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I finally submitted to the marketing and general buzz surrounding this particular iPhone app. My first impression was that its impossible to control. It felt like there was actually no way to control that little bubbled monkey.

After about 1/2 hour of playing around with it, I started to get the hang of it. I noticed early on that its not the monkey you control, you actually tilt the entire level. What makes it hard is that when you tilt the plane, the monkey faces in the direction of the tilt and the viewpoint pans in that direction, so you end up tilting the plane on a constantly changing way. Its hard to adjust, I ended up constantly twitching the iPhone around to try control that perky little monkey. Its hard to explain, I guess the closest thing to it is the feeling of first reversing your car when you are learning to drive. The car goes in the opposite direction when you turn your steering wheel.

In the end I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt, I’ll try it again tomorrow and try get through level 10!

I’m very happy that V Card imports now work in iPhone. Contacts can be added directly from the Mail interface.

I’ve not seen this mentioned much on the blogosphere and I know it was one of the complaints in the past. Of course Apple’s push on business apps it would be a huge omission if this wasn’t a feature.

I love the fact that Solitaire is listed in the Business section of the iTunes App Store.

It kind of reminds me of this:
manual solitaire

Did you find any other amusingly mis-placed apps?

Nit-pickers unite – new Wifi store icon on Phil Shiller’s demo iPhone at the iPhone Roadmap event today (the purple one at the bottom left).

Screenshot attached. If anyone else noticed it, blab about it in the comments. I’d be intrigued by what this is all about. My take its that its just a new, better icon, that actually represents the fact that you use it for music (maybe, just maybe?).

In the hope that someone will find this post, use their basic humanity and actually try return my phone, I am writing this quick post.

Today I was at the NME Big Gig at London’s O2 Arena. From one minute to the next my iPhone was gone from my pocket. I had standing tickets, and I’m hoping that my phone was not stolen, that the person who now has it is wondering how to return it, or even wonders if they could get some repayment for returning it to me. I will offer cash in return for my phone back.

If you have an iPhone in your hand right now that you found at the O2 Arena today 28th of February, perhaps you remember finding it during the Kaiser Chief’s set in the standing area, I would ask you to email me at felixkunze at gmail dot com. I don’t mind anonymous comments left on this post either.

My hopes aren’t high but it would be something for which I would be forever grateful. I can uniquely identify my iPhone by external marks and also what is on the iPhone itself. I also know its serial number and am willing to offer a cash reward for anyone who returns it to me safely.

For search engine purposes, I am including the following keywords: lost iphone at the O2 Arena, NME Big Gig, NME awards, The Cribs, The Klaxons, Bloc Party, The Kaiserchiefs, The Kaiser Chiefs, Manic Street Preachers, The Manic Street Preachers.

Music, with all its joys and glory, has always been an entirely subjective matter, impervious to criticism by any one individual. It is for this reason that I find writing reviews of music to be a sometimes tedious subject. A great review of an album or gig will undoubtedly be met with a conflict of opinion. I go to gigs, I sample a lot of music and I generally perceive my musical tastes to be good enough to share. And while most agree, I occasionally encounter enthusiasm for some creation that I feel is unjustified.

Thus it is with my brother’s love for Biffy Clyro. I had seen them at Wembley, where they supported Muse. While my brother was jumping up and down with excitement, I stood by and tried to judge the performance, the music, the lyrics, the melodies. I went away thinking that they were a good band, but nothing to write home about. Muse blew me away, in fact they didn’t just blow me away, they took me to another place, somehow managed to tug on my heartstrings in a fashion that no other gig has done since. But the difference was that I wasn’t judging Muse, I didn’t try to figure out in myself if I was enjoying myself. I knew completely that I was. The Muse Gig on that June afternoon has and always will be a defining moment in my musical explorations. A time when I found the true joy that music could bring me, the feeling that’s better than most other stimuli that live can throw upon someone. That day I came away with only one disappointment – the fact that all subsequent gigs would judged on this one Muse gig, whether I liked it or not, I would judge them. [Read more →]

How I solved all my needs for 50 USD – with a solution from Apple

Apple TV 2.0 is around the corner, and is sure to be a bigger hit than the previous iteration. But for those who don’t have $229/£199 lying around, I would propose a solution that’s markedly cheaper, and costs as little as $50/£39.

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Apple introduced their new iTunes Movie Rental with much fanfare at Macworld in San Francisco last Tuesday. The selection is somewhat limited as yet but Apple promises 1000 titles for rent by February and an international roll-out by the end of the year “hopefully”. The system lets you keep the movie for up to 30 days, but once you start watching it, it will only remain in your system for another 24 hours. I rented Ratatouille to test out the system (This was the film Steve Jobs kept pushing in his Keynote).

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I just received this from Pandora. I’ve been a user of Pandora for almost a year and this is a sad sad day in the UK, one of the biggest proponents of new music on planet Earth. January 15th will be a sad day for us. When will the record companies learn? I bought tracks because I heard them on Pandora. Why don’t the record companies recognize that they have more to gain from getting music broadly distributed? They are closing off yet another possible revenue stream. Innovation is the sign of an expanding industry, litigation is the sign of a dying one. Pandora faces legal action if they don’t close down their UK service.

A lot has been said about the Digital divide as a planet-wide problem. I wanted to add to the debate based on a project I saw in CNN’s Show and Tell podcast today. My thoughts on this are based partly on Georgia Tech’s project of amalgamating the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ worlds to embed live video feeds into Second Life and Ewan McGregor’s “Long Way Round“. These ‘inspirations’ aren’t particularly relevant, other than to jerk me into writing this post.

Thinking this through a little bit and hunting around the web a little, I see 3 categories in the digital divide:

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