This article will be updated once the films are processed (and it stops raining long enough to get out there) – in the meantime here’s a rundown of the assembly. Below there is also a video that shows how the shutter mechanism works. As you can see, the shutter is far from a tight fit – I’d recommend keeping the camera in a dark bag (as no lens cap is provided) when not in use if it’s loaded with film.

All the components.

The kit may look daunting if you’ve never taken on a reasonably complex model or project, but it really isn’t. The instructions, in Chinese, are reasonably easy to understand just from the pictures, and it’s crucial to identify which screws are needed for each stage, other than that the plastic parts fit well and need no trimming or finishing.

Start off with some basics:

The tripod mount is the nut, which you place inside the plastic cup then screw to the body with two of the smaller, round-headed screws. An easy start!

Once aligned, simply tighten the screws and then that’s this side of the camera completed.

Shutter Test

1995-1997 – Apple Pippin. Pippin Fails.
2013…?

If Apple DID enter the console market, it would be interesting. Consoles are no longer pure gaming devices; in much the same way that Newton demonstrated what a PDA could be, Nokia, Microsoft and Motorola dominated the smartphone OS and hardware sphere, but it was a very small sphere. The iPhone made smartphones the standard device. A matter of timing, widespread internet, data use and so forth.

Well, Pippin previewed the home appliance idea. Ostensibly a games machine, it offered opportunities for online activity through the TV and so forth. Too soon, like Newton.

Now the consumers are used to downloading content, using their TV as an on-demand system, what Apple does well – making things desirable and intuitive – would apply. So perhaps, as the popularity of fairly deep games on iOS has already proven, if you give the developers the market share and tools they WILL come – the barrier to Mac games development historically was simply that the user base wasn’t broad enough to include a significant number of gamers; the development of the PC as a powerful games and the Mac’s “no games” perception is based on some pretty ancient history formed when PCs began to take over from disparate home computers and Macs were expensive and on the decline under some awful management.

In 2007 who would have thought that anyone could knock Nokia sideways. Particularly a manufacturer of relatively unpopular, expensive computers and rigidly limited MP3 players…

Maybe Apple TV – the Television – will not be an iOS device with a simple processor. Maybe it will be something more akin to the multi-core architectures of Xbox and Playstation. Maybe it’ll still have an ARM-core iOS side for the TV/guide/functions, but a lot of processing clout for games.

The more I use my now 6 year old PS3 with its 1TB HD and huge number of ‘free’ games from PSN+, the less I really care that there’s a hardware box there. It could be inside the TV for all I care. And then maybe I’d find the hassle and space of all these Blu-ray and DVD movies annoying, and be used to Cloud storage working, just as Fibre broadband arrives… and instead of a tenner plus petrol plus parking plus waiting for a security tab to be removed, that £7.99 download or monthly subscription looks very appealing. And maybe I could order a pizza on it as well, and play Angry Birds whilst it downloads… controlling it all from my iPad or iPhone. Maybe when I add up the cost of a new-generation console for £400-600, a good quality large smart TV at £1100+, and all the benefits of Apple’s undeniably good industrial design, a cohesive media environment and so forth, the £1499-1999 cost that at first, seems steep, might actually be tolerable.

No doubt this TV will have a camera. And probably, because it’s cheap, location services (for “Find my TV” if it’s stolen, for example). And Facetime. Find my friends? Want to organise a party whilst sat in the living room; send an invite to everyone within a set distance…

It could just be that Apple are going to enter the console market (if you dismiss the idea that they already did with iOS, the iPod Touch and iPhone; I sold my PSP and Game Boy DSi XL because there was no need to carry more than one device) and if they do… it will be as big as when Sony chose to at the end of 1994.

Unlike the Apple and most third party keyboards, the Tactile Pro uses mechanical Alps keyswitches. Whilst these are not the exact components used in those classic ’80s designs, they are of a similar feel. There’s resistance before the key is pressed, allowing a precise and efficient typing action, and you can either bash away like a machine gun or stroke the keys like a properly trained typist. I’m the former flavour of keyboard operator, with typical speeds between 85 and 150wpm, and the only real drawback of the Matias keyboard is during phone interviews where I simply can’t type and talk at the same time. Anyone in a nearby office is going to be absolutely sure that I’m working though!

I remember the horrors of the original Atari ST keyboard, which required spring assisters to make it tolerable, and this template seems to have been adopted for more and more systems. Apple’s own keyboards got cheaper in the Spindler era – with the low point being the flimsy model supplied with the typical Performa or Centris prior to the iMac’s debut. Yet ergonomically they still towered above the current laptop-esque monstrosity that Apple insists on foisting upon users; the flat aluminium design may look like a Jacob Jensen B&O stereo from the mid ’80s, but as a functional device it is seriously lacking.

The Tactile Pro 3 is not quite perfect for UK users. For some inexplicable reason, the ` and § keys are mislabelled and cannot be corrected – so skipping between windows requires Ctrl-Top Left, rather than Ctrl-Right-of-Left-Shift. I’ve tried a couple of utilities to correct this and whilst the keymap can be changed for characters, it’s not reliable for shortcuts. You can’t pop the keys off and swap them as each row is different, as it should be.

The additional benefits of the Tactile Pro 3 are the 3 USB 2.0 ports. The hub allows enough power for flash drives and similar accessories otherwise unsupported by Apple’s keyboards, and one port is positioned conveniently on the rear of the keyboard.

Having used the Tactile Pro 3 for about six months, there’s minimal key wear and it’s proven a worthwhile upgrade over not only the original Apple keyboards (both white crumb-catcher and aluminium alike), but also the Logitech and generic PC keyboards I have tried. There are few rivals, but even with the couple of alternatives on the market, the Tactile Pro 3 is easy to recommend for any serious writer or programmer working with Mac OS.

A JooJoo, Yesterday.

Whilst the original JooJoo has had a firmware update – detailed below – the big news from Fusion Garage is now that the second-generation JooJoo is coming; and it’s based on Android.

The big headline was a new firmware, taking the device from 0.1.15 to 0.2.27 – and adding USB media support and touchscreen calibration to the setup. Most JooJoo owners will have updated, but for those who haven’t, I took a couple of pictures of the process when the unit updates the touchscreen driver.

Updating firmware for the troublesome touch screen.

Overall the JooJoo’s new firmware is more responsive and addresses a few issues that users had found; however, it remains true that the system is using a particularly clumsy way of presenting an “efficient” UI, is not a particularly efficient computer overall and has a poor battery life. Whilst Fusion Garage insist on trying to push it with their OS and as a “stand alone” product, rather than as a hardware platform for touch computing, it will continue to be compared with similarly inflexible hardware like Android and iOS tablets – and with the many manhours of development time sunk into those platforms, it will continue to come off badly in such comparisons.

Changelog.

Wild JooJoos are pretty hard to find, few made it into the hands of journalists or end users but if you want your own you may track them down on eBay and the like.

(This was originally written in June/July 2010)

Revisiting a review first penned in 2010, and never published as JooJoo, quite rightly had they been able to deliver on their plans, wanted to avoid the negative publicity of their distinctly beta implementation. Rushed to market to try to beat the iPad’s announcement, the JooJoo was pioneering in the tablet wars pushed into the mainstream by Apple’s “Magical” iPad – and a troubled gestation was nothing compared to the difficult childhood and possibly premature demise it suffered.

JooJoo's Software never progressed further.

I took the decision to hold back on this review to give them a chance to work out the bugs – even though I felt it was a fair, and objective report on the system. A year later, with the JooJoo tablet as was a mere memory and no sign of the announced Android tablets, I think Fusion Garage’s flawed attempt at entering the tablet market deserves an airing.

This is a geek and tech site above all else; the actual hardware you get inside the JooJoo is of just as much interest as the overall package. We buy all manner of stuff, just to throw away the hard work of the developers and the considerations of the marketplace in an endeavour to force it to do something it shouldn’t. If you look at the JooJoo as components for your money, your £319 is pretty well spent:

Browsing with multiple windows.

Atom N270 CPU at 1.6GHz, paired to an Nvidia ION chipset (GeForce 3400M and DDR3 memory).
The motherboard and components are high-quality items, well designed, with a good cooling setup given the available space.
12.1″ 1366 x 768 colour LED-backlit display with multitouch capacitive ‘glass’ touchscreen (not sure if it is actually glass yet).
Mini-SATA interface, provided with a 4GB drive. Whether others will work is another matter.
802.11b/g WiFi (the card also provides bluetooth, but the JooJoo has no way of using it with the current OS)
One USB 2.0 port
Webcam
One free Mini-PCIe slot, with associated SIM card slot – destined for 3G upgrades
1GB of memory, in a 200-pin SODIMM – upgradeable to 2GB, 4GB will leave 3.7GB (or less) available to the user but is technically feasible.
What appears to be an EFI BIOS.

Flash-based sites were supported.

You also get a decent capacity battery, stereo speakers, a solid plastic chassis with a thin metal backing plate, and JooJoo OS.

Thin metal chassis hides netbook-class hardware.

Unfortunately, what you don’t get yet is the user interface maturity that makes other platforms appealing. The JooJoo OS makes sense in some regards, but what the user experiences is lacking too much; it’s gone from stripped-down, to “featureless” – a concept that Chandra, the CEO of Fusion Garage, would probably argue was a feature in itself. It’s the most literal description of wrapping hardware around a web browser I’ve seen yet, but it lacks the immediacy and consistency that would make this a good thing. It’s early days, but like most startups the early days may be the only days they get; the iPad was in gestation for six years and the first iteration of what is now named iOS – the original iPhone – came in for a lot of criticism for the choices made. It took Apple two years after launch to get the iPhone (and as such the iPad) fully featured enough to be a genuinely solid product that appealed across the board; if anyone else had launched the 2G iPhone it would have sunk without trace and taken the iPad project with it.

Browser-based UI

With the iPhone however, users saw the potential in the OS and the hardware, and worked to break Apple’s limitations and make it fit what they wanted it to do. With the JooJoo, users see the potential in the hardware and throw away the OS, leaving yet another Atom-based unit struggling under the weight of Mac OS or a full-fat Linux distro – or even Windows crammed into that 4GB SSD. All of which are invariably flawed, slow and pointless exercises in the real world. Fusion Garage is heading in the right direction but it hasn’t had time to get there yet.

The concept is pretty much sound – the iPad has demonstrated that with the right environment, an unfamiliar OS can be intuitive and powerful under the hood without having to be slow. The hardware is easily good enough, this combination should turn in a Geekbench score into the high 800s easily – almost three times the iPad’s benchmark. What needs to be addressed is the way the software has been assembled. Currently, the JooJoo’s OS is essentially a Linux distro that only runs a full-page web browser; even the UI as we see it is a locally-generated website (and an unresponsive one at that); with features like a webcam and bluetooth yet no applications to use them it’s hard to believe that what Fusion Garage have shipped is anything other than a browser-based facsimile of the OS they want to deliver.

Onscreen keyboard is inefficient.

Now, that becomes an interesting question. What if that status bar were actually a status bar, which resized the web page when it came down? What if the JooJoo menu were genuinely the OS’ UI, and the little squares a genuine OS UI element linking directly to websites with an efficient, dedicated webkit browser, perhaps one with an API which would allow JooJoo specific “apps” to be developed in much the same way as Apple intended with the original iPhone release? Knowing that Apple were working on the iPad concept long before the iPhone, let alone the pad launched it’s hard to see how Fusion Garage can really catch up to this level of polish with a dev team numbered in tens rather than hundreds, without billions in cash reserves – yet anyone who indulges in slightly left-field projects can confirm that sometimes great, consumer-product based beating systems can be designed on a shoestring and developed on a near-hobbyist basis. I’d personally hold XBMC, Xbox Media Centre, as a shining example of what can be achieved. Of course, XBMC happened slowly, and didn’t have a commercial product launch and VCI in the background hungry for returns, but the results made a £99 console into one of the best home multimedia devices available at the time.

A stylish way of concealing a real USB port.

Chandra’s determination to bring JooJoo to market has to be admired, and geeks everywhere should be looking to this technology as a great opportunity. As someone with a long history and interest in this segment however, I already know that your opportunity to buy a JooJoo is limited. FG’s eagerness to put this device in the hands of consumers, to offer them the choice between a mature concept and an unknown quantity in such a blatant fashion has dealt a knockout blow to JooJoo in Western markets where the MID has failed, repeatedly, to get a foothold. American and European customers want “computers”, an easy web-browsing experience is nice but simply not enough for a market that understands what they are buying beyond the appliance level. It’s the same entrenched market identity that will see China and India leading the way with alternative-energy transport, a new generation of consumers that simply see a useful appliance and have fewer preconceptions about what a “car” is.

JooJoo runs out of power.

JooJoo is down, make no mistake, but the count is still ongoing. At this stage Fusion Garage needs to offer consumers a choice; bring to the system a mature, slow and familiar OS (be it Windows 7 Home Premium with the correct multi-touch drivers, and a 32GB SSD, for the cost of a 16GB iPad – a big ask given the cost of the licenses but one Microsoft may well support – or a Linux distribution) and continue development of JooJoo OS in the background either as a commercial undertaking ready to launch a lower cost, lighter and longer-lived JooJoo V2 (at this stage, dual-core ARM systems being an ideal target for such a system) or as OSS, potentially bringing a developer team of thousands on board.

As long as the myth of the web browser-based UI continues to deliver poor battery life and a substandard user experience, the excellent hardware platform will be little more than a footnote in computing history’s latest saga.

Vodafone’s objection to unlocking was naturally the subsidy, and given that this wasn’t a handset tied to PayG or a contract, they should have unlocked it without argument. In the end it took 3 weeks and 16 emails before the unlocking team actually actioned it (but not before they’d said it wasn’t possible, then that it was but would take a week, then said my unlock code would be in the post…)

Crucially I had to remove the Vodafone SIM and put a different carrier’s SIM in before it would check the system and reactivate the phone, but finally – almost a month after I requested the unlock:

So: Vodafone CAN and WILL unlock the iPhone 4; they have a request form on their website and you may be required to sent a scan/copy of the receipt from the store you bought your Box Only iPhone 4 from. This should show not only the price and “Box Only” status, but also the IMEI.

Good luck!

On the road, however, there are compromises to be made. Hedging my bets a little, I left the Macbook Pro at home when covering recent events, and took the iPad with me. For Photokina, I also took the Archos 9 – which was useful as it turned out, but not for the reasons you might expect. Initially I had a UK event to cover, so traded my usual heavy kit of D3S/70-200 etc. and MBP for a D5000 in camera armour with the compact 18-105 VR lens and the iPad. This event, being a UK seminar for a print title, didn’t need images processing instantly so I relied almost entirely on an app called “SoundNotes” – formerly known as SoundPaper (a title that I personally preferred!). It’s inevitable that I’d forgotten to charge the iPad that week (week, not day, incidentally) so when I picked it up it had 64% charge; the car’s USB charger lead didn’t work for some reason; it also doesn’t charge the iPhone it was originally bought for – so the day’s work had to be done on what I had available.

Overall, with a 7 hour day and really, about 4 hours of “work”, the iPad used a little over 10% of the battery. Running SoundNotes, sitting at the opposite end of the room to the speaker, the internal microphone picked up sound well enough for clear playback (with a slight background ‘taptaptap’ from me typing on the iPad screen occasionally) and as advertised, when I got home to write the article I simply tapped the text for a salient point and got the speaker’s words verbatim. SoundNote, to me, is utterly indispensable and makes the iPad worth the cost alone (combined with the usable on-screen keyboard in landscape orientation, and the Tuff-Luv case I use which supports it for typing but also allows me to wrap the stand around my left wrist, which makes standing and typing very easy).

If you have the camera connector kit, then USB microphones like Blue’s “Yeti” or “Snowball / Snowflake” models are supported, giving much higher quality and directional recording (and avoiding the little taptap noises from taking notes). These are also good for the many audio applications available, and the interface also supports the Griffin iMic for stereo recording from any line/microphone source.

Photokina was helped by a need to pack as little as possible – the last thing I needed when covering an event in 48 hours with 7 hours sleep was to be faffing about with checked luggage, so everything had to fit in one bag; I also lack an international charger for the iPad but not the Archos, which came bundled with several plugs. The Archos was therefore brought as a backup, should the iPad run out of charge (I relied on my iPhone to just stay charged, frankly, but took a USB sync cable). The trusty D5000 came along too.

With breaking news like Sigma’s SD1, I wanted to get the pictures up as quickly as possible. So, along with trying to get a European plug (none in stock), I got the iPad Camera Connector at the Duty Free. Thanks to the WiFi in the press centre, pictures from Photokina were loaded from D5000 to iPad rapidly, clearing my card for further use – then as I shoot raw+JPEG, the JPEG files were loaded into Photohop Express and cropped, quickly adjusted and straightened. Once completed, the WordPress application for iOS allows crude, but functional upload of images (I would like to see this improved, with a similar dialogue to the “Gallery” menu on WP’s edit page that allows placement, sizing and caption editing).

The Archos was not totally redundant. I’d taken a couple of shots on the Sigma DP2, which the iPad cannot handle (JPEG files are fine but I only shoot raw files with Sigma kit), and it also allowed me to charge the USB-connected iPad and iPhone during the stay. Had anyone pointed me at Flash content, it would also have been able to read USB press packs and similar information, and had I had data enabled on my contract for Germany I could have used it tethered with the iPhone – something Apple has yet to enable with the iPad. Of course, the option of the 3G iPad exists but costs more (and more to the point, when I got my iPad there were no 3G models available in any capacity).

Every task I need to do when reporting on events can be accomplished with an iPad 3G; with apps for managing most CMS solutions, quick and dirty photo editing (plus on-location storage if you’re using smaller cards) and of course entertainment for travel and mail for working out of the office. None of this is new in itself, as many people (including myself) have been using UMPCs, laptops, netbooks or whatever to do the same tasks. The crucial difference is that the iPad is the first small, light solution that genuinely saves space and weight whilst offering a vastly improved battery life – and thanks to the work of developers, efficient, targeted solutions.

Improvements with iOS 4.2 will see the ability to research whilst editing, to change WiFi settings without “leaving” your app and most crucially, wireless printing via AirPlay. Photokina’s press office had a suite of printers for journalist use – realistically those printers could be shared either via desktop Macs or direct (some printers already support AirPlay wireless printing, though the list is short) and allow printing straight from iPhone or iPad. Having used iOS’ wireless printing in a beta, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from the iPad; see a document that is printable (website, PDF, picture – and as third-party apps are updated, one would expect word documents, spreadsheets and forms to follow suit), tap the share icon and select “print”. To use a hackneyed Appleism, “it just works”.

A couple of incompatibilities with how PR firms work could be addressed both by Apple and how PR firms distribute data (on Apple’s part, allowing the Camera Connector to read USB memory devices; even if that support were only in QuickOffice or similar apps; the PR firms could use online storage and give journalists access to it via “cloud” applications like Dropbox/box.net and similar). It’s possible to use software like iFile on a jailbroken iPad to access USB storage devices, but that’s something you may not wish to do; it would be better if Apple offered the connectivity officially.

With those final barriers gone, I can see no benefit at all to having a laptop for this sort of work; and if the new wave of Android tablets get the quality right, the battery life right and most importantly the developers to really take advantage of the form factor, it needn’t be an iPad doing the work at all.

September 21st saw the SD1 announced to the world at Photokina via a French website, the German trade show which bi-annually provides Europes imaging industries with a fairly major launch platform and one-stop shop. Along with the usual new lenses (in this case, revised 120-300 and 150mm Macro) the SD1 is a truly significant announcement for Sigma; however, it may also spell trouble for the individualistic Japanese firm’s existing products.

The SD1′s headline specification is a new sensor – the 48.1Mp (16Mp x 3) 1.5 crop factor chip developed largely in house, following Sigma’s acquisition of Foveon. Like most sensors the image area is slightly smaller, giving a 4800 x 3200 pixel (15.36Mp) image, and it’s this headline 46Mp specification that Sigma are focusing on – though the real headline is the massive leap in spatial resolution whilst retaining the unique qualities of Sigma’s X3 CMOS sensor. Undoubtedly using technology lessons learned during Foveon’s flirtation with mobile phone cameras, the new technology brings the output filesize bang into the middle of current professional systems, with 16Mp output sitting very well alongside Nikon and Canon’s professional APS-C offerings. The rest of the camera, bar a magnesium weathershielded body, is fairly consistent Sigma camera technology.

Having handled the new SD1, I can confirm that the body engineering is in a different league to the SD14 and SD15. The body is strong, yet very light. Personally I find the square, solid grip extremely comfortable, and the dials for PASM(C1, C2, C3 also suggesting custom functions) and power/mode are Metal, with the legends in raised 3D relief. The mirror up position remains marked, so that function is probably carried over.

The battery door has a positive twist latch and contains a fairly standard Sigma battery, contacts visible suggest a future power grip option if not compatibility with the PG21. Compact flash card door is solid and positive. Flash sync, USB and power connectors are behind a rubber strip cover, no HDMI but video as per DP/SD15. The on camera flash raises high above the prism, which should reduce vignetting/falloff with longer lenses.

Sigma are reluctant to give an on sale date as yet, but the pre-production model is highly promising, looks well finished and complete. A hot mirror is present, and removable.

I had the opportunity to see a print from the camera, and it is stunning. This is apparently full size printed at 180dpi without any resizing (the 4800 x 3200 pixel spatial resolution translates into 26 x 17″ without any interpolation of the final file at that dpi, so there’s no fudging of the figures here).

Sigma's SD1 46MP DSLR with Foveon technology.

Looking at the press release and specifications, we can draw a couple of conclusions. One, this isn’t going to be delivering video; though it may deliver Live View. The image pipeline consists of two TRUE-II processors, but they’re handling 3x the amount of data – shot to shot speed is probably going to be in the region of 36 seconds once the buffer is full, and no buffer details are given – I would expect the physical capacity to be double that of the SD15 and therefore around 66% of the frame-to-frame performance when shifting this much data. What may help that is the presence of Compact Flash. though SD and CF cards show very little difference in Sigmas past.

The rear LCD sounds like the same 450,000 pixel 3.0″ display from the SD15, and whilst the 11-point AF is new, an UP logo on the drive/power wheel suggests we’ll also find the SD15′s new mirror/shutter mechanism with lock-up functions and immensely smooth operation – though mirror lock up isn’t mentioned in the specification.

And that’s about it from the initial release. New releases from Sigma generally take some time to get to market, a source of irritation for forum users and commentators but if nothing else, predictable and comforting to real Sigma owners, who can be sure that their camera’s obsolescence is not dictated by a relentless marketing push but genuine improvements in technology. However, the SD1 should, and will, have the attention of a new group of fashion, wedding and landscape photographers.

What’s telling is that the SD15 launched not at Sigma’s traditional camera launch price of over £1000 in the UK. The SD1 could carry any price, with the stated resolution who knows what Sigma’s cost and sales targets are. If, as it seems, there is a space sub-£2000 that the SD1 can occupy; perhaps around the £1800 mark, then it will be a real contender regardless of the tertiary specifications. It could be an absolutely unbeatable macro system for example, with that 1.5x crop and lack of colour interpolation to interfere with fine definition on small subjects. Sigma may position the camera higher – yet I see the SD1 being to 2012 what the SD9 was to 2002; and if that’s the case the pricing may be strong.

When the SD9 came out, it stood head and shoulders above the competition in terms of image quality at a time when Nikon DSLRs still had clear roots in their film bodies and Canon’s largest digital user base had “Kodak” written on their bodies. The SD1 looks set to repeat that in a much stronger marketplace; bringing what should be 26-33Mp-equivalent image quality without the colour interpolation of a Colour Filter Array sensor and the startling sharpness that the lack of low-pass filter brings. Even if we assume a logical progression of technology and have realistic expectations of ISO and speed, for this group of photographers working with flash the SD1 could bring a uniquely film-like quality to photography without the compromise of lower spatial resolution that past Foveon DSLR users have worked with. Hell, short of full-frame, this is approaching my ideal studio camera spec and I am not alone in the Sigma userbase in wanting this kind of spec, for those reasons.

In the wider marketplace, the SD1 could damage Sigma partly because it is such a strong specification and significant leap forward. If Sigma’s past launch schedule plays out, we can probably expect to see the SD1 in users’ hands around 2012 – announce at Photokina, preview at Focus, ship after Focus the following year. Naturally I’d urge Sigma not to follow this pattern, please, but this is the reality of their past launch schedules and I see no reason for this to change. In the meantime, without published prices or availability the SD15′s sales may be hindered. SD15 buyers do at least now have something to look forward to that could justify their lens investment going forward.

In perspective, medium format users have endured this sort of timeline for eons, and we expect our cameras to last. The stunning Mamiya ZD DSLR was announced in 2004; I didn’t have one in my hands until the end of 2006 by which time the resolution was outclassed and the performance considered abysmal (even though sitting down and thinking about it, you realise that the bandwidth of the imaging pipeline was pretty much the same as contemporary systems). How long would you be prepared to wait for the image purity of a Hasselblad H4D-Multishot in an affordable, manageable system – and without the static subject limitation of sensor-shift capture?

The SD1, whether it ships in 2011 or 2012, is a huge leap forward for Sigma, and an even bigger leap for Foveon’s X3 technology. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century it’s apparent that perhaps the ubiquitous Bayer CFA’s limitations can be avoided after all. With Canon announcing 100Mp+ APS-C sensor technology in their labs though, it’s essential that Sigma brings it to market ASAP – otherwise it’s going to launch into a numbers-driven, 40Mp+ Bayer market where the defining characteristics are frames per second, tertiary features like video/screen size/whether it has GPS or a coffee machine, and image quality in the purest sense has little relevance.

Once people began to find ways to cram Windows onto the machines, netbook manufacturers like MSI began to change the spec of their systems to suit, substituting small, efficient SSDs with cheap HDs. The modding market forced HSDPA modems, bluetooth, touchscreens into the little Eees until OEMs saw a gap, and began to produce machines to those specs. Eventually what you end up with is a small, not very cheap computer with poor Windows performance.

Asus currently produces a few machines that claim to buck that trend; the dual-core system I hoped to see didn’t arrive (and now looks to be overtaken by a new raft of N550-based dual-core systems). The T101MT reviewed here is a convertible tablet which comes specified with the industry-standard N450 chipset and 2GB RAM; sufficient to deliver acceptable Windows 7 performance with lighter apps. It is in essence an upgrade to the T91MT, a Z520 based convertible system which did not gain critical acclaim.

The MT includes a 1024 x 600 display, 2GB RAM and 320GB HD – apart from the HD capacity, absolutely standard netbook specifications that you can pick up for £250 without any tablet pretentions. As an established “convertible” form factor system it’s also one of the few to offer multi-touch AND a stylus; allowing Windows 7′s fairly basic gesture support to function whilst also accepting that you can’t write legibly with a fingertip, and sometimes Windows UI elements are just too small.

A respectable battery delivers around 4 1/2 hours of runtime whilst Asus’ power management seems to do a decent job of letting the processors work hard when needed to deliver a Geekbench score of 1015. The build quality is heavy, but not necessarily “solid”; whilst the screen unit feels very substantial the bottom half of the system feels no higher quality than the original Eee.

Like most PineTrail systems, there’s no HDMI port. 3 USB ports, VGA and 10/100 Ethernet join power and audio for physical interfaces, whilst the 802.11b/g/n WiFi is the only wireless capability included – amazingly there’s no Bluetooth interface on my review unit, though it’s listed in the specifications.

Similar to the ExpressGate software, Asus includes a Windows touch-friendly interface. it's of limited use.

Alongside the convertible screen, the T101MT is one of the Asus machines that supports “Express Gate” – in essence a BIOS-with-Balls 512Kb embedded OS for performing quick tasks. Booting up in 9 seconds, the SplashTop software it calls up is completely unaware of the touch screen and cannot scroll with touch in the browser for example. Whilst it may appear to have booted quickly, it still takes some time to load the browser from disk; short of an impressive headline startup figure the function is meaningless for real-world use.

Of more use, the built-in SD card reader supports Microsoft’s “ReadyBoost” and with a Class 10 Sandisk 4GB card there were distinct improvements in the responsiveness of the HD-based netbook. It would be interesting to see if those improvements applied to SSD based systems with comparable hardware.

Switching into Windows – in the UK at least, Windows 7 Home Premium with multi-touch support; the USA “enjoys” Win 7 Starter – seems to be the sensible course of action. It boots up relatively quickly and whilst provided with some shovelware, it’s nothing like as infested as a Dell; the AV “trials” and helpful tools are quickly removed and replaced with Microsoft Security Essentials before the inevitable update procedure. As with every tablet PC, the biggest problem is reconciling the users’ desire to run Windows applications, whilst also wanting a tablet, touch based form factor.

I’m not entirely sure why the iPad’s launch appears to have inspired this desire in the wider consumer market, as tablet PCs exist not to run “the whole Windows experience” in touch form but to provide VARs and special needs users with a touch interface for specific applications – such as Point of Sale, or on-site surveying/logistics tracking. Windows and Windows applications are not designed for this method of interaction and no amount of gestures, flicks or layers on the OS are going to improve on this, in much the same way as Apple always claimed they would never make a Mac tablet.

At least with a pure tablet, you have an excuse in terms of mobility and weight. You have to use touch, you’ve no choice. With the convertible model here, you’re gaining nothing as a browsing/light internet use system, and you have a keyboard and fairly basic touchpad (that’s not criticism, I hate cheap multi-touch trackpads) to replace the mouse. As a netbook, it’s also pretty heavy weighing in at 1.4Kg, and far from slim – the touch screen part alone is thicker than the Archos 9 PCTablet or N450-based JooJoo.

The Asus T101 and JooJoo share N450-based architectures - yet the JooJoo is as thin as a single half of the T101MT.

All of this is fairly predictable. Asus has delivered solid netbook material but nothing unique; what therefore justifies the pricing over a netbook?

It would be nice if the unit had a glossy capacitive screen, but there are a lot of factors to take into account, particularly that “writing” bit. I’ve tried writing with a capacitive stylus on my iPad, it feels weird. Maybe better products will be developed, until then resistive is the best route to legible writing, signing of digital documents and precise drawing. Even so, this is far from the best resistive screen I’ve seen, with poor contrast and viewing angles, a distinctly fuzzy appearance and a low resolution for the price point. The multi-touch, palm and pressure sensing touch panel is very clever but ultimately wasted on a device which isn’t powerful enough to run anything that could use the pressure capability (such as Photoshop). Unless you have a pressing need to accept signatures or scribble on your netbook, a more responsive and higher quality capacitive screen would probably have delivered a premium-feeling product to justify the price and generate mainstream sales.

So is the T101MT good for VARs? When a solid touch tablet/PC costs thousands, not hundreds, it would surely be an ideal product. Unfortunately again, the build quality is just not up with that class of machine. It’s not built for that kind of use, and not powerful enough.

Once again it is not that Asus have developed a poor product per se. This is par for the course for this class of machine; if anything it’s a little cheaper than the options that have come before it, and represents steady evolution over the T91 and previous low-cost convertible/UMPC class systems. The T101′s achilles heel is a made-up problem that won’t go away, that of the Apple iPad and the inevitable comparisons that one has to make. Purely against the T91, the T101 is a major upgrade, albeit a larger system – from the display to detachable flush-fitting battery, it’s a more mature product.

The T101MT includes a removable battery - lacking from the T91. The sub-5000mAh unit is still good for almost 5 hours, though the flush fitting means no extended option is available.

The available tablet computers that fulfil this market make the T101 look like much better value, though the decision making process seems backwards. If, instead of adding touch to a netbook, you view the T101 as adding a keyboard and good battery life to a Windows tablet it represents stunning value. The 12.1″ JooJoo has the same basic spec albeit with 1GB RAM, a 4GB SSD and capacitive screen, yet costs just under £400 in the UK without a Windows licence included. It doesn’t even have video output. The Archos 9 is cheaper, but with the Z-series process, small HD and fixed memory it seems like it’s not just specification it’s sacrificed, but usability. Origami hangovers are best avoided, and the Shanzai stuff can’t deliver the battery life yet. When it comes to other convertible netbooks it’s a case of splitting hairs; they’re all roughly the same price, roughy the same spec and work in much the same way (Dell’s Inspiron Duo is a slightly different take on it and reminds me of the Flybook – which cost thousands for a lower-spec system and makes the T101 and its contemporaries look like bargains).

Before the iPad, tablets were niche products. iPad has simultaneously shown how it should be done whilst throwing the reasons for past efforts’ failure into sharp relief; continuing to produce machines that take existing desktop/laptop operating systems and making them into tablets simply doesn’t work. The struggle to make UMPCs cheaper, faster and longer-lived away from power was the wrong battle – what Origami and everything else needed was a new paradigm.

Treating the T101MT as “a convertible netbook”, it’s one of the better ones with strong performance, a well spaced keyboard and decent storage and RAM. The pricing is fairly consistent with the genre and the multi-touch display is definitely an improvement on the last generation of resistive units. The question you really need to ask yourself is whether your priority is to run Windows, in which case a better netbook (for example, the Asus EeePC 12xxN dual-core models offer excellent performance for the same money) or even a full-sized laptop might be preferable, or if you want a tablet machine for simple tasks; in which case the iPad is class-leading and will be getting some very stiff competition in the near future – but not from anything purporting to run Windows or Windows applications. It’s the wrong OS for the market, regardless of the device it’s assigned to.

I admit, I’ve got no patience; it’s why I write about technology. I’m invariably bored with it after a few weeks and itching for the new thing to arrive. Having said that, I’m also really quite tired of the cycle of phone upgrades – so when my 3GS got broken, I hoped that the new iPhone 4 would do everything I needed. This premium-priced gadget is stacked high in shops everywhere, so why was buying it so hard…

The Consumers, The Crooks and the Myth

Let’s get one thing straight about the iPhone 4. Unlike the original iPhone, which was only available through one carrier in the UK, was locked and was on very expensive contracts, the iPhone 4 is available direct from Apple. Go into an Apple store and you can hand over £499 or £599 of your money and have a SIM-free, contract-free iPhone 4. It’s as easy as buying any other bit of technology, or should be. Apple don’t give stock levels online, Apple stores don’t give out incoming stock dates, and Apple stores are only really in major cities – so travelling in just to buy one can be an expensive wasted journey. That said, if you can stand 11 minutes of James Brown screaming down your ear you MIGHT get an Apple genius to answer the phone and let you know if they have stock. Frankly, if you have the time to wait (3 weeks at the time of writing, 2 weeks according to most forums) order one online and be done with it.

That first bit though, the bit about locking, gave rise to The Myth. The Myth that an unlocked iPhone is a thing of beauty and of value. Complicit in this myth is UK distributor eXpansys, who currently charge an eye-watering £944 for a 32GB iPhone 4. Yes, the exact same item you can buy in an Apple store for £599. I can almost understand it though, as when the iPhone 3 came out, they had a similar charging structure for SIM-free models and were essentially one of the few easy sources for such a thing (short of jailbreaking and unlocking, which is so easy anyone who understands what the process does should be able to accomplish it).

Update: eXpansys has lowered their prices. They now want £599 for 16GB or £699 for 32GB. If you’re prepared to pay these prices, I have a hotel in London that I’d like to sell you, along with a bridge in San Francisco. These prices are, hilariously, being described as a £99 saving as they’re also including some free cases.

The Myth has fed a whole load of unscrupulous resellers on eBay, and made buying a secondhand iPhone absoutely infuriating. Again, you can expect to be charged £700+ for a device that costs £500 and won’t be new, may have been unlocked using Jailbreaking techniques and at best, has simply been bought at the store you were going into anyway purely to make a profit. It’s like the Wii all over again. JUST WAIT. Eventually these people will run out of things to try and resell and will go back to running private clamping firms or finding other ways of making money from people’s impatience/stupidity.

What feeds the Myth are The Consumers. They don’t wait, and they don’t think “Oh, this device is not out of print. limited production or discontinued so Apple are, in fact, making more of them and all I need to do is wait”. They actually pay the £750 to someone who just paid £500 and walked out of a shop with it. If the first person to list a Wii for £500, or an iPhone for £1000, had had no takers there wouldn’t be an army of copycat eBay sellers trying to replicate their absolute greed and questionable morals remarkable success; and as such the iPhones in the shop would be bought by people wanting an iPhone rather than a profit.

Once the Myth is established, and the Consumers are used to the idea that an iPhone should, in fact, cost more than the RRP, we get the crooks. The crooks are the worst.

The crooks are not, as you might have expected, the people selling dodgy Chinese iPhone-clones or marking up easily available consumer goods. The crooks are the network operators. Right now, top of my list is Vodafone, my very own operator since 1997. They’re charging more for less, and on the whole they’re doing it consistently, across the board, under the guise of legitimate business practices.

My contract was renewed with the launch of the new iPhone 3GS on the aforementioned network. I fully understand that this phone came with contractual limitations; I paid the grand total of £75 for a 32GB iPhone 3GS with a retail value of nearly £700 (depending on reseller, naturally; at the time Apple didn’t offer SIM-free 3GS models in the UK). Whilst other networks are more reasonable about their locks Vodafone’s customer service came back with this nonsense – “Just to let you know that iPhone 3 and iPhone 4 is exclusively for Vodafone and hence can’t be unlock.”

Aside from the absolute inaccuracy of that statement – unless “exclusively” means “available with slightly fewer partners than yo mamma” – there’s even a page regarding unlocking the iPhone on Vodafone UK’s website which says nothing about exclusivity.

Now fair enough, my 3GS is still in contract. However – I dropped it. And I wanted a new phone. After repeated attempts to call the Apple Store in Birmingham, I gave up and decided that one or other of my networks (T-Mobile and Vodafone) would be able to provide me with an iPhone 4, surely for a reasonable cost. They practically give away things like the Samsung Galaxy S, after all. But The Myth has come to play.

T-Mobile would sell me a 16GB iPhone 4 for £500. Okay, that sounds fair – even if it is £1 over. But wait… I also have to pay £20 for a PayG SIM? I don’t want a PayG SIM. I can buy a SIM-free iPhone for £499 direct from Apple and I don’t have T-Mobile’s purchasing power! Surely if you’re not going to subsidise my phone yet are going to lock it, I should at least be able to just buy the phone. So we’re up to £520. No, wait. I need a MicroSIM for my contract. The contract which I can choose to knock back to £10/month and cease using if I don’t have a handset to use with it… yep. That’ll be a tenner.

The Myth allows T-Mobile to charge £530 for something which is less functional than a £499 device from the manufacturer, whilst committing you to using their network. Madness.

So I try Vodafone. They will do a box-only handset at £590 (their website gives PayG handset prices as £480 and £570 for 16 and 32GB respectively; a small saving). Seems fair. They won’t unlock it, though. In fact, they won’t unlock it ever according to Apple’s website or their own customer service people, despite it costing a mere £9 less than the Apple store and as with my point about T-Mobile, encouraging me to continue using their service rather than buggering off and using something else.

If I didn’t have a thorough dislike of O2, formed back when they were BT Cellnet and my contract was (stupidly) bought through Carphone Warehouse, changing my billing relationship and contractual setup (nice of them to draw my attention to that), what I should have done is gone into the O2 store, and handed over £595 for a 32GB… hold on. That’s a locked handset again, isn’t it… well… yes. And despite their generous terms (£15 unlock) for the iPhone 3GS, they’re claiming the iPhone 4 “cannot be unlocked”.

Having bought the iPhone 4, I thought “surely it would be reasonable to unlock my 3GS at least”. I just gave them a load of money for a replacement phone on my contract, so having a phone tied to that commitment would logically free off the older, upgraded phone. Nope. Not even a chance. Won’t be unlocked until 2012.

O2 will unlock an iPhone 3GS free, after a short period, on the sheer common sense understanding that you’re legally bound to the contract regardless of what damn phone you use or how you use it. In no way does unlocking the iPhone get you out of your 2 years handing over £40/month, neither does using another SIM in it harm O2 in any way, shape or form. They’ll even offer reasonable unlocking terms on their PayG handsets – again for the 3GS, not the 4.

Three will unlock; their site doesn’t seem to give iPhone specific details but unlocking for a fee appears to have no term.

Tesco unlock appears to be tied to 12 month terms, but as Tesco are O2 there may be other details elsewhere on this. They do give unlock details for the iPhone 4 though, unlike some others.

Orange will unlock for a fee (£20); it seems to be that they have a minimum three-month term and your account must be in order.

T-Mobile will unlock for a fee (£15) typically – their iPhone help details don’t give information either way.

Vodafone are the only UK operator who do not have a policy for unlocking iPhones other than “we won’t”.

Of course, it would be easier to take them seriously if they had a consistent policy – which this link seems to suggest they don’t.

Naturally you’d wonder why this is important – and of course for me, I just want to pick and choose between my contracts to see which performs best. As a new user though, you really are much better off going with almost any network other than Vodafone for the iPhone 4 (when they got the 3GS it was a different matter – their contracts with the 32GB model were amongst the best value); if you’re an existing Vodafone customer then it seems taking any other handset, selling it and buying an iPhone from the Apple store will be cheaper and give you a more flexible device than you would have been provided with by Vodafone. Vodafone in Australia (as with the other networks) will happily unlock, and I really don’t believe that their legal team is so incapable of negotiating a contract that they somehow got a worse deal than, say, Three.

Update: It seems that the confusion partly lies in that Vodafone stores can do what they wish with their stock, such as selling a “Box Only” iPhone 4 – whilst Vodafone the company simply don’t have the information framework to handle this and don’t offer a Box Only iPhone 4 themselves. Vodafone will, apparently, unlock a Box Only iPhone on submission of the receipt according to my last emails with the unlocking team, though this is a situation they don’t expect to encounter. As my later post on this suggests, the phone will – eventually – be unlocked though you can expect to bounce emails back and forth between the unlocking team until you get a straight answer.

Whilst there is a degree of market demand, if the operators were to sell unlocked phones the supply would be spread out and available across more outlets – it’s not that there are insufficient phones, it’s that in the back of the Vodafone store there are several hundred locked to Vodafone that aren’t in an Apple store. As a consumer you’re losing out on a subsidy for a locked handset; £10 or £5 is hardly comparable to, say, the £70 the Sony Xperia X10 Mini is subsidised by (£180 on PayG, free on contract, £250 SIM-free). So don’t do what I did, don’t be impatient. Buy your iPhone 4 from Apple.