A couple of days ago I bought an iPhone 3G. Today I returned it. Although it’s an amazing device and revolutionary, it didn’t really suit me. My Nokia N95 is pretty much exactly what I want at the moment – it’s like comparing a quality family car like our Ford Focus C-MAX with a supercar such as the Koenigsegg CCX:
Whilst it’s great looking at and borrowing someone elses supercar, you wouldn’t want to go to Tesco’s in it, would you? It would be impractical. And so the iPhone proves to be. Here’s the 3 main reasons why I returned the iPhone 3G:
1. It’s difficult to text
With the N95, as with most mobile phones, it’s possible to compose and send text messages with one hand. It’s not straightforward to text on the iPhone – it requires two hands and is fiddly to enter characters using the QWERTY keyboard.
2. Hannah wasn’t happy
Although if I’d really liked it this wouldn’t have been an issue, my wife didn’t like the fact I’d taken out a contract with 02 when I’ve still got a few months remaining on my Orange contract. We get free broadband and VOIP calls with the latter contract, you see… :-p
3. It’s painfully proprietary
Although you can jailbreak it and there are workaround to create your own ringtones on the iPhone, it’s not always straightforward. It makes you feel like you’re using someone else’s device rather than your own. It’s kind of the same reason I bought and then returned a Nintendo Wii earlier this year.
What I’d like to see is a touchscreen tablet, slightly larger than the iPhone, that can connect both to wireless networks and to mobile broadband via HSDPA. I’d carry that around in addition to my N95 (or equivalent). Either that, or something that has a touchscreen and a keyboard… 😀
Before I begin, let me just say that this IS actually easy. To put things into perspective, I didn’t opt for GCSE Electronics 13 years ago because my soldering skills were so bad. I hadn’t touched another soldering iron again – until last night. Anyone with an ounce of hand-eye coordination will be fine… 😉
I was fairly gobsmacked when I came across Johnny Chung Lee’s video of how to create an Interactive Whiteboard using a Nintendo WiiMote and infra-red light pen. It came courtesy of a blog post by Mr Platts (inexplicably down at the time of writing – cached version here). The video by Johnny, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, is here:
Is this all we’ll need in the future for interactive presentations?
Excited blog posts and Twitter-comments have been flying back-and-forth across the edublogosphere this week. Why? Because it’s now possible to build a cheap interactive whiteboard using the controller from a Nintendo Wii.
I first came across the idea via Mr Platts’ blog which links to the video by Johnny Chung Lee below. Since then, CoolCatTeacher Vicki Davis has done her usual high-quality synthesis job on what’s out there. As she’s a bit of a beacon, the comments section looks like it’s going to be useful.
What I think everyone’s missed, however, is the fact that mobile phones are due to have projectors built into them in the very near future. This would be an awesome system. You could roll up to do an interactive presentation with nothing but a mobile phone, WiiMote and IR pen. Even better, buy several of the latter and students could use their own phones to do the projecting! I really do think someone needs to set up a web store selling those custom-built infra-red pens. I’d buy one. 😀
