Marketing people are so original aren’t they? I used to be in undated with iPod giveaway offers in my inbox, but in a stroke of genius marketers have found a new junk cheapie to give away. It’s an iPad and it’s a lot less useful than those ipods we used to give away!

I have to acknowledge the iPhone. It has introduced me to the pleasure of Exchange ActiveSync. It is hard to imagine working without a unified mail box and contacts list now.

However, on Thursday l received 52 phone calls and by 3:00 pm my iPhone was dead flat.

Now of course there are a plethora of charging options for the iPhone. Charging sleeves, battery boost packs and car chargers. But of course the simplest and most practical battery power solution for serious users was sacrificed by Apple on the altar of design.

Not Good Enough Apple!

A phone that has 200,000 iFart apps available but cannot practically run all day is a joke!

Fortunately, the benefits of Exchange Active sync have long since been realised by users of tonnes of other phones running Windows Mobile and Android, so now we have a choice!

On other phones like the HTC Desire or HD2 can remove the battery and replace it with a freshly charged one. Instant double battery life!

And, thanks to the fact that you can remove the battery, you can also geta spare battery charger like this one.

No more stuffing around, just plug your phone and battery in overnight and off to work you go!

Now that is a phone for business, not just fashion!

Not wanting to be political, but the full capacity of my 100mbps connection is practically untouched and my real broadband needs are much more mobile oriented than fixed line.

My brother cannot even get broadband at his place in Cranbourne, Victoria and he operated entirely from Telstra NextG. For a few years my own Telstra NextG connection on my Tablet PC was equivalent if not faster than the slow ADSL 2 speeds that I could get at home.

I hate to say it, but implementing better wireless technology like 4G makes a lot more sense than Fibre To The Home… After all, why should we be confined to fixed lines to do what we need to do. Notebooks, Netbooks, Smart Phones, iPads, iPhones and Tablet PCs are not the future, they are very much here and now. They would all benefit much more from better wireless coverage than fixed line broadband.

Update: Judging by the plethora of idiots people commenting on stories on the major news websites, it appears that the NBN represents the politics of distraction.

Punters and politicians are getting wound up about technical things that way out of their depth. They are throwing around billions when none of them have a clue what they are talking about (i.e. they wouldn’t know an ST fibre connector from an SC) , and I guess that was the gambit… What did I expect?

I’m working away at the Qantas Club in Melbourne last week, waiting for a flight to Launceston.

I’m on the communal bench, working on a video on my Fujitsu T900 with full HD AVCHD video.

I’m cutting an editing away, and I love using touch and pen for this job, so I’m in slate mode.

I get interrupted by an important phone call, and while I’m on the phone, this guy comes up and sits right in front

of me (kind of strange because there is plenty of space) and he pulls out his iPad and starts tapping away.

He stays there for all of five minutes under my nose, as if to say “Look at me!’ But by the time I’m off the phone, he’s gone!

I wanted to say to him, “yes, you have an ipad… I have one too, isn’t that nice? Mine’s at home, now excuse me, I have Important work to do!”

I really like the way Motion pushes the boundaries with their products. Their display technology is the best of the best, Gorilla Glass is a must have for Tablet PCs and their battery technology is well in front of their competitors too.

We’re heading to Mackay in North Queensland this week with a bunch of Motion Computing J3500s and Motion Computing F5vs for the Queensland Mining and Engineering Expo. 2 years ago, Motion Computing Tablets were a marginal possibility for mining duties, but now thanks to the ruggedness of tablets like the F5v and J3500 – which have seriously impressed companies like Rio Tinto, Newcrest and Northbridge Mining – the Motion Computing  brand can be found in many mining  situations.

So congratulations to Motion Computing on winning the Microsoft OEM Partner of the Year Award. Well deserved!

Don’t get me wrong, I love the T900. It is certainly my first choice of convertible Tablet PCs. Fujitsu have been extremely reliable for us (less than 1% failure rates so far which is remarkable), and the T900 will continue to be my mobile video editing machine due to it’s performance profile.

I’m switching to the Motion Computing J3500 because of it’s smaller profile, dual battery setup (to be fair I could do this with the T900 too) and the Gobi mobile broadband. We don’t have mobile broadband as an option on the T900 here in Australia unfortunately.

So it’s onto the Motion Computing J3500 with touch. Here is a video that we shot to give you a little preview of it.

After using the J3500 and T900 for a few months now I am extremely impressed with Windows 7 and touch. The only drawback that I have found is that I am constantly touching the Wacom Interactive Pen Display in my office with my finger. I have to remind myself…

I’m currently using the Fujitsu T900 around the home and office for general duties like video editing, music recording and note taking. It has been one of my favourite Tablet PCs to date. It has an Intel Core i7 processor (serious grunt) and features a Wacom active digitizer and multi-touch panel.

It’s amazing to think about how far Tablets have come since I had my first HP TC1000. To use a Tablet, you used to have to take a massive hit on performance. But this Fujitsu T900 and the new Motion J3500 proves that those days are long gone.

I was using the Apple iPad at home, but I found it way too simple for even my simple tasks… so I switched over to the T900. What I have found though is that I have not swivelled the screen of the T900 out of slate mode in a couple of weeks now. I have also practically not used the iPad since.

I’ve found that I’m using touch much more than I thought I would. Touch is no substitute for the Wacom active digitizer pen. The digitizer is perfect as a substitute for a keyboard. It’s perfect for drawing, and more importantly note taking – which I do a heck of a lot of. But touch is great for navigating, web browsing and really short text entry – for example entering URLs.

So effectively I’m currently using the T900 as a slate… But it’s an unnecessarily bulky and heavy slate. And that’s why I’m looking forward to the Motion J3500.

A lot of people that I speak to are a bit apprehensive about going to slate Tablets – I know I was when I first saw the Motion LE1600 at a shop in Sydney several years ago. I thought it was a bit crazy and I took refuge in my hybrid TC1100 at the time. What I’ve found is that particularly since Windows 7, I need the keyboard less and less… at least when I’m mobile.

When I’m in the office, I have the tablet docked with a 23” Full HD screen and an ergonomic keyboard and mouse. A lot of people don’t realise that slate tablets like the Motion J3500 can be docked, so you really don’t miss out on the keyboard at all. Like the TC1100, the J3500 also has a mobile keyboard that you can take with you, but personally I’ve found that I no longer need it.

So for me, the J3500 is the ultimate mobile work tool. It will also do some serious duty at play.

My wife and I both have iPhones, so far we have resisted the iPod. We now have an iPad too and whenever I pick it up it just feels… well, magical!

The friggin’ iPad took me four hours to set up (thanks to ridiculous and bizarre app store country restrictions). I have no music, video or pictures on it because it is just impossible to work with that iTunes rubbish on PC. Ditto for the iPhone. But they are both still amazing!

The web browser on the iPad is built to be worked around. It doesn’t do flash or multi-tasking, so when I went to watch the video on how to use the Dragon Dictation app I just got this big white square where the video should be. And yet it still feels…awesome!

What the hell is going on here? Why do these devices have so many limitations and yet I am helpless to resist? Am I that suggestible?

I did some research and found that Apple are using NLP and hypnosis techniques to sell their products to you. Allow me to explain:

Music, emotional anchoring, colours, hypnotic phrases, keywords… it’s all there and it makes for one amazing show.

The following hypnotic NLP ad is so slick that I want to buy a 27” iMac now. I would run Windows 7 on it though.

…tremendous, unique, so much further, bigger, higher, standard, faster, more, truly our best iMac ever!!!

Is Johnny Ive Derren Browns lost brother? He could be!!!

Of course, I can’t say that I figured this out myself… Thanks to Fake Steve Jobs for this: http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/jonny-uses-nlp-hypnosis-to-make-you.html

So I plugged my iPhone in to my PC and the insufferable iTunes application opened up. I thought that I might be able to drag some music from my collection right onto the phone icon in iTunes and hey presto – new music. It was never going to happen.

It seems that the iPhone is so amazingly clever that you can’t do that. No, Apple insist that I wipe everything off the phone and fully synchronise with this PC. How long is that gonna take? I only had a few minutes.

I initially loaded the music onto the iPhone from my media centre PC (which seems logical right?) but today I was in the office using my office PC. I have 4 PCs that I might use for this task too. Just load some files on right? Nup.

You see because I have six  different PCs that I might use for this task (too many for Apple to deal with by a factor of five – oh but they will actually let you “authorise” five of them). I would have to have all six (actually five, the sixth one Apple won’t allow me to have) loaded up with exactly the same songs. That means converting my entire CD collection from wma format to Apple’s proprietary control system on six (five) different PCs. Yeah right…

But that is the only way Apple will allow me to add to my iPhone music. So now I have this useless thing that won’t allow me to add music without wiping everything off first and waiting an hour for the privilege of starting again. FFS Apple must hate me! Why do they insist on treating me with such disdain and contempt?

I say that because there is simply no valid technical reason that Apple should not allow you to drop mp3 and wma files straight onto the iPhone to play (even through iTunes). So there are only two choices left. Either:

1. Apple can’t develop decent software
2. Apple insist on complicating things to the point that consumers will lose all will power, give up and buy everything through iTunes.

I’m inclined to think that it’s number 2, and that’s exactly the reason that I bought an iRiver instead of an iPod for my car in the first place.

I avoid buying music from iTunes like the plague. Why would I when I can download DRM free mp3 files from Bigpond for less without having to navigate using that cesspool of a program called iTunes?

So buyer beware: Whilst iPhone was once the best thing since sliced bread, don’t expect that it is a phone and an mp3 player. It is not an mp3 player, just a portal to the Apple iTunes revenue farm. Put your credit card away and don’t give it to them.

The app store kept me interested for a little while, but I can seriously say that I don’t rely on any of them. In fact apart from the facebook app, I wouldn’t use any of the 150 apps that I have downloaded on a weekly basis. I’ve even been fully rehabilitated from the games.

I am seriously regretting the purchase of this iPhone. I had a play with the HTC Android phone and the HTC Sense with WinMo on it at my customers office yesterday. The HTC sense is a very nice piece of kit that runs fast and smooth. It’s about friggin time that a Windows Mobile device offered a decent experience, and the HTC sense delivers. Bring on WinMo7 too.

The Windows Mobile move to integrate social media with email and contact management is just awesome. Even the HTC sense makes the Apple iPhone app concept look like kindergarten.

Sorry Apple, I’m over it. I want to load my music on my phone! As soon as I can I’m outta here! I would take a HTC sense of this any day. Making the switch back to PC.