Monthly Archives: January 2011

When I was just 12 years old, I was convinced that my Sinclair ZX Spectrum was superior to the Commodore 64.

I had a ready arsenal of facts that I could use to back up this assertion; the little Spectrum’s 3.5Mhz Z80 CPU was clearly faster than the archaic 1Mhz 6502 processor that lived at the heart of the Commodore.  And the C64 only had 39K of useable RAM, compared to a positively cavernous 42.5K on the crafty Sinclair.

Game, set and match.

Or was it?  As a 40 year old, I’m finally going to admit that I was wrong.  The Commodore was way ahead of its time.  The keyboard was wonderful, the games were great and the SID chip that powered C64 music is legendary and still in use today by professional musicians.

Whoosh.  That felt good.  Cathartic, even.

We haven’t moved on much from the fierce polemic that characterised home computer debate in the 1980s and 90s.  Forums are filled with passionate defenders of sundry operating systems and miniaturized electronics.  Just last week, I read a forum commenter tell an iPhone owner “Go and play with the rest of the iTards. People like u just can’t be reasoned with.”

Ever made a comment like that?  Of course you haven’t – PDA247 hosts a more urbane, civilised and downright courteous breed of poster.  You’ve all read similar comments, though.

Surprisingly, there’s a sound evolutionary basis for such tech zealotry.

I don’t mean that Neanderthal Man sat around the fire during chilly Ice Age evenings, hotly contesting the inherent superiority of whalebone spear points over flint.  Actually, human beings have a natural propensity to engage in competitive grouping.  Such behaviour used to confer an evolutionary advantage by encouraging social solidarity within groups, much like a belief in religion.

Group membership promotes cooperation and cohesion, which enhance an individual’s fitness for survival and reproduction.  In other words, there’s safety in numbers.

The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould coined the term ‘exaptation’, applied to traits that evolved to serve one particular purpose but subsequently came to serve another; so our genetic survival instincts are probably to blame for our factional approach to smartphone debate!

And cognitive dissonance plays its part too.  We’re quite capable of believing that the owners of competing devices are deluded idiots making an irrational choice whilst convincing ourselves that we’ve made the logical decision.  We pooh-pooh those on the other side who think exactly the same about us.  If it starts to look like WE made the wrong choice, we’re quite happy to subtly change the facts to calm our troubled psyche.  Psychologists term this ‘post-purchase rationalisation’ and we’re all guilty of it from time to time.

I tell myself that I don’t want Flash on my iPhone.  It would affect the stability of iOS.  What about battery life – that would suffer, too.  Yet, secretly I yearn for an occasional game of Yeti Sports on the go!

So the next time you feel like loudly evangelizing the advantages of your little grey slab of silicon over the competition, don’t feel too bad about it.

You were made that way.

With thanks to my sister, the psychologist.

Peter.

“Why doesn’t every smartphone have a mute switch and a camera button? The mute switch is a huge time saver and a camera button is a must-have for grabbing a decent snap in a hurry. Many phones have one or the other, but not many have both.”

How could I not reprint this comment from Rob about PDA-247- “I’ve been a regular visitor to your site since I had a Sony Clie NR70V, I use your site as a kind of barometer of where to go next, when nothing much was happening with Palm, I moved to Pocket PC. FS Pocket Loox 720, I enjoyed reading news about what a great choice I’d made for a while and then everyone was getting converged. I moved to MDA & then O2 Orbit, Orbit 2 before being at a crossroads. Do I go iphone or Android. You may not remember that I e-mailed you for advice at the time about whether these new fangled AGPS chips were any good. You told me they both pretty much used them and they both performed quite well. Decision made – iPhone. What I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is I like the fact you’ve moved with the times and changed the site to reflect this.”

Recently I received an email from a reader who was less than pleased with the direction of PDA-247 these days. Here is the main quote- “I own a Palm Pixi and there is little point visiting anymore because you hardly ever cover Palm news. It is all Apple and Windows Phone so you may as well change the name. If you can’t be more balanced with the news change the name!”

I tried to reason with an email reply, but it fell on deaf ears so I thought I would explain why the content tends to be higher for the iOS and Android platforms. It’s because much more happens of interest on these two platforms.

That could be the end of the article, but it would be quite boring so I will explain further. It seems that many of you own iOS and Android devices and that the other platforms are fighting for minor places in terms of visitor numbers. BlackBerry was doing well last year and numbers were up significantly, but there has been a sharp drop off over recent months. Symbian has not been overly well represented for a long time now and I am still convinced that the overwhelming majority of Symbian users do not do much with their phones besides the basics. Of course many who own the high-end phones do more, but the numbers as a whole are still not high.

Here are some stats showing the visitors to 247 on Saturday who were using a mobile, approx. 30% of the total number-

Windows Phone is also struggling to create any impact at all and despite the relative smallness of PDA-247 in the wider mobile web, the numbers are ‘very’ low indeed. What about webOS? The numbers are even lower for webOS (can’t actually see any). It is a fact of life that iOS and Android are dominating visitor numbers here these days, but that is not the reason for more content being produced for these two platforms.

Running a site that caters for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Symbian and webOS is not easy because the natural tendency would be to just cream off the major news for each platform and have done with it. If I do that, and remember it is just I, the site would be a poor replica of the larger specialist mobile platform sites out there. On the subject of specialist sites, someone using a webOS device should not reasonably expect more news on a multi-platform site than they would get on Pre Central for example, and this applies to all of the other platform-specific sites. Even on some of these sites, it is obvious that content is not easy to come by- take a look around and you will see that interesting Symbian and webOS news is at a premium these days- we cannot make up news, we just report it. PDA-247 has to differentiate itself through commentary, humour, straight talking reviews and a variety of other methods. I don’t pretend that it can compete with the likes of engadget or other sites run by teams of people sat at desks, but I do hope that it brings something slightly different to what is a very crowded mobile web.

So, there is no bias towards a particular platform here. It is merely reflective of what is happening in the market, which I guess is how it should be.

Today’s comment of the day comes from Graham regarding the rise of technology- “My wife is my perfect walking companion and I don’t want her replaced by a phone. (Most of the time anyway!) I don’t want my children to either be asleep or online. I want them to use technology but not be obsessed by it. A friend of mine told me that he has a work colleague who nobody sees for weeks. He arrives early, locks his office door and only communicates with people a few yards by email. I know people for whom the virtual world seems to be more important than the real world.

Last year a woman sent me a message on Facebook to see if I was a person she went to school with. I wasn’t: I just had the same name. I thought I would try and help her find the man she was looking for. Within 10 minutes I had found him, found out where he worked, ascertained that he had 2 daughters, found their Facebook pages and knew the names of their friends. I didn’t email the woman back because it seemed a bit creepy. Facebook seems to have a life of its own. Details that I never told them about appear on my Profile page and it is not always obvious or even possible to remove them.

The technological genie is definitely out of the bottle and I wouldn’t want to put him back, even if that were possible. But I do think we need to be careful and think things through before jumping on the latest bandwagon.”