I’ve been looking for at getting a new phone for a while now. Not actively, and not seriously, but it has been on the back burner for a while now.  Its interesting, I was talking with Dave last week about this, and I realised that I have never actually bought a mobile phone for myself before.  My sister and I got our first mobiles from our parents when we were younger (could have been in ninety three or ninety four, and I think it was a Nokia 2110i, the pre-GSM version), and before the contract had expired and I had a chance to change phones I had moved to London.  There I immediately got a company mobile, and have had two or three different models over the years. 

They were all fairly basic though, which perhaps explains my reluctance to use a mobile for anything other than making calls and sending texts. I’ve always been of the opinion that mobiles should be used to make calls, and perhaps tethered to get your laptop online.  I like the large form factor, or so I keep telling myself.  So, I was never really that interested in the funky new things that the cool kids could do with their mobiles. Until recently that is. In the last six months or so, I’ve been looking at the mobile market, and how the technology is evolving.  I believe that it has gotten to the point where tiny devices are in a position to be actually useful. 

Let me illustrate that for you.  I’ve always carried around a PDA, because my memory is crap and I need to be reminded of things.  I use it for notes, lists, contacts, appointments etc.  In the beginning I had Palm Pilots, which were brilliant even though they suffered from relatively crappy desktop connection software.  At some point I replaced mine for a Windows CE device, and stuck with that platform for the Outlook integration.  With that, I could schedule a meeting in Outlook, and have it automatically sync with our Meeting Maker system in the office, and my PDA.  If I created meetings on the PDA, they just appeared in the right places.  It was great, and I went through a bunch of them over the years, culminating in the HP iPaq hx4700 I have right now.  Had up until recently actually, as it stopped working a couple of months ago.  I’ve been fucked without it too I have to say.  There were lost scraps of paper in numerous pockets with tasks that were never going to get done because I never found the notes.  It really was time for a change.

There have been a bunch of different options I’ve considered over the last while.  Getting an iphone is obviously not an option for me.  Windows Mobile was something I have considered many times over the years, but having used a PocketPC for such a long time I can honestly say that the platform isn’t stable enough to rely on for making phone calls.  Nokia have come out with a couple of interesting phones recently, but again nothing really inspiring. Then there’s Android, the new mobile operating system developed by Google.  The only available handset at the moment comes from HTC, and is called the Dream.  Its a touch screen model with a keyboard that slides out beneath the screen.  Its small enough to still be a phone, and yet the screen is large enough to easily read emails and web pages with.  There’s another one coming out soon, called Magic, which will have an updated Operating System and no keyboard.  I really wanted the keyboard though, so the Dream was the way to go. 

Unfortunately HTC have just been sued in Germany.  They are very probably going to have to stop selling their handsets here until they pay an extortionate amount of money to a patent troll company (albeit one who have already successfully sued Nokia for fifteen billion dollars recently). This meant I had to get the phone soon, before they stop selling it here.  My choices were simple; contract with T-Mobile, or developers handset direct from Google.  There was no contest really, I bought the developers handset, because it was completely open and can be used on any network.  I currently get DSL, landline and four mobiles with free calls between all of them from Alice here in Munich, and I’m mostly happy with their service.  I didn’t see any reason to change, so I bought the handset from Google, and it arrived last week.

So far I’m loving it.  It comes bundled with Gmail, Contacts, GTalk, Calendar and Maps, all of which are synced with their counterparts on Google.  There’s a bunch of other apps installed by default too, such as the mobile version of the Webkit browser that powers Chrome and Safari, the ability to search Google by voice, media player, YouTube player and the Android Market.  With the market you can download new applications, both free and by paying for them.  Paid apps aren’t currently available on my version of the phone, but they’re coming with an update to the OS next month which is nicknamed Cupcake.  Let me give you an example of how cool it is.  Yesterday we were in Ikea in Eching.  After looking around the shop and arriving at the checkout, we decided that we should get a CD shelf to hold our CDs and DVDs.  However, we would have had to track back through the store to find the right shelves, and that would have taken ten or fifteen minutes (its a HUGE shop).  So, out came the phone and I searched for “cd regale” (cd shelves) on ikea.de.  The one we were thinking of was called Billy, and we found it in short order.  I know that seems a bit lame to anyone who has used the net on a mobile before, but for me its like the second coming!  Yes, of course I have searched on a mobile before, but always with WAP, or on a phone with such a crappy screen that it made no difference. This is the first time I’ve seen web pages rendered on a mobile device in such a way that it all starts to actually become useful.

Before we decided to go to Ikea, we needed the address.  All we could remember was that it was in Eching, but we needed to program the GPS in the car for that. We could have used the phone too though.  Opening the Maps application and searching for Ikea gives a list of results that you can scroll through either in a list, or on the map as you can see in the screenshot.  Clicking on the result for Ikea Eching brings up a list containing their address, directions from the current location, a link to the web site and the ability to call them direct from the phone. Its a small thing, but incredibly useful.  For me, there would be typically an intermediate step there, which is finding something to write the phone number on, or copying / pasting it into notepad or something.  Removing that intermediate step is a small thing, but a thing of brilliance.  I don’t know if other phones have this feature, and frankly I don’t care all that much to be honest.  The simple thing here is that I’m new to all this, so I’ll get delight out of the smallest thing.  Oh and yeah, I can copy and paste those details to somewhere else too.  Take that iphone users!

Okay so I'm back, and I've got coffee. I’ve no real excuse for not posting except for being really busy.  That and the inevitable blog-apathy that comes in early every year.  If you could graph the frequency with which I posted I’m sure you’d come up with the winter being the least populous.  Right, so after typing that last sentence, I did just that.  I was wrong.  My least frequent posting is done during the summer. Here is the average number of posts I’ve made every month for the last nine and a bit years.

Naturally enough, I also drew a pretty graph about it. So what can we tell from all this?  Well, I’m not the most prodigious of posters, that’s for sure.  That’d be about it really.  I do find it strange that the most frequent time of year for posting is actually in the Autumn, but that’s just me.  Anyway, the reason I was able to get all this data into Excel really easily is that I’ve been working a little on a new design for here.  I know I’ve been talking about this for months, I do have a good excuse for not rolling it out sooner.  I’ve just been really busy with other things, and not in a position to do significant typing with my finger. So, even though I’m still in this cast, here’s a rundown on everything that’s going on at the moment. 

I finished watching Buffy last night.  The ending was good but lacked something I think.  Then again, I was used to having each of the series end with a cliff-hanger, and this one nicely tied up all the loose ends.  It left something for the future, but I guess that never panned out.  Overall it was a brilliant series.  There were high points, such as “Once More With Feeling”, “The Body” and of course “Hush”, and… well not much in the way of low points.  “Once More With Feeling”, was an episode that was filmed as a musical and was so good that I can’t get the music out of my head. Its very Sondheimey, and brilliantly written.  I also have the entire six series of Angel to watch, though I’m a bit tired now, so maybe that can wait for a few weeks. Awesome series though, I have no idea why I didn’t watch it years ago.  If you don’t already know, the guy who created the show is called Joss Whedon. He the one who created both Buffy and Angel, and also Firefly with its spin-off movie Serenity. He also created the excellent series Dollhouse, which is airing right now.  I had been a fan of his long before I knew who he was.

German classes are of course ongoing, though a little slowly at the moment.  There were so few applicants for my course (ie: two) that they decided to change the times around to once a week instead of two.  On top of that, our teacher has been out for the last week, so apart from some homework (which I got mostly wrong!) there’s fuck all happening there.  I thought I had a complete handle on the meaning of the words in the homework – obwohl, falls, wenn, dass, weil, um, damit etc.  English translations would be although, if, that…, at…, with etc, and it turns out I didn’t know them as well as I thought I did.  I actually though I had nailed the meanings of these words about a year ago and had no problem with them. Until now.  Oh well, there’s a major re-learning session coming up I think.

I’m going to be potentially doing some interesting work for James soon, if a couple of quotes that we have sent out are accepted.  More on that as it happens, but there’s a chance to get better at some things I’ve been familiar with but never used extensively in the past.  Oh, and in the next post I’ll tell you about my new mobile.  I’ll start that in a while, just have to go do some things first.

Today I started a new German course.  I guess its official that I’m not actually a beginner at this language anymore.  This course is for middle tier students, which is pretty cool when you think about it.  Sure I took some classes in London, and they were a great foundation, but I never really considered myself anything other than a beginner before.  I believe that after I have finished this course that I can take the official “Look mommy, I can speak German” test.  This is the official test that you get a Government certificate for!  We have the same teacher as last term which is good. 

We’re experimenting with using Moodle to enhance the course, but I have to say we’ve been relatively unsuccessful so far. This is mainly because of a lack of discipline on my part I think.  I take notes on my PC every class, and transcribe them into better German / English later on when I’m studying or doing homework. I should really be using Moodle to ask questions of my teacher, but I find that its easier to simply look up the information I need on the net.  I use Leo, Chemnitz University’s excellent Beolingus service and a couple of other online resources to do things like this.  I also have a rather large paper dictionary at home that I turn to should the online research bear no results, or indeed should I not actually be online.  Not online: What a quaint idea.

U2 have been doing their thing all over the BBC for the last couple of days. Someone commented somewhere that the BBC was acting like their own personal publicity machine, which would be really cool if if only it were true. Anyway, they just signed a big contract with Live Nation to handle their concerts and merchandising for the next twelve years. This morning I went to take a look and see if there had been any more details about the tour released yet, but alas there was nothing. I did find some other groups of interest playing in Munich though, but fuck me were they expensive. Tickets for Madonna range from €70 up to €195! Eagles are coming in June, priced at €110.50 or €127.75.  Springsteen prices range from €79.40 to €96.65. Compare that to Bell X1, whose tickets are €15.16, or Simply Red for €48.05.  Its a fucking crime. If it were just me then I’d be hard pushed to justify spending €80 on a single event, but it isn’t just me.  There are two of us, which drives the prices sky high.  Oh this is interesting… I would never actually have complained about these sorts of prices when we were living in London.  That city was substantially more expensive, and I had a well paying job.  Here though my awareness of the price of expensive things is heightened probably because everything is cheaper and I don’t have a regular job.

Anyway, we went on a walking trip yesterday.  We started in Starnberg, walked through the Maisinger Gorge to Maising and the lake, then on to Aschering. We were supposed to walk through about 2km of forest west of Aschering and then turn north, but there was a navigational malfunction and we ended up heading south to Machtlfing and then on to Erling and up to Andechs.  All in all we covered about 20km. I have to say, walking through snow is incredibly difficult.  When it comes up to your knees you discover just how hard water is to walk through.  I haven’t had any exercise in the last three weeks, and am dreadfully out of shape (even more so than usual) so I found everything beyond Machtlfing fucking hard.  Every step to Erling was hell, and even the thought of getting some good food and a few beers at Andechs wasn’t much consolation.  Still, we made it, and there’ll be more too.  I badly need to get in shape, as does Anna, so this is a good start.  Click the picture to see the route we took, the red line is where we walked, the yellow where we should have gone.