Thanks to TUAW, I found Stephen Fry’s blog today. Despite claiming to be somewhere in deepest (flattest?) Norfolk, far from the realms of Edge let alone 3G and Wifi, he’s posted a great (and long) Blessay (his word) on smartphones. He’s also writing a weekly technology column for the Guardian.
Who’d have thought I had something in common with Stephen Fry, apart from a rapier wit and a penchant for writing ridiculously long (and infrequent) blog posts I mean. To give that context – and to stop your mind leaping to far wilder (and imaginary) similarities or penchants – he says, amongst many things, for instance
“I’ve never met a smartphone that I haven’t bought”
On Palm’s Foleo “If it’s got a chip in it, and a keyboard, and WiFi and a screen and I haven’t sent off for one, then by God you’d better believe it’s in trouble”
On Palm’s threaded text “Add to this the inestimable pleasure and benefit of SMS threading (it simply STAGGERS me that no one until now, with the arrival of the iPhone, aside from Palm, offers this, to my mind, essential feature, something that’s been available on the Treo since the get-go)”
On WinMob devices the syncing software, an almost useless PC app called ActiveSync, allows no control over the syncing process and therefore gets any power user into trouble with duplicates, the bane of our lives.
All the big guns want an iPhone killer. Even I, mad for all things Apple as I am, want an iPhone killer. I want smart digital devices to be as good as mankind’s ingenuity can make them. I want us eternally to strive to improve and surprise. Bring on the iPhone killers. Bring them on.
It’s a long post from Fry but worth the end to end read.