Been head down bum up for a while, that’s busy with work to the rest of you! But recently noticed the spate of TV and Radio adverts featuring the nasty piece of work that is Knock-off Nigel, the kind of steals from the office whip round and the communal fridge, oh and downloads films??? Yes the movie industry if trying to edjukate us that these types are the criminal fringe or lowest form of man and are not to be trusted, easily to spot, they have cheap films! The most annoying element of the whole ad is the lack of branding or underwriting. It’s clearly a message no one wants to actually put their name to? You pay for loads of TV and Radio air time and you don’t want to brand it?? That’s because they know it will have a back lash, and they don’t know just how much of one there will be, so these companies that want to classify music and video copyright infringement alongside terrorism and gross fraud don’t want you to know it’s them, in case you don’t think that one or two cd-r albums or the odd dvd-r film brands you a scum of the earth type.
However it doesn’t take genuis to source the advertiser, the website promoting the Knock-off Nigel campaign equally has no reference to the owner. But a whois look-up show it registered to ‘ Lara Joseph’ of ’80-110 New Oxford Street London WC1A 1HB’, hhmmm, but a search for the postcode quickly turns up the office of Universal Pictures….! So there you go, Universal want everyone who has ever obtained a film without paying the full RRP to be classified as someone who is not be trusted and is likely to steal from their grannies purse. But apparently all the employees at Universal are halo holding RRP angels.
Grow some balls UP. I fully expect that a UP droid will crawl this page and organise a firearms unit to be despatched asap to take me down.
I am glad I am not a UFO spotter looking on the net for any non-restricted information, that’s even worse apparantly!
Wow, in a very smart and future focussed move, Nokia, Symbian’s biggest supporter and shareholder has bought the remaining shares and promptly turned them over to the Symbian Foundation (Read the press release here). A pretty damn fine present for the worlds most popular mobile phone platform as it reaches it’s 10th birthday.
This may be a suprise, but when you consider the moves and pace of the open-source mobile platforms, it is an essential move to avoid Symbian being left behind.
Great news for consumers, at this rate the mobile phone platform community will be makig an example for desktop platforms to follow.
As an avid mobile developer it is good news to see that the options of operating systems are soon to be widened with the release of Google’s Android. Recent demos of the abilities of this new OS and it’s claim that it should port to any mobile phone with a 200+MHz processor means that at last mobile users won’t have their phones limited by a manufacturers bodged job at an OS, like the LG viewty.
What is really exciting is this will mean that phones should date quite as quickly as they currently do. The UK mobile market is one of the fastest and most advanced, couple this with the need to have the latest application and function on the phone, equates to a very high turn over in handsets. This is poor for the environment and also causing manufacturers to rush out the next phone and in many cases too early. This also affects a third-party developers ability to build and deploy apps before the phone is old news.
The other exciting factor about this approach and separation of OS from hardware means that applications can be shared from device to device, no longer will consumers feel penned in by their manufacturer badge or feel jealous of the way their friends phone works. The amount of times I have heard Nokia owners who have bought another manufacturers phone say ‘I preferred the way my old Nokia menus worked’, Nokia’s tend to use Symbian, the current solo open OS.
It’s not just Google that is on this bandwagon, Ubuntu are porting to smaller and smaller boxes, plus there is LiMo and OpenMoko. All these are heading, in my opinion, in an exciting direction and one that will slow the turnover of handsets by adding value to each one, which benefits the consumer and the planet and the developer. It’s all good.
As an avid mobile developer it is good news to see that the options of operating systems are soon to be widened with the release of