I very much thought that this school year would be less busy than the last, affording me more time to do things other than direct school work. So far, I’ve been sorely mistaken about this: despite doing one less subject, I seem to have just as much work at present to the point where I’ve fallen behind on pretty much everything else. I have a million items in my RSS reader: comics, blog posts, lolcats and the like; my inbox is utterly out of control; and I am missing deadlines for things like the recent election to the new board of Wikimedia UK. On top of all this I’m supposed to be applying to university, organise/enter various debating things, and of course it would be nice if I could do some, you know, reading of those things called books. I just don’t seem to be very efficient at getting school work done, probably because I’m usually such a perfectionist regarding such things, and hence I have no time for anything else. Any hopes of doing Wikimedia stuff this year aside from my minimal jobs as I did last year have very much vanished.

This conception of things getting easier as I advance through stages of education is of course a very common one. A friend of my father rung me up the other day to ask after his website which I am supposed to manage (another thing which I have fallen behind on) and hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that this is simply never the case. Education always works by insisting that the current stage is vastly more important than the last. GCSEs mean nothing once you start A-levels. Presumably A-levels will be entirely insignificant once you start university. And once you’ve done a degree you’ll probably be told that everyone has one, and you should try and get a masters. And then a PhD… and it just goes on. Currently I have an idea that once I get to university things will be better because I won’t have to worry constantly about passing exams and I will be able to just enjoy my subject and let it flow in naturally but of course this won’t happen; they’ll just be more exams. This silly idea I have that once I get into university everything will be marvelous and I will be able to breathe a sigh of relief is just as unreasonable as a belief that GCSEs are the be all and end all of education.

Applying to university is a process I’m currently involved in, as noted. These days it’s been privatised to within an inch of its life and is done entirely over the web, and is known as UCAS, or the University and Colleges Admissions System. Applying involves filling in lots of information - qualifications, employment, contact details and the like - but also in writing a personal statement, or set of reasons why you want to do the courses (up to five at five institutions). This is by far the hardest bit. We’re told to mix academic achievements and enthusiasm with hobbies and interests, but linking all of this together is very difficult. The other problem is that I could fiddle with my statement for ever, messing around with wording and clarifying and the like, and I’d end up never submitting it, so it’s just a case of getting it written and as good as possible and then just hoping for the best and hitting send. Conflicting comments don’t help either. While my form tutor says the statement is ‘perfect’ and that she would eat her hat if I didn’t get in to either Oxford or Durham (my top two choices), my family are more criticial of my wording. What’s also difficult is selecting my other three choices of where to apply. Open days and prospecti generally provide little more than advertising material and while I’ve obviously looked into and visited my top two choices there doesn’t seem much to gain from the others. Yet the chance of not getting into my top two is high and so I need to pick places I will eventually be happy with; I don’t trust my form tutor’s hat-eating at all. So I think I’m going to put Birmingham, York and Nottingham down, all for Maths and Philosophy, and we shall see what happens.

Sorry for a very all over the place post. I’ve just got so much to do and think about at the moment.

I’ve long been a big fan of the iPhone, which I’m sure needs no introduction: this device is a mobile phone at heart but can also browse the web in the same way a desktop does, pinpoint you on a map using GPS and give routes and directions, use instant messenging (MSN, YIM, AIM, Google Talk etc.), act as a scientific calculator and a great deal more all in a neat little device. Last Tuesday it came out on Pay as you Go, and I decided to go for it, the main reason being the Internet access available anywhere with a mobile signal, and secondarily for the phone side. Given that I don’t use my mobile phone much PAYG is ideal for sending the odd text and receiving (but never making) calls. I won’t go into the dull story of actually getting hold of the thing here, *mumble* silly debit cards. Porting my old phone number between networks also wasn’t much fun, but I managed.

Despite the hardened geeks of freenode staff heckling me as an Apple fanboy who was buying a locked down device for a ridiculous amount of money, my experience so far has been extremely positive. The iPhone may be missing a lot of features (its camera is of low quality compared to other phones and has no flash, it can’t forward text messages, it can’t send multimedia messages, it can’t bluetooth files around etc.) but what it does do it does so very well, and software features can be added later. In hardware terms it’s fantastic: a below-par camera doesn’t bother me as if I want to take photos properly I would use, er, an actual camera. So while there are things that I would change, things that can be changed in software updates I do hope Apple will roll out (which is likely given that now Google’s Android platform has arrived there is finally some smartphone competition to force Apple into improvements), I have in my pocket a fantastic little device. It is my web browser, SMSer, e-mail reader, music player, direction finder, IRC and SSH client, emergency torch (we had a power cut tonight so this was handy), Twitter client, notepad (although I still like having my trusty ‘collected notes’ commenplace book), clock/alarm/stopwatch/countdown, ping/whois utility, light distraction (simple games), eBook reader (not yet, I intend to look into this), RSS reader (this is one of the main reasons I got it, to try and keep up with blogs and things, and of course once you have the web a world of opportunity is opened. Having all this with me all the time is great.

I could blah for ages about all of the things I’ve just listed but I’ll try and keep to the more notable pros and cons. Firstly, what stands out? The touch-screen interface is very effective. Only very occasionally do I find the phone not doing what I want it to do and this is usually because I have my other hand touching the phone and pressing buttons without me realising. Everything flows together nicely and I am getting pretty fast with the on-screen keyboard. Even if it takes up half the screen during use, and is very easy to hit the wrong keys on, the auto-correct means I don’t go wrong very often, and it is learning things that I type frequently already, such as ‘fn’ for freenode which it would probably thechange to an actual two letter word for any other users. The IRC client that I have been using turns off auto-correct and the amount I rely on it very quickly becomes apparent: my messages to the SilentFlame channel last night were often extremely garbled. The lack of copy-and-paste abikity is a pain but software problems can be fixed, and with the ability to e-mail URLs and the like it’s not that bad. As shown in the picture attached to this paragraph, texting is done very well. Messages are sorted into a conversation view with whomever you have messaged. For me this is fantastic. Not only does it mean I no longer fail to understand replies to my messages sent after I have forgotten entirely what I wrote, but as a user of Gmail since 2004 I am obsessed with keeping archives of all messages so this makes me happy.

Since I’ve had the phone for over a week I have certainly experienced some less pleasant aspects, but as noted above these are mainly software related. The phone has crashed several times: hard reboots don’t always get all the downloaded applications working again, although they often do. Updating a particular app often fixes all the rest. In general the phone can be quite temperamental and slows down a lot at times for no visible reason. There are no background processes, meaning that I can’t stay connected to, say, Google Talk, and go and do something else as nothing can run unless it is actually on the screen. The built in e-mail client is rubbish (thankfully Google’s iPhone-adapted Gmail web-based app is brilliant (as shown next to this paragraph) so I can use that, but that is of course slower than a local program) as it doesn’t support threading at all so is utterly unusable for me as I have mailing lists clogging up my inbox (which is out of control right now, so sorry if an e-mail of yours still hasn’t been answered). Many people have complained about the e-mail client and it could definitely do with improving. The battery life of the phone is appalling when the web is used over WiFi or 3G as these both drain battery, but this is because battery technology just hasn’t caught up with transmission yet. In terms of off-phone issues, 3G coverage really isn’t fantastic so I am often reduced to dial-up Internet speeds. This is fine in my view for reading e-mail and RSS feeds, but it is a shame O2 don’t have better coverage. Being as the iPhone is Apple, I am forced into using iTunes to both activate, upgrade and backup the phone, and to download music onto it. iTunes is in my view a terrible piece of software that I personally find very hard to use, so I’m annoyed I have to use it, but I know a lot of people love it.

While the iPhone may be a great device, I’m obviously not keen at all on the locked down nature of it. As soon as people heard I was getting it, most of the school seemed to commence shouting me down as a consumerist and a capitalist, with my feeble defence of wanting it for a very specific purpose of web browsing not bearing much weight. Philosophically it is very unsound. It’s using a corporate operating system with Apple vetting all applications that can be installed on it. But while I would never choose this over a free alternative, these is not in this case an alternative. I run my computer on Ubuntu because it’s great both functionally and philosophically, but I have Windows installed because I have to in order to play games. I have the iPhone as it is the best choice if I want a phone that does all of the above. So I think I’m in a reasonable position, given the world I’m in.

Overall then, I think my £350 has been spent wisely as I have a great device that does what I expected and does it well, giving me something very useful to have around. Given that I spend my money on little else, I decided to go for it, and am pleased I did. I heartily recommend this to people who would make use of the web to the extent I do. If not, it’s not worth it, as it’s then just a fancy phone with a nice MP3 player.