Song Of The Week: 28/06/2010

Well well well, what’s this making a reappearance after a nine month drought? It’s only ‘Song Of The Week’!

That’s right, every week (when I remember) I post up a song for that week, a song I think deserves to be featured or highlighted.

So what have I picked for the first post back???

This week’s RHP Song Of The Week

Where The Streets Have No Name

U2 and Muse

Now the more eagle-eyed amongst you (aka all of you) will notice that I’ve listed two artists for this song. U2 of course wrote and performed the original song as part of their 5th album ‘The Joshua Tree’, but at Glastonbury two days there was a very unique performance of it.

As part of Muse’s headline set, The Edge came on stage to perform this classic U2 song with them. I was blown away by it, clearly one of the best performances of this years Glasto festival. I’ve always rated Matt Bellamy as an amazing singer and performer, but he stepped seamlessly into Bono’s boots, not an easy task. The end result was nothing short of epic as two of Britains biggest bands joined together.

And so here it is, the performance from Glasto, I hope you enjoy it and if you did, why not download the original from iTunes?!

iHave an iPhone 4!

But was it worth it?

It’s no secret that I’ve wanted an iPhone for a very long time now. I saw them come out in 2007, evolve in 2008, become super quick in 2009 and not ‘revolutionise’ phones again in 2010. However, as a student I never really found the time or money to get myself one of these wonder devices, until now…

As of 2 days ago I’ve become a proud owner of Apple’s latest toy, the iPhone 4. But is this gadget worth all the fuss and of course that hefty price tag? Here’s my view.

The Positives

iPhone 4 is a device full of positives. For me, as someone who’s never even owned a smart phone before, it has blown me away. The touch screen interface is the most intuitive thing I have ever seen. It’s just so simple and easy to understand and use. As Apple say themselves ‘you already know how to use it’ and that couldn’t be more true.

And while we’re on the subject of the screen, it has to be mentioned how vibrant the new retina display is. Apple weren’t lying when they said this is the best screen you will see. It literally does look like reading off paper, a true testament to the device as we know how difficult reading off a screen can be. And try as I might, I cannot distinguish different pixels on it. It’s almost too good.

Apps are also brilliant. I know most of you will already know this from owning older iPhone’s or other smart phones, but the things you can do with this technology. I now have no excuse for not knowing anything/getting lost/seeing my emails/networking with friends/being bored ever again. The raft of apps amazes me, from the fantastic ‘around me’ to the pointless yet brilliant ‘lightsaber unleashed’.

Apple have worked hard on iOS4. There’s multitasking now as well as folders to keep the phone from getting too crowded or overloaded. The A4 chip clearly does it’s job well as I have noticed no slowdown and when using Wi-Fi, hardly any speed loss compared to my laptop which is very impressive. And the design of the phone itself is impeccable with everything shrunk into a smaller package than ever before made mostly believe it or not out of glass! Amazing.

But of course, that design has also led to one of the iPhone 4’s biggest negatives.

The Negatives

So Steve Jobs stood happily on stage just over a month ago and announced that the steel rim of the iPhone 4 is also the antennae. Sounds good, but it causes a big problem. I’m sure by now you’ve read that if you hold the bottom left hand corner of the phone you can dramatically lose your signal. Big whoops.

This is unfortunately a design flaw and Apple won’t be issuing an update to resolve it. But even though it should never have happened, it’s not so bad. I’ve already mastered the new way of holding the phone so that you avoid the sensitive area and it’s not hard at all. In fact it’s already second nature. And should you forget, well the iPhone always lets you know if the signal is lost so you can move your hand and reconnect. Annoying, but not that hard to solve.

Something else which has been a negative to me has been upgrading my Macbook. Sadly, the iPhone 4 it seems is one step too far for my OSX Tiger. So I had to give Apple some more of my cash and upgrade to Snow Leopard. Now I’m not complaining about Snow Leopard, it’s a far superior OS and I love it, but I do find it annoying that I, a loyal Mac user, has to fork out the extra £100 to upgrade, when Windows XP users, still have compatibility straight out of the box. Come on Apple, a bit more backwards compatibility please.

The iPhone 4 (just like previous models) doesn’t properly support bluetooth. In fact bluetooth will only work for headsets (and not even all of them). I fail to see why Apple are so against file transfer when other companies are very happy for you too. It seems to me just slightly backwards for them to lock wireless transfer out on such an advanced machine. Again, a little annoying.

So is it worth buying?

Obviously as with all phones, you have to buy a tariff to go with it. I’m with Vodafone (who I’m so far fairly impressed with) and pay £30 a month with the phone costing £169. I personally do think this is a little steep, but the iPhone does seamlessly do so much more than any other device I’ve ever seen. Apple always charge a premium and I think rightly so, when you compare what they’re doing to any other tech company, they’re miles ahead

So would I still buy the iPhone 4 knowing what I know now? ANYDAY!!!

And I’m not the only one, Apple announced today that the iPhone 4 is it’s most successful launch selling 1.7 million in 3 days!