iPhone and I

My iPhone is the one item I can't leave the house without. Not because I'm worried that I'll miss ten calls if I leave it behind - hardly anyone calls me on my mobile - but because it's so much more than a phone to me.

In fact, pretty much the last thing it is to me is a phone - what an antiquated, 20th century notion!

So if I don't use my phone primarily to speak to other people, then why is it so important to me?

Well, it's certainly a communications device, just not one I use much for spoken conversation. My phone is the primary device I use for accessing both Twitter (I use a popular client app called Tweetie) and Facebook (the Facebook app has very limited functionality, but it's better than nothing).

It also allows me, via mobile internet, to access most of the information I would normally rely on a PC for. I use Google Reader to consolidate RSS feeds and deliver me news on topics of interest. I run apps which provide up-to-the-minute weather forecasts, currency exchange rates and stock prices with a single button-press. YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, live sport scores etc are all available directly online or via apps which re-present complex content into a more useable format for a four-inch screen. I can even remotely set my Sky box to record a programme from hundreds of miles away. Now that's useful!

The phone's built-in GPS also comes into its own for providing local maps and directions - obviously, it's not as good as a dedicated sat nav, but it's surprisingly effective and has stopped me from getting horribly lost on a number of occasions - or to obtain traffic information relevant to my current location.

The camera isn't much cop, but because it can easily interface with Twitter (via, say, TwitPic) and Facebook, it's still a great way to share quick snaps.

And for less serious moments, the phone's accelerometer and touch screen interface allow it to be used as a variety of musical instruments - I have downloaded piano, drums and guitar apps, for instance - and for games - my current favourites being iShoot (tank artillery shoot-'em-up), Scrabble and Toobz (build a network of interconnecting pipes to allow water to flow without leakage). And I've recently noticed that the new Sims 3 game is also available in an iPhone version, so that's next on my list.


The phone is even sometimes used as a substitute for my iPod when I'm out and about, as its stripped down but perfectly adequate functionality means there's one less gadget to carry, and I can still listen to a decent selection of music and podcasts, as well as watch downloaded music videos and TV programmes.

It's all pretty amazing when you think about it. As recently as ten years ago, to get even close to doing all the things I can do today with a pocket-sized device that weighs less than half a pound, I would have needed the following:

• Mobile phone
• Laptop (and a phone socket to plug into)
• Combination of sat nav and physical maps
• Camera (the iPhone has a 2 megapixel camera, which is sub-par even for a mobile but would have been leading edge ten years ago)
• Nintendo DS for game-playing
• Sony Discman for music (and a case to cart a load of CDs around in)
• Portable TV and video player

And a chiropractor to sort out my back after having to heft that lot around!

Even then, armed with several thousand pounds' worth of gear, I wouldn't have been able to communicate with others via Twiter and Facebook; finding news on a laptop would have required much manual searching, as news aggregators and RSS didn't exist; and most people would have thought that YouTube was something to do with plumbing.

Now do you see why my iPhone is the most important and useful gadget I own? It's not just a phone; it's what I use to manage my life and to interact with the entire world around me. What could be more useful than that?

One-and-a-half

Zac is 18 months old today, and looking back over the last few months it's scary quite how fast he's growing and developing.

A few random observations.

He started talking quite early on, but he continues to amaze me with the breadth of vocabulary he now boasts. One morning recently, for instance, he very clearly asked for "mango", to add to an ever-growing food-related repertoire which includes "cheese", "toast", "apple" and "biscuit". His evening bath is frequently accompanied by a repeating mantra of "bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble". He regularly entertains staff and parents at nursery by waving and proclaiming "buh-bye!" whenever anyone goes by. And part of our bedtime routine has traditionally been to sing 'The Grand Old Duke of York', where he completes the relevant lines with giggling cries of "up" and "down".

Naturally, he understands an even wider range of words too. If Heather's in the shower, she will ask him to pass her a towel, and he does. If asked to flush a toilet, he will. When asked to identify dogs, squirrels, ducks, cars, aeroplanes, clocks and assorted other items in books, he will scour the page until he finds them. And he has understood the word "no" for ages, although of course he chooses to ignore it most of the time!

He's been walking for about four months now, but it's quite something to see how quickly he can move when he sets his mind to it (which is often). His balance is coming along nicely too; whereas a couple of months ago he was very much a wobbly toddler, he is now much more confident on his feet, rarely falling, bouncing off obstacles and continuing on like a running back bursting through a crowd of would-be tacklers.

Most gratifying of all from my point of view - partly because it's one of those activities which has very much become a father-son thing - is his response to music, whether it is nursery rhymes or pop music. We have spent many hours together, often first thing in the morning or last thing before bed, singing, clapping or generally just chilling out; music is usually a foolproof way of calming him down when he's throwing a strop. He plays drums on upturned saucepans, recognises familiar songs after only a few notes, claps along in time, and even sings 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star' spontaneously and unmistakably. It's only a matter of time before he starts critiquing my tendency to be slightly flat when singing to him. (Hmm, Simon Cowell in the making ...)

There are so many wonderful things about watching him grow, expecially at this age where the pace of development is so fast it can be difficult to keep ourselves one step ahead of him. Whatever happened to the helpless little thing who used to do nothing but drink, cry and fill nappies?

No longer a baby, very much a boy.

Massacre? What massacre?

It was 20 years ago today that Chinese army tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to bring a dramatic and brutal end to seven weeks of protest.

Officially, 241 civilans and soldiers died in what the Chinese government refers to as simply 'the June 4th incident'. Common wisdom generally puts the number of fatalities much higher than that: certainly several hundred, possibly even a few thousand. We will never know for sure.

What we do know with certainty are the seminal images that were broadcast around the world from what non-Chinese typically refer to with more emotive - and, it must be said, more accurate - descriptors such as 'the Tiananmen Square massacre'.

Just mention the words 'Tank Man' to anyone aged, say, 35 or older, and a picture of a lone protestor standing in the middle of the road, arms outstretched, attempting to stop a line of tanks approaching the square, will instantly form in their mind. (We know that Tank Man was eventually dragged away by the police, and it is widely assumed he was subsequently executed. Certainly, the Chinese government were never able to provide any physical evidence to the contrary.)

The sad thing is that the vast majority of us living outside China know and have seen more of what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989, than the billion-plus Chinese population were every privy to. News, photographs and video images were - and still are - rigorously censored by the authorities.

In the run-up to today's anniversary, the square has been blocked off to prevent any kind of mass gathering, and access to Hotmail accounts and social networking websites like Twitter and Flickr temporarily suspended.

It seems that, 20 years on, the aggressive suppression of information and the curtailment of basic civil liberties such as the right to gather remain standard operating practice for the powers-that-be in Beijing. Even now, in supposedly more enlightened times, they remain just as committed to keeping their citizens in the dark as they have ever been.

And that's the saddest thing of all.

And lead us not into temptation

The tenth series of Big Brother kicks off tonight, with sixteen housemates due for a nasty surprise, as they will be required to spend their first few days sleeping on the living room floor, with no access to the bedroom or bathroom. (Tee hee.) Any of the housemates who are unable to cope with that will be evicted on Sunday, apparently.

Will I be watching tonight? Yes.

But will I be watching religiously every night, as I have done for each of the past nine series? Probably not. Or at least that's my firm intention.

Why? Life's just too short - especially when you have an 18-month old boy who frequently drags you out of bed on the wrong side of 5am - and the format is, despite the producers' best attempts to spice things up, starting to get a little tired.

Blame whatever you like. Maybe it's Channel 4's desire to avoid controversies such as the racism, bullying and fighting which have marred recent series; great for short-term ratings and media coverage, not so brilliant for the programme's long-term reputation. It could be the growing sense of ennui that comes from watching a show for nine years. (Very little feels truly original now, just variations on a theme - although there were some real highlights last year, such as the head-to-toe bodysuits that jolted housemates with electric shocks.)

Or perhaps it's just that we've grown tired of the never-ending procession of former housemates desperately clinging on to Z-list status. Truly, Big Brother has not produced a 'celebrity' of any enduring duration since the late Jade Goody, who emerged way back in 2002. (Sure, there's usually at least one girl every year who becomes lads' mag fodder, but they are no more celebrities than the football WAGs who appear on other reality shows.)

Certainly each year's winner and the more memorable among the supporting cast of characters tend to be discarded and forgotten increasingly quickly these days. Anyone seen last year's winner since her exit from the house? Anyone even remember her name? (It was Rachel Rice, the Welsh, too-good-to-be-true goody-two-shoes, by the way.)

So, anyway, my plan is to watch the first couple of days and then to tune in only for the eviction shows and the more amusing tasks - I figure that will save us at least five hours' worth of TV time per week, which I'm intending to use partly to catch up on the 150 hours of backlog on our Sky+ box and hard drive. God forbid, we might even do other, non TV-related stuff - after all, it is lovely and sunny at the moment.

That's the plan, anyway. How capable I am of resisting temptation and slipping back into old Big Brother viewing habits remains to be seen. I'll check back in a few weeks and let you know.