTC, who do their own mass production. I haven’t seen any news stories about their factories, so they must be paragons of virtue.

The iPhone 4S is not designed to make the IT Industry happy with Apple.

A while ago, while Apple were doing the iPod thing and their machines were still the main asset, the running joke about Apples was that they were obsolete before you got them home. Computers in general, sure, but Apple machines in particular. Now, the industry press is choc-a-block with disappointment for the new iPhone 4S, because there’s not much of a compelling killer-feature for someone who already has an iPhone 4.

Good.

My first iPhone – a 3G – was on an 18 month contract. This iPhone – a 4S – is on a 24 month contract. The vast majority of people buying the iPhone 4 won’t have had it given to them for review purposes, or bought it Sim-Free from the Apple store. They’ll have got it though their network on an 18 to 24 month contract. If they bought it on release date, that’ll expire June 24 2012 (Or July, if they were on CDMA. Or the following April if they bought it in white). The 4S isn’t designed to be a must-upgrade from the iPhone 4. It doesn’t need to be, and probably shouldn’t be. It’s a compelling upgrade for people with a 3G, or 3GS, though.

If we turn that onto the Android market and attempt to apply the same values, it gets a little strange. It’s almost impossible to have a top-of-the-line Android handset for more than two weeks right now, and at one point last year the top-range HTC models were being released *after* the next level of phones had been annouced for release the following month. All of these phones, unless you have the disposable income to drop on the unlocked versions, come with a 18 to 24 month contract. If I hadn’t bought my original-model Desire unlocked, I’d have another six months before I was able to switch, and that would be to a phone that HTC stopped supplying OS updates to a year ago, and didn’t even bother patching for the most recent security lapses.

So I won’t be getting an iPhone 5, because when it comes out I’ll be halfway though the contract for this one. But I’ll probably be right in line for the 5S, even though ZDNet & Engadget think it’s a “Disappointment”.

Tripped, Fell, Bought a new iPhone.

So far, so phone. I had an iPhone 3G, so the wonders of the iPhone aren’t very new to me, and the iPad means I’ve been playing with iOS5 for a little while now. I’d forgotten how much I liked iOS, to be honest.

So, reviews, then:

News Stand

News Stand is one of the smaller features of iOS, because really it’s a glorified categorisation. Previously, Magazine Apps were Apps, and went into App Places. Now they get automatically put into a drawer called “News Stand” which looks different.

However, since I got the iPad I’ve kind of bought into the “Future of magazines” koolaid. Not that the iPad is, specifically, but that Tablets may be. Paid content on the internet is a business, but not a very big or scalable one. The only people who’ve really made it work is the porn industry.

I’ve been reading three things in News Stand, PC Gamer, Edge and the new Guardian app. All are notable because the content is also available for free on the site, so it’s linkable and sharable, but all the sites suffer the great rolling news tragedy. Writing for rolling 24 hour access sites is speed, writing for tomorrow’s newspaper is speed and craft. Plus, instant updates tend to favour the Now over the Important, and the craft of a magazine or newspaper format, with the analysis of what’s important that will *stay* important and thus “Front Page News” is valuable.

They download into off-line form automatically as they become available, and from then it doesn’t matter if you’re about to go into a tunnel when you want to read the next page. The text is as big as you want it to be, you can fit the last two week’s newspapers – in searchable format – into a space the size of The Very Hungry Catapiller. Plus, the Guardian one’s free until January.

Siri

Siri is the most impressive piece of voice recognition software I’ve ever used.

It manages this by two methods. The first is by being limited in scope. It’s not that much different from the old Infocom lexographical parsers for adventure games. It recognises what you want to do partly by matching it against things you *might* have said and choosing the most likely.

Second, it cheats. I realised this when I wandered to do the laundry under our towerblock, and Siri stopped working. I don’t know *what* it sends out to get analysed, I’m assuming it’s not a full voice recording, but it doesn’t work without network.

You can use shortcuts for people, too. Like this:

“Who is my Girlfriend”
“What is your girlfriend’s name?”
“Fyrheafoc”
“Okay. Do you want me to remember that Fyrheafoc is your Girlfriend?”
“Yes”
“Okay Aquarion, I’ll remember that Fyrheafoc is your girlfriend”

And so it does. Kind of. If your “me” contact is a contact that ‘belongs’ to a synchronised Exchange account (or, at least, with Google Sync) it doesn’t seem to be able to create a record of “girlfriend”, and logs the contact name as “Spouse” or – amusingly – “Manager”, and entirely forgetting the ‘girlfriend’ bit (so you go though the above roundabout again). I got around this by creating an iCloud-synced contact called “Aquarion” and setting that as my “Me” contact, and everything after that was fine.

But the most annoying thing?

This:

“What is the distance from London to Glasgow?”

For questions that Siri knows the answer to, it answers.

For questions that it doesn’t, it checks to see if it’s something Wolframalpha knows.

For everything else, it says “You can search the web”.

The exception is for things that the US version of Siri, which has maps and location information enabled, knows, but the Non-US versions don’t. For those, you get this:

Now, the fact that it launched without location data outside the States sucks. But:

If you can’t do it, Siri, please pass it over the things that can, like you do with everything else.

This comes across as “It sucks”, but it really doesn’t. It’s right almost all the time, and when it isn’t it’s almost always because I wasn’t speaking clearly. But the closeness makes the wrong bits so much more infuriating.

I buy an iPad, and Steve Jobs resigns.

D’ya think I should start a Kickstarter project to get a Windows Mobile device?

I’m not actually an Apple fanboy, really.

OS X is my preferred Unix GUI, partly because the development community has a higher background level of interface design. I had a Powerbook until my housemate bricked it with a glass of coke, I had an iPod until the case fell apart, the battery fell out, the hard-drive span out and hit the concrete and I merely had a collection of expensive electronic parts.  My brain finds Apple’s user interface decisions logical.

So I bought an iPad.

There was  a host of rationalisations around this. First, I pay for a mobile broadband contract anyway because the don’t-worry-about-it is worth a lot to me. Second, with the contract it was the cheapest I was likely to find one. Third, I’ve accepted a permenant position as lead developer of Languagelab.com – upgraded from my previous contract – and can overbuy on a more solid footing. Plus, I really, *really* wanted one.

First impressions: Setup is as a giant iPod. You still have to connect it to sodding iTunes to make it do anything apart from sit there looking pretty. This is being fixed for the next major OS release, but it’s still an irritation.

I’m bored of entering my Apple ID. I’ve had to do so around fifteen times for various things (authorise iTunes for this, add Mobile Me account, add Gamecentre account, blah) which makes me wish for a centralised account system a-la android (I’m happier trusting the OS with login data than I am tin-pot organisations). Also, the decision to sync Mail, Notes & Calendar with gmail but not contacts, forcing me to screw around with pseudo-Exchange services, just seems petty.

A lot of the mindless crap I bought for my iPhone has magically appeared on the iPad, without any way of being able to tell if any of them have the ability to use the new screen resolution short of installing and booting them. (Really, Foursquare? Spotify? Guardian? Shazam? Tweetdeck? Still holding off on development until the iPad seems to be a success?) or which have decided that the iPad version should be a seperate app and you should pay for it twice (Thanks, Reeder). An awful lot Just Magically Worked (Dropbox, Evernote and WordPress’s iPad apps get special note here).

All in all it’s far more responsive than any Android-based tablets I’ve tried, and all I need to do now is carry it around for a while and work out when I bring this, and when I bring the Kindle.

Although I can already see I should possibly start looking at bluetooth keyboards…