Stephen Fry - you know, appearances in Blackadder, reads JK Rowling books aloud, did stuff with Hugh "call me House" Laurie - has begun blogging. (We've, umm, borrowed the picture on the right from it.) Given that he's actually a complete gadget freak, who reckons he got the second Mac in the UK (Douglas Adams got the first), has for years gotten his hands on every smartphone he can; I recall him being hired by Psion to unveil something - the ReVo, I think - and using his dry, sarcastic wit to chide them not-so-gently, in his speech to the press launching the damn thing, for not having worked out Mac connectivity.
His first proper posting is on smartphones, and it's not for the hard of thinking, nor the short of time: it runs to 5,300 words and change, even though as he notes he's
writing this in short bursts of time between filming in the middle of rural Norfolk, where GPRS, let alone EDGE, is a rare, momentary treat. This means I haven't been able to check up on all my facts all the time: sometimes a tethered modem DUN connection allows me to jack into the matrix, but mostly I'm in a field fondly fingering a phone.
He calls Palm's recently-cancelled Foleo "one of the most astonishing public suicide attempts in the history of this industry", tries the HTC WinMob, and curses the Sony Ericsson W900i as "a crushing, lowering, fury-inducing disappointment. Just how dumb are the software engineers, designers and marketeers at Sony E? Believe me, I so wanted this to be good. Instead, it is nothing more than a gesture, an under-considered, badly implemented nod at the market."
And he has an iPhone. Which works: "I have a full working model because, as a green carded US resident alien, I have an American bank account and billing address, without which AT&T authorisation would be impossible."
Does he like it? Sort of. "It's one thing to want to keep the proprietary system closed, but to present a device sealed in digital Araldite is a Bad Idea." Physical keyboards? "I'm sorry Steve, but physical keyboards are okay. They're fine. When in your iPhone introductory keynote late last year you dissed the stylus and keyboard, you may have noticed a deafening silence as tumbleweed and sage-brush whizzed through the hall. It is certainly true that the virtual kb used in the iPhone gets better the more you use it. It is also true that the glossary autocorrect system is immensely impressive. But I challenge anyone to type an email as fast on an iPhone than I can on a BB [BlackBerry] or Treo."
There's more, much more. Clearly, he's a man with a budget and time on his hands for gizmos. (And he'll tell you the difference between disinterested and uninterested, though of course Guardian readers know that already...) Stephen, any chance you could you drop us a line about reviewing?
