South Bank Show II

Another image from the London trip, this time of the Royal Festival Hall.

South Bank Show

Recently, I found myself in London for a couple of days, at a fairly dry conference. However, I did have an evening to myself and as I was staying south of the river, spent some time on the South Bank. As I hadn't bothered to take a camera with me, I ended up making some images with my camera phone.

In case you don't know, this is the front of the National Theatre. A few more images to follow.

London, Aye

We were in London on Saturday. Having visited the London Eye, we walked up Victoria Street to the Apollo Theatre. On the way, I made a few images using my camera phone, having decided not to lug a DSLT around with me all day.

Struck by Lightning

Recently, I attended a conference at the RAF Museum at Cosford. The actual conference facilities aren't great, but you do get to wander around the museum during the breaks. One of the halls has aircraft hanging from the roof, like Airfix models from a bedroom ceiling.

There was lots of stuff to interest an aircraft geek, but the one exhibit that stood out for me was the English Electric Lightning pictured above.

The design of this aircraft is so simple. Its basically two jet engines - mounted vertically, rather than horizontally - with a cockpit at the front. The wings and tail are swept in such a way that the result resembles a flying fish, of all things. 

This arrangement was so successful that the Lightning was the main interdiction fighter of the RAF for thirty years, finally being replaced by the Tornado - an aircraft which has never been considered adequate in that role.

The Lightning had a party piece which was often to been at airshows during the sixties and seventies - this was a vertical climb from rotation, followed by a "tail stand" before transition to level flight. 

Someone that I worked with many years ago told me how he had witnessed this display go badly wrong. The story went that the aircraft in question took off and climbed vertically into low cloud, then re-emerged a few seconds later travelling tail first. The pilot ejected - too late - as the aircraft hit the ground and exploded, killing him outright. What made this incident particularly memorable for my colleague - who was in the RAF at the time - was the fact that he was standing next to the pilot's wife.

Anyway, the images here were made with my Nokia 1020, with some post-processing in GiMP.

Axbridge Afternoon

Another image from our afternoon in Axbridge, made with the Nokia 1020. The mono conversion was done in post using GIMP.

A Grave Mistake

More than two tears on, we're still trying to get rid of stuff from my father's house. This led, last Saturday to an unsuccessful attempt to attend a car boot sale. I won't bore you with the details, but the upshot was that, in the late afternoon, we found ourselves mooching round Axbridge.

This image was made with my camera phone, from a vantage point near the Sea Cadet centre which is in the old station. The body of water in the distance is Cheddar Reservoir and the feature on the horizon just to the right of centre is Nyland Hill.

Scrapheap Challenge

The holidays are over and I had to take my car in the get the water pump replaced. This image was made whilst I was waiting for my lift, having dropped the car off first thing in the morning.

I'm really pleased with the 1020 as a camera, somewhat less so as a phone. I'm having a bit of a hard time getting Tu GO working at the moment - I suspect that there will be a post about this in due course.

Harbouring Strange Desires

Another image from the Whitby trip and a further attempt at making images of people. This one was taken at Whitby harbour - the couple are sitting on the breakwater and I was on the beach behind, on the Old Town side of the river. That's the East Lighthouse beyond.

The place was absolutely heaving, so I was amazed that I managed to isolate them, although I have to admit to cloning out a woman who was sitting to the right of the lighthouse. Even so, I'm not sure that the image works as it stands - maybe if the couple had been looking at the lighthouse rather than the seagulls something.

Phoning Around

Another image made with my Nokia 1020. This one is of Scarborough Castle, taken from the promenade, near the Sea Life Centre. The mono conversion was done in post, with GIMP. Nice cloudscape.

For Arguments Sake

Another image from the Whitby trip. This one was made in the Old Town with my Nokia 1020 - the name appealed to me and it was easier to get my phone out in the dense crowd on Church Street than wrestle my DSLR out of my camera bag. Yet again, the phone made a good job of some difficult lighting conditions, in my view.

Broken Symmetry

Another image from the Margam Park visit. For reasons that are too boring and convoluted to go into, I didn't have a DSLR with me, so it seemed like a good opportunity to try out the Nokia 1020 that I've recently upgraded to.

I think that it coped rather well with the difficult lighting conditions. The main problem I find with it is trying to get the framing right whilst holding the thing at arms length - I haven't quite got it right here, the image could have done with being somewhat more symmetrical.

I, Phone

I've recently upgraded my phone. Having lived with a Nokia Lumia 800 for two years, I've now bought a Lumia 1020 – the one with the 42 mega-pixel camera. I used it to make the above image during a recent visit to Margam Park in South Wales. I've done a bit of post processing, but I think that the camera has done a great job in difficult lighting conditions.

Anyway, I can sense some of you shaking your heads at my bizarre decision to buy another Lumia, but I've enjoyed owning the 800 – I've certainly stood out from the zombie hoards of the Android/iOS duopoly.

In any case, I actually like Windows Phone. It’s very simple and intuitive to use and it compares well with Android in that the phone comes with the latest version installed and will get regular updates for the rest of its life. And the desktop sync on my wife’s Sammie SIII is appallingly bad, whereas the 800 has always worked like a charm.

Then there’s the iPhone. Some of my friends and acquaintances think that I'm a Microsoft zealot, railing against Apple in the face of all the available evidence. This is not true – I own an iPod Touch, for God’s sake, the 64Gb top of the range model no less, which I really like and use every day.

My beef isn't with Apple in general or any of their products in particular. It’s with their fanbois, who insist on berating me and everyone else about the superiority of Apple products, both in person and through the media. And I'm afraid that they’re just plain wrong.

So, let’s get one thing straight. The fundamental difference between Microsoft and Apple isn't about one of them being being design led, or having superior corporate ethics, or anything so intangible. It’s all about business models – pure and simple.

Apple provide cheap or free software on over-priced hardware. Microsoft make over-priced software to run on commodity hardware. That’s it in a nutshell. The rest is all marketing.

I suspect that the TCO of either company’s comparable products over, say, five years is about the same, although my 1020 is a damn site cheaper than an iPhone. [Let’s quietly draw a veil over the Surface and the long forgotten and unloved Zune, shall we?]

And that neatly brings us back to Windows Phone and its one main downside, which is the lack of native apps. A couple of years down the line from the first real tranche of Windows Phones, very few businesses have ported their apps over or are looking likely to. But then, I mainly use my phone as a communications device – text, email, voice (remember that?) – which it’s really very good at.

As to the future, I think that the continued dominance of Android and iOS is less certain than some might imagine.

The installed Android base is fragmented and that will only get worse as newer versions are released and manufacturers continue to ignore the need to update older handsets. It remains to be seen at what point developers will find it impossible to make apps that will run across enough of the installed base to make it worth their while.

Add to that the fact that the market for Android handsets is a manufacturer’s bloodbath. Only Samsung are able to make a profit off the back of a mind-boggling marketing spend required to shore up their position as an aspirational brand running an OS more associated with the budget end of the market. The likes of Sony have to scrabble with the other also-rans attempting to differentiate their product, which drives further fragmentation of the OS.

Android may eventually turn out to be the real life example of the Tragedy of the Commons that economists have been looking for.

As for the iPhone, it may be huge in Europe and the States, but not elsewhere – Apple have completely failed to crack China, for example. Like many other innovators, Apple may well see its lead eroded and finally overhauled by commodity manufacturers offering a Good Enough^tm product at a fraction of the price. Its only way out of that bind is to innovate some more, something that it still has to prove it can do without Steve Jobs.

It also amazes me that we haven’t seen an OS developed in China or Africa on the world stage yet.

[Mobile phones are a big deal in Africa, where landline networks are generally lacking. However, the smart-phone has yet to really penetrate that market, which is still dominated by cheap and robust feature phones. Whilst the major players are still focusing on Western and Asian markets, Africa is likely to make or break them in the next few years.]

That might just be a matter of time. In any case, I wouldn't bet against Windows Phone finally emerging from all of this as the dominant mobile platform, not just yet anyway.